Blenheim Palace Shakespeare

Enjoy a Bard classic at Blenheim Palace pop-up theatre

The sumptuous surroundings of Blenheim Palace are playing host to Europe’s first-ever pop-up Shakespearean theatre over the summer. 

Four of The Bard’s most well-known plays will be performed in the 13-sided traditional Elizabethan Rose Theatre which features three tiers of covered seating for 560 and an open courtyard for 340 standing ‘groundlings’. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet transport allow audiences to an intimate atmosphere full of breath taking, spine-tingling and heart-stopping moments courtesy of two companies of actors over a nine-week season which runs until 7th September. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s funniest comedies. Four friends, all in love with the wrong person, set out into the woods and come across the fairy king and queen arguing. When the king, Oberon, decides to fix things using the juice of a magic flower, things start to go very wrong for everyone. 

In contrast, Macbeth mixes blood, tension, witches, ghosts and a kingdom in crisis in the tale of a toxic marriage, crushing ambition and murder. 

Richard III tells of a villain who murders his way to the crown. He woos the woman whose husband and father-in-law he has killed, has his two young nephews murdered in the Tower of London and is finally crowned Richard III, but along the way he makes some serious enemies. 

Warring families is also very much the theme of the most famous love story ever told – Romeo and Juliet. The son and daughter of two respective feuding noble families fall in love but know their love is forbidden and must marry in secret with fatal consequences.