I'm Neil McGregor, the director of the museum, and it's my great pleasure to welcome

this evening's LRB discussion about Shakespeare, our contemporary. We've got a particularly

welcoming image on the screen to look at you. And I'd like to start there by thanking the London

review of books very, very warmly for this evening

and for a long collaboration. We've now reached a position where we firmly believe that

those who are not in London reading the London Review books are actually in the British Museum

looking at our exhibitions. And we hope that many of you will have a chance to see the exhibition in the museum

both on Shakespeare's, the staging of the world, Shakespeare exhibition and the Shakespeare

Money exhibition in our Coins and Medals Department and the two curators, Dorothe Ornton and Barry

Cook are here this evening.

The purpose of this evening is really to ask that fundamental question about Shakespeare,

contemporary or other. And the eye relic of the Jesuit martyr suggests perhaps a certain

level of distance and alterity, as we would say, in the London

Review books.

Can we move on?

Here we are.

As does, of course, the ship offered in thanksgiving by James the 6th for his being saved from shipwrecked by the witches and put in the church at Leith, things that make us seem, I think, very, very far away from this world, whereas the extraordinary

set of flag designs, as James VI struggled to persuade England, that it wanted to be part

of a bigger political whole and, as you know, failed dismally, do bring us perhaps rather closer to the world that we're still living with us.

It has been one of the great excitements of the exhibition and the radio programmes to keep coming backwards and forwards from the distance of this world and the extraordinary immediacy of the issues.

And that's what's going to be discussed this evening.

So I'm now going to hand over to Professor Michael Dobson, the director of the Shakespeare Institute,

...