Performed at St Mary de Crypt on Wednesday 18th September 2024

William Shakespeare was perhaps the most inventive writer the world has ever seen. Without him, the English language would be immeasurably poorer – he invented more than 2000 words in his lifetime, many of them still in regular use today. As England’s foremost playwright he was responsible for some of the finest plays ever written, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar.

In All The World’s A Stage, Barry Page and Chris Moore explore Shakespeare’s world, the richness of his language and the challenges of performing on the Elizabethan stage. Interspersed with readings of some of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, they look at how Shakespeare’s plays were written and performed and how the First Folio, in which his plays were preserved, came to be published just over 400 years ago in 1623.