The 1860s and 1870s are generally considered a hiatus in the history of Shakespearean production on the London stage. Accounts of the period usually move quickly from Charles Kean's retirement in 1859 (or the end of Samuel Phelps' management of suburban Sadler's Wells in 1862) to the beginning of Henry Irving's regime at the Lyceum in 1879—acknowledging the Phelps-Chatterton collaboration at Drury Lane as worthy, but hardly remarkable, and mentioning in passing such isolated events as Fechter's new Hamlet in 1861. Nevertheless, while no management comparable to Kean's or Phelps's, devoted principally to poetic drama, appeared during this time, there were occasional Shakespearean productions of exceptional interest. One such was the Bancrofts' version of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in out-of-the-way Tottenham-street on 17 April 1875. It ran for only thirty-six performances and lost the famous actormanager team £3,000. Despite its financial failure, however, the production attracted considerable critical attention at the time, much of it favorable, and it has since gained an honorable place in stage history. Beerbohm-Tree, for example, in an address to the Oxford Union Debating Society in 1900, called it “the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself.”

The reach of the American theatre between 1870 and 1900 was truly extraordinary, for those were the years when touring combinations crisscrossed the land, finding a ready welcome in countless opera houses, academies of music, and village halls. William Winter, one of the most long-lived of theatrical critics, estimated that by 1880 there were in the United States and Canada about 3,500 towns in which theatrical performances were habitually given in some 5,000 theatres. These hosted more than 250 theatrical companies employing some 5,000 actors. It was a “stirring” theatrical climate, giving employment to countless utility men and women, walking gentlemen, ladies in waiting, second old men and women, soubrettes and comedians—not to mention actors and actresses laying claim to stellar rank.

The fruits of scientific enterprise are never without their detractors, and so the Illustrated News of the World felt the necessity, early in 1891, to deplore a chain of events, pursuant to the invention of the talking machine.

Barely eighteen months before his production of The Shoemaker's Holiday, Orson Welles could not claim for himself a single credential in the professional theatre. Beginning with his very first production, the celebrated “Voodoo” Macbeth, in 1936, Welles quickly became the center of mounting popular and critical attention with Horse Eats Hat, Dr. Faustus and The Cradle Will Rock for the W.P.A. He followed these in the Winter of 1937–38 with the first two productions for his own, newlyformed Mercury Theatre: Julius Caesar and The Shoemaker's Holiday.