Celebrating 400 Years with an

Exhibition, Speaker Series, and Performances

It’s difficult to imagine now, but when William Shakespeare died in 1616, over half of his plays had never been published. As a playwright, actor, and shareholder in his theater company, Shakespeare was above all a man of the stage, and there is no evidence to suggest that he sought to preserve his playwriting legacy in print. In 1623, however, a syndicate of friends and colleagues compiled 36 of Shakespeare’s plays into a single volume—the First Folio. Without the publication of the First Folio, we would have no Macbeth, no Julius Caesar, no Twelfth Night, no As You Like It. Like many plays performed during the English Renaissance, much of Shakespeare’s work would have been lost to time. 

Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623–2023 commemorates the 400th anniversary of a single but extraordinary book. In partnership with Portland State University and other arts organizations, the First Folio celebration features an exhibition, a speaker series, and performances of Shakespearean drama, opera, music, and film. These citywide events will familiarize you with the distant culture of Shakespeare’s world, but they will also explore how the Folio plays raise questions that evoke our own contemporary public debates. In Shakespeare’s plays, for example, who gets a say in how government works? What kinds of gender roles do his characters perform? How did race and ethnicity shape identity? What can the challenges of bubonic plague in Shakespeare’s day teach us about public health crises such as Covid–19?

Beyond the enduring stories and memorable characters, the most compelling quality of Shakespeare’s plays is that they provoke audiences to wrestle with difficult questions, without providing definitive answers. These provocations are why the Folio plays resonate so powerfully across diverse communities and across time. Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623–2023 invites you to come explore the important questions inspired by Shakespearean stories—and to discover how those stories might coincide with your own.

See Full Calendar of Events