Overview
Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance
history is full of anecdotes - ribald, trivial, frequently funny,
sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such
anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's
plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places.
Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes -
stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth,
toga troubles in Julius Caesar - and therefore express something
embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a
vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular
criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their
production: actors.