Shakespeare and a sense of place

Shakespeare’s world was that of space and time, the experiences and understandings he had, and those of the spectators and readers. These, in turn, were particularly dynamic due to the amazing explorations of the age, the descriptions of them that were published, as well as the appearance of historical works that threw light on the past. For the first, Shakespeare lived in the age of voyagers into the unknown, such as Francis Drake, the first Englishman to sail round the world, Martin Frobisher and Henry Hudson, and in the shadow of those of an even bolder set of trailblazers, notably Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan.

Exploration by these men, ‘discoveries’ to Europeans (but not to those who were already aware that they existed), affected not just the knowledge of places and peoples that was available, but also the very way of seeing and explaining the world. This was the case from the existence, number and shape of its continents, particularly the understanding of the existence and scale of the Americas, to the extent of the world’s circumference; and from the projections employed by mapmakers, notably the new Mercator one, to the perspectives deployed. Maps and globes literally changed, and these changes, and the very nature of change itself, encouraged an awareness of a world that was at once known and knowable and yet also in the process of discovery and thus uncertain.

Shakespeare’s location of place reflected this changing geography. In his plays, there were places very familiar and/or well-understood by his audiences, notably the street life and social geography of London. There was also an understanding of the geography of England – the places where Shakespeare set action, for example Dover, Bristol, London, Southampton and York, were understood, even though a smaller percentage of the population would have travelled widely in England. Some places abroad, moreover, were close enough to be presented as similar, notably in order to make archetypal points, such as the Vienna of Measure for Measure, and the Venice of The Merchant of Venice.

Yet Shakespeare also moves further afield. Europe’s peripheries and neighbours come into view in the shape of characters from them, such as the Prince of Morocco who was an unsuccessful suitor of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, or a unit of Muscovite troops in Italy in All’s Well That Ends Well. Such individuals resonated with the news of Shakespeare’s lifetime. The Moroccans had routed a Portuguese invasion in 1578, and Elizabeth I of England had subsequently sought an alignment with Morocco against Spain. Under Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’ (r. 1533-84), Russia had become a major and expansionist power, and England had also sought good relations, not least because Russia was not a Catholic power.

Turning to potent non-Western powers, there is mention of the threat from the expansionist Turkish empire. It is this which leads Othello, a Venetian general, to the Venetian colony of Cyprus, although, by the time of the writing of the play, it had already fallen to the forces of the Turkish Sultan, Selim II. In All’s Well That Ends Well, there is mention of the Turks fighting the Safavids of Persia, which they did for much of the period from the 1500s to the 1630s. Shakespeare does not engage in a comparable fashion with China, India and Japan, but the sense of new lands is seen with the voyages of characters, and their shipwrecks on strange shores. Distance alone should place Prospero’s Island in The Tempest – its travellers shipwrecked on a voyage from Tunis to Italy – somewhere in the Mediterranean. However, the imaginative world had been expanded by recent English voyages, notably to Bermuda and Virginia, and they became the point of reference for the audience, as they, indeed, remain.

The geography of a world-view that spanned Heaven and Hell was fully expressed. In King John, a play that deserves more attention than it generally receives, Philip the Bastard enters during a battle carrying a head and saying:

‘… this day grows wondrous hot;

Some airy devil hovers in the sky

and pours down mischief.’

So, also, with a wider confessional geography that included the placing of the Islamic world, not least Algiers, and Jerusalem, as well as a Protestantism that offered a span from an allegedly Papist anti-christ to Protestant co-religionists. Venice brought in interaction with Jews in The Merchant of Venice, and Othello is set in Cyprus when it was a Venetian colony, before the Turkish conquest of 1570-1. Indeed, the plot comes from the Hecatommithi (1565), a collection of tales by the Italian writer Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio. The plot of Othello brings in another aspect of difference, in the shape of the protagonist Othello, a Moor who has converted to Christianity.

Market days offered a very different and far more specific geography. Market days focused the local understanding of spatial links, notably between towns, like Stratford, and their hinterlands. These could then be supplemented by links between the towns themselves. These links both complemented county divisions and clashed with them.

At a higher level, there was the question of regional identity. The end of the Council of the North meant that there was no specific institutional formulation in England that could be compared to an area covered by an individual French Parlement or an Imperial (German) Circle. Nevertheless, there could still be an idea of a region, for example in East Anglia, the West Country, or ‘the North’; but at the same time there were many divisions within these areas, whether economic, governmental, political, social or religious.

The links within, and between, regions were not affected by developments in transportation, because there was nothing that matched the situation in the century following Shakespeare’s death when, after the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, the turnpiking of roads tentatively began while river improvements were pressed forward. In contrast, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, road links remained particularly poor, and distance set a ready bound to certainty and confidence. Shakespeare’s plays often depicted journeys as dangerous, especially if by sea. Indeed, storms played a frequent role in the plots, providing abrupt changes in fortune, as with the openings of Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and Aegeon’s account at the outset of The Comedy of Errors.

Another idea of space, one that was very different to that of physical movement, was provided by that of kinship groups. This was an aspect of the dynasticism that was repeatedly discussed in Shakespeare’s plays with reference to lineage, parentage and marriage. These links had a spatial dimension as well, with figures from different areas brought into a relationship. As such, space and time were again related.

Overall, there was an assumption on Shakespeare’s part that his audience was familiar with geography. Shylock says of Antonio, the merchant of Venice: ‘He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand, moreover, upon the Rialto [in Venice], he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England.’ Tripolis is Tripoli in Libya. The assumption is that these references are understood, as is the reference, with the Prince of Morocco to his complexion, and to his fighting on behalf of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-66) against the Safavids of Persia (Iran).

Possibly the details were less significant than the sense of distance and difference – as at the beginning of The Winter’s Tale where there is mention of ‘great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia,’ which, today, would be the Czech Republic and Sicily. In Measure For Measure, the lengthy and ridiculous case involving Elbow, Froth, and Pompey leads Angelo to remark:

‘This will last out a night in Russia,

When nights are longest there.’

The sense of distance is sometimes given poetic effect, as when Richard II banishes his cousin Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, and also the latter’s opponent, Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk. Bolingbroke discusses this banishment with his father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who urges him to take it as a travel for pleasure adding:

‘All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and Happy havens.’

and encouraging him to experience places in part by reimagining them. Bolingbroke replies:

‘who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?’

The tone is also lighter, as in The Comedy of Errors when Dromio of Syracuse describes Nell the ‘kitchen-wench’: she is so greasy ‘I warrant her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter,’ in other words a very cold winter for which more fuel would be required. Comparing the spherical Nell to a globe, Dromio cruelly claims in a humour that now seems highly unpleasant:

‘I could find out countries in her.

Antipholus: In what part of her body stands Ireland?

Dromio: Marry, Sir, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.

Antipholus: Where Scotland?

Dromio: I found it by the barrenness; hard in the palm of the hand.

Antipholus: Where France?

Dromio: In her forehead; armed and reverted, making war against her heir.

Antipholus: Where England?

Dromio: I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them: but I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it

Antipholus: Where Spain?

Dromio: Faith, I saw not; but I felt it hot in her breath.

Antipholus: Where America, the Indies?

Dromio: O, sir! Upon her nose, all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadoes of caracks to be ballast at her nose.

Antipholus: Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?

Dromio: O, sir! I did not look, so low.’

Ephesus, Messina (Much Ado), Verona (Romeo and Juliet) and Vienna (Measure for Measure) are scarcely crucial locations for particular plays and, instead, are sketched in with economy. For Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors, this is notably so as a city where the occult allegedly plays a role, rather than as a detailed townscape:

‘They say this town is full of cozenage;

As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,

Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,

Soul-killing witches that deform the body,

Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,

And many such-like liberties of sin.’

At the same time, there is, for Ephesus, as for locations for other plays, a setting described that is necessary for the action and the particular dynamics of characterisation, description and drama, for example:

‘the place of death and sorry execution,

Behind the ditches of the abbey here.’

At times, the departure from geography is readily apparent, even if that does not disrupt the plot. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, there is a lack of specificity as to place, and, indeed, as to the identity of a ruler, as Duke or Emperor. In practice, however, there really was confusion. Independent until 1387, Verona was ruled by Milan (1387-1402), Padua (1402-4), and Venice (1405-1797). In Shakespeare’s lifetime, although the Duchy of Milan had become a Habsburg territory in 1540, there was some dissension as to whether it was part of the inheritance of the Spanish or Austrian branches. In addition, there was also the complication of much of northern Italy being part of the Holy Roman Empire.

Repeatedly, the places in question for the settings are Courts, quays and marketplaces, rather than cities as a whole. The first, in particular, permits a disengagement from context, one also seen when rulers are exiled, as with As You Like It and the Tempest. That the last is set on a deserted island – its location lost in a storm conjured up by magic that affects a boat en route from Tunis to Naples, while Much Ado About Nothing is set in Messina in Sicily – is far less consequential than that they both address types of Court, and that each show the Courtly societies under great pressure. So, also, with Hamlet, a revenge tragedy that could have been set in Italy, where most are set, or anywhere else, rather than having to be in Denmark.

There are other geographical references that lack precision. In Henry VI, Part One, the list of losses in France that is announced to Henry V’s funeral party is designed to impress, and to establish a context of failure:

‘Guinne, Champaigne, Rheims, Orleans

Paris, Guysors, Poictiers, are all quite lost.’

This was a serious exaggeration, indeed misrepresentation, at that stage and also a major foreshortening. Henry died in 1422, but the second messenger brings news of the crowning of Charles VII at Rheims which, in fact, occurred in 1429, as did Talbot’s defeat at Patay reported by the third messenger.

This does not mean that there is a placelessness to Shakespeare’s plays, but, rather, as is normal with the theatre, that the spectators did not have to bring too much to the occasion. Yet, this directs attention to what they did bring: an awareness (and degree of knowledge) of a world that was changing rapidly, while the politics of Europe were also in flux, testing, confirming or overcoming traditional assumptions about countries and peoples. Geography, history and politics came together to provide the setting for human dramas that were fictional and factual.

In this process, the mapping and remapping of the world reflected and encouraged this sense of change, and with it a lack of fixity that could encourage doubt and scepticism. They offered spatial location and meaning, but as part of a world that was ‘modern’ in its acceptance of this very doubt, an acceptance most brilliantly conveyed in Hamlet.

Jeremy Black has recently published England in the Age of Shakespeare, Indiana UP, 2019.