In a late 1590s atlas proof from cartographer John Speed, Queen Elizabeth appears, crowned and brandishing a ruler as the map's scale-of-miles. Not just a map key, the queen™'s depiction here presents her as a powerful arbiter of measurement in her kingdom. For Speed, the queen was a formidable female presence, authoritative, ready to measure any place or person. The atlas, finished during James' reign, later omitted her picture. But this disappearance did not mean Elizabeth vanished entirely; her image and her connection to geography appear in multiple plays and maps. Elizabeth becomes, like the ruler she holds, an instrument applied and adapted. *Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage* explores the ways in which mapmakers, playwrights, and audiences in early modern England could, following their queen™'s example, use the ideas of geography, or 'world-writing', to reshape the symbolic import of the female body and territory to create new identities. The book demonstrates how early modern mapmakers and dramatists -- men and women -- conceived of and constructed identities within a discourse of fluid ideas about space and gender.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Confuting Those Blind Geographers
- Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2. ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’
- Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3. ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’
- Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4. ‘The Fort of her Chastity’
- Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- List of Figures
- Fig. 1: John Speed, Detail, Proof Map of Cheshire, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (Atlas.2.61.1, p. 16).
- Fig. 2: Frontispiece, Christopher Saxton, An Atlas of England and Wales. London: 1579. © The Trustees of the British Museum (1934, 0604.1).
- Fig. 3: Portrait of Henri after the titlepage, Maurice Bouguereau, Le Theatre Francoys (Tours, 1594). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département Réserve des livres rares, RES-L7-2 (gallica.bnf.fr).
- Fig. 4: Giacomo Gastaldi, Cosmographia Universalis c. 1561© The British Library Board (Cartographic Items Maps C.18.n.1.)
- Fig. 5: Queen Elizabeth I (‘The Ditchley Portrait’) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1592. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
- Fig. 6: WA.Suth.C.2.91.3 Anonymous Dutch, Queen Elizabeth I as a map of Europe, 1598 Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
- Fig. 7: Frontispiece, John Case, Sphaera Civitatis [The Sphere of State] (Oxford, 1588). Newberry Library, Chicago (Special Collections Case J 0. 148).
- Fig. 8: Title page, Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (G1006. T5 1570b Vault fol).
- Fig. 9: Petrus Plancius, ‘Orbis terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus’ (Amsterdam, 1599). National Library of Australia (NLA MAP RM 144).
- Fig. 10: Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, ‘Discovery of America: Vespucci Landing in America’ (c. 1587-89) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Estate of James Hazen Hyde, 1959.
- Fig. 11: Anonymous (after Jodocus Hondius), ‘Florentissimoru Regnorum Angliae et Hiberniae accurata descriptio’ (1594). Royal Geographic Society (with IBG). Shelfmark: mr British Isles Div.55.
- Fig. 12: Title page, Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador: or Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth of Glorious Memory (London, 1655). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1976, U.25).
- Fig. 13: Michael Drayton, title page, Poly-olbion (1612). © The British Library Board (General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 641.k.11).
- Fig. 14: John Speed, ‘The Kingdom of Irland’, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London: J. Sudbury & G. Humble, 1611-1612). © The British Library Board (Cartographic Items G.7884).
- Fig. 15: Hans Woutneel, ‘A Descripsion of the kingdoms of England Scotland & Ireland’ [London], 1603. Göttingen State and University Library, MAPP 4570.
- Fig. 16: John Speed, Map of Scotland, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London: I. Sudbury and G. Humble, 1616) ©The British Library Board (Maps. C.7 .c20.(2)).
- Fig. 17: London map from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572). © The British Library Board (Maps.C29.e.1).
- Fig. 18: The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I by George Gower, c. 1588. From the Woburn Abbey Collection.
- Fig. 19: Johannes Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, c. 1657. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York.
- Fig. 20: Margaret Cavendish, Frontispiece to Playes (1662) and Playes, Never Before Printed (1668). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1862, 1011.236).
- Fig. 21: Aaron Rathborne, The Surveyor in Foure Books (Printed by W. Stansby for W. Burre, 1616). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1875, 0814.741).
- Fig. 22: Frontispiece from Britannia fortior (London, 1709). © University of Aberdeen.
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