When visitors today approach Kronborg they experience the castle from a distance as a magical totality of ramparts, walls, towers and spires.
Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet has imprinted ‘the castle in Elsinore’ – Helsingør with its castle Kronborg – in the consciousness of the world. And the castle is of immense symbolic value to the Danish people and played a key role in the history of northern Europe in the 16th-18th centuries. In Shakespeare’s play the castle is the setting for the tragic events where the Danish Prince Hamlet avenges the murder of his father and sets off an avalanche of death and destruction. Though the historical truth is that there probably never lived a Danish prince named Hamlet, it does, however, tell us something important about the fame of Kronborg that Shakespeare chose to set the action of his tragedy there. Around 1600 Helsingør and the castle of Kronborg were a Danish locality that were known all over Europe. Poul Grinder-Hansen’s book opens up the story of Kronborg, the impressive history and architecture of a castle build to impress – a manifestation of power and magnificence.