This is a guest post brought to you in cooperation with Hollie Gibson.
It’s a good year to be British! Our Queen’s celebrating her 60th year on the throne, we’re hosting some pretty major sporting events and we’re getting a thorough work out in our own national sport: moaning about the weather.
And, in the afterglow of the Jubilee celebrations, the British Museum has decided to enter into the ‘Greatest of Britain’ spirit of things. They’re running a major exhibit in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company that celebrates the life of perhaps the greatest British playwright and poet of all time: Mr. William Shakespeare. The idea behind the exhibit is to give an insight into how London became a world power, through the unique perspective of the Bard’s plays.
Of course, it’s a city that’s rich in Tudor and Stuart history, and many of the sites and the sights that inspired Shakespeare are still around today. So, in the lull before London’s full of all things athletic, why not get a bit academic? It’s the perfect time to head to the capital and walk a mile in Shakespeare’s shoes.
There’s no need to enter into the spirit of things with too much gusto – who needs a ‘second-best bed’ (as Shakespeare famously bequeathed his wife in his will) when there are plenty of fantastic hotels in central London to get a good night’s sleep in before a day of exploring?
Bright and early in the morning, head to the British Museum for an entertaining look at the great entertainer. Then, head out to into the capital at large and see its biggest attractions in a completely new light. To whet your whistle, below are potted Tudor/Stuart histories of some of London’s must-sees! To paraphrase one of Shakespeare’s more famous lingual legacies, ‘London is your oyster’…
The Globe
Let’s start with the obvious. The Globe was Shakespeare’s theatrical home from 1599, the site of many famous premiers and just as many real-life dramas – including the time it burned completely to the ground after a stage effect in Henry VIII went wrong.
Visit for a fascinating historical tour during the day or book well in advance to get tickets to one of its sell-out shows. Later this year, the renowned comic, writer and actor Stephen Fry will be playing the tragically ridiculous Malvolio in Twelfth Night; you might get very lucky and manage to grab a returned ticket! A play at the Globe is best experienced in ‘the pit’, a standing area which extends right to the lip of the stage. In Shakespeare’s day, audience members in this section would have been known as ‘groundlings’.
Hampton Court
When Elizabeth I died and her nephew, James the VI of Scotland, ascended to the English throne, Shakespeare was quick to adapt. A mere two months after the queen had popped her clogs, his theatrical company was no longer ‘The Chamberlain’s Men’; they’d adopted ‘The King’s Men’.
Hampton Court was the royal household at this point, so James rolled down from north of the border and made himself at home in the sprawling palace. Royals wouldn’t dream of attending the theatre with the riffraff (who were at worst dangerous assassins, and, at best, smelly), so Shakespeare and his men performed multiple times in the privacy of the ‘Great Hall’ in Hampton Court.
Hampton’s open to the public today, maintained by an independent body. Go on a ghostly tour to see Tudor spirits, or learn about the lively courtesans of James’s grandsons, Charles II and his dashing brother!
The Tower of London
The most extroverted of London’s gruesome attractions may be its dungeons, but if you’re looking for an experience that’s more than just cheap shocks and drama students in zombie makeup then take a trip to the Tower of London. There, you’ll find the history of more than a millennium of gore including a frank overview of the Elizabethan capital at its most cruel and its most bizarre (fyi, the view is much nicer from the nearby Grange Tower Bridge hotel).
The ‘tower’ of the castle’s name was originally built by William the Conqueror, fresh from his successful invasion in 1066. A complex of towers was soon evolving around it, creating a castle that was to be the site of the most infamous tortures, murders, imprisonments and executions in British history.
As a place where political prisoners were incarcerated and quietly ‘offed’, its reputation would have been fearsome in Shakespeare’s day. Even one hundred years before Shakespeare wrote Richard III, the play that damned its titular character’s reign and reputation, it was rumoured that the ‘wicked’ ruler had ordered his two young nephews be murdered in the Tower. If this wasn’t enough, the Tower was also where his patron, Queen Elizabeth I, was imprisoned during part of her half-sister Mary’s stint on the throne, and where members of his extended family were held after being accused of plotting a Catholic rebellion.
It wasn’t all bad, though; for a long time, the Tower was also used as a zoo to house all the exotic animals gifted to the royalty by foreign ambassadors – lions and a polar bear were among its more famous captives! And today it is home to the Crown Jewels, so in between hearing about this and that murder you can have a look at something pretty.
And finally, for a bit of fun, here are a few landmarks which wouldn’t have been around in Shakepeare’s day…
Big Ben was only built in 1858, 200 years after Shakespeare died.
Downing Street was built in 1680, so Shakespeare was a few decades too late to see the future home of the UK’s heads of state.
The Millennium Wheel was built…well…this one’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?
This is a guest post brought to you in cooperation with Hollie Gibson.
