St James's Palace, which was perhaps planned by Henry VIII to be the court of the heir to the throne, came into far more regular use under the prolific Stuarts than it had enjoyed under the Tudors. Under James, the various members of the royal family were assigned particular palaces and royal residences for their own households, and St James's became the London court of the Prince of Wales.

On 6 November 1946, in New York City, three enterprising women of the theatre – Margaret Webster, Cheryl Crawford, and Eva La Gallienne – launched a noble experiment with a lavish production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Their goal was to found a national repertory company, modelled on the European national theatres, to be a home for the classics and a training ground for a new breed of classically trained American actors – ‘an American Old Vic’. Webster and her partners had been trained in such a tradition, and their dream of an American national theatre had been given additional impetus by the Old Vic's successful visit to New York in 1945. Despite the good wishes of the theatrical community, an able band of established actors (such as Walter Hampden, Victor Jory, and the founders themselves), and generally sympathetic critical notices, the fledgling American Repertory Theatre (ART) foundered financially after one season, and the dream was abandoned (though it has recently been revived by Peter Sellars and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.).

In 1965, in an interview in Sight and Sound, Peter Brook eloquently discussed the difficulties of filming Shakespearian plays, decrying the ‘sad history of Shakespeare on the screen’ and denouncing the majority of Shakespearian films as ‘pitiful’ and ‘unspeakably bad’. Speaking at UNESCO's Shakespeare Quatercentenary Celebration in Paris, he said, in essence, that Shakespeare was impossible to film at all. However, the winter of 1968–9 found Brook in Northern Jutland, filming one of Shakespeare's most profoundly intricate tragedies, King Lear. When the film was released in 1970–1, critical reaction ranged from rapture to outrage. Nigel Andrews called Brook's Lear ‘a distinct achievement’, praising the acting, the setting, and, above all, Brook's use of the camera to ‘transcend repre-sentationalism’. Frank Kermode hailed Lear as a ‘fully realized and deeply imagined version of this great work … a masterly conception of the play’. Charles Phillips Reilly cautiously labelled the film ‘a mixed bag’, lauding Paul Scofield's performance as Lear and Brook's understanding of the themes of the play, but criticizing the camera work, especially in the storm sequence. Pauline Kael, the formidable reviewer for The New Yorker, simply said ‘I hated it’, and dismissed the film as ‘gray and cold … the drear far side of the moon’. According to Kael, the concept was ‘second-rate’, the script ‘plotless’, and the actors walking corpses.12 She dubbed the film ‘Peter Brook's “Night of the Living Dead”’.

On Saturday, 10 February, 1827, the Manchester Guardian announced the coming appearance of ‘the African Roscius’ at the Theatre Royal, Manchester. After referring to ‘his success in New York and in all the principal theatres in the United States’ and to his performances ‘in the Theatres Royal, Bath, Bristol, Brighton, Plymouth, Exeter, and upwards of fifty nights at the Royal Coburg Theatre, London, with universal approbation’, the notice states that he will spend one night in Manchester on his way to Edinburgh and Glasgow. A note in the Manchester Courier the following week (17.2.1827) emphasizes the adventurous nature of the theatrical event, telling the public that ‘the spirited manager of this establishment seems determined to spare no pains to render the theatre as attractive as circumstances will permit’. The attitude behind this retains a protective ambiguity towards the experiment.