Abstract
During the eight decades between 1550 and 1630, geographic space in early modern Europe, just as the theater in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England, was subject to considerable social, economic, and political reformulation. As a consequence, the way people came to think about spatiality changed dramatically. By redefining modes of understanding the global spatiality of places, geography underwent a veritable renaissance in the period of late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The pluralization and polarization of voices in the emerging science and in theatrical practice signified the advent of new conceptualizations of space and place, which helped people engage with the changing world around them. This study attempts to situate early modern distinctions in the newly rising geographic thinking in relation to ancient past ones and to drama, showing the pluralism of the emerging field and the multiple voices it represented. Renaissance geographic scholarship relied on the authoritative accents of the classical past, depending on their methods and accessing the broad universal views of ancient cosmography. In this way, geographers legitimized their works by reference to historic precursors. Considering the visually based mental structure derived from geography, cartography, and theater,1 it makes sense to argue that early modern European geography and English drama of the period show similar characteristics.
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Notes
This study is indebted to prominent criticism drawing on correlations of geography and early modern English drama: John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 70–98
John Gillies, “Tamburlaine and Renaissance Geography,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35–49
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Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
For a review of post-structuralism and “relational space” in human geography, see Jonathan Murdoch, Post-Structuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 1–25.
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Doreeen Massey, “Part One: Setting the Scene,” in For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 9–13, 10. Massey reshaped commonsense ways of thinking about space and place in the discipline of geography and across the broader social sciences by stressing that space is the dimension of multiplicity, the product of relations, and is always unfinished and under construction. This reading of space, I believe, can be applied to dramatic action, which is also multiple, relational, and continually renewed through each particular performance.
Ina Habermann, “Introduction,” in Political Topographies, ed. Ina Habermann, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 20, no. 2 (2013): 91.
In an analysis of the relationship between playwrights and the semiotics of the received spatial conventions in Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters, Tim Fitzpatrick points out that it was all about “playwrights thinking spatially” (9). According to Fitzpatrick, “early modern playwrights, actors, and audiences shared a sophisticated sense of space and place in performance” (247). See Tim Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place from the perspective of theatrical history, Fitzpatrick’s argument strengthens my point of the relational spatiality in geography and theater.
Joël Bonnemaison, Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography, trans. Josée Pénot-Demetry, introduction by John Agnew (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 9–17; 45–53.
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See Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
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Bruce Smith, “Taking the Measure of Global Space,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no.1 (Winter 2013): 27.
Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 73.
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Jacques Lacan makes the case of a continuous surface of mathematical topology rather than the discontinuous segmentation of language by asking his audience to imagine the interaction of art and the human being as a Moebius membrane connecting the outside to the inside across the threshold of the body’s orifices. Through this image, Lacan demonstrates that paired terms such as signifier-signified are not discrete opposites but, in fact, continuous. The Moebius strip is discussed in Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 553nl and in his The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 296.
See also Christopher D. Morris, “Barth and Lacan: The World of the Moebius Strip,” Critique 17, no. 1 (1975): 69–77.
See Steven M. Rosen, Science, Paradox, and, the Moebius Principle: The Evolution of a “Transcultural” Approach to Wholeness (Albany: State University of New York, 1994), 88–89. Rosen applies the Moebius principle to such questions as the nature of dialectical change, the meaning of relativity, and the issue of human freedom.
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For the secret sponsoring of geographic science in Spain, see Maria M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 103–40
Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 26
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John Davis, “To the right honorable Lord Charles Haward, Baron of Effingham,” The Seamans Secrets (London: Thomas Dawson, 1595), sig. q3r. STC 6368.4.
Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibvs septentrionalibvs (Antverpiae: Ex officina C. Plantini, 1558). The work by the Swedish scholar, Archbishop of Uppsala, was translated into Italian (1565), German (1567), English (1658), and Dutch (1665). Abridgments of the work appeared at Antwerp (1558 and 1562), Paris (1561), Amsterdam (1586), Frankfurt (1618), and Leiden (1652). The size of the book, however, is not so impressive (just 9/15 cm), as compared to the scope of the project.
Abraham Ortelius, Parergon, sive Veteris Geographiae Aliquot Tabulae, in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, trans. W[illiam] B[edwell] (London: Iohn Norton, 1606). STC 18855.
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Robert Weimann, Author’s Ten and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 180–215; 1.
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Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Urbium praeeipuarum totius mundi. Liber tertius (Coloniae Agrippinae: apud Godefridum Kempensen, 1581). University of Basel Library, EUU I 11a:3.
See Aaron Kitch, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England: From Spenser to Jonson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 105–28
Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, eds., Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, Early Modern Cultural Studies, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–15
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Bradley D. Ryner, Performing Economic Thought, 1600–1642: English Drama and Mercantile Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 1–15.
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© 2015 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
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Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Introduction: Recomposing Space within Geographic Diversity. In: Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_1
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