All the World’s a Stage: 6 Places in Shakespeare, Then and Now

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra sweeps across the Roman Empire, from Sicily to Athens to Egypt and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. Cleopatra’s palace, at Alexandria, plays an important role in the play, but the location of its real-life counterpart was unknown until the 1990s, when divers discovered it submerged off the coast of Egypt, where it ended up after earthquakes devastated the island on which it stood centuries ago. Archaeological excavations of the site are ongoing.

Hamlet complains that Denmark is a prison and that the castle, Elsinore, in which he and the royal family live is a place of drunkenness and reputation-smearing bad behavior. That castle still exists today: Kronborg Castle, in Helsingør, Denmark. Its construction dates to the 16th century, and in 2000 it was added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites.

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare did much to render the Roman emperor’s death iconic: in the Roman Senate, Caesar is set upon by a group of conspirators who stab him as he cries out, "Et tu, Brute?" to his trusted friend Brutus, who has sided with the schemers. It wasn’t until 2012 that archaeologists announced that they had confidently identified the spot where Caesar was killed: the Largo di Torre Argentina, a square in the center of Rome today filled with ancient ruins and stray cats.

In As You Like It, after a duke is sent into exile by his usurping brother, he and his supporters end up in the Forest of Arden. It is a place of banishment, but it’s also a place of freedom from the constraints of court life. Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden had several real-life precedents: the Ardennes forest on mainland Europe was one, but another was the ancient Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, near the town where Shakespeare was born, in Stratford-on-Avon. The forest—which shared a name with Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden—was small at best in Shakespeare’s day and is in little evidence today, although centuries-old trees persist.

Things didn’t end well for Romeo and Juliet in Verona: a misunderstanding prompts Romeo to drink poison, despair prompts Juliet to stab herself. Shakespeare wasn’t the only person to tell this story—he drew on a popular legend about star-crossed lovers in Italy that was well known in England—but he helped it to live on for centuries. Today thousands of letters addressed to Juliet still arrive in Verona, each telling tales of romantic woe; the Juliet Club there replies to them all.

Shakespeare’s Venice, as seen in The Merchant of Venice, is a dark place, full of rumors and scheming and threatened violence. In that play, the title character’s fate is determined in a courtroom, but much of the action takes place in Venice’s streets, amidst torchbearers and masked partygoers and gondolas and talk of business on the Rialto. Today, Venice is a major draw for tourism. The Rialto is still a bustling hub, known for its markets. The famous Rialto Bridge, traveled millions of times since Shakespeare’s play was written, was scheduled for extensive repairs and renovation starting in 2014.