In Stratford-upon-Avon, the owners of Shrieves House, the former Three Tunns Tavern and now a museum, claim William Shakespeare based the character Falstaff on William Rogers, one of the Sargeants of the mace and close friend of the Shakespeares.

Shakespeare experts Sir John Gielgud and Kenneth Branagh consider the definitive rendition of the Bard's tragic tale to be the 1964 Russian film Gamlet () based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and directed by Grigori Kozintsev, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich.

* Open Source Shakespeare — Hamlet A complete text of Hamlet based on Q2.

Richardson said he based his performance of the scheming Francis Urquhart on the way Shakespeare portrayed Richard III.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story Un Capitano Moro (" A Moorish Captain ") by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565.

He serves as Producing Director for Queens Shakespeare Inc, a new classical repertory company based in Flushing, New York.

Some mainstream academics also argue the Oxford theory is based on simple snobbishness: that anti-Stratfordians reject the idea that the son of a mere tradesman could write the plays and poems of Shakespeare.

Steven May, the reigning authority on Edward de Vere's poetry, argues that Oxfordian attempts to relate the Earl's poetry to Shakespeare are based on ' a hopelessly flawed methodology ', in that Looney assigned to de Vere some poems he had not written.

Scholars have found that the styles of Shakespeare and Oxford, based on a computerised textual comparison developed by the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, are " light years apart "; it was reported that the odds of Oxford having written Shakespeare are " lower than the odds of getting hit by lightning ".

All references to Romeo and Juliet, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare second edition ( Gibbons, 1980 ) based on the Q2 text of 1599, with elements from Q1 of 1597.

Category: Plays and musicals based on works by William Shakespeare

In 2011 the Roundabout Theatre Company produced a Broadway revival based on the 2009 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production featuring Brian Bedford as director and as Lady Bracknell.

Cymbeline (), also known as Cymbeline, King of Britain or The Tragedy of Cymbeline, is a play by William Shakespeare, based on legends concerning the early Celtic British King Cunobelinus.

On screen he has been portrayed by Eduard Franz in the film Lady Godiva of Coventry ( 1955 ), George Howe in the BBC TV drama series Hereward the Wake ( 1965 ), Donald Eccles in the two-part BBC TV play Conquest ( 1966 ; part of the series Theatre 625 ), Brian Blessed in Macbeth ( 1997 ), based on the Shakespeare play ( although he does not appear in the play itself ), and Adam Woodroffe in an episode of the British TV series Historyonics entitled " 1066 " ( 2004 ).

Although Shakespeare based many of his characters on existing archetypes from fables and myths ( e. g., Romeo and Juliet on Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet ), Shakespeare's characters stand out as original by their contrast against a complex social literary landscape.

It is one of several Roman plays that Shakespeare wrote, based on true events from Roman history, which also include Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.

The Shrieves House is one of the oldest still lived in houses in the town and Shakespeare is said to have based his character of Sir John Falstaff on one of the residents, his godson's uncle.

In Shakespeare's own lifetime, a writer known for doing likewise was Matteo Bandello, who based his work on that of writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and who could have served as an indirect source for Shakespeare.

All references to Titus Andronicus, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Oxford Shakespeare ( Waith ), based on the Q1 text of 1594 ( except 3. 2, which is based on the folio text of 1623 ).

In 1957, Vissarion Shebalin composed the best known Russian opera based on Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew ( Укрощение строптивой )

In 1953, NBC broadcast an adaptation of the play by Philip Hanson, based on William Dawkins ' production for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Spirits in other Shakespeare plays — notably Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream — exist in ambiguous forms, occasionally even calling into question their own presence.

It is thought that Shakespeare never read Gesta Danorum, and instead had access to an auxiliary version of the tale describing the downfall of the Prince of Denmark, whose real name-Amleth-was used in anagram by Shakespeare for Hamlet.

Saxo ’ s version, told of in Book 3 and 4, is very similar to that of Shakespeare ’ s Hamlet.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare.

Consequently, there is no direct evidence that Kyd wrote it, nor any evidence that the play was not an early version of Hamlet by Shakespeare himself.

Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at age eleven.

Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600 – 1 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of " barely one hundred " for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.

The 2006 publication by Arden Shakespeare of different Hamlet texts in different volumes is perhaps the best evidence of this shifting focus and emphasis.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies, not the action, that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts.

Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet because he " showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings.

Shakespeare almost certainly wrote the role of Hamlet for Richard Burbage.

Oxford editor George Hibbard argues that, since the contemporary literature contains many allusions and references to Hamlet ( only Falstaff is mentioned more, from Shakespeare ), the play was surely performed with a frequency that the historical record misses.

Booth played Hamlet for 100 nights in the 1864 / 5 season at The Winter Garden Theatre, inaugurating the era of long-run Shakespeare in America.

In France, Charles Kemble initiated an enthusiasm for Shakespeare ; and leading members of the Romantic movement such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas saw his 1827 Paris performance of Hamlet, particularly admiring the madness of Harriet Smithson's Ophelia.

Although " posterity has treated Maurice Evans less kindly ", throughout the 1930s and 1940s he was regarded by many as the leading interpreter of Shakespeare in the United States and in the 1938 / 9 season he presented Broadway's first uncut Hamlet, running four and a half hours.

About the Fiennes Hamlet Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that it was "... not one for literary sleuths and Shakespeare scholars.

Off Broadway, the Riverside Shakespeare Company mounted an uncut first folio Hamlet in 1978 at Columbia University, with a playing time of under three hours.

In fact, Hamlet is the most produced Shakespeare play in New York theatre history, with sixty-four recorded productions on Broadway, and an untold number Off Broadway.

Laurence Olivier's 1948 moody black-and-white Hamlet won best picture and best actor Oscars, and is still, as of 2011, the only Shakespeare film to have done so.

Notable made-for-television productions of Hamlet include those starring Christopher Plummer ( 1964 ), Richard Chamberlain ( 1970 ; Hallmark Hall of Fame ), Derek Jacobi ( 1980 ; Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC ), Kevin Kline ( 1990 ), Campbell Scott ( 2000 ) and David Tennant ( 2009 ; Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC ).

Several times since 1995, the American Shakespeare Center has mounted repertories that included both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with the same actors performing the same roles in each ; in their 2001 and 2009 seasons the two plays were " directed, designed, and rehearsed together to make the most out of the shared scenes and situations ".