Nineteenth and early twentieth century critics, all convinced that they knew Shakespeare’s ‘original’ texts, reacted with horror to adaptations of his plays. More recently adaptations have been studied as products of particular social, political, or theatrical conditions, or as examples of implicit criticism. We will concentrate on adaptations of a select group of plays—Macbeth, Hamlet, The Tempest, and King Lear—which will provide us with the opportunity to consider the notion of an ‘original’ Shakespeare text, to reconsider various explanations for the existence of multiple version of his plays, and to examine some very interesting Restoration and eighteenth century adaptations for the stage and late twentieth and early twenty first century adaptations for film.