Coming into the Closet: Spatial Practices and Representations of Interior Space

Abstract

This article considers the ways in which Shakespeare used the theatre’s representative space to explore the possible uses and misuses of the Renaissance privy closet by royal figures in King John, Richard III and Hamlet. While scholars have typically figured the closet as a space for licensed misbehaviour for monarchs, Shakespeare repeatedly portrays the king retreating to his closet in moments of dramatic crisis, enacting an abnegation of his public duties. Ironically, what the behaviour of these sovereign figures demonstrates is that Hamlet, who in the closet scene brazenly accuses his mother of incest and murders the wrong man, actually has a better understanding of the royal closet’s function, because he enters the closet by invitation, limits slanderous accusations to the most private of spaces, and defends the room from interlopers. I use the closet in order to interrogate how specific spaces make new types of behaviour possible, and how occupants must negotiate the correct uses of these spaces. It is only from inside that the sovereign’s time in the closet space appears justified; from outside the closet, the audience will tend to perceive concealment.

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