Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1785: Mr. Quick as Launce with his Dog.

Rachel Thorpe writes: "Although the popular opinion is that this is one of Shakespeare’s least accomplished plays, it has enjoyed a rich stage history. Notably, Peter Hall chose it has his first production as artistic director of the RSC in 1960, and John Barton directed another important RSC production in 1981. The play has been set in almost every imaginable era – the medieval, the renaissance, the music-hall 1930s, the rock-and-roll 1950s, the fashion-obsessed 1990s – and is not always confined to Verona and Milan. It attracted further attention after being featured in the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998), despite never being explicitly named. The play is regularly admired for its spirited comedy. And for the fact that one of the characters is a dog." ("Open Shakespeare": Open Knowledge Foundation Projectⓒ All material available under CC Attribution license v3.0)

Courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection at http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/the/the.html