Space, Place, and Literary Self-Projection

Nayar, Sheila J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_7

Space, Place, and Literary Self-Projection

Sheila J. Nayar²

Chapter
First Online: 30 October 2018

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Abstract

This chapter probes the more ontological and epistemological shifts induced by “compass and card.” Nayar begins by considering the modifications in visual field that were induced by Ptolemaic principles and then imaginatively co-opted both poetically and politically. How the map was staged in drama, together with how the stage could serve as an allegorical stand-in for the map, is also explored, as are too the literary ramifications of chorography, or a prose-mapping of land. This latter genre even stimulated a new sort of national poetry, one radically beholden to materializing the nation as territory. Finally, Nayar explores the coterminous map-minded emergence of authors rhetorically staging their own taking flight above and across (or even beyond) the newly gridded globe.

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Notes

1.
David Buisseret, The Mapmakers’ Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115.
2.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1963), 21.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Robert Ralston Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 104.
5.
See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977).
6.
See Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In some sense, I consider this chapter a more epistemologically motivated extension of their work.
7.
Arthur Klinghoffer, The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 15.
8.
Ibid., 13.
9.
Gordon and Klein, introduction to Gordon and Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, 3.
10.
Ludmila Makuchowska, Scientific Discourse in John Donne’s Eschatological Poetry (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 16.
11.
D.K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 60.
12.
Steven J. Harris, “Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume III: Early Modern Science, eds. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 361.
13.
Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., “From Mental Matrix to Mappamundi to Christian Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance,” in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 48.
14.
Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools [c. 1509], trans. and ed. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York: Columbia UP, 1944), 350.
15.
Ibid., 352.
16.
Rodney Shirley, “The Title Pages to the Theatrum and Parergon,” in Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of his Death, 1598–1998, eds. Marcel van den Broecke et al. (Houten, the Netherlands: HES, 1998), 169. Shirley freely translates van Meetkerke’s composition.
17.
Quoted in David McInnis, Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 26.
18.
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton [1594], ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 343.
19.
Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 339 n. 60.
20.
Thomas Elyot, The boke named the gouernour [1531] (Londini: In edibus Tho. Bertheleti), 35, Early English Books Online.
21.
William Cuningham, The cosmographical glasse… (Londini: In officina Ioan. Daij typographi, Anno. 1559), preface, unnumbered, Early English Books Online.
22.
Rychard Eden, “Rychard Eden to the reader,” in A treatyse of newe India…, by Sebastian Münster (London: In Lombard strete, by [S. Mierdman for] Edward Sutton, [1553]), Early English Books Online.
23.
Smith, Cartographic, 8.
24.
Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis? A iust censure of travell… (London: Printed by Edward Griffin for Nathaniel Butter, 1617), 33, Early English Books Online.
25.
Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I [perf. ca. 1600] and II [perf. ca. 1630], ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 95.
26.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), 492.
27.
Mapping the World: An Illustrated History of Cartography (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 104.
28.
Robert Greene, Greenes mourning garment… [1590] (London: Printed by I. W[olfe] for Thomas Newman), 5, Early English Books Online.
29.
William Goddard, A mastif vvhelp and other ruff-island-lik currs fetcht from amongst the Antipedes… (Dordrecht: By George Waters, 1616?), unnumbered, Early English Books Online.
30.
Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy… (Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lychfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, Anno Dom. 1621), 4, 351, Early English Books Online.
31.
Francis Bacon, Great Instauration, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, Volume III (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848), 336.
32.
Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery , trans. David Fausett (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994), 6. Some cartographers, like Thevet , broke with this tradition (Ibid).
33.
John Donne, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 7, Part I: The Holy Sonnets, ed. Gary A. Stringer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), 8.
34.
Makuchowska, Scientific, 31.
35.
Richard Helgerson, “The Folly of Maps and Modernity,” in Gordon and Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, 250. He states this apropos Holy Sonnet V, admittedly.
36.
Donne, Variorum, 8.
37.
John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 282.
38.
Ibid., 283.
39.
This argument is made by Ladan Niayesh, “‘All Flat Maps, and I Am One’: Cartographic References in the Poems of John Donne,” Études Épistémè 10 (2006): 47.
40.
Donne, in his early religious fervor, saw crosses everywhere in nature (Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry [New York: Columbia University Press, 1960], 36). As he proclaims in “The Crosse”: “All the Globes frame, and spheares, is nothing else / But the Meridians crossing Parallels / Material Crosses then” (ll. 23–25) (Donne, Complete Poetry, 246).
41.
Donne, Complete, 258.
42.
Ibid.
43.
Ibid., 8. On the influence of cordiform (heart -shaped) maps on the imagery of this poem, see Robert L. Sharp, “Donne’s ‘The Good -Morrow’ and Cordiform Maps,” Modern Language Notes 69, no. 7 (1954).
44.
Donne, Complete, 84.
45.
Ibid., 30.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Ibid., 85.
48.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv. According to M. Thomas Hester, Donne was scornful of English adventuring in America and, consequently, reads the elegy as “an Ovidian jeu” and “sassy generic retort to the popular Petrarchist mode of established Virgilian high-seriousness” (M. Thomas Hester, “Donne’s (Re)Annunciation of the Virgin(ia Colony) in ‘Elegy XIX,’” South Central Review 4, no. 2 [1987]: 49–50).
49.
Rhonda Lemke Sanford, “A Room Not One’s Own: Feminine Geography in Cymbeline,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, eds. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 63.
50.
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Pearson, 2014), 17.
51.
Cawley, Unpathed, 88. See also Donne’s epigrams “Cales and Guyana” and “Sir John Wingfield.”
52.
Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy [ca. 1579], in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 1077.
53.
Paul Binding argues something similar regarding Renaissance painters (Paul Binding, Imagined Corners: Exploring the World’s First Atlas [London: Headline, 2003], 5).
54.
Smith, Cartographic, 8–9.
55.
Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1969), 160. Since several of Marlowe’s contemporaries also speak of this “triple world,” advises Cawley, there is possibility of an intentional archaizing (Cawley , Unpathed, 76).
56.
Emrys Jones, quoted in Jacques Lezra, “Geography and Marlowe,” in Christopher Marlowe in Context, eds. Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 125. See also John Gillies, “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,” in Gillies and Mason, eds., Playing the Globe; David Keck, “Marlowe and Ortelius’ Map,” Notes and Queries (June 2005); and Yves Peyré, “Marlowe’s Argonauts,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
57.
Ethel Seaton, “Marlowe’s Map,” in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Volume X, ed. E.K. Chambers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 18.
58.
Ibid., 27–28.
59.
Marlowe, Complete, 105.
60.
McInnis, Mind-Travelling, 61.
61.
Smith, Cartographic, 132.
62.
Marlowe, Complete, 185.
63.
Ibid., 253–254.
64.
Keck, “Marlowe,” 189 (the quote from Marlowe appears in Complete, 148).
65.
Marlowe, Complete, 184.
66.
Keck, “Marlowe,” 189.
67.
Makuchowska, Scientific, 27.
68.
Quoted in Binding, Imagined, 233.
69.
Peyré, “Marlowe’s,” 114.
70.
Marlowe, Complete, 178.
71.
Ibid., 254.
72.
Lezra, “Geography,” 127.
73.
While the Globe’s construction postdates Marlowe’s play, the reference feels rhetorically apt.
74.
William Caxton, Caxton’s Mirrour of the World, ed. Oliver H. Prior (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1913), 23. See Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 85; and Gillies, “Marlowe,” 226.
75.
Cawley, Unpathed, 117.
76.
John Gillies, “The Scene of Cartography in King Lear,” in Gordon and Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, 118.
77.
Shakespeare, Complete, 878.
78.
Ibid., 1680.
79.
Ibid., 186.
80.
Ibid., 1145.
81.
Ibid., 908.
82.
Jerry Brotton, “Tragedy and Geography,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume I: The Tragedies, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 228.
83.
Gillies, “Scene,” 123.
84.
Shakespeare, Complete, 806.
85.
Ibid., 807.
86.
John Rennie Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475–1600 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 129–132.
87.
Ibid., 88.
88.
R.A. Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries; a Revised Edition of Old Decorative Maps and Charts (London: Staples Press, c. 1952), 12.
89.
Short, Making, 87–88. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries initiated this “pool of commodified land” (Ibid., 87).
90.
Helgerson, “Folly,” 253. This he argues regarding Europe more broadly.
91.
John Norden, The Surveiors Dialogue… [1607] (London: Printed for R. Montagu, at the Book Ware-House, the General Post-Office, in Freat Wilde-street, near the End of Great Queen-street, next to Drury-Lane. 1738), 4, Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
92.
Short, Making, 101.
93.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 114.
94.
William Camden, Camden’s Britannia newly translated into English… (London: Printed by F. Collins, … 1695), Mr. Camden’s Preface, unnumbered, Early English Books Online.
95.
Ibid.
96.
Bernhard Klein, “Imaginary Journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the Poetics of National Space,” in Gordon and Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, 209.
97.
Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion: A Chorographicall Description of Great Britain, Parts I-III [1622], reprinted from the edition of 1622 (Printed for the Spenser Society, 1889), unnumbered.
98.
Short, Making, 92.
99.
Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 4. The second part of Poly-Olbion, which appeared after Henry’s death, was dedicated to his brother, Charles.
100.
Helgerson, Form, 118. John Selden’s annotations to the first part of Poly-Olbion are packed with humanist references.
101.
Ibid., 130.
102.
Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 21.
103.
Ibid.
104.
Ibid., 30.
105.
Ibid., 160.
106.
Ibid., 170.
107.
Ibid., 162.
108.
Helgerson, Form, 140.
109.
Klein, “Imaginary,” 207.
110.
Ibid.
111.
Ibid., 212.
112.
Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 259.
113.
Ibid., 277, 285.
114.
Ibid., 298.
115.
Brian Gibbons, “The Wrong End of the Telescope,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155.
116.
Ben Jonson, “On the Famous Voyage,” in Hugh Maclean, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974), 19.
117.
Andrew McRae, “‘On the Famous Voyage’: Ben Jonson and Civic Space,” in Gordon and Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, 188–189; and Anthony Parr, Renaissance Mad Voyages: Experiments in Early Modern English Travel (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 202–205 (McRae also mentions the New River project).
118.
McRae, “‘On the Famous,’” 188–189.
119.
Jonson could have seen Drayton’s work earlier, given they were friendly and familiar correspondents.
120.
Parr, Renaissance, 185.
121.
Jonson, “On the Famous,” 15, 16.
122.
Ibid., 15.
123.
Ibid., 16.
124.
McRae, “‘On the Famous,’” 191.
125.
Hugh Maclean, ed., Ben Jonson, 20 n. 2.
126.
While I borrow this from Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” Jonson does mention the offal of meat markets.
127.
Jonson, “On the Famous,” 16, 17.
128.
John Taylor, The Praise of Hemp-Seed… (London: [By E. Allde] for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold [by E. Wright?] at Christ-Church gate, 1623), 558, Early English Books Online.
129.
Ibid.
130.
Ibid.
131.
John Wilkins, A discourse concerning a new world & another planet in 2 bookes (London: Printed [by John Norton and R. Hearne] for Iohn Maynard, & are to be sold at the George, in Fleetstreet neare St. Dunstans Church, 1640), 2, Early English Books Online.
132.
Quoted in Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472–1500 (London: The British Library, 1987), 59. This was the Rom Weg map (ca. 1500).
133.
See Paul Longley Arthur, Virtual Voyages: Travel Writing and the Antipodes 1605–1837 (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 1.
134.
Lestringant, Mapping, 5. See also Smith, Cartographic, 54.
135.
Lestringant, Mapping, 5.
136.
Cuningham, Cosmographical, 53.
137.
This appears in II.2 of Francis Quarles, Quarles’ Emblems [1634] (London: James Nisbet and Company, 1886), 73–74, Public Domain Review.
138.
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
139.
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 234–235.
140.
James R. Siemon argues that the play must have resonated with Marlowe’s educated but socially disadvantaged peers, who could only “dream of attaining marketable recognition” (James R. Siemon, “Marlowe and Social Distinction,” in Bartels and Smith, eds., Christopher Marlowe in Context, 159).
141.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus [A-text], in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 1129.
142.
Ibid., 1148.
143.
Smith, Cartographic, 149.
144.
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus [B-text], ed. Hilary Binda, in The Perseus Garner: An Overview, by Clifford E. Wulfman, April 2001, Perseus Digital Library.
145.
Smith, Cartographic, 148.
146.
Joseph Hall, Occasional Meditations, Also the Breathings of the Devout Soul [1630] (London: Pickering, 1851), 139.
147.
Burton, Anatomy, unnumbered.
148.
Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps (London: The British Library, 2010), 78.
149.
Burton, Anatomy, 39.
150.
Rose Marie San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors: The Animation of the Visual Image and Early Modern Travel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 2.
151.
Ibid., 2–3.
152.
Ibid., 58.
153.
Burton, Anatomy, 4.
154.
Ibid., 336.
155.
Ibid., 317.
156.
Ibid., 317–318.
157.
Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moon [1638], ed. Charles C. Mish (New York: New York UP, 1963), 239.
158.
Ibid.
159.
Ibid., 243.
160.
Ibid., 261.
161.
Ibid., 257.
162.
Ibid., 258–259.
163.
Johannes Kepler, Somnium: The Dream or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy [1634], trans. Edward Rosen (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 36.
164.
Ibid.
165.
Taylor, Praise of Hemp-Seed, 551.

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Sheila J. Nayar

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Nayar, S.J. (2019). Space, Place, and Literary Self-Projection. In: Renaissance Responses to Technological Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_7
Published: 30 October 2018
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