Shakespeares Settings and a Sense of Place

By (author) Ralph Berry

Publication date:

15 March 2016

Length of book:

101 pages

Publisher

University of Wales Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9781783168088

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.