CBS REACTED TO the signing of Barrymore by hiring stars from Hollywood, Broadway, and radio. Columbia timed the release naming its casts to be in papers the same day as Barrymore's Hamlet reviews. Leslie Howard, Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Tallulah Bankhead, Claude Rains, Burgess Meredith, Walter Huston, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and Rosalind Russell were some of the actors who would play the leads. NBC had the brightest star, but Lewis signed a galaxy of stars for Brewster Morgan to direct.

Morgan was born in Kansas City, attended the University of Kansas, and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He acted in Othello for the Oxford Dramatic Society in 1929, became its first American-born president, and directed the Society's 1930 staging of Macbeth. It seems curious that Columbia produced neither play, but that may indicate the selections were made by higher-ups in the organization. Morgan worked briefly on Broadway, became a producer for NBC Blue, and then moved to CBS. He directed or codirected some of the Columbia Workshop's most prestigious programs and co-directed the second part of the Orson Welles two-part Hamlet. Morgan would script six Cycle episodes and direct them all. Archibald MacLeish adapted King Lear and Gilbert Seldes adapted The Taming of the Shrew.

MacLeish was a prolific writer and modernist poet whose play Panic was produced by John Houseman in 1935. He scripted the Columbia Workshop sensation Fall of the City, broadcast on April 11, 1937. He later became Librarian of Congress. Seldes was a well known cultural critic and champion of what he called the lively arts, such as radio, film, comic strips, and jazz, as explored in his book Seven Lively Arts. Seldes and Erik Charell co-adapted a musical called Swingin’ the Dream in 1939, a commercial and critical failure based on A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I have not been able to learn when preparation for the series began, but common sense dictates it was before the May announcement, and we know from one Humphrey Bogart biography that he was asked to play Hotspur as early as June for the August broadcast, so that episode had already advanced to the casting stage, meaning at least a draft script and character list existed by then.