All the world’s a… map?

In early 2023, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (the world’s largest William Shakespeare collection) launched a major redesign of its main Shakespeare Exhibition Hall. Folger’s (now retired) director of education, Peggy O’Brien, knew that a section of the hall needed to address Shakespeare’s plays because, as she points out on the Folger website, “Most people meet Shakespeare through a play.”

Justice... for all? Legal dramas and political prisoners.

• The Merchant of Venice
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Measure for Measure
• Henry VI, Part 2
• King John
• The Winter's Tale
• The Two Noble Kinsmen

O’Brien and her staff wanted visitors to be able to look at all the plays at once. Through conversations with a creative agency, they came up with the idea of creating a fictional map. From there, says O’Brien, “We needed a brilliant scholar with a sense of humor and the right artist.”

That scholar turned out to be UMass Amherst’s own Adam Zucker, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies for the English department—and author of Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford University Press, 2024) and The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Isle of Tyrants. Murderous, self-obsessed, scheming antiheroes.

• Richard III
• Macbeth
• The Winter's Tale

O’Brien tapped Zucker to be the expert curator who worked alongside the creative team, having previously worked with him during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer program for secondary education teachers. Not to mention, Zucker has published quite a bit about Renaissance comedy. “Apparently, I was the right scholar for the job,” Zucker says with a shrug. When O’Brien described the outlines of the map idea to him, Zucker immediately signed on.

“I was the type of kid who spent hours examining the maps in fantasy novels,” Zucker says, “so I was glad to see that style taken up here.”

The map, titled “A Fantastical World of William Shakespeare,” follows in the tradition of fictional maps of Middle Earth found in the Lord of the Rings and Westeros in Game of Thrones… sort of. Designed to be approachable, funny, and full of puns (Shakespeare wouldn’t have had it any other way), the map invites visitors to test their knowledge of Shakespeare by examining locations in forest, sea, wilderness, and city settings and to discover hidden gems and easter eggs therein.

The Tempest-Tossed. Maritime disasters: Shakespeare's favorite plot device.

• The Comedy of Errors
• Pericles
• The Winter's Tale
• The Tempest

“[The] map includes references to every single Shakespeare play in an imagined landscape,” says Zucker, “with characters staged in areas defined not by literal locations in plays, but by a few of Shakespeare’s favorite themes and situations. So, while you’ll spot some famous moments here and there, don’t look for Hamlet in a graveyard or Macbeth chatting with the Weird Sisters. Characters appear in a thematically organized landscape of city and country, of land and sea, of dangerous bears and support groups for children of terrible fathers. We think Shakespeare would have approved.”

The charming and lighthearted map takes its place beside a wealth of other resources about the Bard in the Folger—“the single most important library in the world devoted to the works of Shakespeare,” says Zucker. “In addition to holding thousands of rare early printed books by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and in addition to holding a comprehensive archive of scholarship written about Tudor and Stuart literature and culture, the Folger owns 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio (by far the largest collection anywhere),” he explains. The First Folio is a collection of plays by Shakespeare, published about seven years after his death. It is counted alongside the Bible and Darwin’s Origins of the Species as one of the books that shaped the world.

Ancient Heroes, Shakespeare's many classical pasts

• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Troilus and Cressida
• Titus Andronicus
• Julius Caesar
• Antony and Cleopatra
• The Two Noble Kinsmen

“We’re hoping the Folger will make a poster-sized version of [the map]. It’s the kind of thing teachers can hang in classrooms,” Zucker says. For him, this gets to the central appeal of the project: “I want to keep sparking curiosity about Shakespeare’s work for educators and for students. There is a shifting universe of thoughtful beauty in those plays. I don’t aspire to tell everyone exactly what they mean, but I do want to show people and interest people in a few of the things they can do and be. The Folger map is one small performance of all that possibility.” 

Explore Shakespeare’s world for yourself!

Check out the full map, click to enlarge, and look for all the fun details.