history

Scroll down for a brief overview and year-by-year history of SF Shakes and our productions.

It all began back in the summer of 1983, on or around a picnic table in Golden Gate Park. Newly incorporated as a 501c3 non-profit organization, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s first official show was a production of The Tempest. The mission then was essentially the same as now: to make the words and themes of Shakespeare accessible to everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, financial status, or level of education.

For fifteen years before that, director Margrit Roma and husband-producer Clarence Ricklefs were managing a company called New Shakespeare Company. However, a lack of federal funding split the group in two in 1983, with one part becoming San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. Since then, we’ve presented the annual Free Shakespeare program continuously, even in pandemic times when our development of Unified Virtual Space enabled us to convene community online and continue our arts programming without interruption.

While many people know us from Free Shakespeare, arts education has been equally important to us since the beginning. In 1988, it seemed only natural for the mission of accessibility to take Shakespeare beyond the park and into the schools, and Shakespeare on Tour was born, taking one-hour performances to schools across the state in our trusty van and reaching tens of thousands of students annually.

In 1993, building on our strong commitment to education, another seminal event took place – the founding of Bay Area Shakespeare Camps, to this day one of our most beloved programs.In the late 1990’s and 2000’s, we expanded and rotated Free Shakespeare sites, including Oakland, Pleasanton, San Jose, Cupertino, and the Presidio, and we added Midnight Shakespeare as an after-school education program.

Today SF Shakes continues to thrive by holding true to our founding values while forging bold new paths in the ever-evolving landscape of theater.