Samuel Phelps (1804-1878)

In 1844 Phelps was able to take over the management of the then-unfashionable Sadler's Wells Theatre and revolutionize the production of Shakespeare 's plays by restoring Shakespearean performances to the original text of the first folio and away from the adaptations by Colley Cibber, Nahum Tate and David Garrick that had been favored by the theatre-going public since the Restoration. Phelps staged all but four of Shakespeare's plays at Sadler's Wells , some of which (like The Winter's Tale and Measure for Measure ) hadn't been performed much in their original texts since their premieres at the Globe Theatre. Phelps' most frequently performed role was Hamlet , but he counted Macbeth ,Wolsey ,Leontes , and Bottom among his greatest achievements. He was generally considered the finest King Lear of his generation, returning to Shakespeare's version (which had been replaced on stage for over a hundred and fifty years by Tate's happy ending adaptation The History of King Lear), and staging the first production of the original version since the Restoration in 1845. (Wikipedia, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)