II spent part of December in Copenhagen at the climate conference. One night we went to dinner at Kronborg Castle near Elsinore, about thirty miles north of the city. We got there before the light of the short winter day had started to fade: the sky was pale blue and clear, the temperature well below freezing.

Kronborg’s surroundings are dismal but the castle is magnificent: square, solid and tall, standing guard over the narrow strip of sea which separates Denmark from Sweden. In its heyday it could accommodate over 1,000 men with provisions for a six-week siege.

Most people believe that the castle found fame through Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but in fact its reputation preceded that of the play. Kronborg began life in the 1420s as a sort of glorified toll booth, a fortress built by King Erik of Pomerania to extract payment from ships entering or leaving the narrow sound that leads to the Baltic Sea.

During the 1570s, Frederik II transformed the crude fortress into a magnificent Renaissance castle richly decorated with marble fireplaces, ceiling paintings and tapestries. The castle was then the finest in Europe, which befitted the international shipping and cultural centre that Elsinore had become.

It was this impressive structure that a troupe of English actors encountered when their company toured in 1585. Upon their return to England, three of them (Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas Pope) became colleagues of Shakespeare and told him about their experiences abroad.

By 1602, Shakespeare had used Kronborg as the setting for The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke and the Castle of Elsinore. The play was based on the legend of Prince Hamlet, first mentioned more than 800 years ago in a history of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus and dramatized in 1590 in England by Thomas Kyd.

The touring actors’ accounts of the castle became Shakespeare’s stage directions. ‘The Courtyard is a prison, with total security of access and exit,’ explains Shakespeare scholar Ralph Berry. ‘Off it is the Chapel, where the body of Polonius is laid to rest. Upstairs is the Lobby, where Hamlet walks. Gertrude and Hamlet meet in the Queen’s Rooms. Polonius hides behind the arras, one of the famous tapestries that still adorn the palace walls. The fencing match takes place in the Great Hall. The play is made for the castle.’

And indeed, Hamlet has often been performed at Kronborg, the first time in 1816 to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. Since then, a succession of British actors have played the role inside the castle, including John Gielgud in 1939, Michael Redgrave in 1950, Richard Burton (1954), Derek Jacobi (1979) and Kenneth Branagh (1988).

The enduring popularity of Shakespeare has, perhaps, kept Kronborg in the public eye. But even without this literary association, Kronborg still would have been added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 2000 as one of the most important Renaissance castles in Northern Europe.