OH MY GOD, THERE ARE MORE: (in re #297, though, come on–Mercutio? That’s totally reasonable. Lord Capulet not so much.)

161. If I must stage Macbeth in a modern setting, there is no reason to dress the Scottish nobles as Hare Krishnas, especially if I also arm them with machine guns.

165. At no time shall Romeo slap Tybalt with a fish. This is especially key during their confrontation in 3.1.

201. Similarly, I will remember that Much Ado is a comedy. I will refrain from having the company dress in funereal black for the wedding, dance to sombre music, and then die in a bombing raid. Even if am labouring under the misapprehension that this would be terribly artistic.

202. When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth meet for the first time, I will not transform their greeting into five to ten minutes of rolling around the stage making out, groping, and kissing like two teenagers in the back seat of a car. This goes double if I’ve costumed Lady Macbeth with a black leather miniskirt. If I do decide to go ahead with this insane idea, I shall make sure that the miniskirt is pointing away from the audience.

203. I will never dress Puck in a black t-shirt reading PCUK, even if it seems funny when I think of it.

219. I will not decide that Helen of Troy in Troilus and Cressida is actually a sports car, nor will Pandarus do lines of cocaine off of her. (I will especially not do this if I can’t afford a real sports car and have to make do with a small toy Ferrari, set on a table).

232. I will not cast Hamlet as two people, one male and one female.

254. Titania/Bottom sex scenes are never necessary. This is especially true when using an actor who’s clearly very proud of his braying abilities and wants the whole world to know it.

256. The Montague clan are not aliens. No, really, they’re not.

258. In a production of As You Like It, I will not portray the banished Duke and his followers as a community of Mennonites simply because I have an excess of those costumes in the costume storage shop.

259. I will never cast Hamlet as a horse just so I can have characters ride around on his back during the so-called sexually tense scenes.

261. Also, it would be wise to avoid ever staging Macbeth as if it were Reservoir Dogs, especially if the witches are going to be homeless people clinging to chain link fences.

265. Do not set fire to the actors to emphasise their emotions. It never helps.

280. The main theme of Richard III is not the suffering of the female characters. Even if it were, a sound design of continuous wailing is not the best way to represent this.

290. I won’t ever have Romeo shoot Tybalt in the back.

347. I will not decide that the best way to portray “Exit, pursued by a bear” is to have the rest of the cast dressed in brown and do some sort of modern-dance amoeba thing to absorb the character.

and still MORE.