Collecting Shakespeare

The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world. In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger of Brooklyn, a couple who were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday, April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, D.C., for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. The library provided Grant with unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault. He draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.

What if one of literature's greatest poets was actually a zombie, writing in an Elizabethan world teeming with the undead hiding in plain sight? Inviting readers to see the sublime in the looming apocalypse, this book presents all 154 Shakespearean sonnets (with minor alterations transfigured into "zonnets") in their horrifying glory, highlighting transcendent themes of love, death, beauty and feasting on the flesh of the living. Each sonnet portrays a zombie encounter, with accompanying vignettes revealing the struggles of undead life in early modern England. Original illustrations by Anna Pagnucci bring the nightmare to life. Shakespeare will never be the same.

This volume collects the critical prose of award-winning writer Anna Frajlich. The Ghost of Shakespeare takes its name from Frajlich’s essay on Nobel Prize laureate Wisława Szymborska, but informs her approach as a comparativist more generally as she considers the work of major Polish writers of the twentieth century, including Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Bruno Schulz. Frajlich’s study of the Roman theme in Russian Symbolism owes its origins to her stay in the Eternal City, the second stop on her exile from Poland in 1969. The book concludes with autobiographical essays that describe her parents’ dramatic flight from Poland at the outbreak of the war, her own exile from Poland in 1969, settling in New York City, and building her career as a scholar and leading poet of her generation.

DigiCat presents to you this unique and meticulously edited Shakespeare collection: Comedies All's Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Love's Labour's Lost Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing Pericles, Prince of Tyre The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night or What You Will Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Noble Kinsmen The Winter's Tale Tragedies Romeo and Juliet Coriolanus Titus Andronicus Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth Hamlet Troilus and Cressida King Lear Othello Antony and Cleopatra Cymbeline Histories King John Richard II Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV, Part 2 Henry V Henry VI, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 2 Henry VI, Part 3 Richard III Henry VIII Poetry The Sonnets Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece The Passionate Pilgrim The Phoenix and the Turtle A Lover's Complaint Apocryphal Plays Arden of Faversham A Yorkshire Tragedy The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine Mucedorus The King's Son of Valentia, and Amadine, The King's Daughter of Arragon The London Prodigal The Puritaine Widdow The Second Maiden's Tragedy Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cromwell King Edward The Third Edmund Ironside Sir Tomas More Faire Em A Fairy Tale in Two Acts The Merry Devill of Edmonton Thomas of Woodstock The Life of William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet, and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works consist of approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.