Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. William Shakespeare died this week in 1616,

and he was baptized this week in 1564. So this week is all about William Shakespeare, the

Bard. We've had him on the podcast many times. We haven't had him personally, but we've had

people talking about his plays, his poetry, his flipping genius on this podcast many times.

So it's difficult for us to select exactly who or what we should run with today. I'm going to

bring one out of the archive in which I visit, because this reminds me of the time when we used to

go out and do things, dig holes in the ground, look in them, go for a pint afterwards, it was

brilliant. This is a trip I took around Shakespeare's Shoreditch Theatre as Shoreditch is rapidly becoming

the most desirable trendy area of London, a part of London in which team History Hit

Tao is his base. Yes, we're going up in the world. We now have office space and it's in Shoreditch.

Anyway, as the builders have been in constructing giant new shiny buildings and apartments in Shoreditch,

they have discovered a theatre that we think once hosted Shakespeare's Merry Band of Players.

I visited this 16th century playhouse where some of Shakespeare's works were first performed,

can you imagine being there in that audience and looked at the archaeology, looked at what the

remains have to tell us with Heather Knight, senior archaeologist from Museum of London archaeology.

This was a huge treat. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you want to listen to more

back episodes of this podcast, deep, deep back into the mists of time, you can do so only at

HistoryHit.tv. It's our digital history channel. No adverts on the podcast, no adverts at all.

You listen to them all, you have a nice old time listening to the podcast without listening

to my ridiculous adverts. And then you could also watch hundreds of hours of videos on there as well.

All about History. Proper History for Proper History phones, please go and check that out.

HistoryHit.tv. But in the meantime, here's the very brilliant Heather Knight taking me around

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