The appointment of Emma Rice as the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, succeeding Dominic Dromgoole and the founding director Mark Rylance, caused surprise when it was announced in 2015. Ms. Rice, then in charge of the Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall, a venue with a reputation for experimental workshop productions, had directed only one play by Shakespeare, Cymbeline, which Kneehigh staged at Stratford in 2006—if a production can be described as “by” Shakespeare that was marketed as “adapted by Emma Rice, written by Carol Grose,” with only a handful of Shakespeare’s lines retained (there is an inexplicably admiring account of it in Martin Butler’s Cambridge edition). Nor, by her own admission, did Rice know much else in the canon. Interviewed in advance of her first season, she explained that she had been doing her homework as best she could: “I have tried to sit down with Shakespeare but it doesn’t work. I get very sleepy and then suddenly I want to listen to The Archers” (a long-running British radio soap opera). She even disclosed that, at her interview for the post, when asked what plans she might have for the 400th anniversary, she replied, “What 400th anniversary?”

One might well wonder who else was on the shortlist, and in keeping with that reaction Rice christened her first season “The Wonder Season,” declaring, “I bring story, I bring humanity, I bring event and I bring wonder”—all of which, presumably, Shakespeare forgot to bring. Her manifesto