first world tour in the history of theatre, in which it has taken Hamlet to almost every country – North Korea is still holding out. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to showcase each of Shakespeare’s plays, along the South Bank. The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and virtually every other theatre production company in the country will be marking the anniversary. Interpretations will range from the resolutely traditional to the Brighton-based Spymonkey’s Complete Deaths, a romp through the 74 deaths – 75 including a fly squashed in Titus Andronicus – by stabbing, poisoning, smothering and smashing across the plays. There will also be hundreds of lectures, recitals, international academic conferences, films, concerts, operas and major exhibitions. For a man famous in his own lifetime, there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life and times. The plays would scarcely have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every scrap of every play they could find – drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors’ parts and 17 plays not known in any other version – into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display –