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Shakespeare in Performance

The plays never left the stage — but every century performed a different Shakespeare. A tour of four hundred years of productions.

Shakespeare wrote for performance, and performance has been rewriting him ever since. No era has staged “the real Shakespeare”; each has staged the Shakespeare it needed.

The Restoration: adapted Shakespeare (1660–1700)

When the theatres reopened in 1660 after the 1642–1660 closure, Shakespeare came back in costume — literally rewritten. William Davenant and John Dryden adapted freely: Nahum Tate gave King Lear a happy ending (Lear survives, Edgar marries Cordelia) that held the stage for 150 years; The Tempest gained a new character, a sister for Miranda. The star was Thomas Betterton, whose Hamlet — grave, restrained, definitive — dominated the age. The Restoration wanted Shakespeare respectable; it got him by rewriting him.

The 18th century: Garrick’s Shakespeare (1700s)

David Garrick made Shakespeare England’s national poet by making him popular entertainment. His 1741 Richard III (played young, electric, naturalistic against the old declamatory style) made him a star overnight; as actor-manager of Drury Lane he staged Shakespeare more than any predecessor. In 1769 he organized the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford — a three-day celebration that was famously rained out (no plays were actually performed) but permanently fixed Stratford as Shakespeare’s shrine and Shakespeare as England’s secular saint.

The 19th century: the actor-managers (1800s)

The century belonged to star tragedians and spectacle. Edmund Kean’s 1814 Shylock at Drury Lane — played as a wronged, dignified man rather than a comic villain — electrified London. Henry Irving ran the Lyceum (1878–1902) with Ellen Terry as his leading lady, staging Shakespeare as pictorial realism: historically researched sets, huge casts, star turns. Across the Atlantic, the Booth family (including Edwin Booth, the great American Hamlet) carried the tradition. The plays were often cut to ribbons to showcase the star — the Victorian Hamlet could lose half its text and nobody minded.

The 20th century: film, war, and the director

Laurence Olivier brought Shakespeare to film and to wartime Britain: his Henry V (1944) — released as the Allies fought in Normandy — turned the Agincourt play into national myth; his Hamlet (1948) won the Academy Award for Best Picture, still the only Shakespeare film to do so. John Gielgud defined verse-speaking for a generation; Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company (1961) at Stratford, institutionalizing ensemble Shakespeare; directors from Peter Brook (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970 — a white-box circus) onward treated the plays as raw material for radical reinterpretation.

The Globe rebuilt (1997)

The American actor Sam Wanamaker spent decades campaigning for a faithful reconstruction of Shakespeare’s playhouse on Bankside; the new Shakespeare’s Globe opened in 1997, staging the plays in daylight, in the open air, for standing groundlings — the closest modern audiences get to the original conditions. The reconstruction is scholarly and theatrical at once: oak frame, thatched roof (the only thatched roof in London, with special fire precautions), and no amplification.

Shakespeare everywhere

Today the plays are performed in more countries and translated into more languages than those of any other playwright — Kabuki Hamlet, Bollywood Othello (Omkara), a Midsummer Night’s Dream in every school hall on earth. Each production is an argument about what the play means; the canon survives because it keeps losing the argument and winning the audience.

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