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Actors. Once Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, he wrote exclusively for that company. Doing so afforded him an opportunity to write for particular actors whose abilities as performers he knew personally.
- Censorship
Perhaps the most infamous case in which Shakespeare’s plays...
- Shakespeare's Globe Theater
Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had long...
- Censorship
- Sir Mark Rylance
- Sir Ian McKellen
- Dame Judi Dench
- Sir Patrick Stewart
- Ralph Fiennes
- Sir Kenneth Branagh
- Dame Maggie Smith
- James Earl Jones
- Sir Derek Jacobi
- Kevin Kline
Shakespeare lovers cheered when Rylance took home an Oscar in 2016 for portraying accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies.” The role marked a departure from his usual fare. For many, the great Shakespearean scholar is best known as the original artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London; he also playfully under...
Long before he played Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films, McKellen made his name as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time. A graduate of Cambridge University (and its famed Marlowe Society), McKellen has performed the Bard’s works all over the world with esteemed companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company...
This legendary talent won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in John Madden’s 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love,” but Dench’s own passion for Shakespeare goes back much farther. A graduate of London’s Central School of Speech and Drama (alongside renowned actor Vanessa Redgrave), Dench made her professional stage debut as Ophelia ...
Stewart has enjoyed a long career as a film and television star, but it all started with a turn at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s. Stewart then made his Broadway debut playing Tom Snout in Peter Brooks’ 1971 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and worked with the Royal National Theatre for many years. Though he took time off for ...
Another performer who got his start with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Fiennes is an award-winning Shakespearean actor with an astonishing body of work to his name. He has portrayed Romeo, Hamlet, and Claudio in “Much Ado About Nothing” in productions in London and on Broadway. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dram...
One of the most prolific adaptors of Shakespeare for the screen, Branagh made his name first as a performer, and then as a screenwriter and director of great classical works. A graduate of RADA, who later became its president in 2015, Branagh performed Shakespeare all over London early in his career and co-founded the Renaissance Theatre Company in...
This wildly inventive actor is famous across generations, from a stage career spanning over 50 years to her roles as Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” franchise and Violet Crawley in “Downton Abbey.” Smith was once a fixture at Canada’s Stratford Festival, where she performed numerous Shakespeare roles, and she received the first of six Ac...
One of this country’s most beloved theater and film actors, Jones made his Shakespearean debut in “Othello” over 60 years ago after training at the University of Michigan, and later studied at New York’s American Theatre Wing. Darth Vader in iambic pentameter? Yes please. His career has covered many more of the Bard’s works (in addition to great Am...
A Cambridge graduate (like his friend McKellen and the longtime director Sir Trevor Nunn), this Shakespearean actor honed his skills from a young age as a member of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. When Laurence Olivier became the first director of the Royal National Theatre, he invited Jacobi to be a part of its company, along with Smith. His car...
A founding member of what is now the touring theater troupe known as The Acting Company, Kline has been performing Shakespeare since his days as a Juilliard student. The actor spent a decade working onstage in New York before breaking into film with “Sophie’s Choice,” and was in several productions as part of Shakespeare in the Park throughout the ...
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Jun 26, 2015 · Columbia University’s James Shapiro ( A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599) is the most notable exception to the rule. An inimitable scholar, Shapiro spent years building ...
In this fact sheet, students will learn about the people who became actors, what an average day was like and more. A printable version of this Fact Sheet is available in the downloads section below. Actors. The life of an actor changed dramatically during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.
Shakespeare the Actor and Playwright. We know very little about Shakespeare's life during two major spans of time, commonly referred to as the "lost years." The lost years fall into two periods: 1578-82 and 1585-92. The first period covers the time after Shakespeare left grammar school until his marriage to Anne Hathaway in November of 1582.
William Shakespeare - Playwright, Poet, Actor: The first reference to Shakespeare in the literary world of London comes in 1592, when a fellow dramatist, Robert Greene, declared in a pamphlet written on his deathbed: What these words mean is difficult to determine, but clearly they are insulting, and clearly Shakespeare is the object of the sarcasms. When the book in which they appear (Greenes ...
