William Shakespeare Archives

Literature

Shakespeare Among the French Romantics

One way to take the temperature of a society in crisis

October 30, 2025 • by Sophia Charles

In 1776, Voltaire penned a letter to the Académie Française. His subject was Shakespeare, his mood grim. He was responding to a new translation into French of the playwright’s work, still little known to France. In the context of the French Enlightenment, Shakespeare came as a shock. Instead of dramatizing nobility of ...

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

What makes the arts an essential part of a society is their freestanding value—a value that cannot be described as radical, liberal, or conservative

February 28, 2022 • by Jed Perl

While there have been many periods when the arts inspired some sort of controversy, different times have different troubles. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat....

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

History

Time Is Out of Joint

Simultaneity in the epoch of the near and far

July 16, 2020 • by Sergio Infante

For those who are either unemployed or overworked, those whose habits and routines have fallen apart, those experiencing psychological or bodily distress, the days may seem to drag on endlessly. For others -- perhaps those who find themselves on the pandemic’s frontlines or those who have discovered a sense of ...

Democracy

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague

May 28, 2020 • by Emily Pitts Donahoe

We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase. Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...

<em>Troilus and Cressida</em> and a Diseased Body Politic

Film & Performing Arts

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

March 2, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

Education

How Shakespeare Helps Us Challenge the Far-Right in Europe

His works prove that migration has always been central to European society

June 19, 2019 • by Mercedes Sapuppo

Shakespeare’s England was also full of migrants, many refugees from the European wars of religion. He lived near and worked with people of many different backgrounds, and maybe this is why he asked his audience to “imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs and their ...

Race

The Outcast State

Shakespeare’s Unlikely Connection to Black Subjectivity

June 18, 2019 • by Seven Richmond

Now that race is the hottest topic of discussion, Othello is everywhere, positioned as the Shakespeare on race. This past semester, while we were reading the play, there were no fewer than four different Othello adaptations nearby: Bill Rauch’s production at the American Reparatory Theater, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol’s Othello in the Seraglio, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and a ...

Feature

Learning to Hate Shakespeare

What are the implications of being engaged with Shakespeare at the expense of what could otherwise be regarded as a black or African authenticity?

June 17, 2019 • by Jordan Mubako

Looking at Literature syllabi across former British colonies, Shakespeare has persisted to this day. The recent syllabus from the West African Examinations Council (including countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) has Othello as a compulsory text, with Shakespeare granted equal status as “Non-African Drama” and “African Drama.” Paper 3 of the ...

Education

Public Shakespeare in Public Seminar

Public writing is framed as an alternative to both academic writing and creative projects

June 17, 2019 • by Jeffrey R. Wilson

The assignment, which you’re welcome to use or adapt as you like, starts with students selecting two essays from our Public Shakespeare page. Based on their research topics, they identify three possible venues for their Public Shakespeare essays, reading some recent (non-Shakespearean) essays from these venues to get a feel for public writing. In ...

Feature

How Game of Thrones Will End

Spoilers from the fifteenth century

April 24, 2019 • by Jeffrey R. Wilson

I’m not a particularly vigorous fan of Game of Thrones, the kind who dissects all things Westeros on Internet forums. I haven’t seen any secret scripts or decoded some hidden message from the books. But I’m a scholar of Renaissance literature who’s taught a class on how the series takes its storyline ...

Feature

What Shakespeare Can Tell Us About School Shootings

In the film O, a 1999 adaptation of Othello, toxic masculinity is at the root of violence

December 12, 2018 • by Iman Lavery

In 1998, five shootings took place on school campuses in the United States. So far in 2018, there have been more than sixty-five. Over the last few decades, the frequency of violence in schools has increased exponentially. As a society, we have struggled to understand the nature of such violence and ...

What Shakespeare Can Tell Us About School Shootings

Feature

Iconoclasm Today

Overturning the icons of toxic masculinity

October 19, 2018 • by John Hudson

What difference would it make if Shakespeare’s work was written by a dark-skinned woman, a feminist courtesan-poet, from a family of second generation Jewish-Italian immigrants? When my book on Shakespeare came out in 2014, I was happy to get a supportive reception from Dr. Gina Luria Walker, professor of women's studies at the ...