Oh, a middle grade book, A Girl Named Hamlet.

Most excellent suggestions.

(None of you mentioned Wise Children by Angela Carter, though. C'mon! I left that one sitting right there for you.)

Any other songs which do more than just allude to a line but rather examine a character or scene?

Peter Brooks most famous productions were on my mind, but I'd also include the Comedy of Errors with the Flying Karamazov Brothers that played once on PBS. (It can't be released because of rights issues but it was on YouTube last I checked.)

Another notable performance (for me at least) is Ian McKellen reciting Sonnet XX (the gay sex one!) backed by a rock band (The Fuzztones playing in the style of the VU) on Andy Warhol's cable access show, on Valentine's Day. It's awesome. Also it's up at Buffistarawk if anybody needs it.

How about other poets specifically going back to Shakespeare like Keat's "Before re-reading Lear."

Oh look! There's a King-Lear.org! Heh.

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres was, indeed, a take on King Lear and the movie followed fairly closely.

And in The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss is playing Richard III (in a very , um, ODD production).

And there was Ian McKellan's own version of Richard III, done as a fascist state.

Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream

I saw it ... and have fond memories of it.

Natalie Merchant's "Ophelia"? That's more a metaphor, though.

Do you mean Keats? [link]

Do you mean Keats? [link]

I did. (and corrected upthread) This is what I get for studying the Romantic poets in one anthology. They all jumble together. Though Coleridge's essay on Lear is also famous.

Any more short stories?

I'm thinking of John Crowley's "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines" as one example.

Again, not allusions or references to, but works centrally concerned with Shakespeare's works or life or backstage at theatrical productions or reworking the text.

Connie Willis has a great short story called "Much Ado About [Censored]." It was collected in this book, and I loved it when I was a teenager. It's about a high school in the future trying to put on Hamlet but having to strike out everything that someone has filed a complaint about. They can't even get past the first line, "Who's there?" because it's offensive to the National Council Against Contractions or something like that. And the murder of Polonius has a citation from the Drapery Defamation League or something because of its negative portrayal of curtains: "Curtains don't kill people. People kill people."

I wonder if SF and Fantasy writers are more likely to consider Shakespeare their playground?

There's also Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest.

Sports Night also has a St. Crispin's Day reference, though it's not crucial to the episode. (Just to a really slashy reading.)

Due South also had a whole speech.

They have called this day The Eleventh of March! And whom-so-ever of you gets through this day, unless you are shot in the head or somehow slain… you will stand at tiptoe… when e'er you hear the name again, and you will get excited!…At the name March The Eleventh! We happy few, we few, we band of brothers…our names will be as like…household names. And those who are not here, be they sleeping or… doing something else… They will feel themselves…sort of crappy. Because they are not here to…to join the fight. On this day, the Eleventh of March!!