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I've been working on adapting Two Noble Kinsmen for performance, and boy, it's not a good piece. I haven't been counting it in my quest to perform every Shakespeare play, since it's not included in the First Folio. I've been treating it as a Fletcher play with some Shakespeare touching-up.

Not that every word Shakespeare wrote was gold. He wrote some real stinkers, especially when it comes to the comedies, which this one kinda-sorta is. (Spoiler alert: it ends with both a death and a marriage.) It's clunky and confused, and none of the poetry is the least memorable. I do find the very tail end of the jailer's daughter's story very sweetly written, but the rest of her plot is so horrifying that I'm tempted to simply drop it entirely. It has no bearing on the main plot.

Still, it's nifty to know that somebody in Spain wanted this play so early on.

What's next after Shakespeare is done?
We'll revisit many of the Shakespeare plays with new ideas. It's been a decade since we did Hamlet and even longer since Othello, for example. We just did a version of Romeo and Juliet with female leads, exploring issues around queer voices.

I was about to direct A Midsummer Night's Dream, inspired by a combination of JRR Tolkien and Susanna Clarke -- the fairies as "fae folk". (Which required massive abuse of the script, but that's a lot of what keeps Shakespeare evergreen. At least I'm not writing in a happy ending for King Lear, the way the Victorians did.)

We also explore other classics. Right now we're doing Revenger's Tragedy, another Jacobean play. We also had our sights on Twelve Angry Men, and even hoped to be able to convert it to a Zoom production during lockdown, though aggravatingly digital broadcast rights don't exist. (I suspect it has to do with the fact that it was originally a TV play.)

In 2019 we actually didn't do any Shakespeare at all: Uncle Vanya, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Country Wife.

So... plenty to keep us busy.

Have you ever considered the 100 Decameron stories, or the 24 Canterbury tales? No worries about digital broadcast rights there!
Well, Two Noble Kinsmen is adapted from The Knight's Tale, which is itself adapted from Bocaccio (Theseid, rather than Decameron), so it covers all the bases ;-)

Our play selection starts with directors, who submit a project that interests them (groomed into a season by the artistic director). I will sometimes nudge people towards certain projects: for some time I tried to get somebody to direct Love's Labors Lost (the next-to-last play we hadn't done) and Cymbelline. At some point I'd like to see if somebody will do Hamlet; it's been a long time. (We have a fondness for the obscurer Shakespeare plays; they give us a lot of opportunities for insight. Our Monty Python-inspired King John was a hoot -- and literally Shakespeare's own text.)

We don't generally write plays ourselves, though our artistic director did her own translation of Lysistrata. If a director adapted Bocaccio or Chaucer, we'd definitely give it a look.

It it’s so bad, why would you go to all that effort toward its performance? Just for the sake of completeness?
Precisely. In fact, I'm taking advantage of the current crisis to do a half-performance, as a Zoom show rather than a stage show, which has much lower costs and much less mental overhead. I'm also using it as a class in editing Shakespeare for performance -- it's a rare opportunity to come into a (nominally) Shakespeare play with no preconceptions.

We are so close: in two decades we've done everything except Cymbelline, which we had scheduled to be rehearsing right now. That "everything" includes Pericles and Henry VIII, which aren't really any more attributable to Shakespeare than 2NK, but they happened to appeal to somebody who wanted to put them on. I was going to declare that we'd "spiked the canon" after Cymbelline, but the asterisk kinda bugged me. So, opportunity.

Cymbelline is itself not very good, but it appealed to a director, who has a charming "Princess Bride" take on it. We want to do a full performance, which is the best way for us to really study the play, so we've put it on hold. We had converted a production of Romeo and Juliet, already underway, into a Zoom show, and we're doing some other Zoom shows and online classes to keep our hand in.

Ah, OK! Thanks for the interesting reply.
I find it interesting that the earliest and the latest plays of Shakespeare were collaborations. It seem like an apprentice system where you "pass the baton" to the next generation.
Isn't that why some people theorize that shakespeare's plays weren't written by one person, but a group of people? I remember one of my teachers in high school mentioning that we don't even have definitive/direct evidence that shakespeare wrote the plays to which he is credited. I wonder if we could do textual analysis to determine if the plays were written by one person or many. Maybe track down who wrote the plays.
The majority of the plays were written by William Shakespeare solo, and this includes the most well known like "Hamlet", "Romeo and Juliet", "Othello", "King Lear" and so on.

But a number of plays were written in collaboration with other playwrights - for example the play "Two Noble Kinsmen" mentioned in the article, which was written in collaboration with John Fletcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare%27s_collab... for other collaborations.

Quantitative textual analysis have indeed been used to try to discern which scenes were written by who. The method is still pretty controversial though, and subject to the pitfalls of machine learning - selection of training sets, overfitting and so on. For example new edition from Oxford press attributes Henry VI parts 1-3 to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, but this is highly controversial. The attribution are based on similarities to Marlowe's style, but critics have pointed out it could just be Shakespeare emulating Marlowe.

However the theories that all of Shakespeare's plays were written by a committee or by someone not called Shakespeare, are just fringe theories without any serious support.