In this castle too in 1589 James VI. (and afterwards I.) was married to his Danish bride. That was only by proxy so far as the Scot was concerned, but the next year Queen Anne brought her husband to sojourn at the well-loved spot.
By the sea is a long sandy beach and dark woods cover the flat lands behind. The superb castle was rising, or re-rising, from the ground during Shakespeare's younger years (1577-85); he first went to London the year after it was done. A grand sample of Renaissance work, it stands four-square to all the winds and protects a court within; details are carved in solid stone. And at each angle rises a tower, all different in design and height. A light for the shipping burns in one.[72] The architect was G. F. Stahlmann.
The world fame of Elsinore is owed very largely to the immortal English bard who probably never was there. On the flat terrace between castle and sound Hamlet spoke with his father's ghost. The tale of Amlet or Hamlet seems to be derived from some old saga of a Jutish prince,[73] and the Ambales Saga gives an Icelandic form of the legend.
True, indeed, that Shakespeare's Hamlet, like his other plays, whose scene is laid abroad, lacks special local colour. But it is no weak link between Denmark and the world of English speech that the scene of one of the great masterpieces of Saxon literature, indeed of all the writings of the earth, is laid on Danish soil.
CHAPTER VII
VISBY
Thou wonnest, O warrior-wager,
Tribute from folk of Gothland,
And durst not men against thee
With brand to ward their island.
So ran the Isle-syslings' war-host;
I heard that the wolf-kind's hunger
Thawed east-away.