Shakespeare Set A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Athens. But Which Athens?

Exploring whether Shakespeare’s “Athens” was inspired by Sabbioneta, the Secret Italian Renaissance city known as “Little Athens”

Why would anyone travel to a tiny, almost forgotten Italian Renaissance town to look for clues about A Midsummer Night’s Dream if everyone knows it was set in ancient Athens, Greece?

 “O wall, o sweet and lovely wall” (V.i). A perfect stage set for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: impressive walls enclosing Sabbioneta, Italy’s “Little Athens”, and beyond, dense woods where Shakespeare’s pairs of lovers might well spend their enchanted night. [Photo by Teseo, licensed under CCA-Share Alike 4.0 License, without changes.]

My husband Rich certainly thought the idea that Shakespeare had set A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Italy instead of Greece ridiculous.

"We aren't going to find anything," he said, glancing around the halcyon gardens of our hotel on Lake Garda. "And we're giving up an entire day of this to do it."

He had a point. It meant driving almost two hours across Lombardy southwest of Mantua to visit a tiny walled city that almost no one knows about, called Sabbioneta.

Shakespeare repeatedly assures us that A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in Athens. He mentions Athens and Athenians, often gratuitously, almost 40 times in the play, sometimes twice in a single line.

Why not just take the man at his word?

🎭 Why Shakespeare May Not Have Meant Athens, Greece

PUCK:  Up and down, up and down.                                       

I will lead them up and down.

III.ii

For a poet who can spin spiders webs into traces for a fairy’s coach, that much repetition is ham-fisted and very odd.  He writes “Athens” and “Athenians” repeatedly, but never once mentions “Greece” or “Greeks” or “Grecian”. He has led us to assume he meant Greece, because that is the Athens we know best. But he never said it was in “Greece”.

What if he meant another, lesser known place he knew well called “Athens”?  Maybe a place that time has now left behind? Apart from the Athenian names for the play’s nobles, remarkably little else in the play seems to belong to ancient Greece.

Shakespeare populates his "Athens" with English tradesmen, Roman gods, Renaissance dukes and duchesses, coats of arms, nuns, cloisters, knights, French, Latin and, at the end of the play, a Bergomask dance imported straight from Bergamo in Lombardy in northern Italy. Even the "temple" where the weddings take place feels much more Renaissance than ancient Greek.

The man protesteth too much. It bothered me.

This is why I found myself standing in a nearly empty piazza in tiny, walled Sabbioneta wondering whether Shakespeare had puckishly led all of us “up and down, up and down” and into the wrong country, or only me and Rich.

🕵️‍♀️ Seeking Shakespeare in Sabbioneta, Italy

Years ago, I came across an intriguing suggestion in Richard Roe’s A Shakespeare Guide to Italy, that Shakespeare's Athens might actually have been Sabbioneta, today called “Little Athens on the Po." Rich thought it a wild Athenian goose chase.

The only one way to settle the matter was trek to Sabbioneta.

The modern city’s soccer team logo proudly announces it as “Little Athens” and I found some black and white photographs of mid-20^th century tourist road signs bearing the title “Little Athens of the Po”. But Sabbioneta is hardly well known today outside of Italy. What could have possible survived 400 years to show that it was known as “Athens” or “Athenian” during Shakespeare’s time? Or show that he knew this tiny jewel box of a city so well that he had to have been there himself?

🌍 When Shakespeare's "Mistakes" Aren't His Mistakes, But Ours

 “At the Dukes oak we meet.” (I.ii) A real tree? A landmark? An oak door across this very gate in 16^th century Sabbioneta? Only Shakespeare knows why he named the players’ meeting spot so oddly specifically. But he is telling us something we don’t know. Yet.

Whenever Shakespeare's geography seems wrong to us, the standard explanation is that he made a mistake because he never left England. Yet the more I travel through Italy, France, the Low Countries and the United Kingdom on his trail, (which we do a lot, just ask Rich) the less convincing that explanation becomes. Many of Shakespeare’s supposed geographical blunders disappear with a little research into sixteenth-century European history, how his world functioned, and what Europe actually looked like geographically.

For example, Italy itself was not a country, but a patchwork peninsula of republics, duchies, Spanish territories and the Papal States. Venice was then much larger, ruling not only the Venetian islands, but Verona, Padua, Bergamo and much of the eastern Adriatic seacoast. Milan was connected by canals and navigable rivers to both the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian seas. Time and again, what appear to us to be Shakespeare's mistakes turn out to be our mistaken assumptions.

So, I’ve come to trust Shakespeare, especially when he puzzles me. I trust that he is right, and that I am uninformed enough to research a theory, fly an ocean, then spend a day testing it in the place itself.

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🏺A City That Calls Itself "Little Athens"

LYSANDER: Fair love, you faint with wand'ring in the wood,

And, to speak troth, I have forgot our way.                                                                 Act II, Scene ii

Sabbioneta is one of those places almost too perfect to be real, like an elegant stage set waiting for actors to enter the piazza from the side streets. Built largely under the direction of the rather vainglorious Duke Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna, (the man had enough of an ego to have his ancestors carved out of wood in full armor on horseback to decorate one room of his palace), it was conceived as an ideal Renaissance city, complete with imposing brick walls, elegant streets and public buildings intended to celebrate classical learning, theater and the arts. So there was association with ancient Greece in its Renaissance past.

As we approached, the first thing I noticed was not the city itself, but the dark, thick woods surrounding it. Shakespeare's lovers spend nearly the entire play on Midsummer Night wandering through a forest just beyond the city walls, where ordinary rules of courtship dissolve, mistaken identities flourish and anything seems possible until dawn. If you’ve read What is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Really About, you know that what goes on in the Tudor woods on St. John’s Eve stays in the woods!

 Standing outside Sabbioneta's gates, gazing at its imposing red brick walls and those woods, I had to admit that my heart beat picked up. Walls, gates, woods right there, even 400 years later.

Maybe Shakespeare had been here. Or maybe I was being led astray.

🌳 Seeking Shakespeare at the Duke’s Oak

QUINCE: “At the Duke’s Oak we meet.’

         Act I, Scene ii      

Roe recounted hearing that Sabbioneta's imposing gatehouse was called the "Duke's Oak," where Peter Quince and his fellow actors agree to meet before rehearsing their play. That would have been amazing evidence that Shakespeare knew Sabbioneta very well. Despite searching in Sabbioneta and reading all its history that I could find in English and Italian, I found nothing to verify Roe’s report. It may once have existed, or it may simply have grown in the telling.

Rich gave me the spousal eye-roll.

🏛️ Seeking Shakespeare at the Temple

DUKE THESEUS:  “For in the temple, by and by, with us                                                       These couples shall eternally be knit.”

Act IV, Scene i

“The duke is coming from the temple.” (IV.ii) Called “Il Tempio dell’Incoronata”, (the “Temple of the Crowned”), this octagonal church may have been built on the foundation and with the very stones of a Roman temple beneath it. Was this Shakespeare’s “temple” where the three couples are married in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Sabbioneta’s octagonal Church of the Coronation is commonly referred to as Il Tempio dell'Incoronata, the Temple of the Coronation. It is, of course, a Catholic church, built by the same vainglorious duke Vespasiano. It houses his unsurprisingly enormous effigy on his tomb.

Throughout Italy, churches were frequently built on the foundations of Roman temples, often preserving something of the older name while the temples literally disappeared stone by stone into the churches. Was Duke Theseus’ "temple" where the three couples are wed really a church that local people called a temple because it had been built on top of a temple? I could not confirm that either.

By this point I was beginning to suspect that my historian husband was right:  we’d wasted a beautiful day on Lake Garda, unless by some stroke of divine intervention, I got very lucky.

🫅🏼 Dea Ex Machina: Athena Appears

HERMIA:  By Cupid's strongest bow,                                                       

By his best arrow with the golden head,                                                       

By the simplicity of Venus' doves..."

           Act I, Scene i

We wandered across the Piazza d'Armi on our way back to the carpark. I had resigned myself to concluding that Sabbioneta was a fascinating, beautiful, secret Renaissance city built to honor classical Greece, but probably not Shakespeare's Athens, and definitely far off today’s tourist trail.

But sometimes, when you call upon the Gods, they answer.

 I squinted heavenward at something in the middle of the Piazza.

And there she stood.

From the top of a high column in the middle of the Piazza d’Armi, a huge Renaissance statue of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, calmly surveyed her Little Athens.

Since 1527, decades before Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this Athena has been watching over Sabbioneta. The Italian city was known for the classical arts in the Renaissance, and then and today called “Little Athens.” She had been hiding in plain sight all along. How Shakespearean is that?

She stopped me in my tracks.

It turns out the Athena statue was actually famous and she’d been in Sabbioneta all along.

She had been brought home after the Sack of Rome in 1527 by the vainglorious Duke’s father, decades before Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream. By the late sixteenth century Athena was already part of the city's identity. If Shakespeare had visited Sabbioneta, he would have seen her and known that Sabbioneta was nicknamed “Little Athens” for her and for its devotion to the classical arts, including theater.

Athena was simply waiting, either to be invoked, or discovered, by a meandering tourist on a mission. You can pick which explanation you prefer.

Those are my favorite moments engaging in historical research through travel, not because they always prove anything conclusively, but because they remind me that books and the internet can only take us so far. Sometimes you have to stand in the place yourself and look up.

🧚‍♂️So Was Shakespeare's Athens Really Sabbioneta?

I cannot honestly say whether Shakespeare set A Midsummer Night's Dream in Sabbioneta because he had been there and stood where I stood. But there are very good arguments that knew it well and that he has been playing a joke on us for 400 years. He knew that we would assume he meant Athens, Greece. That is why he sprinkled so many clues in the play about Italy.

Knowing Sabbioneta was built for the classic arts, exploring its 16^th century indoor theater with perfect acoustics and a raked stage, walking its walls and the woods beyond them, finding a church still known as a “temple”, and unexpectedly encountering Athena herself when I needed her, I can say with confidence that the city and its woods would make a perfect stage set for this play. Maybe a Shakespeare company will perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this “Little Athens” and its woods.

I would go back in a heartbeat to see it.

So, the next time you come across something in Shakespeare that doesn’t quite add up, don’t dismiss it too quickly. It likely not his mistake, but his invitation to look more closely and follow his lead.

🎥 If you'd like to see more of Sabbioneta for yourself, you can also join Rich and me as we follow Shakespeare's trail through northern Italy.  Shakespeare in Northern Italy: Traveling Together Through Shakespeare's Italy, Part I