Going Viral with Shakespeare and Other Essays Hardcover – February 18, 2026

“Eric Rasmussen is a regular Robert Langdon of the Shakespearean world” – The Washington Post“Indiana Jones, sans bullwhip” – Kirkus ReviewsEric Rasmussen, author of The Shakespeare Thefts, continues his search for long-lost copies of one of the world’s most valuable books – the Shakespeare First Folio – from the dusty archives of a Jesuit college in the north of France to a former outpost of the British Raj in India. The world is so eager to learn of his findings that stories about his discovery of a new First Folio receive over 12 billion online pageviews in a single day.Rasmussen’s narratives of discovery are punctuated throughout by lighter moments in which he encounters five-year-old geniuses who debate whether Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon, teaches a graduate seminar that refuses to stop meeting for over a decade, gets censored for quoting Shakespeare on the BBC, faces the wrath of Prince Charles over his use of the semicolon, and discovers photos of himself holding a Shakespeare First Folio on the liners of stackable plastic bins at airport security checkpoints.The essays in Going Viral with Shakespeare are lucid, informative, engaging, and, on occasion, laugh-out-loud fun.The collection also includes the full text of the script to the pilot episode of Rasmussen's mini-series for television, Barn Elms.Eric Rasmussen, editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, is a three-time winner of the Falstaff Award for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year. He has delivered over one hundred plenary lectures worldwide on the Shakespeare First Folio, served on the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America and as a General Editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare. Read more