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Shakespeare’s use of location governs his dramas. Some he was personally familiar with, like Windsor; some he knew through his imagination, like Kronborg Castle (‘Elsinore’); some matter because Shakespeare’s plays were performed there, like Hampton Court and the Great Hall of the Middle Temple. Shakespeare’s plays are powerfully shaped by their sense of place, and the location becomes an unacknowledged actor. This book is about the locations that he used for his plays, each of which the author has visited, and the result presents the reader with a sense of those places that Shakespeare knew either through direct personal contact or through his imaginative re-interpretation of the scene.

INTRODUCTION
1) Hamlet at Kronborg
2) Elsinore Revisited
3) Shakespeare at the Middle Temple
4) Haddon Hall and the Catholic Network
5) Ephesus and The Comedy of Errors
6) Shakespeare’s Venice
7) Measure for Measure at Hampton Court
8) Windsor and The Merry Wives
9) Richard III’s England
10) Falstaff’s Tavern
11) Jonson’s London
12) Stage Direction as Memoir: Jonson at Althorp

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Shakespare

Literary Criticism

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Publié par	University of Wales Press
Date de parution	15 mars 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783168101
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1074€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Shakespeare’s Settings
AND A SENSE OF PLACE
Ralph Berry

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2016
© Ralph Berry, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78316-808-8 eISBN 978-1-78316-810-1
The right of Ralph Berry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover images: William Shakespeare © Dreamstime; illustration of Hampton Court Palace © iStock; photograph of Kronborg Castle © Kronborg Castle/Thomas Rahbek.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 Shakespeare’s Elsinore
2 Elsinore Revisited
3 Shakespeare at the Middle Temple
4 Haddon Hall and the Catholic Network
5 Ephesus and The Comedy of Errors
6 Shakespeare’s Venice
7 Hampton Court Palace and Whitehall
8 Windsor and The Merry Wives
9 Richard III’s England
10 Falstaff’s Tavern
11 Jonson’s London
12 Ben Jonson at Althorp: Memoir of a Royal Visit
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter One , Chapter Two , Chapter Three , Chapter Four and Chapter Six first appeared in Contemporary Review . Chapter Nine is part of an essay, ‘ Richard III: Bonding the Audience’, from Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard , edited by J. C. Gray (University of Toronto Press, 1984, and reprinted with permission of the publisher). Chapter Twelve , ‘Ben Jonson at Althorp: Memoir of a Royal Visit’ appeared in Notes and Queries , and is reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
References are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare , updated fourth edition, edited by David Bevington (Longman Publishing Group, 1997).
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Kronborg Castle. © Kronborg Castle/Thomas Rahbek.
Kronborg Castle courtyard. © Kronborg Castle/Thomas Rahbek.
Kronborg Castle in winter. © Kronborg Castle/Thomas Rahbek.
Middle Temple Gardens. Courtesy of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.
Stained glass windows in Middle Temple Hall. Courtesy of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.
Middle Temple Hall. Courtesy of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.
Haddon Hall. Courtesy of Haddon Hall, Bakewell.
Two views of Haddon Hall, base court. Courtesy of Haddon Hall, Bakewell.
Steps outside Haddon Hall. Courtesy of Haddon Hall, Bakewell.
Theatre in Ephesus, Turkey. Courtesy of the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey, Office of the Counsellor for Culture and Information.
Rialto Bridge, Venice. © Kumar Sriskandan/Alamy.
Hampton Court Palace. © Historic Royal Palaces. Photograph: James Brittain.
Windsor Castle. Courtesy of the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead.
Schloss Hohentübingen gate. © University of Tübingen/Friedhelm Albrecht.
Tower of London. © Historic Royal Palaces. Photograph: Nick Guttridge.
Stone tavern sign of the Boar’s Head, London, 1668. © Museum of London. 79
Detail from Claes Visscher’s panorama of London, 1616.© Museum of London.
Althorp. © David Humphreys/Alamy.
INTRODUCTION
S HAKESPEARE loved settings, locations, the places where human beings live under certain specific conditions. Through the physical milieux we understand the people who dwell in them. I take it to be axiomatic that Shakespeare’s intuitive grasp of psychology is the foundation of his drama, and this is reflected in the places where his dramatis personae live.
Man lives in a landscape, always.
This book’s prime interest is topography and the special significance of certain settings for Shakespeare’s plays, both in performance and in his imaginative re-creation of the milieu. Shakespeare had always a clear idea of his plays’ settings, and his dramas show imprints of location-values upon the playwright’s mind. I take it for granted that he never left England, but his mind absorbed information from all quarters, and he must have spoken to many travellers from many lands. London, the crossroads of world travel, was ideal for a man of his interests. And he read widely. The great proving ground for all this is Hamlet .
It is as certain as anything can be that Shakespeare got his idea of Elsinore – Kronborg Castle, Helsingør – from his three colleagues who had a gig there in the summer of 1586. Will Kemp, George Bryan and Thomas Pope are all recorded in the royal Danish household as having been paid for two months’ residence, with a one-month bonus. All three toured on the Continent. Of course they talked about their experiences on tour, as actors do. I suspect that Kemp, a notable self-publicist, talked of little else. When Theseus gracefully declines Bottom’s offer of a ‘Bergamask dance’ at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , he is putting across a company in-joke. The editorial gloss on ‘Bergamask:a rustic dance named after the people of Bergamo in northern Italy’ is incomplete without the further information that it is the only recorded citation of the word in the OED . Kemp was linked to Bergamo, according to Thomas Nashe. So Theseus is saying to Bottom – played, as we know, by Kemp – in the manner of Mr Bennet, ‘You have delighted us long enough.’ From this archetypal travel bore Kemp, and from Pope and Bryan, Shakespeare gained first-hand accounts of a royal palace which became the stage set embedded in the text of Hamlet . The imaginative fictions took off from the physical realities, and it shows. Kronborg is a massive stage direction, which illuminates the text at many points. The ‘platform’ (gunsite), ‘cannons’, ‘lobby’, ‘chapel’, ‘hall’, ‘arras’ (with ‘picture’), all appear in the text and the actuality of Kronborg Castle. Courtyard, terrace and Great Hall are exceptionally suited to the performance of certain phases of Hamlet , with the first two being featured in the Hamlets of Richard Burton and Kenneth Branagh. The climate of Helsingør fits in with the short summer night of the opening scene and the coming of the ‘dawn in russet mantle clad’, when indeed it can be ‘a nipping and an eager air’. Shakespeare was well acquainted with the castle and outlook, and may well have studied the illustration of Kronborg in Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum . Elsinore is a country of the mind that comes to life in Kronborg Castle, and Kronborg owns the birth certificate of Hamlet .
Certain plays are powerfully shaped by Shakespeare’s sense of place. Consider the Great Hall of the Middle Temple. It is certain that Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, played Twelfth Night there on Candlemas, 1602, and it is overwhelmingly likely that Shakespeare – unless he were off sick – took part in that performance. The Twelfth Night of that event resembled what we would call Dinner Theatre, laid on for the Serjeants’ feast. Even if one does not accept Anthony Arlidge’s thesis ( Shakespeare and the Prince of Love , Giles de la Mare, 2000) that this was the first night, there is a closely argued case that Shakespeare was well familiar with the Middle Temple and its members, and that Twelfth Night has clear allusions to the physical features of the Middle Temple Hall. When Kenneth Branagh received the Golden Quill Award of the Shakespeare Guild there in 2000, the guests had a unique opportunity to contemplate a setting which must have featured in Shakespeare’s thinking about the text and performance of Twelfth Night .
Other locations he knew personally, of the play’s setting or at its performance. Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, with its (rare) base court and proximity to the battlements, could well have been the inspiration for the key scene in Richard II . It is owned to this day by the Manners family, Dukes of Rutland, and we know that Shakespeare was on good terms with the Earls of Rutland in his day, for he was paid in 1613 for providing an impresa to the Earl of Rutland. The Vernon family too had close links with Haddon Hall, and they are favourably treated in the History plays. If future research strengthens the claims of the Lancashire Connection version of Shakespeare’s lost years, then Haddon Hall may appear as a map reference point in Shakespeare’s travels. Hampton Court Palace was the setting for a command performance of Hamlet by the King’s Men, put on for St Stephen’s Night in 1603. There, King James and Queen Anne (who knew Kronborg well) watched Claudius and Gertrude enact royalty watching a play. The King’s Men went on to play regularly at Whitehall for the court. And Shakespeare must have known Windsor, where The Merry Wives of Windsor conveys a totally authentic sense of the town. The play could serve as a tourist guide, with a map supplied by Windsor’s information bureau. The people of Windsor come to life in Shakespeare’s townscape.
There is a wide-ranging general agreement that Shakespeare knew a great deal about Italy, knowledge which he must have picked up from many sources. It is not possible to pin down a particular channel of information, as it is with Kronborg, but Venice is a central presence in two major plays and its location values form the plots. Shakespeare is at pains to establish some kind of familiarity with Venice, if not the Baedeker name-dropping that Jonson went in for in Volpone . In Othello , ‘Lead me to the Sagittar’ might well refer to the Frezzeria, the street of the arrow-makers (and today, Harry’s Bar). ‘What news on the Rialto?’ is twice named, in The Merchant of Venice , to signal the city’s nerve-centre. ‘Rialto’ and ‘gondola’ figure in Shakespeare’s