The plays of Shakespeare have become undisputed literary classics. They have been encountered by vast numbers of students as words on the page, and only by a small fraction of that great number as staged performances. The texts have undergone exhaustive interpretative and bibliographic explication so that in addition to their own literary canonization, they have generated an immense volume of centrifugal literature.

Only since the beginning of this century has there been a move to apply an academic discipline to the study of Shakespeare in performance, and so to reaffirm the stature of the original corporate encounter of the plays as staged presentations. The thrust towards the study of the plays in performance has come about partly as a result of influential writing on this subject by authors of stature like John Russell Brown, J.L. Styan, Raymond Williams, Richard David and Stanley Wells. Between 1966 and 1981 John Russell Brown produced six books which stress the importance of the theatrical study of Shakespearean drama, the most controversial of which is his Free Shakespeare (1974). Stanley Well's Literature and Drama (1970), J.L. Styan's The Shakespeare Revolution (1977), Richard David's Shakespeare in the Theatre (1978) and the collection of essays, Players of Shakespeare, edited by Philip Brockbank (1985), have given wider dimensions to this consideration. On a more immediate level, the study of Shakespeare in performance has been promoted through the greater collaboration of the university and the theatre, both through their joint participation in projects and through the movement of university-trained actors and directors into the professional theatre.