Richard III (play) The earliest certain performance occurred on 1633, when Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria watched it on the Queen's birthday. Colley Cibber produced the most successful of the Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare with his version of "Richard III", at Drury Lane starting in 1700. Cibber himself played the role till 1739, and his version was on stage for the next century and a half. It contained the lines "Off with his head; so much for Buckingham" – possibly the most famous Shakespearean line that Shakespeare did not write – and "Richard's himself again!". The original Shakespearean version returned in a
History of the Shakespeare authorship question R.C. Churchill says that the first documented expression of doubt about Shakespeare's authorship came in 1760, in a farce entitled "High Life Below Stairs" in which a Miss Kitty poses the question: "Who wrote Shakespeare?" The Duke responds "Ben Jonson." Lady Bab then cries; "Oh, no! Shakespeare was written by one Mr. Finis, for I saw his name at the end of the book." Churchill writes that, while not a very "profound" joke, there "must have been, in the mid-eighteenth century, a certain amount of discussion as to the authenticity of the traditional authorship of Shakespeare, and the substitution of