Shakespeare: Staging the World

The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, but the Reading Room remains in its original form at the British Museum. Designed by Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, the Reading Room was in continual use until its temporary closure for renovation in 1997. It was reopened in 2000, and from 2007 to 2017 it was used to stage temporary exhibitions. As of 2021, it remains closed to the public while its future use remains under discussion.

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, commonly referred to simply as the Great Court, is the covered central quadrangle of the British Museum in London. It was redeveloped during the late 1990s to a design by Foster and Partners, from a 1970s design by Colin St John Wilson. The court was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.

The Obelisks of Nectanebo II are a pair of monumental obelisks that were found in Cairo but were originally located in the ancient city of Hermopolis (modern Al-Ashmunayn), central Egypt. The fragmentary monoliths were recovered by French scholars as part of Napoleon's 1798 expedition to Egypt but, after the capitulation of French forces, they were confiscated by the British, along with a number of antiquities including the Rosetta Stone, and transported to England. They can now be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum.

The Field of the Forty Footsteps was part of meadow lands at the back of the British Museum, once known as the Long Fields, then Southampton Fields. As the land lay behind Montague House, the town house of Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu, completed in 1679, it became known as Montague Fields, which contained the Field of the Forty Footsteps.

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.The museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions.Its ownership of a small percentage of its most famous objects originating in other countries is disputed and remains the subject of international controversy through repatriation claims, most notably in the case of the Elgin Marbles of Greece, and the Rosetta Stone of Egypt.

The Revells of Christendome is an engraving by English engraver Thomas Cockson. With image size of 21.6 x 35.5 cm and overall measure of 29.2 x 37.2 cm, A copy is in the collection of the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum.

Montagu House (sometimes spelled "Montague") was a late 17th-century mansion in Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury district of London, which became the first home of the British Museum. The first house on the site was destroyed by fire in 1686. The rebuilt house was sold to the British Museum in 1759, and demolished in the 1840s to make way for the present larger building.

The British Museum Department of Coins and Medals is a department of the British Museum involving the collection, research and exhibition of numismatics, and comprising the largest library of numismatic artefacts in the United Kingdom, including almost one million coins, medals, tokens and other related objects. The collection spans the history of coinage from its origins in the 7th century BC to the present day, and is representative of both Eastern and Western numismatic traditions.

The Rondanini Fawn is a marble sculpture by Flemish artist François Duquesnoy. It is part of the collection at the British Museum in London. The Rondanini Faun was built on an ancient torso, completed by Duquesnoy between 1625 and 1630. Duquesnoy's completion of antiques was acclaimed in Rome as 'absolutely perfect.' In 17th-century restoration of antique statues, the latter were often imbued with Baroque style by the contemporary sculptor who completed the opus. Albeit not excessively so, the Rondanini is no exception, its broad movement being proof thereof. Duquesnoy is known to have produced at least the limbs and the head for this figure, completing a severed torso with a faun tail. Duquesnoy's Faun takes its name from the Palazzo Rondanini in Rome, where it was once kept.

The Lion of Knidos is the name for a colossal ancient Greek statue erected near the ancient port of Knidos, south-west Asia Minor (now near Datça in Turkey). Although there is some debate about the age of the sculpture, in general, scholarly opinion dates it to the 2nd century BC. Since 2000, it has been prominently displayed on a plinth under the roof of the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court because soon after it was seen by British archaeologists in 1858, the statue was taken by the British to London where it became part of the British Museum's collection.

The Secretum or secret museum was a section of the British Museum created officially in 1865 to store all historical items deemed to be obscene.

Hoa Hakananai'a is a moai, a statue from Easter Island. It was taken from Orongo, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in 1868 by the crew of a British ship and is now in the British Museum in London. It has been described as a "masterpiece" and among the finest examples of Easter Island sculpture. Though relatively small, it is considered to be typical of the island's statue form, but distinguished by carvings added to the back, associated with the island's birdman cult.