“Thank you all for your continued support of The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. This is YOUR Festival and we look forward to performing for you again this year. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, too, so feel free to contact me via this website with anything you’d like us to know or with any comments you’d like to make on our work”.

Dr David Crilly
Artistic Director
[email protected]

About the Festival

The Festival has become a significant cultural event in the region and can expect to attract upwards of 25,000 visitors for the productions which run during the eight weeks of the Festival. Also, because the city attracts so many tourists at this time of year, the Festival has acquired a national and international dimension, with many visitors returning to Cambridge again and again.

… a tour de force… as hilarious as anything you would see at the RSC —The Times

An evening at the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is a unique experience. Prior to the performance, members of the audience can picnic in this idyllic setting, before sitting back to enjoy an evening of dynamic and highly visual theatre. The Festival prides itself on an artistic policy which strips away unnecessary theatrical artifice and gimmickry, and the Company exists to provide access for all to these marvellous works without assuming any prior knowledge of the author or the play in question.

The productions themselves are vivid and spectacular, and are performed in full period costume with live Elizabethan music. Imperceptibly the evening passes from a glorious summer evening to dusk and then to night. The moon rises to provide additional lighting in a way that no theatre could match. Following the performance the audiences from each venue return to the heart of Cambridge and its many bars and restaurants to end a perfect evening.