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. 

THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

My castle will have two staircases, one Jacobean oak (in honour of Shakespeare), and the other a cardboard/pencil copy of Hogwarts' stone staircase from the Harry Potter films. The latter I have named the Deathly Hallows after the last book, and because I wanted to decorate the staircase with ghostly portraits of 'ancestors' who met a grizzly end.

The railings and newel posts are being made from cereal packet card, pencils, corrugated card, and bolsa wood. I have tried to copy Harry Potter's stairs (below).

Should I paint mine too to get an older feel? I decided I would, so here are before and after shots...

The paintings in the room have been chosen because I like the look of them really, but I've also tried to find portraits that fit these themes: people who are famous for their hideous deaths or for mourning the dead; and portraits that are unidentified (all those paintings in galleries that say "portrait of an unknown lady" next to them). I also wanted the room to feel a bit gothic, so I've tried to find some of the past's more querky looking folk, and mixed them up with a few that look like heroes/heroines from gothic novels.

I was particularly intrigued with the Spanish queen Joanna the Mad when I saw pictures of her mourning her husband Philip the Fair in the Prado Museum in Madrid. She could not accept his death and would not let anyone touch his body for a long time. People say his death drive her mad. It turns out that she and Philip are also connected to the Trenchard family. They were shipwrecked off the Dorset coast and my ancestor Sir Thomas Trenchard took them in for a while until they moved on to the English court to meet Joanna's sister Catherine of Aragon. Wolfeton House outside Dorchester, where Sir Thomas entertained them, has statues of the pair carved into one of the wooden door cases. So I had to include this couple and paintings of Joanna mourning her husband (above the arched doorway).

It will take me a while to frame all the pictures! I'll do some with wooden mouldings, and some I plan to layer up with card.