HeyJaredFolger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare materials. Advancing knowledge and the arts. Discover it all at www.folger.edu. Shakespeare turns up in the most interesting places—not just literature and the stage, but science and social history as well.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
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- Jul 14, 2026
Latest episodes
The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, with Paul Menzer (opens the original)
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How do you write a "complete" life of Shakespeare when very little complete information about his life exists? Four centuries after Shakespeare's death, the legends that have grown up around him have taken on a cultural significance of their own. As Inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies Paul Menzer puts it, "The verifiable facts of his life would fit on the back of a postcard. But the stories that we have told about them would fill a dozen phone books." Menzer's new book, The Complete Li
The Bard in the Borderlands (opens the original)
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In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony of Santa Fe was established. While you might not immediately think Shakespeare had much to do with the Latinx experience, Shakespeare's career and the Spanish conquest of the Americas fit into a similar timeline. The Bard in the Borderlands, a three-volume anthology of plays by Chicanx and Indigenous playwrights, explores the possibilities of retelling Shake
Shakespeare and the Law, with Len Niehoff (opens the original)
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If you were Hamlet's lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Polonius to be murder or manslaughter? These are the kinds of questions that University of Michigan Law professor Len Niehoff asks his students to consider. But why is it so important for lawyers to brush up their Shakespeare? According to Niehoff, Shakespeare and lawyers both think about everything. Some of his plays illustrate the consequences of a lawless socie
Stratford Festival's Antoni Cimolino (opens the original)
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Near the end of The Tempest, Prospero vows to retire from practicing the "rough magic" he has mastered, to break his magical staff and drown his spellbooks. After 14 seasons as Artistic Director of Canada's Stratford Festival, Antoni Cimolino has chosen to direct The Tempest as part of his final season before he, too, enters retirement. As possibly the final play Shakespeare wrote alone, The Tempest has often represented a goodbye, or at least a sea change. For Cimolino, who started his career i
Shakespeare and Stephen King, with Caroline Bicks (opens the original)
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Imagine being able to dig through Shakespeare's manuscripts and ask him about his writing process. Did King Lear survive in the first draft? What if Hamlet originally said, "To live or not to live?" While we can only dream about that opportunity, scholar and Everyday Shakespeare host Caroline Bicks experienced something close to it when she gained unprecedented access to the archives of another famous author: Stephen King. The Bard of Avon and the King of Horror have more in common than you migh
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