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 ...

Disability

Shakespeare’s Ultimate Crip Text

In a new Richard III, populism is the pathology

September 10, 2024 • by Antoinette Burton

When I bought my ticket for this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Globe Theater in London, I chose a seat under cover of the rafters rather than a place standing directly in front of the stage—a distinction designed to echo the several ways that Elizabethans could experience ...

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....

The Arts

When Diane Arbus Came to Central Park

The New York City story of a latchkey kid and a trailblazing photographer

November 30, 2021 • by Vicky Oliver

For me as a city kid, Central Park was a forbidden Eden. Even though I grew up a stone’s throw from the park, my parents forbade me to walk there, even chaperoned, even in broad daylight. And so, it’s all the more astounding that I recently found myself trotting—no, tearing over—to see ...

Colonization

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

September 20, 2021 • by Casper Andersen

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...

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, ...

Troilus and Cressida 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

Shakespeare on Helicopter Parenting

‘And so shall starve with feeding’

June 22, 2019 • by Luke Williams

Minor disagreements have been overshadowed by common findings; first, helicopter parenting is hyper-present, characterized by abundant parental support but only to craft a child's behavior and public image. And second, helicopter parenting hinders the child's ability to develop an autonomous character -- the ability to make critical, life-changing decisions, more ...

Uncategorized

An Unexpected Concertmaster

How Shakespeare Influenced the Romantic Era

June 20, 2019 • by Max Serrano-Wu

You thought Shakespeare was all about the language? Not according to the scholars who estimate there are over 20,000 Shakespeare-inspired pieces of classical music! During the Romantic Era, composers such as Johannes Brahms, Giuseppe Verdi, and Antonín Dvořák drew inspiration from tragedies like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. They gravitated to ...

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 ...