The first Shakespeare performance that the general and artistic director of Glimmerglass Opera, Michael MacLeod, can remember being involved in was in the early 1970s, as a schoolboy at Fettes College in Edinburgh, Scotland. “I found myself head of house directing a school production of ‘Julius Caesar,'” he recalled. “And there playing Marc Antony was this truculent, troublesome young man, one year younger than me, always questioning authority, but even then showing himself to be a wonderful speaker.”

Caesar’s stage assassin was the young Tony Blair, known to his friends in those days as “Lugs” Blair because his ears — what the Scots call “lug ‘oles” — stood straight out from his head. “As you can imagine, when he spoke the line, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears … ‘ everyone cracked up with laughter,” Mr. MacLeod said.

A couple of years later, Mr. MacLeod won a scholarship to Amherst College and, arriving on campus with a conspicuously British accent, was smartly drafted into playing a small part in “Richard II.” The production toured to Washington, D.C., and, to his surprise, he found himself performing on the stage of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s replica Elizabethan Theatre on Capitol Hill, a meticulous and beautiful copy of a half-timbered English 17th-century theatrical inn, complete with three-tiered wooden balconies and carved oak columns.

A similar facsimile Elizabethan stage, based loosely on the plan of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, has been erected in the opera house at Glimmerglass as the sole set for four operas composed around Shakespeare stories. The audience sitting on three sides of the protruding stage will discover the theatrical intimacy within which Shakespeare set his plays.

At first, a Shakespeare opera festival was not on Mr. MacLeod’s mind. “I wanted to stage Wagner’s early opera ‘Das Liebesverbot,’ based upon the plot of ‘Measure for Measure,'” he explained. Then he thought that by using the same apron-stage Tudor theater set for all four operas, he could not only keep costs down but establish an overriding theme to New York’s rural summer opera festival: Shakespeare’s stories in opera.

Mr. MacLeod has deliberately distanced himself from the repertoire programming of his predecessor, Paul Kellogg. Last year, Mr. MacLeod’s first, he presented four new opera productions based around the Orpheus myth. The season was a notable success, bringing together Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” the Gluck/Berlioz “Orphée et Eurydice,” Philip Glass’s striking modern “Orphée,” and, for light relief, Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.”

Having settled on the Shakespeare theme for this summer’s season, it soon became clear that the task of picking exactly which Shakespeare-inspired operas to mount was not easy. Berlioz, Shostakovich, Britten, Nikolai, Salieri, Goetz, Shebalin, Weber, and Gounod, among many others, have borrowed from Shakespeare or his sources. Verdi alone wrote three Shakespeare operas: “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff.”

Mr. MacLeod toyed with staging Purcell’s “The Tempest” before settling on his selections: Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” which, he adds, “should really be called ‘Caesar and Cleopatra'”; Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” based on “Romeo and Juliet,” and, “to provide balance,” Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate.” To round out the program, Mr. MacLeod has added concert performances of Mendelssohn’s “Complete Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

He justifies including Porter in an opera festival by insisting the Elizabethan theater setting will add its own dignity, making it “‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ but at the Globe.” “The usual reaction is, ‘That’s really interesting,'” he said. “‘Kiss Me, Kate’ is closer to the world of opera than a musical. More Lehár than Lloyd Webber.” Audiences, it seems, are not deterred. “If there are raised eyebrows, tickets are selling like hotcakes,” he said.

To encourage audiences to stay over and hear all four operas, Mr. MacLeod aims to provide a mixture of musical styles. “I believe the balance of the season is really good,” he said. “The Handel has one after another glorious arias.” The Puccini offered “a vehicle to show off voices,” including some young singers from Glimmerglass’s Young American Artists Program. “The Wagner is in because it deserves to be revived. The Cole Porter provides a balance to the other three,” Mr. MacLeod said. “And the cream on the cake is the Mendelssohn.”

All four productions are new this season. “You will have to come to Glimmerglass to see them,” Mr. MacLeod said. This is a break from the past: In the hands of Mr. Kellogg, Glimmerglass shared productions with New York City Opera, which he also directed.

Now that Glimmerglass productions will no longer go to the State Theater, Mr. MacLeod hopes audiences will travel north to hear what they are missing. “I think in the past our audience has suffered because some people stayed in New York to wait for productions to visit them,” he said.

Mr. MacLeod is ever aware of living within a tight budget. He will defray some of the costs of last year’s Glimmerglass production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” when it receives its Norwegian Opera premiere on May 29.

The need to find alternate sources of revenue has also led to negotiations with a company in California that wants to hire this summer’s Globe set. What a California company wants with an Elizabethan theater is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they will put on a Los Angeles seaside “Kiss Me, Kate,” with its recurring refrain, “We Open in Venice.”

July 5 through August 24 (Cooperstown, N.Y., 607-547-5704 and glimmerglassopera.org).