Reproduced with permission of the Royal Shakespeare Company from the programme for Henry V 1997.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, probably the most famous classical theatre company in the world, has operated in its present form since 1961 but its history goes back way beyond that.

There had been talk of establishing a permanent theatre in Stratford for the performance of Shakespeare's plays from as early as 1769, when the first Shakespeare Festival was held to celebrate David Garrick's Jubilee, but it was not until 1875 that efforts got seriously under way. In that year Charles Flower, a Stratford brewer and philanthropist, launched a national fundraising campaign to build a theatre and, by personally donating the two-acre site on the banks of the Avon, began a tradition of family generosity to the theatre which has continued up to the present day.

The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, a Victorian gothic building seating 800 people, opened in 1879 with a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. The initial week-long summer festival soon grew, under the directorship of the indefatigable Frank Benson and his successor W. Bridges-Adams, into spring and summer seasons, with tours of the country in between, and in 1925 almost fifty years of excellence were recognised by the granting of a Royal Charter.

Disaster struck a year later when the theatre was almost completely destroyed by fire but while the Festival productions went ahead in a local cinema, a worldwide fundraising campaign was launched as well as an architectural competition, and in 1932 the present building, designed by Elisabeth Scott, was opened by the Prince of Wales. Stratford now had a state-of-the-art theatre to match Frank Benson's ideal, stated back in 1905: 'to train a company, every member of which would be an essential part of a homogeneous whole, consecrated to the practice of the dramatic arts and especially to the representation of the plays of Shakespeare'.

During the next thirty years, under a succession of visionary and creative artistic directors - Ben Iden Payne, Robert Atkins and the revolutionary Theodore Komisarjevsky in the thirties: Barry Jackson in the forties; Glen Byam Shaw and Anthony Quayle in the fifties - the company went from strength to strength.

Established stars and dynamic newcomers shared the stage on sets by designers like Aubrey Hammond, Tanya Moiseiwitsch or the all-woman team Motley. The acting generation of Balliol Holloway, John Laurie and Alec Clunes yielded the stage to Rachel Kempson, Harry Andrews, Donald Wolfit and the young Paul Scofield, while the Fifties glittered with stars like Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Anthony Quayle, the young Richard Burton and that most glamorous couple, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Tours of Europe, Russia and the USA and guest appearances by overseas stars like Paul Robeson and Charles Laughton helped to establish the company on the international stage.

In 1960, with the appointment of Peter Hall as Managing Director, the company took its most exciting leap forward. A young man in tune with the new decade, Hall made radical changes, establishing a London base at the Aldwych Theatre and widening the repertoire to take in both classics other than Shakespeare and, importantly, the modern plays which were to add a new contemporary awareness to the Company's experience of classical discipline and sense of language. Plays were commissioned from writers like John Arden, Peter Shaffer and John Whiting, and a new generation of young actors, designers and directors flocked to what had by then (in 1961) been re-named the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Peter Brook, Michel Saint-Denis and John Barton began their long association the company. Productions like Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Hall/Barton epic The Wars of the Roses became theatrical landmarks and established the reputations of Judi Dench, Ian Richardson, Ian McKellen, Glenda Jackson, Janet Suzman and so many more. The company extended its pattern of regional and world tours, and broke into television and film, a continual process of bold experiment and re-invention on which Hall's successors, Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands, Adrian Noble, and, currently, Michael Boyd, have continued to build.

In 1974 the RSC acquired its first studio theatre, The Other Place. Converted from a rehearsal room, and directed initially by Buzz Goodbody, whose early tragic death robbed the company of one of its brightest talents, The Other Place became home to some of the company's most exciting small-scale and experimental work and soon found its London counterpart in the Warehouse in Covent Garden. The work of writers like Howard Barker, Peter Flannery, Edward Bond and Willy Russell flourished in these small-scale spaces and although a more modern building replaced the old Other Place in 1991 it remains true to the spirit of the original, housing some of the company's most exciting productions as well as hosting overseas companies, workshops, teaching courses and conferences on all aspects of theatre, including the annual Prince of Wales Shakespeare School.

The Eighties saw the RSC's move to the Barbican Centre in the heart of the City of London and the opening of the company's third Stratford theatre, the Swan, a galleried Jacobean playhouse built through the extraordinary generosity of an American benefactor, Frederick R. Koch, to supply another vital dimension to the RSC's work. The Swan's varied repertoire includes classics of world theatre, new plays and the work of neglected British dramatists, including Shakespeare's contemporaries.

So this is the RSC you see today - at any one time there are two companies of some eighty actors each, playing in five home theatres, as well as two or three major productions out on tour around the UK and abroad. Although Shakespeare is still our central focus, our varied repertoire means that in any few days you could see at least two Shakespeare plays, an early or unfamiliar European classic, cutting-edge contemporary drama and a gem from the Elizabethan repertoire perhaps not seen for four hundred years. Often productions go on to a longer life in the commercial theatre: The Herbal Bed and The Cherry Orchard are just the latest in a long line of RSC hits which also includes Educating Rita, Piaf, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and, of course, Les Miserables - still playing to packed houses in its thirteenth year and taking the company's talents to an even wider audience, as well as providing much-needed additional income.

We are also grateful to colleagues in the business world who have contributed to the company's success through sponsorship, particularly Allied Domecq, whose continuing principal sponsorship of the RSC from 1994 to 1999 has reached a record-breaking £5.5 million - the UK's largest single arts sponsorship and one which has, amongst other activities, enabled the RSC to undertake a regular international touring programme.

Yet despite its growth from Festival theatre to international status, the ideals of the RSC under Adrian Noble in 1997 are the same as those of Sir Frank Benson in 1905: the RSC is still formed around a core of associate actors and actresses whose skills continue, over the years, to give a distinctive and unmistakable approach to theatre. The RSC is not only a great theatre company but a superb training ground for the artistic and technical talents of British and international theatre.