“The Royal Shakespeare Company, keeper of the flame of the greatest playwright ever, plans to ‘knock Shakespeare off his podium’, according to artistic director Michael Boyd, by increasing the proportion of new plays it stages to half of its total work.” In addition to commissioning plays, “writers will be ’embedded’ within the company. The first of these, Adriano Shaplin, will be working with the actors who are preparing Shakespeare’s history plays, all eight of which will be in the repertoire by spring 2008. The idea is for authors to write plays with a specific ensemble in mind, just as Shakespeare did.”