This dissertation analyzes the production of space in Shakespeare’s plays, in performances of Shakespearean drama, and at cultural heritage sites related to the playwright. I argue that in Shakespeare’s works, space is subjectively experienced. It is only through the bodies of the characters and actors that move through and interact with these imagined worlds that we can orient ourselves. The plays are known for their rich settings that combine reality with fiction. Thus, how do they evoke vivid “local habitations”? While references to actual locations allow the audience to gain a foothold in the text, Shakespeare also incorporates ways for the characters to orient themselves through how they interact with and define space. The meanings created by these orienting factors can be compounded on or reinvented in performance, when actors embodying the roles of the characters layer their subjective relationship with the performance space onto the text while the audience participates in the embodied experience of playgoing. This relationship between body and space also shapes the way visitors interact with the narratives constructed at heritage sites such as Stratford-upon-Avon. The constant, reciprocal flow between bodies and space in creating “reality” on stage haunts all elements of Shakespeare’s works and legacy. How do we experience space in Shakespeare’s plays, both on the page and the stage, and how are our understandings of these fictionalized worlds shaped? In turn, how might real world places associated with the playwright be influenced by Shakespeare’s politics of spatial practice? While place-naming is an important and well-known factor in understanding Shakespeare’s conceptualization of space, Henri Lefebvre’s theories on the production of space as well as Sara Ahmed’s expansions on Lefebvre’s understanding of orientation and the subjective nature of a body’s experience in space can illuminate additional, often alternative meanings of a work. Valerie Briginshaw’s reading of the role of perspective in theories of the production of space intersecting with Valerie Traub’s depiction of embodiment in performance can highlight additional modes of meaning-making that are facilitated through the body of the actor. Chapter 1 examines As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale as examples of how Shakespeare uses literary modes such as the pastoral to both invoke and circumvent tropes to disorient characters (and thus also the audience/reader) in space. Chapter 2 explores Shakespeare’s use of metadrama in bridging the gap between literature and the stage by having characters operate within this framework to demonstrate how public, private, and political spaces are produced in his plays, specifically Hamlet and Henry V. Chapter 3 describes how the corporeal presence of actors in performances of Othello and Richard III influence interpretations of the plays when audiences apply their understandings of contemporary identity politics to the production of social space. Chapter 4 pairs with my digital project, The Stratford-upon-Avon Heritage Guide, and demonstrates the subjective nature of visitor experiences even when faced with carefully curated Shakespearean cultural heritage sites. Throughout time, Stratford-upon-Avon has been socially constructed through a desire to link the plays to Shakespeare himself by imagining the characters and spaces from the texts in conjunction with his home. This project highlights the ways past and present are brought together in these spaces and traces how their shifting narratives influence visitors’ perspectives of Shakespeare and his works. This dissertation argues that Shakespeare imagines space as something that is subjectively experienced. How characters, actors, audiences, and tourists experience space is largely dependent on how their bodies are situated within it. Bodies produce the space around them, and this is the foundation for Shakespeare’s spatial practice.
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