"The earliest certain performance occurred on 1633, when Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria watched it on the Queen's birthday. Colley Cibber produced the most successful of the Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare with his version of ""Richard III"", at Drury Lane starting in 1700. Cibber himself played the role till 1739, and his version was on stage for the next century and a half. It contained the lines ""Off with his head; so much for Buckingham"" – possibly the most famous Shakespearean line that Shakespeare did not write – and ""Richard's himself again!"". The original Shakespearean version returned in a"
"version took place, probably due to audiences' increasing interest in original texts. From this point on Cibber's adaptation vanished from the stages. It took two centuries to change critical and popular opinion and to make a staging of the original script possible again. The once discredited original now rules the stage unchallenged. Cibber's version, which was the most oft-produced ""Shakespeare"" play in nineteenth century America, cannot be found on stage any longer. Some directors thought it a good idea to preserve some of Cibber's most famous lines, such as ""Off with his head! So much for Buckingham."", which fit well"
"Colley Cibber Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir ""Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber"" (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 plays for his own company at Drury Lane, half of which were adapted from various sources, which led Robert Lowe and Alexander Pope, among others, to criticise his ""miserable mutilation"" of ""crucified Molière [and] hapless Shakespeare"". He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as"
"Cibber contrived a completely new opening act, including the murder of King Henry VI taken from ""Henry VI, Part 3""; that is not in Shakespeare's version. However, parts from the original first act are mentioned in the course of the play. One example is the conversation between Lady Anne and Richard in the second act, after the death of King Henry VI, in St. Paul's Cathedral. Another is Tressel's lines, ""Your Queen yet Lives, and many of your Friends, / But for my Lord your Son---"", dealing with the report to King Henry VI of his son's death, are also"
"and David Garrick, including Cibber's line, ""Off with his head. So much for Buckingham!"". Like Cibber and Garrick, Olivier's film opens with material from the last scenes of ""Henry VI, Part III"", to introduce more clearly the situation at the beginning of the story. A key change in the story involved the seduction of Anne. It is split into two scenes instead of one, and an element of perversity is added—whereas in the original play she is following a coffin with the corpse of her father-in-law, in this film the coffin contains the corpse of her husband. John Cottrell has"
"off scene as a song usually given to a minor character was sung by Anne in front of the enraged Queen Katherine. Henry VIII (play) Henry VIII is a collaborative history play, written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of King Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All Is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic evidence indicates that individual scenes were written by either Shakespeare or his collaborator and successor, John Fletcher. It is also somewhat characteristic of"
"Henry VIII (play) Henry VIII is a collaborative history play, written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of King Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All Is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic evidence indicates that individual scenes were written by either Shakespeare or his collaborator and successor, John Fletcher. It is also somewhat characteristic of the late romances in its structure. It is noted for having more stage directions than any of Shakespeare's other plays. During a"
"flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: ""Cymbeline"", ""The Winter's Tale"" and ""The Tempest"", as well as the collaboration, ""Pericles, Prince of Tyre"". Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, ""Henry VIII"" and ""The Two Noble Kinsmen"", probably with John Fletcher. Other important figures in the Elizabethan theatre include"
"unsuccessful. The disappointment of the audience forced him to return to Cibber's more familiar version of the play. Twenty-three years later, Samuel Phelps launched a similar attempt at Sadler's Well, but was equally unsuccessful. The public's opinion did not change until as late as the turn of the eighteenth century, and even then Samuel French called Cibber's version of the play the ""acting version"" of the plot. That Cibber's adaptation was performed on stages up to the latter half of the nineteenth century underlines this. In the later part of the century a gradual shift back to the original Shakespearean"
"Cibber created a new scene involving Rutland; after the death of York, he and Rutland are laid side by side on the battlefield. In 1817, Edmund Kean appeared in J.H. Merivale's ""Richard Duke of York; or the Contention of York and Lancaster"", which used material from all three ""Henry VI"" plays, but removed everything not directly related to York; the play ended with his death, which occurs in Act 1, Scene 4 of ""3 Henry VI"". Material from ""3 Henry VI"" included the opening few scenes involving York taking the throne from Henry, preparing for battle, and then the battle"
"much, but think the more"" (4.1.85) and ""Not I, my thoughts aim at a further matter:/I stay not for love of Edward but the crown"" (141.124–125); Warwick's ""O unbid spite, is sportful Edward come"" (5.1.18); the entirety of Richard's soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 6, after killing Henry (ll.61–93) and Richard's ""To say the truth, so Judas kissed his master/And cried 'All hail', whenas he meant all harm"" (5.7.33–34). The play also featured in ITV's ""Will Shakespeare"", a 1978 six-part (heavily fictionalised) biopic of Shakespeare (Tim Curry), written by John Mortimer. Episode one, ""Dead Shepherd"", focuses on Shakespeare's apprenticeship to"
"play is Thomas Stukeley, presented as a larger-than-life figure driven by ambition: he is given a soliloquy on his desire to be a king which very probably influenced Shakespeare in writing the Duke of Gloucester's similar speech in ""Henry VI, Part 3"". Peele may have chosen to treat Stukeley as he does in an attempt to create a hero compable to Marlowe's ""Tamburlaine,"" which was the great theatrical success of the late 1580s. (Peele wrote a poem,""A Farewell to Norris and Drake,"" in which he links Stukeley and Tamburlaine: ""proud tragedians...mighty Tamburlaine,/ King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley..."") Critics contend that the"
"the same source used by Shakespeare. Shakespeare used Britain's mythical history in several of his plays, including ""King Lear"" and ""Cymbeline"", based on the stories of Leir of Britain and Cunobelinus, respectively. The play is essentially a pastiche of Shakespeare, with Vortigern serving as a Macbeth figure; other Shakespearean elements include the use of Holinshead and Flavia's cross-dressing. The play experienced a comedic revival by the Pembroke Players at the Pembroke College New Cellars, Cambridge, on November 19, 2008. The production was directed by Pembroke third-year Alexander Whiscombe, and starred David Harrap in the title role with Eystein Thanisch as"
"Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and the 1584 ""Doctrine of Equivocation"" by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s. Perhaps Shakespeare's most direct reference in the plays to contemporary religious issues comes at the birth of Queen Elizabeth in ""Henry VIII"", during whose reign, as the character Archbishop Cranmer, architect of the reformation, predicts: ""God shall be truly known"". The words in question, however, are generally attributed to Fletcher, and not directly attributable to Shakespeare. One perspective is that to deduce from the evidence a definite Anglican Shakespeare is to misapprehend"
"Bosworth Field. The night before the fight Richard is haunted by ghosts of all the people he has killed. In the battle on the following morning, Richard is killed, and Richmond is crowned King Henry VII, which concludes the fifth act. Even though Cibber takes fewer than 800 lines from Shakespeare, he stays for the most part with the original design, mainly adapting the plot to make it more suitable for the Orange stage, as well as performable in less than two hours. Cibber add aspects and scenes and extended the plot, and leaves out several Shakespearean characters and passages."
"main players are given in the following order: Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, Thomas Pope, William Sly, Christopher Beeston, William Kempe, and John Duke. (Kempe would leave the company the next year, for his famous morris dance from London to Norwich.) In 1599, Jonson wrote what would prove to be a much less popular sequel, ""Every Man out of His Humour"". The play was revived around 1670; Sackville provided a verse epilogue in which Jonson himself appeared as a ghost. David Garrick brought a revised version to the stage in 1751; the changes he made served chiefly"
"and Bristol indicate that at least some of the company toured that summer. The character of Falstaff, though immensely popular from the start, aroused the ire of Lord Cobham, who objected to the use of the character's original name (Oldcastle), which derived from a member of Cobham's family. In the last years of the century, the company continued to stage Shakespeare's new plays, including ""Julius Caesar"" and ""Henry V"", which may have opened the Globe, and ""Hamlet"", which may well have appeared first at the Curtain. Among non-Shakespearean drama, ""A Warning for Fair Women"" was certainly performed, as was the"
"Colley Cibber. Cibber was accused of borrowing parts of ""Love at a Venture"" to write his own, ""The Double Gallant"". However, as a gesture of friendship in hopes of smoothing things over, Cibber accepted a part in Centlivre's next play, ""The Platonick Lady"" (November 1706). After having grown weary with anonymous authorship, Centlivre used the preface to ""The Platonick Lady"" to express her distaste for society's outlook on the female writer. Following her marriage, Centlivre took some time off. This decision turned out to be a good one; her time away resulted in her most successful comedy, ""The Busy Body"""
"Hamlet in performance Hamlet by William Shakespeare has been performed many times since the beginning of the 17th century. Shakespeare wrote the role of Hamlet for Richard Burbage, tragedian of The Lord Chamberlain's Men: an actor with a capacious memory for lines, and a wide emotional range. Hamlet appears to have been Shakespeare's fourth most popular play during his lifetime, eclipsed only by ""Henry VI Part 1"", ""Richard III"" and ""Pericles"". Although the story was set many centuries before, at The Globe the play was performed in Elizabethan dress. ""Hamlet"" was acted by the crew of the ship ""Red Dragon"","
"murdered, including Buckingham. Richard is portrayed as suffering a pang of conscience, but as he speaks he regains his confidence and asserts that he will be evil, if such needed to retain his crown. The fight between the two armies is simulated by rowdy noises made off-stage (""alarums"" or alarms) while actors walk on-stage, deliver their lines, and exit. To build anticipation for the duel, Shakespeare requests more ""alarums"" after Richard's councillor, William Catesby, announces that the king is ""[enacting] more wonders than a man"". Richard punctuates his entrance with the classic line, ""A horse, a horse! My kingdom for"
"updated the setting to the 1930s but changed none of Shakespeare's dialogue. Shakespeare in performance Thousands (perhaps even millions) of performances of William Shakespeare's plays have been staged since the end of the 16th century. While Shakespeare was alive, many of his greatest plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and King's Men acting companies at the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres. Among the actors of these original performances were Richard Burbage (who played the title role in the first performances of ""Hamlet"", ""Othello"", ""Richard III"" and ""King Lear""), Richard Cowley, and William Kempe. Shakespeare's plays continued to be staged"
"poem and the epilogue to his ""Old Fortunatus"" (also performed at court in 1599), and a verbal echo of the Dial Hand poem in his ""Whore of Babylon"" (1605). Hackett states that, unlike Shakespeare, Dekker regularly wrote complimentary verse about Elizabeth and suggests that the poem was intended to be spoken at the end of his play ""The Shoemaker's Holiday"". To the Queen ""To the Queen"" (or ""To The Queen by the players"") is a short 18 line poem praising Queen Elizabeth I attributed to William Shakespeare. It was included in 2007 by Jonathan Bate in his complete Shakespeare edition"
"to more original writing. The comedy ""The Careless Husband"" (1704), generally considered to be Cibber's best play, is another example of the retrieval of a straying husband by means of outstanding wifely tact, this time in a more domestic and genteel register. The easy-going Sir Charles Easy is chronically unfaithful to his wife, seducing both ladies of quality and his own female servants with insouciant charm. The turning point of the action, known as ""the Steinkirk scene"", comes when his wife finds him and a maidservant asleep together in a chair, ""as close an approximation to actual adultery as could"
"Monck Mason, and in the nineteenth century, William Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. All doubted Shakespeare's authorship. So strong had the anti-Shakespearean movement become during the eighteenth century that in 1794, Thomas Percy wrote in the introduction to ""Reliques of Ancient English Poetry"", ""Shakespeare's memory has been fully vindicated from the charge of writing the play by the best critics."" Similarly, in 1832, the ""Globe Illustrated Shakespeare"" claimed there was universal agreement on the matter due to the un-Shakespearean ""barbarity"" of the play. However, despite the fact that so many Shakespearean scholars believed the play to have been written by"
"Lord Abergavenny. Their speeches express their mutual resentment over the ruthless power and overweening pride of Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey passes over the stage with his attendants, and expresses his own hostility toward Buckingham. Later Buckingham is arrested on treason charges—Wolsey's doing. The play's second scene introduces King Henry VIII, and shows his reliance on Wolsey as his favourite. Queen Katherine enters to protest about Wolsey's abuse of the tax system for his own purposes; Wolsey defends himself, but when the King revokes the Cardinal's measures, Wolsey spreads a rumour that he himself is responsible for the King's action. Katherine also"
"world. Shakespeare sings the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, when asked about his view of death (the song is titled ""Fear No More""). ""Fear no more the heat of the sun"" is the line that Winnie and her husband are trying to remember in Samuel Beckett's ""Happy Days"" as they sit exposed to the elements. Cymbeline Cymbeline , also known as Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a play by William Shakespeare set in Ancient Britain (""c."" AD 10–14) and based on legends that formed part of the Matter of Britain concerning the early Celtic British King Cunobeline. Although"
"Though once held in very high regard, ""Cymbeline"" lost favour with critics in the 18th century. The most famous comments were made by Samuel Johnson: Lytton Strachey famously found it ""difficult to resist the conclusion that he [Shakespeare] was getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams."" Harley Granville-Barker had similar views, saying that the play shows that Shakespeare was becoming a ""wearied artist"". William Hazlitt and John Keats, however, numbered it among their favourite plays. Some have taken the convoluted plot as evidence that"
"play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Brythonic figure Leir of Britain, whose name has been linked by some scholars to the Brythonic god Lir/Llŷr, though in actuality the names are not etymologically related. Shakespeare's most important source is probably the second edition of ""The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande"" by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587. Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier ""Historia Regum Britanniae"" by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was written in the 12th century. Edmund Spenser's ""The Faerie Queene"", published 1590, also contains a character named Cordelia, who also dies from hanging, as"
"Richard III (1699 play) Richard III (1699) is a history play written by Colley Cibber. It is based on William Shakespeare's ""Richard III"", but reworked for Williamite audiences. Cibber, a prominent theatre manager, first attempted to stage his version in 1699, but the performance was a disaster. The Master of the Revels censored the entire first act and the production was a popular and commercial failure. Cibber published the script in 1700, including the problematic act, with a short note on its suppression. Ensuing performances from 1704 eventually risked the entire play in Cibber's new form. The play became a"
"2005), provides two different versions of the play, each with respectable authority. The problem exists with at least four other Shakespearian plays (""Henry IV, part 1"", ""Hamlet"", ""Troilus and Cressida"", and ""Othello""). During Shakespeare's lifetime, many of his greatest plays were staged at the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars Theatre. Shakespeare's fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men acted in his plays. Among these actors were Richard Burbage (who played the title role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including ""Hamlet"", ""Othello"", ""Richard III"" and ""King Lear""), Richard Cowley (who played Verges in ""Much Ado About Nothing""),"
"1923 production of ""Cymbeline"" at the Birmingham Rep. This production was groundbreaking because it reintroduced the idea of modern dress back into Shakespeare. It was not the first modern-dress production since there were a few minor examples before World War I, but ""Cymbeline"" was the first to call attention to the device in a blatant way. Iachimo was costumed in evening dress for the wager, the court was in military uniforms, and the disguised Imogen in knickerbockers and cap. It was for this production that critics invented the catch phrase ""Shakespeare in plus-fours"". The experiment was moderately successful, and the"
"the actual historical events of the play proceeded over a much longer period. In Cibber's version the years 1471–1485, during which Richard gained power and was able to rise to the throne of England, are presented to the audience in five acts. The main events take place in London, mostly in the Tower, and in the camp and battlefield at Bosworth Field. The play does not reflect the time frame in an obvious manner: it's not clear which actions take place at what specific time or how much time actually passes during the play. Shakespeare's first act begins with Richard"
"to ""Elementary, my dear fellow! Elementary!"" (in the final 1935 text; Act II Scene II). The 1976 Samuel French reprint has the phrase ""Oh, this is elementary, my dear Watson"" (Act I Scene III; though the scene has been placed in a different act, it is the same scene as above), but it is unclear which of the earlier versions is the basis of this reprint. It was also Gillette who introduced the famous curved pipe as a trademark Holmes prop. Sherlock Holmes (play) Sherlock Holmes is a four-act play by William Gillette and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, based on"