Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Many Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” They’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare’s world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. In Muc...

27 Jan 34min

While Shakespeare was reshaping English drama, a parallel theatrical revolution was unfolding in Spain. During the Spanish Golden Age, playwright Lope de Vega pioneered the comedia nueva, a bold new d...

13 Jan 31min

Why does Samuel Pepys’s diary still matter 200 years after it was first published? In her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, historian Kate Loveman examines how Pepys’s extraordina...

29 Dec 202536min

What did people really eat in Shakespeare’s England? In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, food historian Sam Bilton uncovers the vibrant and surprising world of early modern cuisine—where sugar wa...

16 Dec 202534min

Hamnet, the acclaimed novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is now a major film. The story imagines the life and death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, whose loss would later echo through one of his most famous tra...

2 Dec 202536min

Before Shakespeare became a literary icon, he was a working writer trying to earn a living in an emerging and often precarious new industry. In The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Maki...

17 Nov 202536min

Imprisoned for nearly 20 years by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, fought her battles through words, sending and receiving coded letters hidden in books, garments, and even beer bar...

3 Nov 202536min

Long before Shakespeare became a household name, there was Richard Burbage. As the first actor to play Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear, Burbage helped define what it meant to be a Shakespe...

21 Okt 202534min