Stewart, Michael Pennington, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Roger Rees, Jane Lapotaire and Peggy Ashcroft, Barton recorded nine workshop sessions for London Weekend Television. These programmes, together entitled Playing Shakespeare, were aired that year on Channel 4 and became the source material for Barton's best-selling book of the same name. Though stiff in his resolve against writing on the subject of performing Shakespeare, the surprising success of the televised series convinced Barton to produce a book. It, too, found great success, and remains a popular guide to performing Shakespeare among working actors and aspirants. Playing Shakespeare, the ITV series, is available on DVD. He followed this series up with a single DVD entitled The Shakespeare Sessions which was released in 2003, in which he and director Peter Hall worked with actors Cynthia Nixon, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Kline, and Liev Schreiber. Barton is quoted in an article by Michael Billington as saying "the success or failure of the RSC depends on the quality of the actors. If I've learned anything in my time, it is that if you get the right combination of actors, a production will generally work... But one should always remember that no theatre company is immortal and Zeus could still chuck a thunderbolt at any moment". Barton possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Shakespeare and is known to be able to identify one of his plays from a single line of text. A story is told of Barton getting so into his directorial work giving notes one night, that he fell into the orchestra pit, climbed out, and dusted himself off before resuming. A great deal of the past and continuing success of the RSC is attributed to John Barton and to his unrivalled wisdom of language, verse, character, and voice. Barton continued these workshops and conducted Master Classes at BADA (British American Drama Academy) during their Summer in Oxford training programmes. He was awarded the 2001 Sam Wanamaker Prize. Barton believed that the present-day speech of the Appalachian Mountains is the most suitable model for actors who want to imitate the accent used at the time of Shakespeare's plays. In 1969, he married the former Anne Righter, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar at Girton College, Cambridge (later Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge). Anne Barton died in November 2013. Notable stage productions 1963 - The Hollow Crown 1963 - The War of the Roses 1968 - Troilus and