Neil MacGregor

In 1600, when Shakespeare's audience at the Globe heard 'Hamlet' for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.

If you are born in 1564, your dislocation from your parents' experience is very profound. You are the first generation who will have had all your religious experience in English, the first to have a countryman circumnavigate the globe. All the power and economic structures of the world are changing around you.