* 1660 – A woman ( either Margaret Hughes or Anne Marshall ) appears on an English public stage for the first time, in the role of Desdemona in a production of Shakespeare's play Othello.

Notorious for a life of dissipation and debauchery somewhat similar to Falstaff, he was among the first to mention Shakespeare in his work ( in Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit ), suggesting to Greenblatt that the older writer may have influenced Shakespeare's characterization.

Sadler's first name is spelled " Hamlett " in Shakespeare's will.

* First Folio ( F1 ) In 1623 Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard published the First Folio, the first edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works.

It became the first of Shakespeare's plays to be presented with movable flats painted with generic scenery behind the proscenium arch of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre.

After Collingridge's resignation, Urquhart — in imitation of Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester — at first feigns unwillingness to stand before announcing his candidacy.

"); this derives from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where it actually forms the first half of a macaronic line: " Et tu, Brute?

* 1609 – Shakespeare's sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe.

The longest sequence was written to Tommaso dei Cavalieri ( c. 1509 – 1587 ), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57 ; these make up the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another, predating Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth by fifty years:

* 1604 – William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello is presented for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.

* 1611 – William Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Tempest is presented for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.

His portrayal of Shakespeare's Othello was the first of someone of African descent to take the role in Great Britain, in an otherwise all-white cast, since Ira Aldridge's 19th century portrayal.

She would release her first film in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Conversely, most Cardassians figure out during the first act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that all the conspirators are going to kill him, but cannot understand why Caesar cannot figure this out ( or is willfully blind to an impending coup d ' état ) until the knives are literally coming at him from all directions.

According to his nephew's Memoir the first edition was prepared by Bowdler's sister, Harriet, but both were published under Thomas Bowdler's name, probably because a woman could not then publicly admit that she understood Shakespeare's racy passages.

* April 23 – Probable first performance of William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

* December 9 – Probable first performance of William Shakespeare's Richard II.

* Probable first performance of William Shakespeare's plays Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream in London.

* November 1 – At Whitehall Palace in London, William Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Tempest is performed, perhaps for the first time.

* William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is first performed and his play The Merchant of Venice is published.

* Spring – Possible first performance of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet.

) – Possible first performance of William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth in London.

* September 21 – The first performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the Globe Theatre in London, is reported by Swiss traveller Thomas Platter the Younger.

Differing from the quartos of the plays, the first editions of Shakespeare's narrative poems are extremely well printed.

" Richard Field, Shakespeare's first publisher and printer, was a Stratford man, probably a friend of Shakespeare, and the two produced an excellent text.

Since 1600, two successive lines of verse that rhyme with each other, known as a couplet featured as a part of the longer sonnet form, most notably in William Shakespeare's sonnets.

In this, the murdered king has two sons — Hroar and Helgi — who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's.

Early editors of Shakespeare's works, beginning with Nicholas Rowe ( 1709 ) and Lewis Theobald ( 1733 ), combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1.

Finally, in a period when most plays ran for two hours or so, the full text of Hamlet — Shakespeare's longest play, with 4, 042 lines, totalling 29, 551 words — takes over four hours to deliver.

The most common imbrication between these two categories of mental impairment occurs in the polemic surrounding Edmund from William Shakespeare's King Lear.

* William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and the films made from these two plays ( played by Marlon Brando and Robert Speaight, respectively ).

Shakespeare's native Avon and Stratford are referred to in two prefatory poems in the 1623 First Folio, one of which refers to Shakespeare as " Swan of Avon " and another to the author's " Stratford monument ".

The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The play concerns the misadventures and musings of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet who are childhood friends of the prince, focusing on their actions with the events of Hamlet as background.

Bernardina da Silveira Pinheiro observes that Stoppard uses metatheatrical devices to produce a " parody " of the key elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet that includes foregrounding two minor characters considered " nonentities " in the original tragedy.

In 1951, Leigh and Olivier performed two plays about Cleopatra, William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, alternating the play each night and winning good reviews.

Shakespeare's romances were also influenced by two major developments in theatre in the early years of the seventeenth century.

Indeed, modern productions of Shakespeare's plays often reflect the world in which they are performed as much as the world for which they were written: and the Moscow theatre scene in 1994 provided an example, when two very different productions of the play ( those by Sergei Zhonovach and Alexei Borodin ), very different from one another in their style and outlook, were both reflections on the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The only two significant big-screen performances of Shakespeare's text date from the early 1970s: Grigori Kozintsev was working on his Korol Lir at the same time as Peter Brook was filming his King Lear.

") The two are reconciled ; they prepare for war with Mark Antony and Caesar's adopted son, Octavian ( Shakespeare's spelling: Octavius ).

Opinions vary on the artistic value of the resulting production: some see Welles's mercilessly pared-down script ( the running time was around 100 minutes without an interval, several characters were eliminated, dialogue was moved around and borrowed from other plays, and the final two acts were reduced to a single scene ) as a radical and innovative way of cutting away peripheral elements of Shakespeare's tale ; others thought Welles's version was a mangled and lobotomised version of Shakespeare's tragedy which lacked the psychological depth of the original.

Kier Elam posits a date of 1591 as a terminus post quem for the composition of the Folio text of The Shrew, based on Shakespeare's probable use of two sources published that year.

The debate regarding the relationship between the two plays began in 1725, when Alexander Pope incorporated extracts from A Shrew into The Shrew in his edition of Shakespeare's works.

" Character names are changed, plot points are altered ( Kate has two sisters for example, not one ), the play is set in Athens instead of Padua, Sly continues to comment on events throughout the play, and entire speeches are completely different ( lines from other plays are also found in A Shrew, especially from Marlowe's Tamburlaine ), all of which suggests that the author / reporter of A Shrew thought he ( or she ) was working on something different to Shakespeare's play, not simply transcribing it.

When the two plays were revived together in 1633, Fletcher's play proved more popular than Shakespeare's.

The most successful adaptation was David Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio, which was introduced in 1756 and dominated the stage for almost two centuries, with Shakespeare's play not returning until 1844 in England and 1887 in the United States, although Garrick's version was still being performed as late as 1879, when Herbert Beerbohm Tree staged it.

This play treats the events leading up to the start of Shakespeare's play ( though the two texts do not have identical characters ).

Some critics, among them W. W. Lawrence, consider it to be one of Shakespeare's " problem plays ", because the first three acts are filled with intense psychological drama, while the last two acts are comedic and supply a happy ending.