‘If you want to tell the history of the whole world, a history that does not unduly privilege one part of humanity,’ MacGregor declared at the outset of that book, setting out his claims for this approach, ‘you cannot do it through texts alone, because only some of the world has ever had texts, while most of the world, for most of the time, has not.’ Thus things, in MacGregor’s view, can provide a more eloquent and comprehensive source of information about the history of the world than words, with their inevitable exclusions and limitations. This proposition, plausibly sustained in the earlier book, is more severely tested in its successor, Shakespeare’s Restless World, a sumptuously illustrated volume produced to accompany last year’s exhibition at the British Museum, Shakespeare: Staging the World, jointly organised with the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival. (Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton wrote the well-illustrated catalogue of the same name [British Museum Press, 2012].)

‘...things, in MacGregor’s view, can provide a more eloquent and comprehensive source of information about the history of the world than words’

Shakespeare’s Restless World looks at twenty physical objects chosen to illuminate the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. They include a black obsidian mirror, used by the magus John Dee to communicate with angels; a sixteenth-century rapier recovered from the foreshore of the Thames; a Flemish clock of 1598 with two hands (a technological advance on the customary one-handed clocks of the period); the battle-gear of Henry V, now housed in the Crypt Museum of Westminster Abbey; an apprentice’s woollen cap, fine quality, but a clear marker of social status; designs, never implemented, for a new flag to signal the proposed union of England and Scotland; the right eye (now preserved in a silver box at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire) of the Jesuit martyr Father Edward Oldcorne, a gentle priest unhappily caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot; and an inscribed brass-handled iron fork – a rare commodity in Shakespeare’s time – evidently once belonging to a playgoer who came to the Rose Theatre to snack ostentatiously on sweetmeats with his new toy during performances, then absent-mindedly left it behind.

MacGregor describes each of his twenty items with flair and authority, drawing from time to time on the advice of curatorial and academic colleagues, and pondering the larger significance of these objects within the world of Shakespeare’s imagination. The book has much of the same appeal as A History of the World in 100 Objects, though MacGregor now faces a challenge not encountered in the earlier volume. For the objects he looks at in the present book are selected not just for their intrinsic interest but for the light they potentially cast on Shakespeare’s creative work. This is a somewhat trickier task, as MacGregor, setting out the book’s methodology, circumspectly explains.

The chapters that follow do not draw principally on literary resources, nor do the things in them make for a narrative history of England around 1600. They aim instead to take us immediately to a particular person or place, to a way of thinking and of acting which may be difficult to recover if we work only from texts, or look top-down at broader historical currents. They are a physical starting point for a three-way conversation between the objects themselves, the people who used or looked at them, and the words of the playwright which have become such an embedded part of our language and of our lives.

While these procedures sound fine in principle, there prove to be some stretches in this three-way conversation when the voice of the playwright falls strangely silent. Several chapters deal with topics that Shakespeare doesn’t in fact touch on anywhere in his writings, and gain entry here presumably as being, in some more general sense, a part of his ‘world’. These include the sensitive issue of succession, widely discussed yet officially off limits during Elizabeth’s last years (approached here via a dynastic painting of 1571 by Lucas de Heere, circulated as a propaganda print in the early 1590s); the equally touchy topic of Ireland (here illustrated by John Derricke’s book of 1581, The Image of Ireland); and the decorative ‘Romanizing’ of London by triumphal arches erected on the streets of the city to welcome the new king, James I, early in 1604: handsomely captured in Stephen Harrison’s The Arches of Triumph, published in the same year. Shakespeare wasn’t in fact part of the team responsible for this latter event, the principal speeches for which were composed by Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, among others. It’s reasonable to suppose that he may have witnessed part at least of this progress, but it wasn’t in any sense the product of his contriving.

The success of other chapters depends on the (often considerable, but predictably variable) skill with which MacGregor moves from things to words, using a particular object to make some larger point about Shakespeare’s particular genius.In one of his more successful transitions, he turns from the story of Father Oldcorne’s eye to the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, and a brief meditation on juridical cruelty in early modern England. Another chapter, on changing religious attachments in the period, opens promisingly with an account of a silver chalice made for use at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1571 – the year following Elizabeth’s excommunication – whose simple decorative design marks it out at once as a Protestant, not a Catholic, vessel; and tells of Shakespeare’s father, John, demolishing the rood loft in the chapel of Stratford’s Gildhall in the year of his son’s birth, and whitewashing the Last Judgement from its walls. These are highly suggestive objects and occurrences. But in a less happy transition, MacGregor moves from the silver chalice (which ‘was, so far as we know, never used to poison anybody’) to the poisoned cup from which Gertrude mistakenly drinks at the end of Hamlet: an event so far removed from the central theme of the chapter as to seem merely distracting. What Gertrude is given is indeed another precious drinking vessel, but one that tells us nothing about religious practices in Shakespeare’s England.

One of Neil MacGregor’s most notable skills since being appointed to the directorship of the British Museum a decade ago, when restitution of the Elgin Marbles and other acquisitions was the subject of impassioned debate, has been his readiness to present his institution with some rhetorical dexterity as ‘the World’s Museum’, a repository of treasures gathered from across the globe, lovingly preserved and displayed for the benefit of visitors from many nations. A History of the World in 100 Objects was a skilful iteration of what, in the director’s words, ‘the Museum has been doing, or attempting to do, since its foundation’, offering freely back to the world the world’s own riches. While the objects described in Shakespeare’s Restless World are drawn not merely from the British Museum but from a variety of institutions, the book – commemorating as it does the World Shakespeare Festival, during which the entire Shakespearian canon was presented at the Globe Theatre in a variety of languages by actors from many countries – makes use of a very similar vocabulary. It promotes Shakespeare as no mere talented Englishman but as the world’s supreme writer: as the product of a moment when, following Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, some idea of the earth’s immensity could at last be attained; and as the cultural possession in modern times of every nation under the sun. ‘England Goes Global’ is the title of the book’s first chapter, and ‘Shakespeare Goes Global’ is the similarly trumpeted title of its last.

While Shakespeare these days may indeed seem ‘global’, one needs to remember that in his own day he seems never to have ventured outside England, and seems never to have been much good at geography, believing that Bohemia had a sea coast, and invoking only in the vaguest of ways the Italian cities in which he set so many of his plays. Many of Shakespeare’s great literary contemporaries – Sidney, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne – had a more informed sense of that vast world that lay beyond Britain than Shakespeare ever did. If he has become a globally venerated figure in recent times, it is through the exceptional power of his literary creations, through the supreme achievement of his language, which, as he himself noted – recalling a sentiment that had itself endured for centuries – tends, at its best, to last longer than brass or stone or marble. Things are always good to think about, as the present book eloquently reminds us. But words – ah! ‘Words, words, words’ – words are another matter.