As devotees of the Bard, we’re only too happy to draw our readers’ attention to what promises to be a fascinating talk on Shakespeare by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.

MacGregor, whose BBC Radio 4 series ‘100 objects that shaped the world’ became almost required listening, is delivering an illustrated talk on Monday 3rd December about the dynamic and dangerous world that Shakespeare knew.

The talk will be delivered from 7pm to about 8pm in Southwark Cathedral, the church William Shakespeare and his fellow actors on Bankside knew simply as St Saviour’s. It was the single most important church for the theatrical profession during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, when Bankside was London’s major red-light district. About half the actors listed in the front of Shakespeare’s first folio, published in 1623 by two key members of The Kingsmen acting company, also appear on the parish register at St Saviour’s.

MacGregor’s talk will offer us a fascinating three-way conversation between objects of the time – a dagger, a magical mirror, a woollen cap – the men and women whose lives they touched, and the words of Shakespeare himself.

He will build a picture of a world which had expanded in size with the discovery of the New World yet was crumbling in many of its central assumptions about identity, religion and history.

The talk will be chaired by the Very Revd Andrew Nunn, Dean of Southwark Cathedral.

Tickets, priced at just £5, can be purchased at the Southwark Cathedral shop or online from restlessworld.eventbrite.co.uk . Ticket holders will be entitled to £5 off the publication Shakespeare’s Restless World by Neil MacGregor, available from the Cathedral Shop.

A short tour of the Shakespeare-related monuments and artefacts in Southwark Cathedral is included in Act II of our regular guided Shakespeare walk http://footprintsoflondon.com/shakespeare . It captures the Bard at his creative and financial peak in the 1590s and very early 1600s. See the Globe and Rose theatres with a full supporting cast of narrow cobbled streets, coaching inns, bear-bating pits, brothels and intense thespian rivalry.