page_title: Great Bed of Ware
section_title: References to the Great Bed in literature
hierarchical_section_title: Great Bed of Ware / References to the Great Bed in literature
caption_attribution_description: Great Bed of Ware.
context_page_description: The Great Bed of Ware is an extremely large oak four poster bed, carved with marquetry, that was originally housed in the White Hart Inn in Ware, England. Built by Hertfordshire carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke about 1590, the bed measures 3.38m long and 3.26m wide and can 'reputedly... accommodate at least four couples'. Many of those who have used the bed have carved their names into its posts.
  Like many objects from that time, the bed is carved with patterns derived from European Renaissance ornament. Originally it would have been brightly painted, and traces of these colours can still be seen on the figures on the bed-head. The design of the marquetry panels is derived from the work of Dutch artist Hans Vredeman de Vries and the panels were probably made by English craftsmen working in London in the late Elizabethan period. The bed-hangings are modern re-creations of fabrics of the period.
  By the 19th century, the bed had been moved from the White Hart Inn to the Saracen's Head, another Ware inn. In 1870, William Henry Teale, the owner of the Rye House, acquired the bed and put it to use in a pleasure garden. When interest in the garden waned in the 1920s, the bed was sold.
context_section_description: William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (circa 1601)
  Ben Jonson's Epicoene, or the Silent Woman
  George Gordon Byron's Don Juan
  George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer
  Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
  Loretta Chase's Last Night's Scandal (page 90)
  Sarah MacLean's No Good Duke Goes Unpunished
  Deanna Raybourn's "Silent on the Moor"
  Charles Dickens' The Holly Tree
caption: The Great Bed in Saracen's Head
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