With a dazzling succession of top-rank productions, daily talks and discussions, meetings with directors and visits to places known to Shakespeare, our annual ‘Shakespeare and his World’ provides an incredibly rich theatrical experience.

The Royal Shakespeare Company – ‘probably the most famous classical theatre company in the world’ – provides three of the plays in their theatre at Stratford. This re-opened last year after a three-year building and refurbishment programme; even the larger of the two auditoria (capacity 1,000) has no seat more than 13 metres from the stage.

Though a replica of the 1599 building as exact as available evidence allows, the reconstructed Globe on Bankside is no mere antiquarian exercise or meretricious tourist attraction. Productions here are vital, demotic, thoughtful, hilarious, intimate and profoundly moving, with a degree of authenticity provided by an audience generally uncowed by stuffed-shirt theatre-going conventions. We will buy two tickets for each participant, one for the gallery and one for the yard. If you tire of standing among the penny stinkers you can retire to the (relative) comfort of a (covered) seat, though if your back can cope you may not want to relinquish the extraordinary engagement that proximity to the stage brings. The play we see here, Henry V, was maybe the very first to be performed in the original Globe (‘this wooden O’).

The other London venue is the Roundhouse in Camden, which began life in 1846 as a steam-engine repair shed and has become a major cultural venue, home to a bold and exciting programme of live music, theatre, dance, circus, installations and new media.

There is another aspect to this tour: visits to sites in Stratford and London associated with Shakespeare. Some are fascinating, beautiful and moving – others less so (one is now an underground carpark), but all provide a springboard for a study of the topographical and historical context in which the plays were written. They provide a powerful aid to coming closer to Shakespeare the man and the writer and to learning about the age which shaped him, his plays and poems. Like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, he was ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, and his observations of the quotidian and the banal characterise his work as much as his acute commentary on the grand affairs of state or the revelation of the human condition.

London was where Shakespeare pursued his second career as an actor and playwright, acquired fame, achieved social advancement and made his fortune. But Stratford-upon-Avon, his birthplace, remained his home. When he headed for the metropolis aged around 23, his wife, three children, parents and siblings remained behind, and he returned to them regularly. In London he was only a lodger; he bought the biggest house in Stratford aged 33, and when he died there (aged 52) he may have been retired from the London stage for three or four years.

Fortune has been kind to the fabric of Shakespearean Stratford, less so to his London. But in London there are sufficient physical remains and identifiable sites – the footings of two Elizabethan theatres have been revealed in recent years – for an exploration to be peculiarly rewarding.

The lecturer, Charles Nicholl, is author of The Lodger, acclaimed for bringing the reader closer to Shakespeare than any other historical study, and of The Reckoning, an award-winning study of the death of Christopher Marlowe.

Read itinerary