Blogging Shakespeare

By Stephen Grant My first descent into the underground vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library took place in 2007 during a short-term Folger fellowship. With a tape measure stuffed into a side pocket, I trailed Betsy Walsh, head of reader services, as she led me to yards of shelving supporting dozens of gray archival boxes […]

By Stephen H. Grant On the Ides of March five years ago, Johns Hopkins University Press released Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, the first biography written about the founders of the Folger Shakespeare Library. During the research phase in which I visited 35 archives in the US and UK, I put […]

Stephen H. Grant, distinguished member of and longtime contributor to the Blogging Shakespeare community talks about Henry and Emily Folger, and their lifelong engagement of collecting Shakespeare. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Author of Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, I submitted my first guest blog in December 2014 and my twelfth in March 2017. I plan to submit my next guest blog after having spoken on the Folger story in six locations in the UK according to […]

Emily Jordan Folger’s Shakespeare Play Diary 1906 – 1930 By Stephen Grant Dodd, Mead Co. in New York produced a handy hardback book 5×8 inches in size, green in color, and full of blank pages: Plays I have Seen. From 1906 until 1930, the year her husband Henry Clay Folger died, Emily Jordan Folger filled […]

Rev. Dr. S. Parkes Cadman is high on the list of notables born in the town of Wellington, Shropshire in the West Midlands. After having worked ten years as a coal miner and become a Methodist minister, he immigrated to the United States in 1890 at the age of 26. A clergyman with great oratorical […]

Sidney Lee né Solomon Lazarus Lee in London in 1859 was a biographer and Shakespearean scholar. He edited the Dictionary of National Biography to which he contributed over 800 articles. He wrote a biography of Shakespeare in 1898. We Americans remember that he delivered lectures on “Foreign Influences in English Literature” at Johns Hopkins University […]

This series will explore people’s personal stories about their enjoyment of Shakespeare. We begin with Donavan Wilson who we met on our twitter account @ShakespeareBT . Wilson has his own blog http://timonsopus.wordpress.com/ and explains that this year he is rediscovering his passion for Shakespeare’s work, and English history.  He is currently living in the Washington, […]