THE world's top Shakespeare experts are at Lancaster University and Hoghton Tower this week to discuss the region's link with the playwright voted 'Man of the Millennium'.

They could be sitting in the very room in which Shakespeare first learned his craft. It is becoming increasingly accepted that the Bard spent his early life as tutor and budding actor/playwright with the great northwest families, possibly including the Hoghtons who still live at their ancestral home between Blackburn and Preston.

From here Shakespeare set out to conquer the hearts and minds of the Elizabethan court and lovers of drama and language across the world.

Lancaster University's Shakespeare specialist Professor Richard Wilson said: "Scholars now agree that Shakespeare spent a crucial decade of his young manhood in Lancashire at a succession of great Catholic houses starting at Hoghton in 1580 and graduating to the Earl of Derby's players at Knowsley near Liverpool. The conference at the University of Lancaster and Hoghton Tower will bring together 150 of the world's top Shakespeare specialists, theatre directors and film makers to debate this exciting new story and the implications for staging the plays in the 21st century. Most people associate Shakespeare with Stratford, London and the Globe, but what excites scholars about the Lancashire Shakespeare is that it gives us a dramatist whose work began outside the official culture.

Shakespeare in this setting is a much more dangerous subversive writer."

A whole series of events have been organised during the conference to recreate the type of drama and music that would have been performed in the house in Shakespeare's time.

The Choir of the Sorbonne, Paris, two University drama groups and Lancashire Morris Dancers will entertain the conference in the style for which Hoghton was once famous.

Academics, including Shakespeare doyen Steve Greenblatt and Royal biographer Anthony Holden, currently working on a Shakespeare book.

He will be presenting ground-breaking papers on four main themes covering the pre-Globe theatre years.

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