“Festival terms”: Shakespeare at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe

William Shakespeare’s plays—and plays and musicals inspired by him—are always a feature at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival, and this year is no exception. A quick search for “Shakespeare” amongst the thousands of shows listed on the 2026 Fringe website turns up over 40 results, ranging from new plays to old favorites, grim adult imaginings to more kid-friendly offerings that play almost around the clock in multiple venues throughout this ancient city from August 3–30 (click on the various titles below for specific times, dates, venues, and ticket availability).

You can start your day in Edinburgh by literally having Shakespeare for Breakfast every morning at 10am. Shakespeare for Breakfast is a long-running Fringe show (since 1992) that promises “puns, pastries, and pentameter” and is advertised as “perfect for hardened fans and blank verse virgins alike.” At 10:45am, Dee Ryan’s Detective Broadguess investigates the mysterious connections in the Shakespearean canon in her 50-minute interactive comedy, part of the long tradition of solo Shakespeare shows. Also at 10:45 (in a different venue, obviously) is Smashing Shakespeare: Brave Macbeth, a one-hour musical comedy version of Shakespeare’s grim tragedy designed for children. And in Shakespeare’s Dead Dames at 11:15am, six female Shakespearean characters find themselves in a holding area until the play they’re in gets revived by another company and they can (re)live their tragedy over (and over) again.

Around lunchtime—which is still probably breakfast time for the late-night crowd—you can enjoy various Shakespeare dishes. At 12:30, the musical Midsummer! retells A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a modern verse translation from Jeffrey Whitty (Avenue Q) commissioned by Play On Shakespeare. As part of a trend I’m dubbing “Game Show Shakespeare” (with more examples below), Dungeons & Shakespeare combines Shakespeare’s greatest characters with “horrific monsters from Dungeons & Dragons.” And there’s the aptly named Shakespeare for Kids, which advertises itself as “the perfect introduction to Shakespeare’s beloved characters for children and their families.”

Mid-afternoon brings several spins on Shakespeare. Dogberry & Verges Are Scared (which I’ll be acting in and wrote about last month) manages to be a hilarious riff on both Tom Stoppard and Much Ado About Nothing even as it races to its surprisingly moving conclusion. In MUSE: The Shakespeare Mayhem Musical, several of Shakespeare’s most famous characters vie to be in young Will’s first published play. In the Irish production Julius Caesar Variety Show, three actors of different races and genders audition for an “unorthodox” Shakespeare production that will investigate and exploit their identities.

The art of improvised Shakespeare (a spectacular high-wire act I’ve written about before) will be represented by ShakeItUp: The Improvised Shakespeare Show and Rattlepole! An Improv Shakespeare Show, both of which use audience suggestions to create a completely made-up comic play inspired by Shakespeare’s themes, language, and characters.

There will also be—gasp!—traditional productions of actual Shakespeare plays. From the Czech Republic, Prague Shakespeare Company will present Othello, Hamlet, and Love’s Labour’s Lost in rep (and in English) from August 10–16. And a Scottish company will present The Taming of the Shrew during the festival’s final two weeks.

While most of these are professional productions (though I Love Thee, I Love Thee Not offers audiences a journey through Shakespeare’s most famous couples guided by two thespians from RADA—the “Regular Academy of Decent Actors”), several student groups will be performing as well. The Edinburgh Youth Theatre will perform their Tempest adaptation An Island of Bad Ideas, while Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company’s An Infinite Monkey Attempts to Write the Complete Works of Shakespeare: A Variety Show will feature a range of acts from music to improv, promising that no performance will be the same. Students from North Country Union High School in Vermont will perform Robert Wing’s Opening: A Dessert Place, which sets Macbeth in a contemporary high school demonized by three supernatural restaurant servers. And the Liahona Theatre Department, defending champions of the National Utah Shakespeare Festival high school competition, will present a fairly straight-forward (though, at 75 minutes long, well-edited) Measure for Measure.

While A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also the basis for Knight’s Dream (a dark musical comedy with a new pop/jazz soundtrack), and Hamlet and King Lear each inspired the solo shows Hamlet (an experience) by Emily Carding and The Last Audition, in which an aging actor (played by writer/performer Paul Shearman) rehearses Lear to prove he’s still able, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is (perhaps unsurprisingly) the inspiration for several Fringe productions. In addition to the two works already mentioned, there’s The Witches of Macbeth, which combines Shakespeare’s play with a 4,000-year-old Sumerian poem to recast the bloody Thane as an unsuspecting sacrificial king; Out, Damned Traitor!, which mashes up Shakespeare’s tragedy with the popular TV reality show; Rockbeth, which uses classic rock anthems to create something described as “part live gig, part Shakespearean meltdown;” and ‘Beth, which also uses an original rock score pumped through headsets worn by the audience to create an immersive musical spectacle that transforms Shakespeare’s thane into an ambitious and ruthless anti-heroine.

There are many others: from the musical 12th Night—Karaoke Era to the game show mashups Shakespeare Dice: As You Like It and Shakespeare’s Big Brother; from the solo shows Fakespeare, After Shakespeare, and 1 King, 2 Princes and Shakespeare’s Lie to the Shakes-adjacent Shakespeare x 5 from Bulgaria, The Great Shakespeare Showdown, which crowns “the Wild West’s best Bard of 1882,” and Women of Will, inspired by Tina Packer’s book, that examines how Shakespeare’s female characters changed over the course of his career.

Not all these productions will be good, of course—one show, about Shakespeare’s villains, is literally called Bad Shakespeare—but that’s part of the adventure of seeing shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. What you hope for is something unique and unmissable; as Hamlet himself never said, “There’s no show either good or bad, but seeing makes it so.” Just enjoy the ride and, as the folks at Fringe favorite Sh!t-faced® Shakespeare remind us, remember to always “#EnjoyShakespeareResponsibly.”