PERCHANCE TO DREAM: Shakespeare's staircase

I used to love reading Shakespeare even when I was a schoolboy. I remember first learning the opening scene of Richard III and reciting it to ducks on holiday. So far in my acting career, I have performed in nine of his plays, on top of the two I did at school. 

With the bard playing such a central role in my life, I wanted to give him a central role in my castle too: so the main staircase is dedicated to Shakespeare and decorated with characters from his plays. 

The Jacobean oak design is copied examples like Blickling Hall and Hatfield House (below).

I made my newel posts from obeche wooden strips covered in pieces of a cheap Chinese wooden fan, all wood-stained along with the obeche steps, stuck onto a bolsa wood frame. That was the easy bit. Figuring out how to make the fiddly balustrades was much harder...

I started with a graph paper design. First I tried cutting it out of thin obeche planks, but the grain of the wood was not fine enough. So I resolved to layer each banister up using cardboard. This process is taking quite some time: the first attempt at one balustrade between two newel posts has taken most of a day! At this rate it will probably be a few months before this stage is completed. 

Once all the balustrades are finished, I will add a bought wooden moulding for the hand rails, and either wood stain or paint them before adding them to the staircase. Then will come the figurines on top of the newel posts, which will be pewter figurines that I have been collecting from myseum and stately home gift shops. The head of one of them will be crowned with a donkey head from a tiny nativity set to be Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream!

 

HORDLE CASTLE: Overview

This page is a quick overview of the rooms I've made so far...

HORD DRACONIS the great hall 

The LADY DE MOHUN room: the screens passage.

PAGANUS: the chapel

CHESTER: the attic nursery

SULIS: the grotto

HORACE: the wine cellar

THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: the staircase

SOPHIA: the vestibule

PERCHANCE TO DREAM: 

The Shakespeare staircase

SOPHIA: The vestibule of Wisdom

If the Lady De Mohun Room is an architectural poem around the theme of the judgement of Paris - who chose between love, power and wisdom - and the two doorways from there representing love and power lead to the Great Hall - a room of family - then the third and last doorway out of the Lady De Mohun Room must lead instead to a room of wisdom...

This tiny vestibule, 4 inches wide and 8 inches long, is a work in progress. What do I think is the nature of wisdom? And how can I represent that as a miniature interior?

I wanted the downward-dog-performing cat in the room to show that for me, the principles of yoga - linking mind, body and breath - are key to the beginning of wisdom. The cat's black and white coat against the black and white floor say something about my mind's propensity to a dualistic view of the world - yin and yang - but a cat in a 'downward dog' position surely suggests that nothing is black and white!

The owl, always a wise creature in Western culture, is the link to Minerva/Athene in the Judgement of Paris myth, but together with the pussy cat, also suggests that searching for wisdom can sometimes be enjoyable nonesense, as the 1871 nonesense poem by Edward Lear, The Owl And The Pussycat.

It is significant in my mind that the vestibule of wisdom, named Sophia after the Greek (and Christian mystical, poetical idol), should link the castle's main entrance to the wine cellar! The other doorway also link wisdom to the Kitchen and to food. A Turtle (the Chinese animal representing wisdom, Ugue) will hang above the kitchen door leading to the vestibule. Turtle shells were often displayed in kitchens as a sign of wealth. 

The style of the vestibule - beamed ceiling and wall, with stone walls too and tapestries - is based partly on Baddesley Clinton and partly on Snowshill (below). These old Tudor beams seem to resonate with the wisdom of the ages to me.