It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period (1500–1750) in Britain and Europe.

Standard Oil of New York executive Henry Clay Folger, a graduate of Amherst College and Columbia University, was an avid collector of Shakespeareana, beginning in 1889 with the purchase of a 1685 Fourth Folio.

[2] Toward the end of World War I, he and his wife Emily Jordan Folger began searching for a location for a Shakespeare library based on their collection.

[8] The Folger's first official reader was B. Roland Lewis, who later published The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations, Translations, and Commentary based on his research.

[9] Early Folger exhibitions featured enticing items in the collection, including Ralph Waldo Emerson's copy of Shakespeare's works, an Elizabethan lute, and Edwin Booth's Richard III costume.

[13] The first Director of the Library, from 1940 to 1946, was Joseph Quincy Adams Jr.[14] The main Folger building was designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret.

The white marble exterior includes nine street-level bas-reliefs of scenes from Shakespeare's plays created by the sculptor John Gregory, an aluminum replica of a statue of Puck by Brenda Putnam, as well as many inscriptions personally selected by Henry Folger.

The Elizabethan Theatre lobby contains the original marble Puck statue (restored and moved indoors in 2001), and architectural painting by muralist Austin M. Purves Jr.

Trowbridge and Cret shared a similar vision for the design of the Library—a neoclassical building that stripped the facade of any decorative elements.

To retain an Elizabethan quality on the exterior of the building, Cret and Trowbridge proposed to decorate the facade with scenes from Shakespeare's works.

Currently, the relief sculptures includes scenes from Henry IV, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet.

[15] In 1959, the Folger contracted Harbeson, Hough, Livingston, and Larson, a Philadelphia firm that succeeded Cret's, to design a new wing by building over a rear parking lot.

The nineteenth-century office building was adapted by architect Andrew K. Stevenson to house the library's education and public programs staffs.

[20] Henry Folger wanted the Library's reading room to feel at once like a private home and the Great Hall of an English college.

The large stained-glass window overlooking what is now the Gail Kern Paster Reading Room was designed and created by Nicola D'Ascenzo, who depicted the familiar "Seven Ages of Man" soliloquy from As You Like It.

Decades of exposure weakened the statue, and after Puck's right hand was found across the street at the Library of Congress in 2000, the original piece was moved.

[24] The west garden's lawn shrank during the 1959 additions to the library, when part of its space was paved for a new staff parking area.

[25] The Folger Library and Theatre have undergone major renovations over the past six years, with the building being closed to daytime visitors since January 2020.

The renovations added a new learning lab,[27] new exhibits, outdoor gardens featuring a new Juliet balcony, and a reimagined great hall with a cafe (Quill & Crumb).

The topics of these texts vary widely, ranging across literature, politics, religion, technology, military history and tactics, medicine, and over 2,000 volumes on the Protestant Reformation.

Notable manuscripts include the earliest known staging diagram in England, a list of quotations George Eliot compiled while writing Middlemarch, the 18th-century Shakespeare forgeries of William Henry Ireland, and the papers of legendary 18th-century actor David Garrick.

Scholarly programs run by the Folger Institute include the Folger Institute Consortium, a group that shares research and other resources among over 40 universities, the Center for Shakespeare Studies, which seeks depth and diversity in Shakespeare scholarship, and the Center for the History of British Political Thought, which promotes continued scholarship of three hundred years of British politics.

The Emily Jordan Folger Children's Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1980, allows elementary students to perform every spring.

[44][45] TSI participants work with experts to study a small number of Shakespearean plays in terms of scholarship, performance, and the classroom.

Folger Consort is the library's resident early music ensemble, founded in 1977 by its artistic directors Robert Eisenstein and Christopher Kendall.

Hardison Jr.[52] Past poets involved in the series include Octavio Paz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, Hayden Carruth, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Sterling Brown, Denise Levertov, June Jordan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sonia Sanchez, and James Dickey.

Michael Witmore, a scholar with particular interest in the digital analysis of Shakespeare's texts, became the Folger's seventh director on July 1, 2011.