William Shakespeare, Broadway’s most prolific playwright

William Shakespeare is said to have been born on this day in 1564. It wasn’t until 1750 that there is any record of one of his plays being produced in New York — “King Richard III” — but Broadway (and the rest of  America) has made up for its relatively late start with a long-lasting obsession with the Bard, as Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has chronicled in fascinating detail.

On Broadway alone, there is a record of 66 known productions of Hamlet since 1761, the last one in 2009 starring Jude Law, 50 Macbeths (Daniel Craig in 2022), 37 Romeo and Juliets (Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler in 2024), 31 Twelfth Nights ( Mark Rylance as Olivia in 2013),  22 Othellos (Denzel Washington in 2025), 20 King Lears (Glenda Jackson in 2019), 20 Julius Caesars (William Sadler in 2005, opposite Denzel Washington as Brutus), only 11 A Midsummer Night’s Dreams. True there have been no known Pericles, but it’s safe to say that William Shakespeare is Broadway’s most prolific, popular and enduring playwright.

Some samples below (video and photographs)

Hamlet

A program for Edwin Booth in Hamlet, 1866. Edwin Booth as Hamlet. He first performed the role at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1864, and last at the Broadway Theatre in 1891.

Booth as Hamlet

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. She performed the role in 1900 at the Garden Theatre.

E.H. Sothern as Hamlet and Julia Marlowe as Ophelia, sometime after 1904. A famous acting couple even before they were married (which they did in 1911) they performed together in some dozen productions of “Hamlet” over two decades. A possibly apocryphal story has it that during the first week of Sothern’s first production of “Hamlet” in New York, in 1900, he was stabbed in the foot by Laertes’ sword and was stricken with blood poisoning, thus forced to close the production.

John Barrymore as Hamlet in 1923

Lillian Gish as Ophelia in Hamlet, 1936

John Gielgud as Hamlet 1938

Sam Waterston as Hamlet, 1975

Jude Law as Hamlet, 2009

Richard Burton, 1964

Macbeth

E.H. Sothern in Macbeth,1911

Florence Reed as Lady Macbeth 1928

Maurice Evans in Macbeth, 1941

Flora Robson and Michael Redgrave in Macbeth, 1948

Ethan Hawke as Macbeth in 2013

Alan Cumming as Macbeth in 2013, a one-man version that takes place in an asylum

Daniel Craig as Macbeth in 2022, directed by Sam Gold

Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer, 1988

Romeo and Juliet

Katharine Cornell as Juliet and Basil Rathbone as Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”. 1934

Romeo and Juliet 1899 Maude Adams as Juliet and William Faversham as Romeo

Eleanor Robson and Kyrle Bellew in Romeo and Juliet 1903

Eva Le Gallienne as Juliet 1933

Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Romeo and Juliet in 1940. The actors became newlyweds shortly afterward.

Martin Sheen and Susan McArthur in Romeo and Juliet 1968

Rachel Ziegler and Kit Connon in Romeo + Juliet 2024

Twelfth Night

Ellen Terry as Viola in Twelfth Night , 1884

Twelfth Night, 1919, with E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe.

Helen Hayes as Viola in Twelfth Night 1940

Maurice Evans as Malvolio in Twelfth Night 1940

Judi Dench in Twelfth Night. Now, this is cheating a little because this photograph of her is as Viola in the RSC production in 1969. But Dame Judi made her Broadway debut in Twelfth Night in 1958, on her 24th birthday, as Maria, Olivia’s woman in waiting.

Paul Rudd in Twelfth Night 1998

Mark Rylance as Olivia in Twelfth Night on Broadway