Abstract
This essay focuses on Shakespeare’s impact on the material world in the shape of sites of collective and cultural memory—landscapes, castles, houses, shrines and graves—and on the spatial practices of literary tourism and pilgrimage. Inspired by Shakespeare’s often vague and imaginative settings, Helsingør and Verona have become part of the Shakespeare trail. Significantly, however, the retrospectively constructed Shakespearean locations also demonstrate an erasure, a reduction of the intricacies of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet into a single gesture or character stereotype such as Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’, and Juliet’s ‘love until death’. Examining their ‘local habitations’, Balz Engler shows how certain characters have ‘left the book’ and taken residence in a highly medialized cultural imaginary.
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Notes
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Beyond the work on literary tourism and constructions of regional and national identity (see for example McNeil 2007), these phenomena are also addressed in literary geography and geocriticism. For an introduction to literary geography see Piatti (2008), Piatti et al. (2009), Moretti (1998), Bulson (2007), Tally (2011) and Ebbatson (2013).
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His supposed grave can be visited today on Ammelhede (Hamlet’s Heath), near Randers in East Jutland.
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See the official website of Kronborg Castle (http://www.kronborg.dk/).
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A version of it was shown to visitors as early as the 1880s (Ballou 1889, 231). It has also been described as a ‘pile of rocks surrounded by trees’.
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Instead, Ballou in the 1880s was shown ‘Ophelia’s fatal brook […] To be sure, this rivulet is not large enough for a duck to swim in, but a little stretch of the imagination will overcome all local discrepancies’ (Ballou 1889, 231). Regarding the current monument, an official Danish tourist website makes the following comment: ‘The monument is designed by sculpturer Einar Utzon-Frank. On one side you see a lion-like fabulous animal—the symbol of the masculine (Hamlet). On the other side a cornucopia—the symbol of the feminine (Ophelia). The Utzon-Frank monument is the fourth version of Hamlet’s Grave in Helsingør since the 17th Century’ (http://www.visitdenmark.co.uk/en-gb/denmark/hamlets-grave-gdk620721).
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The first night in Denmark, which had to be moved to the ballroom at the Hotel Marienlyst because of rain, has often been noted. Its effect on the staging of Shakespeare is described in Gaines (2006).
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A picture of it now graces the cover of the Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Burnett et al. 2011).
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The statue of Romeo, promised in the same passage by Capulet, has never been realised; and Romeo’s house, which is located nearby, has remained closed to the public.
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I confess to having read a few notes when they were still deposited in the empty sarcophagus. Today, a more discreet letterbox has been placed near it.
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A picture of the stonework at the museum can be found in Pesci (1999, 17).
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Engler, B. (2016). Local Habitations: Hamlet at Helsingør, Juliet at Verona. In: Habermann, I., Witen, M. (eds) Shakespeare and Space. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51835-4_12
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