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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.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-51835-4_4

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