The Long History of the Hamnet Myth
The belief that his son’s death inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet is itself inspired by an enduring, compelling, and highly questionable theory.
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Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America
At a perilous American moment, the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains why he wanted to read The Turner Diaries.
Photograph by Johnathon Kelso What Shakespeare Got Right About PTSD
A new production of Othello foregrounds what the play’s earliest audiences recognized: the psychological costs of war.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Kean Collection / Getty. A Hamlet for Our Age of Racial Reckoning
A conversation between a leading Shakespeare scholar and this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park director about staging Hamlet in the Atlanta of 2020
Joan Marcus Shakespeare Wrote Insightfully About Women. That Doesn’t Mean He Was One.
To speculate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is to pursue conspiracy theories—and in this case, to obscure a sea change in how directors, actors, and audiences understand his depiction of women.
Edward Gooch Collection / Hulton Archive / Getty
