#Folger Shakespeare Library

[shakespearenews]

An essay I wrote about Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V at the Guthrie Theater was published this week in the Stage Directors and Choreographers Journal.

I assistant directed the plays earlier this year and enjoyed reflecting back on the process with the actors, directors, stage managers, dramaturgs, casting directors, and observers who made the process possible. A huge thank you to my editors at SDC, Stephanie Coen and Lucy Gram, and everyone who gave their time for interviews: Mark Catron, Penelope Geng, Joe Haj, Tyler Michaels King, Jennifer Liestman, Tree O’Halloran, Carla Steen, Will Sturdivant, and Stephen Yoakam.

I wanted to work with Joe Haj since I saw his Pericles at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2015 when I was on the public programs staff. It is still one of the best productions of [anything] that I’ve seen and I’m grateful he invited me to join the directing team3 for this project. I have so many treasured memories like Henry IV bringing an air fryer to rehearsal and making pizza rolls for everyone, Hotspur creating company-specific Connections during tech, or the staggeringly brilliant composer Jack Herrick teaching me to juggle during dinner breaks.

Joe and Yoke were in the Histories at the Guthrie in 1990 and I read Michael Pennington’s book about producing ALL of the history plays with the English Shakespeare Company during rehearsals. We were all struck by how the challenges and rewards of digging deeply into Shakespeare rhyme across the years:

Joe was reminded of an experience he had on a tour of the theatre archives at the Folger Shakespeare Library when he directed Hamlet there in 2010. “I remember [the librarians] taking these prompt books down and looking in the margins, which are filled, filled, filled with scribbles of…artists just like us, trying to wrestle to the ground the hardest material in the world. Trying to find a path into it, trying to make something that may be beautiful for people to come and participate in and watch. I realized this play has been around for centuries…we’re just in the river of the long history of this play.” “We get to go in, splash around a little bit, make our minor contribution to this eons long contemplation of this play. It was so disburdening…I don’t have to make the perfect anything. I don’t have to make the thing nobody’s ever seen. I don’t have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process, that’s my only responsibility.”

From "History Plays, Hot Ones, and the Heat Death of the Universe"

[archivlibrarianist]

I love this blog post, and how the author, Erin Blake, goes in to the way that catalog and documentation are such an important and vital part of provenance-- and how a text might have progressed over its life cycle.

It also links out to the Folgerpedia, a free resource where I anticipate eventually doing a research freefall at some later point.

[bonomovesinmysteriousways]

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

[lizziebathory42]

It is definitely implied in the text that Benedick and Beatrice had a thing previously. When the Prince claims Beatrice lost Benedick's heart (after Benedick has a meltdown and storms off from being roasted by Beatrice) she responds:

"Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice. Therefore your Grace may well say I have lost it."

"Yeah, he gave me his heart for a while and we used our hearts together. Then he won his heart back using loaded dice, so you can totally say I 'lost' it."

[eopederson]

Bas Relief, "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," Folger Shakespeare Library, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 2014.

Over the past several years the Library has been undergoing expansion and renovation and thus closed to the public. On Tuesday we attended a patron's cocktail hour to introduce the new facilities and also the programs for the 2024-25 theatre and music season. We are looking forward to the plays and to the Folger Consort concerts. Meanwhile, the Folger Library is now open to the public and has extensive display spaces where one can examine, among many other treasures, some of the collection of first folios. Only a block from the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court and two blocks from the Capitol building, the Folger should be on the agenda for any tourist visit to Capitol Hill.

The first play in the 2024-25 theatre season is "Romeo and Juliet," and the bas-relief on the exterior wall has been cleaned.

[burningvelvet]

William Shakespeare’s handwritten last will and testament, including his presumed final signatures (March 25, 1616). Taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Archives of England.

[bookholichany]

Am I going to start collecting them?

Absolutely

[guy60660]

William Jaggard | Folger Shakespeare Library

[dontdenymeshakespeare]

Mid Year Book Freakout Tag

[britneyshakespeare]

thinking about eric rasmussen who identifies and catalogues known surviving first folios of shakespeare being asked about if it still feels special every time he touches a new first folio and saying

I think it’s rather like a doctor who delivers babies, and you may have delivered 230 babies, but each one is still a miracle, and each one is still beautiful...

[frogshunnedshadows]

A bit about lost plays of the 'early modern' period.

[blackfeminism]

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

[zenmantra]

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.