...because there won’t be time to sleep if you’re a Shakespeare nut visiting Canada. Almost two dozen annual festivals—even a world-famous, full-blown Shakespeare theatre (Stratford, in Ontario)—across the country celebrate the Bard every summer. These are five that float top-of-mind, sort of like Ophelia drifting downstream:

1. Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK, has The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor in July and August this year.
    
2.  Bard on the Beach in Vancouver, BC, runs through late September 2010, with Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Falstaff (an adaptation of Henry IV, Parts I & II by Errol Durbach), along with Henry V in repertory.
    
3. At the venerable Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the premier see-Shakespeare site in Canada, 2010 offers As You Like It, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and The Two Gentlemen of Verona from the mid-April through the end of October—along with contemporary offerings such as Evita, Peter Pan and Dangerous Liaisons.
    
4. Winnipeg, MB’s Shakespeare in the Ruins performs one play for just a few weeks in late spring at the Assiniboine Park Conservatory. This year, it was The Merry Wives of Windsor; next year, who knows?
    
5. At the Shakespeare By The Sea Festival in St. John’s, NL, among other plays Love’s Labour’s Lost appears this summer in Harbourside Park; Troilus and Cressida at Signal Hill National Historic Site and contemporary riff The Compleat [sic] Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) at the Topsail Beach Amphitheatre in Conception Bay South.

Want more? The Shakespeare Fellowship lists North American sites. Some links are outdated, but that’s much ado about nothing.