Startling Shakespeare on the Restoration Stage or, “A dozen Shakespears here interr’d do lie.”

This paper aims to demonstrate what it was about Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that was manifestly important to the practising playwrights who took his plays up to re-model for the newly opened London theatres at the Restoration. In showing how Shakespearean moments were transferred from page to stage at this time the paper offers another angle on very recent critical debate about Shakespeare as a playwright for both readers and audiences in the Seventeenth Century; the adapters must have read their Shakespeare with an imaginative eye as to how their new version could, or would, look on the developing stages. Whatever these Restoration adapters of Shakespeare may have said about their purposes, and whatever literary assessment they may have made of him, it was clearly the sheer visual theatricality of certain Shakespearean episodes and characters which they knew and prized.