The summer-stock model worked for a time, but transience has limits. In 1972, the festival relocated permanently to the campus of Drew University in Madison, Morris County — a move that gave the company something summer stock never could: a year-round home, an institutional identity, and a relationship with an academic community that deepened both the scholarship and the stagecraft. The company performs at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, a dedicated performance space on Drew's campus that gives the productions an intimacy suited to the demands of verse drama. Madison's tree-lined downtown and the university grounds provide a setting that feels, if not quite like Stratford-upon-Avon, at least like somewhere that takes the enterprise seriously.

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is the state's only professional troupe specializing in Shakespeare and, as of 2013, its largest theater company dedicated to that mission. The main stage season runs from May through December — a schedule long enough to encompass full productions of major and minor plays alike, including the rarely-produced epics that most companies skip for practical reasons. That willingness to take on the full canon, not just the titles that sell easily, is part of what defines the company's ambition. In 2002, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation awarded the theater a one-million-dollar strategic partnership grant, citing the company's artistry, achievements, and leadership as a performing arts and education organization.

Shakespeare requires not just performance but explanation — the language that was vernacular in 1599 is not vernacular now, and the theater has always taken its educational responsibility seriously. Its programming extends beyond the main stage into schools, workshops, and community engagement. The F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre sits on a working university campus where students of literature, drama, and performance practice encounter the plays as living texts rather than museum artifacts. That proximity between the academic and the theatrical is unusual in American regional theater, and it shapes what happens when the lights go down and an actor steps into the first line.