Gary Taylor, in his leadoff entry in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, begins with a catalog of images of pregnancy, labor, and childbirth in Shakespeare’s plays in order to assert that “we mislead ourselves if we imagine a playing moving from text to stage, as though textuality and theatricality were two separate entities. . . . For Shakespeare, a play began life in the theatre” (1). Just so. But the challenge of writing Shakespeare performance history is that subsequent theatres—however much they implicitly recognized Taylor’s truism, regardless of the literary or canonical status they granted to the text, and regardless of the cultural capital invested in the very notion of “Shakespeare”—were, nonetheless, moving from text to stage, making theatre from pre-existing scripts. To write about the history of Shakespeare in performance is to write about this fact.