Thickets and beaches

evoking place in the stories of king lear

Werner Brönnimann

pp. 59-78

in: Ina Habermann, Michelle Witen (eds), Shakespeare and space, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Werner Brönnimann's contribution focuses on staging and setting in King Lear, addressing the absence of place and the reduction of movement into vectorial directions. Taking a comparative approach, Brönnimann shows that a sense of locations and of emotive attitudes to them can in fact be found in Shakespeare's precursors, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, Layamon's Brut, John Higgins's The Mirror for Magistrates, and the anonymous (or possibly Kyd's) King Leir. Emptying locations of their residual cultural connotations, he argues, Shakespeare opens them up to the radical idiosyncrasies of the characters' perceptions, as in the scene of Gloucester's attempted suicide. Rather than providing an elaborate setting, Shakespeare's stage circumscribes psychic spaces that take their shape and colour from the characters' mental dispositions.

Cited authors

Shakespeare William

Brönnimann Werner