William Shakespeare

William Charles Macready (son of an actress and an actor-manager) began his successful acting career as Romeo in a performance in Birmingham; he became a specialist in Shakespeare an roles.

Francis Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review that for real force and originality of genius the age of Shakespeare outranked various other famous ages in cultural history, including the Augustan.

William Hazlitt published A View of the English Stage.

Thomas Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare, in fact a further extension of a project begun by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler .

Helen Faucit made her first important acting appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre, aged eighteen.

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

Henry George Bohn published A Bibliographical Account of the Works of Shakespeare.

Artist Richard Doyle published, with a poem by William Allingham , a collection of exquisitely detailed and coloured plates called In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World.

Irish writer Nina Kennard published the first of her rather woodennovels, There's Rue for You.

Actress Helen Faucit (who had become Lady Martin when her husband was knighted in 1880) published On Some of Shakespeare 's Female Characters, a collection of essays that first appeared in Blackwood's.

Vale Press was founded as a printing house in Chelsea, London, by Charles De Sousy Ricketts ; its first two books were published by John Lane .

A. H. Bullen founded the Shakespeare Head Press at 21 Chapel Street, Stratford upon Avon, two doors away from New Place, Stratford upon Avon, the house which Shakespeare bought in 1597.

Tolstoy on Shakespeare, which included a translation of Tolstoy by Isabella Fyvie Mayo as I. F. M., and Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov as V. Tchertkoff (as well as an essay by George Bernard Shaw ), was published.

Publisher J. M. Dent launched Everyman's Library, aiming to reprint 1,000 classic titles: the first year's 155 volumes included Æschylus , Shakespeare , Jane Austen practically complete, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .

A campaign to establish a National Theatre began with a mass meeting at the Lyceum Theatre , London.