The digital age — though not without its pitfalls! — has truly opened up an entire world for students of Shakespeare. From the magic of streamed performances to entire collections of images, online content has brought the Bard to any number of audiences. This accessibility has been all the more significant in recent months, of course.
As part of our Treasure Troves, we wanted to highlight another wonderful resource. Shakespeare Documented: An Online Exhibition, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library, offers digitized access to hundreds of materials related to Shakespeare’s life and works. His plays and sonnets are so immersive that it can be easy to lose sight of the man behind them; what this exhibition offers is a multi-faceted vision of, as the website describes it, “a professional playwright, actor, poet, business man, and family man who lived in both London and Stratford-upon-Avon.”
Young performers will especially enjoy glimpsing first editions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as well as plays such as Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream! Browse through the exhibition and find plays which your young actors might be studying; not only do these images offer a sense of Shakespeare’s historical era, but they also show the grand theatrical tradition which the children are continuing. Whether on parchment or computer screens, Shakespeare’s words live on.