What is the setting of Tales from Shakespeare?

Each of the twenty stories in Tales from Shakespeare has its own setting or settings. Two of the tales, "The Tempest and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" are set in enchanted places, an enchanted island and an enchanted forest. In a number of the tales, a short period of time is spent by the main characters on board a ship or boat, as in "The Tempest," "A Winter's Tale" and "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." Other tales are set in known cities of different countries like Venice, Italy in "The Merchant of Venice" and "Othello," Verona, Italy in "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Romeo and Juliet," Padua, Italy in "The Taming of the Shrew," Messina, Italy, in "Much Ado About Nothing," Vienna, Austria in "Measure for Measure," and in Athens or near Athens, Greece, in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Timon of Athens."

A number of the tales take place in royal courts, as in "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." In several of the tales, banished men live in forests, as in "As You Like It," where the banished duke lives in the forest of Arden in France and in "Cymbeline" Belarius is banished and lives in a cave in a British forest. Two of the tales take place on barren heaths in the British isles: "Macbeth" on the Scottish heath and "King Lear" on the English heath.

There are many different settings in the tales, some of which are set in mythological ancient Greece and the middle East, others in ancient Britain and other European countries. These colorful and varied settings might be conducive for making the children want to travel and see the world someday. The settings definitely stimulate young imaginations, or anyone's imagination, for that matter.