Folger Shakespeare Library Announces 2023/2024 Season

The Folger Shakespeare Library recently announced its 2024-2025 Season theme of Whose Democracy?, the first time a theme has been activated across all performances in a season.

The Folger is reopening after its $80.5 million renovation on June 21, 2024 and will feature new exhibitions within the building that provide more access to the Library’s incredible collection of materials related to Shakespeare. One such exhibit, Power Players, on display from February 1 through July 31, 2025 offers examples of how rulers have utilized rhetoric, pageantry, and stagecraft to project, showcase, critique, and undermine power from Shakespeare’s time to the present day.

The Folger Theatre’s 2024-2025 performance season will also offer audiences the opportunity to reflect on how power is performed — through the lens of some of Shakespeare’s most beloved stories and characters.

“The season emphasizes how examining political systems and the dynamics of class, gender and race can aid us in finding our own power in the most limiting of circumstances,” says Karen Ann Daniels, Folger’s Director of Programming and Performance and Artistic Director of Folger Theatre.

The season opens in the fall with Shakespeare’s iconic romance Romeo and Juliet, directed by Raymond O. Caldwell (former Artistic Director of DC’s Theater Alliance), and it concludes with Shakespeare’s music-filled, gender-bending comedy, Twelfth Night, in Spring of 2025.

In addition to stage performances, Folger Consort, the early music ensemble-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, returns for its 47th season with four concerts that explore how popular and court music reflects political and historical landscapes.

The 56th season of the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series has six readings, including its annual tribute to Emily Dickinson, the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and readings featuring world-renowned writers in an intimate setting. A complete schedule, including poets and dates, will be announced soon.

Folger’s more than 12,000 square feet of new public spaces show all 82 of the Folger’s Shakespeare First Folios together for the first time and feature a learning lab, collaborative research spaces, expansive new outdoor gardens and visitor amenities, a gift shop and a new café, Quill & Crumb, in the reimagined Great Hall.

Visit during the 2023/2024 Season, here is the line-up:

Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Raymond O. Caldwell
October 1 – November 10, 2024

The Reading Room Festival
Winter 2025
Dates: TBA

A Room in the Castle
By Lauren Gunderson
Directed by Kaja Dunn
March 4 – April 6, 2025

Twelfth Night
By William Shakespeare
May 13 – June 29, 2025

Subscriptions to seasons of theater, consort, and poetry are currently on sale. Single tickets for all performances go on sale later this summer.