Kronborg

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kronborg sits at the extreme northeastern tip of the island of Zealand, where the Øresund narrows to just four kilometres between Denmark and Sweden. At that bottleneck, every ship sailing in or out of the Baltic Sea had to pass directly under its guns. The captain of each vessel was required to declare the value of his cargo, and the Danish king reserved the right to purchase that cargo at the stated price. This arrangement, known as the Sound Dues, was a masterstroke of economic coercion: it kept captains scrupulously honest, because any undervaluation could result in the king simply buying their goods on the spot.

  What raised this fortress from a regional toll booth to a monument of world culture was a playwright who almost certainly never visited it. William Shakespeare set his tragedy of the brooding Danish prince in a castle he called Elsinore, the anglicised name of the surrounding town of Helsingør. The association transformed Kronborg into a literary pilgrimage site, drawing actors from Laurence Olivier to Jude Law to perform in its courtyards. In the year 2000, UNESCO placed the castle on its World Heritage List.

  But the full story reaches deeper than Shakespeare. It runs from a fifteenth-century fortress built to dominate a sea lane, through a catastrophic fire and a Swedish conquest that stripped away some of its finest art, to a period when the castle held both convicts in chains and a queen in exile. How did a medieval stronghold become the stage for one of the world's most famous plays? And who was actually sleeping in its cellars long before Hamlet ever arrived?

• 2. Krogen and the Sound Dues

  ›

  Eric of Pomerania, ruling as King Eric VII, built the original fortress at this location in the early fifteenth century. He called it Krogen, meaning simply "the Hook," a reference to the sandy tongue of land, Ørekrog, on which it stood. Eric's ambition was fiscal as much as military. He demanded payment from every ship passing through the Øresund, and a powerful fortress at the narrowest point in the Sound was his instrument of enforcement.

  At the time Eric built Krogen, the Kingdom of Denmark extended across both banks of the Sound. On the eastern shore, Helsingborg Castle had operated since the Middle Ages. Paired with Krogen and a guard ship, these installations gave Denmark effective control over all navigation between the North Sea and the Baltic. No merchant fleet could slip through unnoticed or unpaid.

  Krogen was built on a square plan, with a curtain wall enclosing several stone structures. The northeastern corner housed the king's personal residence. The southwestern corner contained a large arched banquet hall. The southeastern corner is thought to have functioned as a chapel. Large sections of those original walls still exist inside the present-day Kronborg. King Christian III later reinforced the curtain wall by adding bastions at its corners in 1558-1559, a detail that would matter enormously when the military technology of the following generation began to outpace what medieval masonry could absorb.

• 3. Frederick II's Grand Redesign

  ›

  After the Northern Seven Years' War ended in 1570, King Frederick II recognised that Krogen's defences had been overtaken by the improved striking power of contemporary artillery. He began with the bastions, commissioning the Flemish architect Hans Hendrik van Paesschen to extend the advanced earthworks. That phase was completed in 1577, and at that point the fortress received its new name: Kronborg.

  The castle itself was rebuilt across a longer span, from 1574 to 1585. The three separated buildings of the old Krogen were extended and joined into three coherent wings. Frederick, who was a keen patron of theatre, hosted players at the castle when he held court there in 1579. The north wing was given chambers for the king, the queen, her ladies-in-waiting, and the chancellery. The chapel in the south wing was refitted with vaulted windows.

  In 1578 the Flemish architect Anthonis van Obbergen took over as master builder, and ambition expanded considerably. The south wing gained an additional storey, topped by a new, gigantic ballroom placed directly over the chapel. The north and west wings were similarly heightened. An enclosed passage called the Queen's Gallery was added, linking the queen's chambers in the north wing to the ballroom in the south so she could move between them without exposure to the elements. The exterior walls were clad in sandstone quarried from Scania, and the roof was finished in copper sheeting. When James VI of Scotland arrived in 1590, after his marriage to Anne of Denmark, he expressed his appreciation by giving two thousand Danish dalers in gold coins to the castle's officers and servants.

• 4. Fire, Conquest, and Stripped Walls

  ›

  On the night of the 24th to the 25th of September 1629, two workmen were careless enough to set the castle ablaze. The fire consumed most of Kronborg. Only the chapel survived intact, saved by the strength of its stone arches. King Christian IV moved quickly. By 1631, reconstruction was already underway under the architect Hans van Steenwinckel the Younger, and by 1639 the exterior had been restored to its former grandeur, largely without major changes as the king wished. The interior, however, never fully recovered, and the new decorations were rendered in Baroque style rather than the Renaissance idiom of the original.

  Less than two decades later came a second, deliberate destruction. During the Dano-Swedish War of 1658-1660, a Swedish army commanded by Carl Gustaf Wrangel besieged, attacked, and took the castle. During the Swedish occupation, Kronborg served as a residence for Hedvig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp, the queen of Sweden, and for the Swedish king's sister Maria Eufrosyne of Pfalz. King Charles X of Sweden visited them there during the campaign.

  The occupiers left with a great deal that was not theirs to take. Among the losses were the richly decorated fountain that had stood in the castle courtyard, Frederick II's own canopy, and many of the large ceiling paintings Christian IV had commissioned for the ballroom. The Swedish conquest also proved that Kronborg, for all its magnificence, was not impregnable. Danish engineers responded by adding an advanced line of defence called the Crownwork between 1688 and 1690, followed by a new series of outer ramparts. After those works were finished, contemporaries considered Kronborg the strongest fortress in Europe.

• 5. Prison, Queen in Exile, Barracks

  ›

  From 1739 and continuing into the twentieth century, Kronborg served as a place of imprisonment. Convicts were divided into two categories based on the severity of their crimes. Those with minor sentences were classed as "honest" and were permitted to work outside the castle walls. Those sentenced for violence, murder, arson, or equivalent offences were classed as "dishonest" and were confined to hard physical labour inside the ramparts for the full duration of their sentences. Both groups shared certain conditions: they wore chains and spent nights in cold, damp dungeons.

  The most prominent prisoner in the castle's history arrived on the 17th of January 1772. Queen Caroline Mathilde, sister of King George III of Great Britain, was held at Kronborg until the 30th of April 1772, following the scandal of her affair with Johann Friedrich Struensee. A queen confined in a castle already famous for its association with a fictional Danish royal catastrophe makes for an almost theatrical irony.

  The military's hold on the castle formalized in 1785, when Kronborg ceased to function as a royal residence and was converted into barracks. The chapel, inaugurated in 1582, was stripped of its furnishings that same year and converted into a gymnasium and fencing hall, with the original furniture stored away. The furniture was returned and the chapel reinaugurated in 1843. The Royal Danish Army held administrative control of the castle from 1785 to 1922, departing in 1923. The castle was then renovated and opened to the public in 1938.

• 6. Shakespeare's Ghost and Living Stages

  ›

  Hamlet was first performed at Kronborg in 1816, staged to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Soldiers from the castle garrison played the roles, and the production took place in the telegraph tower at the castle's southwest corner. It was an unusual premiere for one of the world's most celebrated tragedies.

  In the decades that followed, the courtyard and the fortification walls became recurring venues for the play. Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Christopher Plummer, Derek Jacobi, and David Tennant all played Hamlet at Kronborg. In 2009, Jude Law took the role. In 2017, the production company Hamletscenen staged the play under the direction of Lars Romann Engel, with Cyron Melville as Hamlet and music composed by Mike Sheridan.

  Kronborg's connection to Shakespeare also found its way into popular culture far from Denmark. The 1983 comedy Strange Brew, starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, named its fictional beer "Elsinore Beer" in a direct reference to the castle. And beneath the castle, in its casemates, a different legend runs parallel to Hamlet. A statue of the sleeping figure of Ogier the Dane, known in Danish as Holger Danske, has been installed there. According to legend linked to Arthurian myth, the Danish king Ogier was taken to Avalon by the enchantress Morgan le Fay, returned to rescue France from danger, and then journeyed to Kronborg, where he sleeps with his beard grown along the ground, waiting to be called if Denmark is ever threatened.

• 7. The Castle Today

  ›

  The Ballroom at Kronborg measures 62 by 12 metres. When it was completed in 1582, it was the largest hall in Northern Europe. The walls now carry a series of large paintings originally made between 1618 and 1631 for the Great Hall of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen. Among them are works by Francis Cleyn and Reinhold Timm, including Children off to School, Feminine Pursuits, Riding at the Ring, A Boys School, A Wedding in a Church, An Academy for Noblemen, and A Banquet from 1622.

  The Little Hall holds seven tapestries from what was once a series of forty, commissioned by Frederick II around 1580 to portray one hundred Danish kings. The surviving pieces include depictions of Oluf, who reigned from 1376 to 1387, and Knud VI, who reigned from 1182 to 1202. Seven additional tapestries from the set are held at the National Museum of Denmark. The rest have been lost.

  Since 2013, Kulturhavn Kronborg has operated as a joint cultural initiative involving Kronborg Castle, the Danish Maritime Museum, Kulturværftet, and Helsingør harbour, offering cultural programming to residents and visitors. The castle sits at an elevation of 12 metres on a small foreland, approached from the town to the east through a series of moats and gates. In its north wing, the royal apartments still contain Netherlandish furniture from the seventeenth century, and the King's Chamber retains the bay window from which a Danish monarch could once watch arrivals at the main portal below.