Waltzing past a bookshop window, anything with ‘Shakespeare’ on the cover is guaranteed to keep you foxtrotting elsewhere. As Bill Bryson concisely put it, the wealth of written material available on Shakespeare is enormous. You could (if pressed) wade past ten million documents stretching over one hundred miles in the National Archives and sift through over sixteen thousand entries in the British Library.

So what makes Neil MacGregor’s book any different from this crowd of entries? Notwithstanding his credentials (since 2002 he has been the director of the British Museum, after having been the director of the National Gallery for fifteen years), Shakespeare’s Restless World is both accessible and fresh – avoiding the pitfalls of pretention and conjecture. Like his previous bestseller A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor takes the same approach of examining specific objects. What makes his work such a success though is the combination of this methodology with the perspective of those who lived in the Elizabethan era. Taking point from Napoleon, ‘that to understand a man you need to understand the world when he was twenty years old’, MacGregor aptly focuses on the perceptions of those born in England around 1560, witnessing not only Shakespeare at the zenith of his career, but also the tensions and uncertainties of a world on the brink of new horizons.

Amidst the detailed illustrations of etchings, maps, portraits and present day photography, MacGregor presents us with globes, African treasure and eroding eyeballs. Each object introduces a fragment of the prevailing thought of the day; thoughts that inspired Shakespeare’s most potent and omniscient themes. Rejected designs for the British flag underscore national unrest at home and abroad, a model ship belonging to James I reveals curses and the threat of witches on the high seas, whilst glass goblets in Venice have more in common with New York shopping-sprees than you might think.

Not every object is built up with such unexpected monumentality though. Perhaps the most mystical object in the entire book is ruthlessly degraded to little more than smeared bat faeces. In similar fashion, a moving excerpt from Samuel Pepys diary is brought to an awkward standstill: at the funeral effigy of Queen Katherine of Valois, Pepys remarks how ‘I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen’. Not quite, Sam – the wooden effigy bears a closer resemblance to a botoxed badger than a regal monarch.

Still, these jarring moments reconstruct a varied and refreshing account of a world where the stage and the street blended seamlessly together, of a time when going to the theatre in London was cheaper than a history tour (£37.97 priority booking for Westminster Abbey anyone?). Neil Macgregor’s invigorating renewal of dusted relics brings attention to the world we live in now, a world that shares the same uncertainties as 16th century Europe, but where material appreciation is often overlooked.

Shakespeare’s Restless World is available now from Allen Lane

words: Ben Meagher