Key locations
The jealous Leontes may have had no real-life counterpart, but Sicily was a kingdom, by various definitions, between 1130 and 1816 – its rulers seated at the Royal Palace (now the Sicilian Regional Assembly, but open for tours; federicosecondo.org) in the capital Palermo. Messina is a pretty city, its Forte Gonzaga (associazionegonzaga.it) still daydreaming of the 16th century as the Italian mainland rises up in the near-distance.
In person
The five-bedroom Villa La Boheme, in Taormina, costs from £4,800 per week through Sicily4U (sicily4u.co.uk).
Athens
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania, sometime of the night, lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.” (Oberon – A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
The Greek capital appears regularly, but largely ethereally, in Shakespeare’s work. It is the city in which the recklessly generous Timon of Athens gives away all his money, before fleeing to a cave in the wilds; it is in a forest somewhere outside it that the titular Two Noble Kinsmen fight over the same woman. And it is this same context, the woods beyond the walls, where the madness and magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all mischief-making fairies, love potions and donkey-headed actors – spills on to the stage.
In person
You can try for a midsummer’s dream of your own in Attica, the region which spreads out around Athens. Vrbo offers a six-bedroom villa (ref: 4120016), which sleeps up to nine people at Sounion, 40 mile south of the city. It is available in the week July 9-16 for £2,637 – flights extra (vrbo.com).
Anatolia
“Cry, Trojans, cry! Practice your eyes with tears! Troy must not be, nor goodly lion stand. Our firebrand brother, Paris, burns us all. Cry, Trojans, cry! A Helen and a woe. Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go.” (Cassandra – Troilus and Cressida).
Like Homer 2,400 years earlier, Shakespeare was drawn to the golden coastline of what is now western Turkey. Troilus and Cressida sets out its sorrow amid the bitterness of the Trojan War. It is a shadowy, bleaker, seedier Romeo and Juliet – a swirling mess of lovers divided by enemy lines, honour trampled in the bloody sand, and a constant air of imminent catastrophe. Some 230 miles to the south, Ephesus is the scene of The Comedy of Errors – one of the Bard’s lighter efforts, with its mistaken-identity humour about two pairs of identical twins, embroiled in a rivalry with (the ancient Sicilian city of) Syracuse.
