Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION The aim of these volumes is to give the history of Shakespeare on the London stage for approximately two centuries and a half. Beginning with the opening of the theatres, shortly after the Restoration, in 1660, the chronicle traverses the intervening ages down to and including the times of Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree. It is hoped that no important production of those many years has been overlooked, and that no change in method of presentation has failed of report in the narrative. The account will show the vicissitudes of the plays themselves, and, so far as possible, the manner of putting them on the stage. As to the first of these objects proposed, a reader unacquainted with the stage history of Shakespeare will be surprised to learn that never in all the years involved was any play of the poet presented before an audience exactly as he wrote it. At best, the works were enacted very greatly curtailed, with characters and episodes eliminated, and with scenes transposed at the will of the producer; but at worst, and for considerably over a century, dramatists simply re-wrote Shakespeare, changing his plots, introducing new characters, and, as they fondly thought, "polishing" his verses. The list of these depredators extends from Sir William Davenant and John Dryden, in the decade 1660-70, to the anonymous adapter of parts of Henry VI, acted by Edmund Kean in 1817. Only from the time of Macready, especially in his period of management(1837-43), has the tendency to restore Shakespeare been noticeably progressive. But "restoring" Shakespeare, or, as the playbills put it, "acting from the original text," meant acting merely as much or as little of a given play as the manager desired. The ideals of Charles Kean, of Henry Irving, of Augustin Daly and of Beerbohm Tr...