Eisenhower opened at Alleyn's Theater in January 1972, less than three months after the opening of Harry Truman Part II. But audiences drawn to it in the hope of more of the same would have been disappointed - instead of the heroism of Ridgway and the marines in Korea, they would have seen a far darker view of the military, and in particular of a man whom Americans of all political stripes still regarded with respect bordering on awe. For an English playwright - and an English actor; Burbage took the title role when Eisenhower opened - to portray Eisenhower not as the 'honest Ike' of his public persona, but as a thoroughly ambitious and unscrupulous political animal, and a knowing ally and promoter of the hated Nixon, was a dangerous move.

Or so one would assume. But although Eisenhower, like the rest of the Nixoniad, became unpopular for this reason retrospectively - publicly condemned in the Senate in 1981; its author accused by name in a presidential speech in 1983 as having been part of the 'enemy within' - its initial performance went off fairly quietly by the standards of the day. Burbage's injury forced him to withdraw from the production after only a week, but it is still far from proved that the gang members who attacked him were politically motivated. The financial links between several New York street gangs and Nixon's Urban Pioneer Program are nothing unusual -  many street gangs of the time in cities across the country received these grants, justified as promoting inner-city enterprise and community cohesion (and no doubt also providing an useful demonstration to attract urban votes), and there is no hard evidence that the gangs in question were even expected to participate in political activities such as get-out-the-vote efforts, far less 'dirty tricks' of the kind later infamous in the United States. And there is, for that matter, no evidence that Burbage's unidentified attackers even belonged to a gang which had been paid under the UPP.

Sterling Hayden, a New York theatre veteran who had appeared in the role of Nimitz in Harry Truman Part I, stepped into Burbage's place and the run continued for another seven weeks. Its relatively short run may have been due to competition from a recently-arrived touring production.
Actor-director George C. Scott had stunned Hollywood audiences in 1971 with his production of Fletcher's Patton; extraordinarily ambitious, foul-mouthed and spectacular to the point of megalomania, Patton was the kind of play made to show off what the enormous and technically sophisticated theatres of Los Angeles and the West Coast could do. Nor was it the first such epic. The vogue for "grand slam plays", which began with Lean's Company and the Paramount Theater in the 1960s, would last for many more years, with expatriate English playwrights such as Fletcher, Kyd and (later) Webster and Middleton avoiding the traditional circuit of theatres in New York, Baltimore and Boston, to head for the broad canvases and newly-rich audiences of Southern California, fast becoming the true capital of American theatre.

But the kind of plays best suited to Los Angeles theatres were, by definition, difficult to perform on the smaller stages of the traditional theatres of the East Coast (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) and were therefore frustratingly difficult to take on tour. Shakespeare mocks the failures of one such effort, probably the 1964 London production of The Longest Day, in the Prologue to Henry V, when the Chorus remarks: "But pardon, gentles all,/The flat unraised spirits that hath dar'd/ On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth/ So great an object. Can this cockpit hold/ The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram/ Within this wooden O the very casques/ That did affright the air at Agincourt?" The producers of The Longest Day had attempted exactly that with respect to the 1944 invasion of Walcheren and Beveland, and the result, on the cramped stage of the Lion Theatre in London, must have been ludicrous. Only a hastily arranged and very popular run of outdoor performances in the grounds of Kenwood House saved the blushes of Zanuck's company and the purses of his investors.

Scott, however, made it work. Patton opened in April 1972 at the Empire Theater in New York, in a radically rewritten version with many of the battle scenes excised, and was an immediate success. A few wealthy New Yorkers (Sullivan among them) had already made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles to see it at its original home in Mann's Chinese Theater, and had whetted the appetite of their less fortunate fellow citizens. Scott, to the fury of Alleyn (and presumably Shakespeare) was the guest of honour at a Gracie Mansion revel that summer; an honour which had so far escaped Alleyn, despite Lindsay's many years of patronage. The rift between Alleyn and his New York patrons would be slow to spread but ultimately disastrous for both him and Shakespeare.

Timeline: premieres and selected subsequent performances of the Nixoniad

Late 1969 - Shakespeare arrives in New York
1970 - working on Eisenhower and The Tragedy of John Kennedy
Around September 1970 - begins work on Harry Truman Part I
February 1971 - first performance of Harry Truman Part I at Alleyn's Theater
May 1971 - first performance of the masque The Tragedy of John Kennedy, venue unknown
November 1971 - first performance of Harry Truman Part II at the Empire Theater; Burbage arrives in New York
January 1972 - first performance of Eisenhower at Alleyn's Theater
October 1972 - first performance of Lyndon Johnson Part II at Alleyn's Theater, under the title The History of Lyndon Johnson
November 1972 - Richard Nixon re-elected as president; Beaumont arrested
December 1972 - closure of Alleyn's Theater; Alleyn leaves the US for France; death of Harry Truman
January 1973 - death of Lyndon Johnson
February 1973 - Burbage and Beaumont return to England
May 1973 - first performance of Lyndon Johnson Part I at the Great Rose in Boston
January 1974 - Shakespeare returns to England
August 1974 - first performance of Lyndon Johnson Part III at the Haymarket Theatre in London; resignation of President Nixon
December 1974 - first New York performance of Lyndon Johnson Part III
April 1975 - first performance of Richard Nixon at the National Theatre in London
June 1976 - first New York performance of Richard Nixon
9 September 1991 - death of William Shakespeare
1994 - death of Richard Nixon; first complete performance of the Nixoniad (including John Kennedy), produced by Trevor Nunn in London
1997 - revised Oxford edition of Shakespeare's works omits John Kennedy, based on vocabulary analysis showing it was mostly the work of other authors
1998 - Kenneth Branagh produces The White House, a heavily abridged adaptation of the Nixoniad, as three plays, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
2001-2 - The US National Theater Corporation tours the country with The West Wing, its own adaptation of the Nixoniad
Summer 2004 - Citizens Theatre stages its "Other Voices" Nixoniad project, including, as well as Shakespeare's plays, John Kennedy, Ensler's Lady Bird and Cole's The Mountain (both commissioned for the project) and Fletcher's Fear and Loathing and The Right Stuff

We can only regret that Shakespeare did not follow Eisenhower with his own John Kennedy. Kennedy's relations with his family - in particular his father Joseph and brother Robert - would have been fascinating to see on stage in Shakespearean form, as would the closely-fought 1960 election campaign that pitted him against Richard Nixon. Kennedy's presidency, too, offers plenty of dramatic material - the failed foreign interventions in Central America, the first steps towards involvement in Indochina, the Patrol Crisis, and of course his eventual assassination. Instead, we have the composite John Kennedy of which little is definitely Shakespeare's work, taken by Fletcher, as already mentioned, from the lost 1970 masque. However, we can deduce a little about the structure of the masque from the fragments which survived in Fletcher's play.

Fletcher covers the period from (roughly) June 1960 to the Patrol Crisis in November the next year, finishing on a triumphant note as the young president outfaces his hawkish advisors and negotiates a mutual climbdown and establishment of legally-binding air identification zones. (The Madrid Accord would eventually evolve into the Open Skies Treaty and play a major role in reducing tensions in the later Cold War.)

Shakespeare's contributions are all found in the first two acts of Fletcher's composite Kennedy and, compared to the rest of the Nixoniad, they are jarringly light-hearted. Masques were customarily lighter in tone than formal plays, even when they dealt with serious subjects such as (to take one famous example which survives) the possibility of an accidental nuclear war - the long Prologue to Act II mocks Kennedy's famous 'lockjaw' accent and literary aspirations as well as Nixon's prickly demeanour, and makes Nixon's vehement anti-socialist paranoia more of an eccentric flourish than a destructive and central part of his character. The election is almost a political comedy, with the Kennedy family's plotting and counterplotting even verging on farce. The darker second half of Kennedy is, paradoxically, more Shakespearean, even though there is probably nothing by Shakespeare in it - the failure of the Veracruz landing and the growing fear of an all-out bomber war fit the rest of the Nixoniad thematically, and we can only regret that Shakespeare never handled them in play form. The clashes between MacNamara, Le May and Kennedy would surely have been of equal quality to the Truman-MacArthur and Truman-Eisenhower scenes earlier in the series, and indeed the many other similar scenes in Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  Instead, with Eisenhower ending only around 1955, Shakespeare never brings John Kennedy on stage at all - except, of course, in spectral form in Lyndon Johnson.

Perhaps this was a deliberate strategic decision. After the turbulence surrounding Eisenhower, Shakespeare would have become even more aware of the intimately political nature of the US theatrical community. The success of Patton against Eisenhower underlined the east-west cultural split which would be echoed by the on-stage clashes between the Californian Nixon and the East Coast political establishment, and which, of course, would worsen - tragically - in the 1970s and early 1980s. But the US stage was a divided political arena as well, and stage players needed political patrons. With Gracie Mansion perhaps seeming less secure as a hinterland, Shakespeare may have felt the need for caution in order to secure his possible line of retreat to Kennedy territory in Boston; a retreat he would in fact make less than a year later. Instead, he turned his attention to Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson.

The crowning glory of the Nixoniad is, without doubt, Richard Nixon itself. But Lyndon Johnson Part II is a close second. If we divide the Nixoniad into two chronological (and "rhyming") halves, the first, from Harry Truman Part I to Eisenhower, opens with a funeral and ends with a worrying foreshadowing of war, as Eisenhower commits his government to massive retaliation against any attack on the United States or its allies. The second half begins - if the plays are read in the order they were written - with a triumph. Act I of Lyndon Johnson Part II, or The History of Lyndon Johnson as it was originally titled, depicts the closing stages of Johnson's successful campaign for re-election. And while the obvious comparison is with Act I of Richard III, in which the ostensible triumph of the House of York is immediately undermined by Gloucester's envy and ambition, the opening speech from Johnson - "The clouds are lifted, Heaven on us smiles/ A calm breeze and the Sun's benevolent eye!" - is an uncomplicated admission of triumph.

In fact, Shakespeare's authorial outlook in the first half of Lyndon Johnson Part II (and for that matter in Lyndon Johnson Part I, which he wrote the following year) is jarringly optimistic for those of us who have just watched his bleak portrayal of the realities of political strategy in Eisenhower. Johnson wins the election in a crushing victory (as in real life) over his opponent, the Western conservative Goldwater. Interestingly, Shakespeare makes more of his Western-ness than his conservatism - which could be seen as unsettling political prescience, as a reflection of the increasingly febrile political atmosphere in New York in the weeks and months before the 1972 election, or, less charitably, as a sign that the threat to the New York theatre from the Californian companies was still very much on his mind.

In Act II, Johnson turns his attention to the issue of civil rights. It is surprising that so little reference is made to Kennedy's efforts in this area - after all, Shakespeare directs our attention to the offstage presence of Eisenhower, commenting on the incongruity of seeing American airborne soldiers escorting little children to school in their own country. But the ghost of Kennedy remains resolutely in the wings until Lyndon Johnson Part III. Act II and Act III also feature one of Shakespeare's most hotly-debated characters, Doctor King.

King has been the subject of more critical writing, praise and condemnation than any other character in the Nixoniad - than any other character in Shakespeare's writing, almost, with the exception only of Shylock. In contrast to many subsequent portrayals - by Cole, most famously, and also by Freeling and Beaumont - Shakespeare's King is far from saintly. He is ambitious, cunning and aggressive, a skilled actor and orator capable of shifting gear from Biblical sermonising to callous strategy in the space of twenty lines (as in II.iii) and overrides dissent from his allies with a high hand, even facing down Johnson himself in III.i. But this portrayal has to be seen in the context of the Nixoniad's overarching theme. Shakespeare rejected the option of treating King as a martyred saint, because he wanted to portray him as something more important to his argument - a successful politician, with the determination of one faction married to the idealism of the other. There is no agonising in King, no second thoughts - he acknowledges that his aims are ambitious (not only civil rights for black Americans, but a wholesale reordering of American society to favour the poor and marginalised) and goes after them anyway, by whatever means he can. Shakespeare has been condemned for giving him a death wish - but it's more correct to say that he portrayed King as a man who realised the likelihood of his own death and accepted it, as simply another tool that could come to hand. Doctor King, Shakespeare decided, was far from a saint, but he is as close as the Nixoniad comes to a hero.

"I have lost the South for a generation", the historical Lyndon Johnson said on signing the Voting Rights Act; Shakespeare's version does so (oddly, offstage) before the beginning of Act IV. And here Shakespeare again plays with history for dramatic effect. The first US marines were deployed into combat in Indochina in February of 1965, and the Voting Rights Act was signed only in August that year. Shakespeare swaps the dates, to give Johnson a slide from triumph towards disaster. And in place of the historical sequence of events, which saw US assistance to the German colonial government grow gradually from 1962 onwards, Shakespeare gives a simplified story of three main events, following hard on each other's heels; the news of the disastrous siege of Dienbienfu, and the commitment of US air power; the appeal from the German ambassador for aid from Germany's old ally, America; and the fateful decision to send a division of marines to Karlshafen (now Haiphong).

The irony is painful by the end of Lyndon Johnson Part II, just as it is at the end of Henry VI, when Edward IV announces "Sound drums and trumpets! farewell sour annoy!/For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy." We know, watching, that Edward and his family have only a few years left to live, and that the peace he has established will not outlive him for long. Similarly, when Johnson, riding high on his domestic triumphs, resolves to "bear the burden/Face the foe, and pay the price" (echoing the famous words of the historical Kennedy), we know that he has doomed himself and his legacy. The stage is set for the tragedies of 1968.

The History of Lyndon Johnson opened on 16 October 1972 at Alleyn's Theater. And surely audiences would have noticed, in its ominous ending, an echo of events in the world outside the theatre doors. Onstage, Shakespeare and Alleyn were depicting the start of the turmoil that would engulf American society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sparked by the commitment of US troops to the unpopular war in Indochina and the civil rights agitation in the southern states; offstage, the turmoil was reaching its climax, with President Nixon's crushing re-election victory just three weeks away.

Just down the street at the Raleigh Theater, meanwhile, Beaumont's intensely political Man without a Country opened in the same week. It is not well-known or often performed in England - its subject, the catastrophic presidency of James Buchanan (1857-1861), is remote to English audiences, and its long Oval Office scenes are unleavened with the kind of quick-fire argument or on-stage action which a Shakespeare or a Webster would have written. But its characters and events were and are far more familiar to Americans, and in October 1972 its references to contemporary events were literally (and tragically) explosive.

America had last seen a wave of political violence in the previous election year, 1968, with the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King (both of which would be depicted by Shakespeare in Lyndon Johnson Part III). In 1972 the gun gave way to the bomb - between 16 October and the end of the year, no fewer than 37 bombs exploded in the continental US, the vast majority in the north-eastern states, 16 in New York itself, and one, of course, outside the Raleigh Theater (one dead and 16 injured; the perpetrators remain unknown). As if to add to the misfortunes of the unhappy country, a week after Nixon's re-election, on 12 November, the first known victim of what would become known as Kansas City 'flu died in a Cook County hospital.

Faced with a growing and multi-headed crisis, Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover responded in the only way they knew. The day after the election, public safety orders closed many theatres declared to be particularly at risk of attack from the bombers; most, for one reason or another, were in New York. More public safety orders followed as the Kansas City epidemic spread; Alleyn's Theater was closed on 1 December, ending the New York run of The History of Lyndon Johnson after just two weeks.

More chillingly still, another public safety order on 15 November dictated the arrest of Beaumont, his director Robert Altman, and several of his investors. Beaumont lacked the protection of a local political patron - Robert Lindsay was still Mayor, and despite his feting of the visiting Californians earlier that year, he was still close enough to Alleyn to attend the opening night of The History of Lyndon Johnson in a very public demonstration of support. Only Beaumont and one investor, the wealthy landlord Robin Sacker, were actually arrested under the 15 November order, and both men were released a few days later - but the message had been sent and received. Alleyn embarked for St. Nazaire on New Year's Eve aboard the liner Grand Duke, beginning work on his first play, Anne Hall, during the voyage. Beaumont (along with Richard Burbage and several other prominent actors) would return to England in the New Year aboard Canberra, a voyage later immortalised by Tom Stoppard in 1999 in The New World. Shakespeare should have gone along with them. But instead he remained in the United States for the whole of the turbulent year 1973, moving from the Island to the (slightly) safer environment of Boston. His motives puzzled Burbage, as we know from his letters at the time. They are, to us, perfectly clear.

Throughout his stay in the United States, Shakespeare published and performed nothing except for the Modern History plays. But it may not be true to say that he wrote nothing else. Most of his longer poems can be dated with a fair degree of confidence, and all but two (The Phoenix and The Sea Elegy) date from the 1950s and 1960s. The Phoenix has a fair claim to being his last work, and was probably written not long before publication in 1983 - the last of his poems to be published in his lifetime. The Sea Elegy is more problematic, but its similarity in theme to The Tempest probably also dates it to Shakespeare's later London days.

The Sonnets are more difficult. The order in which they are numbered probably bears no resemblance to the order in which Shakespeare wrote them - the publisher Thomas Thorpe is believed to have ordered them according to his own perception of theme, and little external evidence has survived to confirm the ordering (the poems themselves are too short for reliable dating by vocabulary analysis).

But the traditional dating of many of the (numerically) earlier sonnets to 1973 is no worse than any alternative. And, once this is accepted, the romantic deduction that some Bostonian lady was the Dark Lady of the sonnets - and the reason for Shakespeare remaining in the United States - is extremely tempting. (Tom Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love went one further by associating the Dark Lady of the sonnets with Catherine Kennedy, the widowed cousin of John Kennedy, and making both Lyndon Johnson Part I and the lost masque John Kennedy a memorial to the dead president, written as a gift for his relative - but there is, unfortunately, little external evidence to support this.)

Romantic associations aside, Lyndon Johnson Part I was definitely written with a Kennedy audience in mind. Though there was no formal relationship of patronage between Shakespeare and the family in 1973, keeping on good terms with the Kennedys would have been simple common sense for a writer in Massachusetts, especially as the year grew darker.

Shakespeare had written prequels before - Henry VI Part I was written the year after Parts II and III. But writing Lyndon Johnson Part I (originally simply The Succession of Lyndon Johnson on its first performance, but retitled by 1975) meant facing a new set of problems; with most of the climactic moments of Johnson's presidency already dealt with in Part II, how was Part I to end satisfactorily? He chose, instead, to focus on Johnson's Great Society initiative, producing a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Johnson (surprising, because the Texan successor was never on friendly terms with the Kennedys) in particular drawing the contrast between his near-poverty childhood and Kennedy's privileged background.

In other hands, this could have become a simple tale of grievance and class rivalry. But Shakespeare handles it more subtly than that, with much of Acts I and II set before Johnson's entry into politics. Nixon does not appear in Lyndon Johnson Part I. This and Harry Truman Part II are the only Nixoniad plays in which Nixon does not appear on stage, and in Lyndon Johnson Part I he is not even mentioned by name. But, I would argue, Shakespeare's depiction of Johnson's early life is intended to portray him as the anti-Nixon. Both men come from humble origins (as indeed did Eisenhower) - Johnson's parents were poor farmers in Texas, Nixon's were shopkeepers in California. But while Nixon's memory of his status will lead him to seek revenge for his grievances, Johnson's drives him to an uneasy alliance with Kennedy and then, as president, to seek to improve the lives of the people he left behind.

Shakespeare's ambivalence towards Kennedy was not typical of English expatriates in the United States at the time. Most (Cooke, Webster and Fletcher most obviously) were won over by the undoubted charisma of the Kennedy family and their often-displayed attachment to the finer things in European culture - Shakespeare seems to have been more drawn to the lower-middle-class Truman and Johnson, and chides them only for their lack of determination.

After the lacklustre reception in Boston of The Succession of Lyndon Johnson (now Lyndon Johnson Part I), Shakespeare's nerve may have been shaken. The diarist and journalist Robert Woodward went to see the play in June 1973 and described it in distinctly lukewarm terms - "a fair piece of work, but nothing much here not seen already" remains a valid criticism. Many of the issues it deals with were handled better in The History of Lyndon Johnson, and the Succession lacks a foil of the quality of the History's Dr King.

Shakespeare's movements for the rest of the year are (perhaps deliberately) hard to trace. He was certainly still in Boston in early July, when he wrote to Alleyn bemoaning the play's lack of success. (Alleyn did not reply; he may have derived some satisfaction from knowing that his former partner, having refused to accompany him to Europe, was finding life more difficult on his own.) He was certainly in Boston again in early December, when he completed the legal agreements covering subsequent productions of his modern histories at the Great Rose Theater there, and there is good evidence that he was there in mid-November to make arrangements for his move back to England in January 1974. But that still leaves four months unaccounted for, in which he was apparently inactive in the theatre business and in Boston's social world.

The surviving documents - in particular the household accounts - of Philip Massinger, then a script doctor in Los Angeles, suggest one answer. The Massinger papers for this period never name Shakespeare, but in early August he took on another servant from a short-term domestic employment agency - presumably to cater for the needs of a guest. His surviving diaries make repeated reference to his provision of introductions to various magnates and other writers for an unnamed visitor to Los Angeles between August and October. He received no income from the rental of his guest house throughout the second half of the year - in previous years, as Harold Bird's 1992 biography notes, the thrifty Massinger had made several thousand dollars a year from renting out the unneeded building, which came to him along with his own house and its estate as a bequest from the Los Angeles theatre mogul David Selznick. Presumably the guest house was unavailable for rent because it was occupied by a non-paying friend. Could this have been Shakespeare, making a sub rosa visit to the home of the rival West Coast theatre?

If so, the summer and autumn of 1973 would have been a momentous period for Shakespeare. In the Hollywood Hills of the early 70s, he would have witnessed the birth of a new theatrical tradition - one which fused the spectacles of the Californian mega-theatres with the ingenuity of the traditional East Coast and European writers, and which continues to dominate the world of theatre to this day. Patton had shown the way, and put Eisenhower into the shade in doing so - Shakespeare wanted to create his own "Grand Slam" play (the wartime term for a large aerial bomb was first used as a theatrical term for a tremendously expensive and successful play in Los Angeles in 1962), and in Lyndon Johnson Part III he would finally do so.