Othello (William Shakespeare): Home

From the Newberry Library in Chicago comes Creating Shakespeare, a digital exhibition that explores how Shakespeare created his body of work and how that corpus has lived on afterwards through numerous professionals whose work "creat[es Shakespeare] anew for each successive generation." The exhibition opens by examining the time period in which Shakespeare lived and worked, as well as the sources that inspired him, providing historical and cultural context for his creative life. Subsequent portions deal with Shakespeare's "afterlife," looking at the myriad ways his works have been printed, performed, studied, and reinvented in the four centuries following his death. Each part of Creating Shakespeare weaves together narrative explanations and numerous images from materials in the Newberry's archives, providing visitors with an engaging journey through Shakespeare's world and legacy.

Casting Shakespeare provides users with "a visual deep dive into data from 1,000+ productions of 10 Shakespearean plays between 1900 and 2018." Designed and coded by Eric William Lin, this award-winning website (featured in the 12-14-18 issue of the Scout Report) uses engaging analytics to tell the story of "how age, gender, and race affect casting." With its interactive display and creative data mapping, users can click through graphs and captions that create a comprehensive catalog of the actors who have starred in various Shakespearean roles. In doing so, users can further explore how aspects of performers' identities have shaped the roles and interpretations of Shakespeare's work over time.

Educators looking for contemporary approaches to teaching Shakespeare should check out this teacher's guide put together by the folks at EDSITEment. Among its many offerings, this guide provides visitors with links to resources demonstrating ways that Shakespeare's works have inspired or been combined with pop culture, as well as "how performers around the world have infused their respective local histories and cultures into [Shakespeare's] works." In the Teaching Shakespeare portion, readers will find a diverse collection of nine lesson plans for middle and high school students that instructors can adopt in their current form or use as jumping-off points. These lessons include comparisons of revenge ethics from two different historical cultures (using Hamlet and the Japanese Bunraku/Kabuki play Chushingura or the Treasury of the Loyal Retainers), a performance-based activity exploring the language of Othello, and a close reading examining the connections between Shakespeare and STEM subjects.

Readers curious to learn about how theater professionals engage with Shakespeare's works and what keeps them coming back to the Bard should check out Such Stuff. This podcast is produced by Shakespeare's Globe in London, a renowned performing arts venue and a reconstruction of the original Globe Theater where many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed. Launched in 2018, Such Stuff is hosted by artistic director Michelle Terry, Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, and Imogen Greenberg. Listeners to Such Stuff's roughly 30-minute episodes are treated to discussions of "Shakespeare's transformative impact on the world around us," and taken behind the scenes into interviews with actors, directors, and playwrights exploring how the work of Shakespeare, as well as the modern theater world more broadly, reflect and engage with contemporary issues.

Nearly everyone has read Shakespeare at some point in their life, but few have had the chance to read the original editions. Shakespeare Census has compiled a database of 1,843 "extant copies of all editions of Shakespeare's works through 1700, excluding the folios." Readers may wish to begin by reading the About page for information on navigating the site. On the home page, visitors will find a list of all of the Bard's works. Clicking on a specific text will take you to a list of publications, organized by edition. This listing also gives the year of publication, the number of existent copies, and more. Selecting a particular edition opens a list of library locations of original texts, along with provenance and copy-specific notes on the texts (accessible by clicking on a library name). For organization purposes, each copy has "a unique identifier, the SC #." Readers interested in viewing digitized versions of the original texts can click the camera icon on the right side of each listing.