Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of Renaissance literature and an expert in Shakespeare at Harvard, said that “Henry V” appeals to chief executives not because there are four or five management principles to be made of his career. “‘Henry V’ is actually a play about the necessity of betraying your friends at court, and dealing with the cost of that,” Professor Greenblatt said. “Studying the consequences of these actions makes powerful people more richly human.”

Image James Fugitte, the chief of the Wind Energy Corporation, says the language of Shakespeares plays gives him insight into power. A portrait of Shakespeare hangs in his office. Credit... Michael Clevenger for The New York Times

Mr. Coleman said he noticed the chief executives in a recent audience grow pale as he played the role of Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his father.

“The ghost demands, ‘if you love me you will avenge my murder.’” The C.E.O.’s told him, Mr. Coleman said: “‘This is the dilemma we face: what is our responsibility to shareholders, to employees, to clients?’ It became an emotional discussion. C.E.O.’s who have to be so certain, so in control, were asking, ‘What do I do as a person? Where does my loyalty and my sense of love and justice lie?’”

Chuck Schwager, chief executive of the Polaris Healthcare Corporation in Boston, said he had a conversion experience at a lecture on Shakespeare and power at Arden and became a part-time actor. “There are sensitivities about power that Shakespeare knew better than I did, and I wanted to find out what those were,” Mr. Schwager said.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said that Shakespeare was the last writer who lived at a socially fluid time that permitted him to work in close proximity both to kings and queens and to working people. He grasped the psyche of power, Mr. Gioia said.

“Corporations tend to be run by very ambitious and focused men and women,” Mr. Gioia added. “They are not likely to be people who have learned the human truths that art teaches best. The higher you get in corporate life, the more you need the truths you get from Shakespeare, which point you in directions rather than provide you pat answers. We remember truths more vividly when they are embodied in a story.”