Summer of Shakespeare, Blenheim Palace

Dust off your ruffs and ready your quills. This summer, travel back in time to Renaissance England at Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace where Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre is putting on four of the bard’s masterpieces. For Europe’s first ever pop-up Shakespearean theatre, all the world truly is a stage, as they bring to life a 13-sided Elizabethan-style playhouse, complete with an Elizabethan village.

Whether you’re looking for Athenian revelry, ill-omened ghosts, tearful adieus or bloody British history, there’s something for everyone with perennial favourites A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III performed across a nine-week season.

The season follows a highly acclaimed inaugural run in York in 2018. In overseeing the four plays, Damian Cruden brings with him 22 years of experience as artistic director of the York Theatre Royal. Tom Wright will be associate director of Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy and courtship comedy whilst Juliet Forster will take on his star-crossed lovers and ambitious King.

It might be hard to get your head around the multiple layers of history in visiting an Elizabethan town inside a Baroque palace, but with frothy ales served from thatched stalls, performing minstrels and a garden maze, we’ll certainly give it a try. After all, 'summer's lease hath all too short a date', so why not make the most of it.