The New York Shakespeare Festival, which is using the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink while its theatre near the Belvedere is being completed, began bravely.

* March 6 – The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon is destroyed by fire.

By contrast, Peter Hall's production at the Shakespeare Memorial presented nearly the entire play, including the long-neglected dream scene ( although a golden eagle designed for Jupiter turned out too heavy for the stage machinery and was not used ).

* 1950: John Gielgud played Cassius at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the direction of Michael Langham and Anthony Quayle.

In the early 1870s, Charles Flower gave several acres of riverside land to the local council on the understanding that a permanent theatre be built in honour of Shakespeare's memory, and by 1879 the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre had been completed.

Notable more recent productions of Measure for Measure are Charles Laughton as Angelo at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933, Peter Brook's 1950 staging at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with John Gielgud as Angelo, and a 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival production featuring Meryl Streep as Isabella and John Cazale as Angelo.

He made his final appearances on stage as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as King Lear at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959, although failing health resulted in both performances being disappointing, according to some British critics.

A filmed extract from Benson's Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, the film presented a short pantomime version of the play, with pieces of Shakespeare's original text used as intertitles throughout.

In 1959 she appeared at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the direction of Peter Hall as Helena in A Midsummer's Night Dream opposite Charles Laughton as Bottom and Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier ( in the title role ), Albert Finney and Edith Evans.

* 1953, Michael Redgrave played Antony and Peggy Ashcroft played Cleopatra at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck's 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

* Michael Hordern – at the Shakespeare Memorial ( now the Royal Shakespeare ) Theatre, Stratford

Tutin first joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company for the 1960 season in Stratford-upon-Avon, appearing as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Viola in Twelfth Night and Cressida in Troilus and Cressida.

The internationally known California Shakespeare Theater, ( a. k. a. " Cal Shakes "), performs from June to October at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater ( located on land leased from EBMUD in the hills north of highway 24 ).

Redgrave joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company at Stratford-upon-Avon and for the 1951 season appeared as Prospero in The Tempest as well as playing Richard II, Hotspur and Chorus in the Cycle of Histories, for which he also directed Henry IV Part Two.

Returning to London in January 1958 he appeared as Philip Lester in A Touch of the Sun ( N. C. Hunter ) at the Saville Theatre — Best Actor in the Evening Standard Awards 1958 — before rejoining the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in June 1958, to play Hamlet and Benedick, also playing Hamlet with the company in Leningrad and Moscow in December 1958 ( while his wife Rachel Kempson played Ursula in Much Ado About Nothing and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet ).

In 1952 he appeared at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre ( forerunner of the Royal Shakespeare Company ) but had mixed reviews: his Prospero in The Tempest was judged too prosaic, and his Macbeth, directed by Gielgud, was thought unconvincingly villainous (" Richardson's playing of Macbeth suggests a fatal disparity between his temperament and the part ").

He went on to take over the Memorial Theatre at Stratford, and to create a permanent Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1960, also establishing a new base at the Aldwych Theatre for transfers to the West End.

The RSC ’ s history began with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was the brainchild of a local brewer, Charles Edward Flower.

More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.

There are a number of performing arts groups at Columbia dedicated to producing student theater, including the Columbia Players, King's Crown Shakespeare Troupe ( KCST ), Columbia Musical Theater Society ( CMTS ), NOMADS ( New and Original Material Authored and Directed by Students ), LateNite Theatre, Columbia University Performing Arts League ( CUPAL ), Black Theatre Ensemble ( BTE ), sketch comedy group Chowdah, and improvisational troupes Alfred and Fruit Paunch.

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.

Sam Waterston later played the role himself at the Delacorte for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the show transferred to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1975 ( Stephen Lang played Bernardo and other roles ).

David Warner played the role with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1965.

In the 20th century there was also renewed interest in Machiavelli's La Mandragola ( 1518 ), which received numerous stagings, including several in New York, at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976 and the Riverside Shakespeare Company in 1979, as a musical comedy by Peer Raben in Munich's antiteater in 1971, and at London's National Theatre in 1984.

Most notable of the professional companies are Nashville Children's Theatre, Tennessee Repertory Theatre, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, the Dance Theatre of Tennessee and the Tennessee Women's Theater Project.

The cross-dressing actress Charlotte Charke ran the successful but short-lived Punch's Theatre in the Old Tennis Court at St. James's, Westminster, presenting adaptations of Shakespeare as well as plays by herself, her father Colley Cibber, and her friend Henry Fielding.

* King Lear ( 2007 ), incidental music for a Public Theatre production of the Shakespeare tragedy, composed with orchestrator Michael Starobin.

* A nine-month run in 1976 had a new translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett for the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, with Raúl Juliá as Macheath, Blair Brown as Lucy, and Ellen Greene as Jenny.

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 was also performed in Cambridge in October 2007 in a production directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, who sought to re-capture the essence of the play as a story narrative, and in November 2007 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

In early 2011, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC, performed the play.

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 ).

He directed John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre, and in the same period he directed Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon.

A tradition, impossible to verify, holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599 — the Globe would have been the " wooden O " mentioned in the Prologue — but Shapiro argues that the Chamberlain's Men were still at The Curtain when the work was first performed, and that Shakespeare himself probably acted the Chorus.

* 1965 Aldwych Theatre, Ian Holm as Henry ( Royal Shakespeare Company )

* 1976 Aldwych Theatre, Alan Howard as Henry ( Royal Shakespeare Company )

* 1985 Barbican Theatre, Kenneth Branagh as Henry ( Royal Shakespeare Company )

Shakespeare does not tell us that Shylock was an aberrant individual.

Quiney was in London again in June, 1601, and in November, when he rode up, as Shakespeare must often have done, by way of Oxford, High Wycombe, and Uxbridge, and home through Aylesbury and Banbury.

In their very first speeches it was clear that Shakespeare, like a Nostradamus, had foreseen this moment.

* 1564 – Playwright William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England ( date of actual birth is unknown ).

Drama in English often used alexandrines before Marlowe and Shakespeare, by whom it was supplanted by iambic pentameter ( 5-foot verse ).

Among the dances described were the solemn basse danse, the livelier branle, pavane, and the galliarde which Shakespeare called the " cinq pace " as it was made of five steps.

Shakespeare may have changed this aspect of his character in order to please King James, who was thought at the time to be a descendant of the real Banquo.

But Shakespeare may also simply have altered Banquo's character because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder.

The cynical attitude toward recruited infantry in the face of ever more powerful field artillery is the source of the term cannon fodder, first used by François-René de Chateaubriand, in 1814 ; however, the concept of regarding soldiers as nothing more than " food for powder " was mentioned by William Shakespeare as early as 1598, in Henry IV, Part 1.

The early films were often melodramatic in tone, and there was a distinct preference for storylines which were already known to the audience-in particular adaptations of Shakespeare plays and Dickens ' novels.

Shakespeare's desire to burlesque a hero of early English Protestantism could indicate Catholic sympathies, but Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham was sufficiently sympathetic to Catholicism that in 1603, he was imprisoned as part of the Main Plot to place Arbella Stuart on the English throne, so if Shakespeare wished to use Oldcastle to embarrass the Cobhams, he seems unlikely to have done so on religious grounds.

The Cobhams appear to have intervened while Shakespeare was in the process of writing either The Merry Wives of Windsor or the second part of Henry IV.

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.

The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Sir Francis Bacon wrote some or all the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, in opposition to the scholarly consensus that William Shakespeare of Stratford was the author.

Soon after that second hospitalization, Cantor's youngest son Rudolph died suddenly ( while Cantor was delivering a lecture on his views on Baconian theory and William Shakespeare ), and this tragedy drained Cantor of much of his passion for mathematics.

" The play was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most-performed, topping the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance list since 1879.

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.

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.

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.

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.

" " Hengist and Horsus " appear as antagonists in William Henry Ireland's play Vortigern and Rowena, which was touted as a newly-discovered work by William Shakespeare in 1796, but was soon revealed as a hoax.