An article in the June 23, 1937 show business newspaper Variety began,

Difficult as it is to imagine today, America's two leading media companies fought over which had the better claim to Shakespeare. The Battle of the Bard explores this episode in US cultural history when the dominant broadcast networks, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), deployed their best resources to appropriate Shakespeare's prestige and the print media described it with the nomenclature of boxing. These fourteen broadcasts are among the more remarkable recreations of Shakespeare of their time.

Shakespeare audio, meaning radio broadcasts and other audio Shakespeare, are the neglected corner of Shakespeare performance scholarship, yet there have been more audio productions of Shakespeare than film and television productions combined, hundreds more, often with big name stars in the lead roles. I offer this book as an example of just how interesting and rewarding the study of Shakespeare audio can be.

Americans born in the fifties did not experience network radio as their parents knew it. Those born in the twenty-first century arrived in a world in which radio has largely been supplanted by downloads, CDs, and “radio” delivered by satellite. Many today may be surprised to learn the power the medium had from the twenties through the early fifties. The introduction of this book, therefore, will show that radio was the dominant medium in these decades, for the Battle of the Bard cannot be understood without that context.

Chapter 1 surveys Shakespeare broadcasts in the United States prior to the Battle to understand why the networks presented heavily abridged adaptations in time slots of forty-five and sixty minutes. The formats of the Battle programs met the expectations of most listeners.

The second chapter introduces the Battle and explains why the networks were so angry that each wanted to lord Shakespeare's prestige over the other, how they put their series together, and tells the story of the first series broadcast, Streamlined Shakespeare on NBC.