Chicspeare began in 1995 out of a performance, and the collaboration of two actors.

Ann James and Christine Calkins met when they were cast as the Nurse and Juliet in a production of Romeo & Juliet for high school audiences. Though both actors saw that seeing the play helped students understand what they were reading, they also knew their performances were not as rich as they could be because neither of them had had much experience working with verse.

Wanting to improve their performance "in the verse vay," they took some classes in a technique based on work by John Barton at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Using the First Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays as performance texts, the technique treats the scripts almost as if they were musical scores. Actors learn to play with sounds and rhythm and patterns of repetition. Spelling, punctuation, even what gets capitalized and when, serve like musical notation, giving clues to how a word should be pronounced or what the tone of a phrase should be.

Realizing many of the techniques could make reading the plays easier for anyone, not just actors, James and Calkins developed a program to take this performance-oriented approach into the classroom. The response was immediate and rewarding: as one student wrote, "it was really inspiring... and... helps me to bring out the image of the play, which is very good because when I read [it] I did not have a clue...."

They also realized that the emotionally intense, ensemble-based style of acting for which Chicago actors are known resonated with the style Shakespeare asked of his actors, and would blossom when disciplined by the demands of verse. And so, James started Chicspeare, a company which would make Shakespeare's work accessible to all Chicagoans through educational programs and productions, and would offer Chicago actors from every community in the city a chance to perform Shakespeare regularly.

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