Stratford Shakespeare Festival production history it also produces a wide variety of theatre from Greek tragedy to Broadway musicals to contemporary works. By 2017, only three of the 14 productions were based on Shakespeare's works. The following is a chronological list of the productions that have been staged as part of the Stratford Festival since its inception. On February 17, 2015, AP News reported that the Stratford Festival plans to film all of Shakespeare's plays. The 1986 season was staged by Artistic Director John Neville with Shakespeare plays produced against a modern play with similar themes or characters (i.e. "Hamlet" and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Shakespeare in performance fetters on our imagination". Herder likewise proclaimed that reading Shakespeare's work opens "leaves from the book of events, of providence, of the world, blowing in the sands of time". This claim that Shakespeare's work breaks though all creative boundaries to reveal a chaotic, teeming, contradictory world became characteristic of Romantic criticism, later being expressed by Victor Hugo in the preface to his play "Cromwell", in which he lauded Shakespeare as an artist of the grotesque, a genre in which the tragic, absurd, trivial and serious were inseparably intertwined. Theatres and theatrical scenery became ever more elaborate in the 19th century,