The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

My thanks to Huston Diehl, without whom I might never have gotten started, and Claire Sponsler, without whom I might never have finished, and to Annie, without whom it wouldn’t have been any fun at all.

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell

D. K. SMITH Kansas State University, USA

© D. K. Smith 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D. K. Smith has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Smith, Donald Kimball The cartographic imagination in early modern England : re-writing the world in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell 1. Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–1593 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599 – Criticism and interpretation 3. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618 – Criticism and interpretation 4. Marvell, Andrew, 1621–1678 – Criticism and interpretation 5. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism 6. Maps in literature 7. Geography in literature 8. Cartography – England – History – 16th century 9. Cartography – England – History – 17th century I. Title 820.9’32’09031 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Donald Kimball. The cartographic imagination in early modern England : re-writing the world in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell / D. K. Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5620-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Maps in literature. 3. Cartography—England—History—16th century. 4. Cartography—England—History— 17th century. 5. Geography in literature. 6. Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–1593—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Marvell, Andrew, 1621–1678— Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR428.M355S65 2007 820.9—dc22 2007035131 ISBN 978-0-7546-5620-3

Contents List of Maps

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: The Cartographic Imagination

1

1

“To passe the see in shortt space” Re-Mapping the Medieval World in the Digby Mary Magdalen

17

2

The Transformation of Seeing: Christopher Saxton and the Development of the Cartographic Imagination 41

3

From Allegorical Space to a Geographical World: Mapping Cultural Memory in The Faerie Queene

73

4

Conquering Geography: Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, and the Cartographic Imagination 125

5

‘Tis not, what once it was, the world’: Andrew Marvell’s Re-Mapping of Old and New in Bermudas and Upon Appleton House 157

Bibliography

189

Index

203

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List of Maps I.1

Psalter World Map, mid-13th century

4

I.2

Cityview of Wells, 15th century

5

I.3

Pilgrimage map by Matthew Paris, 13th century

7

1.1

Hereford Mappa Mundi, 13th century

23

2.1

Plan for the fortification of Portsmouth, 1545

47

2.2

Cityview of Venice, 1500

55

2.3

Cityview of Norwich, 1558

58

2.4

County of Wiltshire by Christopher Saxton, 1579

64

3.1

County of Lincolnshire by John Speed, 1611

76

4.1

Walter Raleigh’s Map of Guiana, 1596

144

5.1

Richard Norwood’s Map of Bermuda, 1618

162

5.2

Radolph Agas’ Estate Map of Toddington, 1581

177

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Acknowledgements Much of the research for this essay was conducted at the Huntington Library under the auspices of a Huntington Fellowship and a W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowhip. I would like to thank Robert C. Ritchie, Romaine Ahlstrom, Anne Mar, Mona Shulman, and the rest of the staff of the Ahmanson Reading Room for their generous help and hospitality. I would also like to thank the Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust, the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, the British Library, and the British Museum for their permission to reproduce photographs of just a few of the remarkable maps and images in their collections. In addition, I’d like to express my appreciation to the anonymous readers for the journal The Seventeenth Century and for Ashgate, both of whom provided a wealth of excellent suggestions. They are responsible for many of the better points I raise in this book, and for none of its shortcomings.

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Introduction

The Cartographic Imagination It is impossible to conceive of the world without maps, impossible to visualize all that lies beyond the range of the most immediate, personal experience, without the use of abstractions. An understanding of the whole is necessarily distinct from an awareness of its parts, and while the local is present and available to the senses, the broader reaches of the globe are inevitably products of representation. Even today, when the earth itself may be laid out before the window of an orbiting space shuttle, the function of maps is little changed. People who exist comfortably with the certainty of the world’s shape and appearance still depend for this understanding on the image of an idea: the product of imagination rather than experience. And it is within this gap of imagination and experience that the essence of cartography lies: the bland and affirming portrayal of complex relationships, ideas and objects, landscapes and locations, from a perspective otherwise impossible to obtain. Despite its emphasis on visual representation, a map’s most important function is to show what cannot actually be seen. At the same time, the underlying assumptions about what could be contained in a map and how, has changed drastically over time. And to trace the implications of these changes is to recognize that altering the way the world looks, alters the way people look at the world. In what follows I want to consider how the increasingly widespread availability of new mathematical and cartographic technologies in late sixteenth-century England impinged on broader ways of thinking. More particularly, how did the experience of these mathematized techniques of spatial representation— what amounted to a new spatial consciousness in early modern England—create new tools for imaginative organization and literary work? It has become a commonplace in the field of geography that a map means both less and more than it reveals. The apparent objectivity of a map disguises the broad range of cultural forces within which it is embedded, and the unspoken assumptions behind its construction carry as much meaning as the images themselves.1 As Andrew 1

There is a considerable body of work in recent years exploring this realm. Among the most recent works are: Andrew McRae, God speed the plough: The Representation of agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain

2

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

Gordon and Bernhard Klein have observed, “the cartographic image is revealed as more than a mere functional tool, or neutral scientific record, emerging instead as a crucial representational site of cultural and historic change.”2 The matrix of cultural expectations and epistemologies both limits and defines the understanding of physical space. And this understanding, in turn, reaches beyond the strictly geographical— beyond, that is, the consideration and representation of physical space—to define broader modes of imaginative manipulation, providing what are essentially “symbolic ‘maps’ to other domains.”3 Henri Lefebvre, one of the foremost theorists of space, has highlighted the culturally constructed nature of spatial awareness. He notes that “every society ... produces a space, its own space.” And this space, once produced, “serves as a tool of thought and of action ... [and] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power.”4 The world is derived from maps as thoroughly and completely as maps are derived from the world. In this light, by articulating and organizing an understanding of the material realm, maps can be seen to shape a parallel understanding of things immaterial. The episteme of a cultural moment, ordering and moulding the most fundamental patterns of thought, is formed not least by the perceived shape of the world, and the means that are available to represent and manipulate the one may be transposed and employed in the manipulation of the other.5 An imaginative landscape must necessarily be patterned on the organization and manipulation of the material realm, and if the cultural imagination helps to shape an understanding of the world, that understanding in turn defines the shape of the imagination. In late medieval and early modern England, the changing shape of maps paralleled the changing understanding of space. In medieval times this relationship focused less on physical geography than on the symbolic and spiritual nature of the world. Although portolan charts as early as the thirteenth century were drawn to provide practical guidance for navigation, they rarely extended their geographical rendering inland from the shoreline, providing what amounted to a diagrammatic itinerary of the coast. And the broader representations of the world provided by mappa mundi were, in only the most approximate sense, about the organization of space. This is not to say that they were technologically primitive. In some instances they provided representations of great precision. But their primary function was not to measure space, but to impose on the template of the physical world a constant reminder and organizational outline of the events of Christian history. They provided little more (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jess Edwards, Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America: Circles in the Sand (London: Routledge, 2005). 2 Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, “Introduction,” in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds), Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 3. 3 Stephen C. Levinson, “Language and Space,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 357. 4 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 31, 26. 5 For more on the concept of the episteme see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. xxii and generally.

Introduction

3

of the world than was needed to contemplate heaven, and physical location was in large part merely the means to an end: a signifier evoking the appropriate signified of Christian doctrine. In the thirteenth-century Ebstorf map, for example, a circular map of the world was laid out with Jerusalem at the center and the head, feet, and hands of Christ at the four compass points, while a smaller world map in a thirteenthcentury English psalter offered Jesus and two angels gazing out serenely over the globe (see Figure I.1). There was no emphasis on precise measurement and little effort to represent a world through which the viewer could visually and physically negotiate his way. Rather, these maps offered a realm whose shape and details were largely emblematic, even whimsical, untied to the fixed and rigid precision of spatial relationships. Similarly, even among the more local maps of cities or fields, the spatial was often less important than the symbolic. While there were a few local plans that sought to visualize the layout of fields or buildings, most medieval maps represented objects more in relationship to their fundamental purpose and imagined significance than to the larger space they inhabited. From the detailed, small-scale drawings of individual land holdings to city views and world maps, the components—be they buildings, fields, or biblical events—were evoked in relationship to ideas rather than to space. As P. D. A. Harvey observed of medieval local plans, “Most of them are diagrams rather than maps, concerned to show a single set of spatial relationships rather than the overall relationships within the given area.”6 A map of Sherwood forest, for example, consisted largely of lists of place names, forming a group of itineraries but not offering any real spatial organization. Even the maps of individual fields were likely drawn on an ad hoc basis in an effort to reaffirm ownership, and may therefore be seen as a kind of aide memoire, orienting the land in relation to memories of past use rather than in relation to the larger world.7 Certainly none of these maps was drawn to scale. In a view of the city of Wells from the fifteenth century, no effort was made to portray the city as a realistic space (see Figure I.2). The elements were arranged to evoke an imagined sense of buildings and people, to represent, in short, an emblematic image of the city. But there was no expectation of spatial accuracy, no representation of the sorts of organizational and volumetric techniques that defined a sense of inhabited space and rendered it open to precise measurement. Each map offered the view of a place, which could be imagined, rather than a space that could be inhabited. And although the technologies for long-distance travel were available throughout the Middle Ages, the perception of the world as open to such travel was slow in coming. The medieval understanding of geography didn’t include “a way of imagining space expressed in cartographic terms as actually and invitingly open to exploration.”8 Maps made no place within themselves for their audience.

6 See R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey (eds), Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 9 and the introduction generally. 7 For a comprehensive collection of surviving local maps see Skelton and Harvey, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England. 8 J. R. Hale, Renaissance Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 51.

4

Figure I.1:

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

Psalter World Map, mid-13th century. About 3 1/2 inches in diameter, this map was drawn on the first page of a psalter, produced in London in the early 1260s. By permission of the British Library. British Library Additional MS. 28681, f.9.

Introduction

5

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure I.2:

Cityview of Wells. Drawn by Thomas Chaundler in the early 1460s. By permission of the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford.

6

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

Even the pilgrimage maps of the period, the closest things to a practical cartographic guide in the Middle Ages, didn’t provide anything more than the most approximate evocations of physical landscape, and “even on these maps of areas actually traversed and observed there was no uniform scheme of geographical space.”9 Matthew Paris’ thirteenth-century maps of the route to the Holy Land, among the earliest of English maps, included representations of the towns and landmarks pilgrims could expect to find on their way to Jerusalem, but these images were entirely emblematic, highlighting specific details of place without providing any sense of overall spatial organization (see Figure I.3). The linked images were arranged linearly like a modern-day triptych, and though a pilgrim might conceivably follow its series of individual guideposts, the map reduced the route to an imagined straight line, without any attempt to represent the shape of the physical terrain or the spatial relationships of one site to another. The world, even with the aid of such a map, was imagined as a series of local sites, separated by a vague and unarticulated breadth of space. The nature of this space, and its representation throughout the Middle Ages, reflects a precise sense of the period’s epistemological foreignness, marked by an understanding so fundamentally different from today’s that it is almost impossible to recapture. For modern culture is so completely saturated with cartographic understanding that it cannot see the world except in terms of maps. As Lefebvre suggests, the “ideal” space of the map, a space defined by “mental (logicomathematical) categories” is closely and reciprocally tied to the “real” space of social practice, space as it is culturally produced and experienced.10 Even when the maps aren’t explicit, even when the cartographic references are purely imaginative, metaphoric, or vague, the modern world cannot be separated from a sense of spatial organization that is fundamentally cartographic. But in the Middle Ages, the experience of the physical world was an almost purely local one. “Without the habit of conceptualizing space, a traveler going to war or work could not link his separate impressions to the nature of his route as a whole or extend them imaginatively to the unseen parts of the area through which he was passing; a man could not visualize the country to which he belonged.”11 But in the late sixteenth century, the new introduction of cartographic representation to a widespread, literate public, brought about a shift in the way terrestrial space could be represented and manipulated, ushering in a whole new way of thinking about the world. Improvements in surveying technology made it possible for increasing numbers of individuals to measure and record the shape and order of the country, and with the development of scale maps in the early 1540s a sense of confidence in the precision and accuracy of spatial representation became possible. At the same time new artistic techniques imported from the continent supplied the means of visualizing this new precision more effectively, and the spread of the bird’s-eye perspective—in which a town is seen obliquely from an elevated 9 Ronald Rees, “Historical Links Between Cartography and Art,” The Geographical Review 70:1 (1980): 65. 10 Lefebvre, p. 14. 11 Hale, Renaissance Europe, p. 53.

Figure I.3:

Pilgrimage map by Matthew Paris. Dating from the 1250s, this itinerary represents the route from London to Rome, Naples, and Apulia. It is arranged to be read up from the bottom left, starting from London. By permission of the British Library. Cotton MS Nero D.i fols 183v–184r.

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

8

position—and the rise of panoramic representations of cities and coasts brought a new emphasis on visually organizing the topography.12 New rules of perspective brought improvements in landscape painting and engraving that allowed the creation of more complex and convincing representations of spatial volume, and these improvements, in turn, informed the way maps could be read. Cartographic accuracy began to carry with it a concomitant sense of perceived space, a sense of an implicitly physical volume that could be imaginatively inhabited. A growing awareness of maps—what P. D. A. Harvey has famously called “mapmindedness”—spread through the early modern culture. But more importantly for my purposes, there came as well a radical change in the way maps were seen to function. With the English translation of Euclid’s Geometry in 1570, and the mathematization of surveying that followed, new and more accurate maps were produced. The techniques of surveying grew more technologically sophisticated, and the uses of mapping became more widespread. In turn, these new ways of representing and manipulating geographical space produced a broad range of cultural and epistemological changes. The focus came to be on the earth itself rather than what it represented, on physical, spatial relationships rather than imagined and recollected meaning. And as the ideological expectations of mapped accuracy and objectivity became widespread, maps were used to impose a range of political and economic authority on the land and the people who occupied it. England was “a kingdom, which, more and more, was taking shape along the lines laid out by the theodolite, the cross staff, the plane table—the instruments of the cartographer.”13 Both at home and abroad “cartography extended political authority,”14 and the belief in the mathematical precision of the new maps allowed new uses and applications for the developing cartographic technologies. As Leslie Cormack has observed, “Geography encouraged a mathematical control of the world and a mentality that sanctioned its exploitation.”15 This increasing acceptance and mobilization of cartographic precision produced new ways of thinking about space. The growing expectation was that “the objects in the world to be mapped are real and objective, and that they enjoy an existence independent of the cartographer.” The goal of mapping was, thus, “to produce a ‘correct’ relational model of the terrain.”16 This is not, of course, to say that the new maps offered a realistic and objective view of the land, but rather that they were believed to. William Cuningham in his 1559 treatise on cosmography The Cosmographical Glasse, argued for the ability of the map to stand in for the territory. 12

For more on the bird’s-eye view and the map-view see John Fisher, A Collection of Early Maps of London 1553–1667 (Kent: Harry Margary, 1981). 13 David J. Baker, “Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland,” in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): p. 81. 14 Baker, p. 77. 15 Cormack, p. 11. 16 J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26 (1989): 4. While Harley places the beginning of this scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, it seems clear, with the developments of Christopher Saxton and other Elizabethan cartographers, that its roots can be traced even earlier.

Introduction

9

“I had almoste (throough making ouer much hast) forgotten to resight the beneffits we receiue of Cosmographie: in that she deliuereth vs from greate and continuall trauailes. For in a pleasaunte house, or warme study, she sheweth vs the hole face of all th’Earthe, withal the corners of the same.”17 In this light, the development of newly accurate maps in the late sixteenth century provided not just a new way of seeing the land but a new way of imagining it. By combining accuracy of depiction with a vivid pictorial style, maps such as the 1579 atlas of the counties of England and Wales by Christopher Saxton, allowed the viewer to envision the countryside representationally even as he could visualize the accurate proportion and relationships between elements in the landscape. For the first time, the nation as a whole could be seen and comprehended. And this new way of encompassing the land brought with it a new degree of imaginative control. Maps became devices not just for representing the world but for manipulating it, for empowering a re-imagination of physical space. Much recent work has focused on how the new perception of cartographic precision fed the rising wave of English imperialism, examining “the conceptual and semiotic interplay between cartographic discourse and related forms of spatial representation.”18 Where the work has taken a broader perspective, attempting “to relate models of cognitive mapping back to a specific historical moment,”19 the analysis has tended to concentrate on how the idea of mapping metaphorically inflects a particular political or civic institution. But in almost every case the focus, however wide it may start, ultimately narrows to the political or nationalist ramifications of a map’s organizing potential.20 In this book, however, I am less concerned with the political ramifications of the new maps than with the broader epistemological implications of the new mathematical precision they embodied. I want to consider not just the way specific maps were used in England during the fifteenth, sixteenth,

17

William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse (1559), The English Experience no. 44 (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press; New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968), Praeface, n.p. 18 Gordon and Klein, “Introduction,” p. 5. For a variety of insightful readings of cartographic influences on the English attempt to conquer Ireland see: Baker; Bruce Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,” ELH 57:2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 263–79; Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Mapping Mutability: Or, Spenser’s Irish Plot,” in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (eds) Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–115; and Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland. For a discussion of imperialism in America see William Boelhower, “Inventing America: a model of cartographic semiosis,” Word & Image, 4/2 (April–June 1988): 475–97. 19 Gordon and Klein, “Introduction,” p. 3. 20 The marked exceptions to this include Joanne Woolway Grenfell, “Do real knights need maps? Charting moral, geographical and representational uncertainty in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds) Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 224–38, and Bernard Klein’s analysis of cartographic influences in Spenser, both of which I will consider in some detail later.

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

10

and seventeenth centuries, but the fundamental change in spatial consciousness they brought about and made available to other discourses and disciplines. In considering the influences of this new cartographic awareness I am not so much concerned with the general idea of “mapmindedness,” as I am with the narrower effects of what I am calling the cartographic imagination. By this term I mean to suggest something related to, but significantly different from, the rich implications of the “geographical imagination” posited by Gillies.21 At its most fundamental, Gillies’ term suggests the ways in which a growing awareness of the technically advanced maps of the new geography illuminated the literature, drama, and cultural perspectives of Renaissance England. But whereas Gillies examines the effects of new maps on early modern epistemologies, I focus on the technological changes and imaginative transformations that undergirded those new maps. I consider how the new techniques of surveying and mapping produced a fundamental shift in the way space was imagined and the effects, in turn, of that new spatial consciousness on the ways people thought and wrote. Tom Conley has shed considerable light on the broader epistemological implications of cartography. In his examination of psychoanalysis, writing, and cartography, he examines the relationship of literary works to “changing conditions of information and its dissemination, to new taxonomies, to new relations that individuals hold with space.”22 What I hope to do here draws on a similar awareness of the broader epistemological effects of the new spatial thinking, but in my terms, the cartographic imagination embodies something other than the graphic and psychoanalytic aspects of cartographic writing that Conley examines. I am concerned not with the way printed language reflects a spatial aspect in its “diagrammatic articulations”23 but with the new means of imaginative organization and manipulation enabled by the epistemology of mapped precision and objectivity. In formulating my argument, I want to make as clear a distinction as possible between a cartographic and a geographic emphasis. Where geography, in its broadest terms, concerns the earth and its description, cartography is more narrowly focused on the making of maps. This can often appear as a small distinction and a shifting one. Certainly there is enormous overlap between the two disciplines. But the imaginative focus in each case is distinct. In centering my discussion primarily on cartography I mean to place the emphasis of my explorations on the technologies of representation, rather than on the shape of the earth. Thus, the cartographic imagination is concerned not simply with the ways in which the world is spatially organized, but with the way those discourses of imagined space enable other ideas and concepts to be organized and treated. In examining these new techniques of cartographic representation, I am certainly concerned with their impact on the way people thought about the world. 21

See John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and John Gillies, “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,” in John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds) Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), pp. 203–29. 22 Conley, p. 2. 23 Conley, p. 4.

Introduction

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But more than that, I will consider how a burgeoning sense of the physical world as a precisely measurable and objective space could bring about a fundamental change in the organizational and metaphoric paradigms available to the imagination. “Maps, so to speak, offer themselves to be seen through rather than seen, such that the structure of the mapped object ... is rendered transparent to the gaze of the viewer.”24 But if maps provide a lens through which the viewer can gaze, it is a lens which can be used for examining more than just the earth. A map’s interpretive structures may be applied to imaginative, as well as physical, relationships. The widespread belief that space could be measured, represented and manipulated with mathematical precision mobilizes, I would argue, a set of imaginative techniques and expectations for the manipulation of literary texts and ideas. With the embedding of cartographic representation within an ideological context of mathematical precision comes the potential for a parallel organization of ideas within an analogous matrix of precision and manipulation. The imagination becomes spatialized; ideas and texts become subject to the same rules of organization and control that shape the understanding of the landscape. As Harley suggests, “Once created, map images, like images in art in general, acquired an independent life and survived beyond the society into which they were born.”25 As the newly mathematized cartographic images were put into cultural circulation, they became elements in a larger context of textual exchange and interaction and were, in turn, subject to modification and re-imagination. Maps functioned as a “cartographic lingua franca” that helped to create the possibility of “mental geographies” that went beyond the limited and immediate experience of individuals, and provided new ways for people to imagine places they could not see.26 And in the same way that the mapped images of unseen places were newly organized within a context of certainty and reliability, so too the realm of the imagination, equally unseen, and poised alongside the imagined conception of real, but distant space, drew energy and coherence from the same imaginative paradigm. The new familiarity with maps created not just an imaginative context for visualizing the world, but a new means of organizing wider patterns of thought and imagination using these new visual tools. If, as Harley writes, “the rules of society and the rules of measurement are mutually reinforcing in the same image,”27 then the imagery of maps, their semiotic content, contained a variety of assumptions which colored not just the explicit information of spatial arrangement but other issues of imaginative organization. By accepting the “truth” of the map’s apparently objective rendering of physical space, readers implicitly accepted the range of ideologies and symbolic meanings that undergirded it.

24

John Gillies, “Introduction,” in John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds) Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), p. 29. 25 J. B. Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: British Library, 1983), pp. 22–3. 26 Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography,” p. 25. 27 Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” 6.

12

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

In his elegant exploration of the cultural and ideological constructions of what he has termed “spatial practice,” Michel de Certeau outlines the ways in which people interpret and make use of space. In doing so he draws an important distinction between lieu and espace, between place and space. While place is an area defined by the fixed relationship of objects, space is defined by the changing interactions between subjects inhabiting the area. Where place is fixed and essentially unresponsive, space is created by the active cultural practices that organize it, allowing it to be shaped and defined by the changing relationships of its inhabitants.28 In these terms, then, space is not just an area that can be measured but an area that can be inhabited—a realm of imagined occupation and use. It is in these terms that the development of the English cartographic imagination can best be understood. It derives its new power from the transformation of maps from markers of place to renderings of space. For in the sixteenth century cartographic representations began to evoke spatial relationships that could be both imagined and imaginatively inhabited. They were ordered and organized by the principles of human movement. Buildings were represented in a way that encouraged their imaginative occupation. Streets were offered as regions through which movement could take place. Even unseen spaces, hidden behind buildings or partially revealed, were implicitly open to movement and use, even if just out of sight. Within the cartographic epistemology of the sixteenth century, maps offered the experience of “a relation to the world.”29 The perceived sense of geometrical accuracy and perspectival realism, which appeared first in the new cityscapes of the mid-century and later in smaller-scale maps, allowed the viewer to imagine himself within the scene. And this same sense of what might be called “spatialization” encouraged a new set of expectations which, in the years following, created the epistemological basis for conceiving of imaginative space with the same measure of geometrical precision and mathematical certainty that underlay the physical world. As both Lefebvre and de Certeau suggest, each society offers up its own space for explication, and in doing so offers up its representations of space for consideration and manipulation.30 Space exists within a cultural matrix; it operates “by means of shared understanding, assumptions, and conventions.”31 And as such “space can be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of signification.”32 The specifics of the certain and the readily imaginable are manipulated and juxtaposed to reveal new meanings, allowing new abstract and metaphoric readings based on the most concrete of images. In this context, maps can be seen to constitute a particular form of written language.33 They are a means of inscribing meaning upon the natural order, a way of 28 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendell (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 117–18. 29 de Certeau, p. 117. 30 Lefebvre, p. 31. 31 Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 4. 32 Lefebvre, p. 17. 33 As Jacques Derrida suggests, “If ‘writing’ signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of

Introduction

13

making sense of what Foucault has called “the prose of the world.” As Victor Morgan argues, maps were recognized as a “language of signs” and “no sharp demarcation was made between this class of signs and those to be found in the parallels of history, the metaphors of language and the visual emblemata so popular in the period.”34 In this light the world itself becomes a text, and “nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms.”35 The increasingly accurate and representational images of the Renaissance’s new geography molded the interpretation of both the worldly text and the imaginative representations that comprised the literary texts of the time. The growing familiarity with maps, and with the control and manipulation of the landscape which they encouraged, propelled the symbolic and organizational power of maps into wider cultural circulation. In what amounted to a fundamental shift in the “phenomenology of the imagination,”36 the poetic and epistemological effects of the cartographic imagination created for themselves new ways of imagining the world of abstract ideas. The new maps, expressing in their precision and detail a growing confidence in the measurability of the world, manifested a sense of what Bachelard has called “reverberation.” In a close and reciprocal effect of invigoration and channeling, the new ways of thinking about the world spilled over and enlivened other poetic and imaginative discourses.37 In this light, the developing epistemology of cartographic accuracy can be seen to bring to the sixteenth century new modes of poetic and literary expression, new ways of thinking about ideas and imagery, that were unavailable before. In launching my exploration of these issues, I begin in the fifteenth century with the examination of an unusual saint’s play. Chapter One explores the roots of the English cartographic imagination by arguing that the first development of geographical awareness in England occurred at least half a century earlier than previously thought. While the technological developments that made possible precise and accurate cartography did not occur in England until the early to mid1500s, surprising developments in a popular religious drama of the late fifteenth century reveal a growing awareness of the wider world as a realm that could be understood in spatial as well as spiritual terms. Chapter Two highlights the development of the cartographic imagination, tracing the epistemological transformation that occurs with the spread of new surveying techniques, the mathematization of mapped representation, and the new expectations of spatial accuracy and objectivity that arise in the sixteenth century. The development of the bird’s-eye perspective and the rise of panoramic representations of cities and writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs ... “ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.) (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 44–5. 34 Victor Morgan, “The literary image of globes and maps in early modern England,” in Sarah Tyacke(ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: British Library, 1983), p. 55. 35 Foucault, p. 40. 36 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. xviii. 37 Bachelard, p. xvi.

14

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

coasts in the early 1500s provided new means of creating a visual and imaginative space that actually appeared inhabitable. And with the development of scale maps in the 1540s, a new confidence in the mathematical precision of the represented spaces became possible. This development reached its first wide-scale application in the 1579 atlas of the counties of England and Wales by Christopher Saxton. Capping almost eighty years of cartographic development, these maps introduced new expectations of accuracy and objectivity, and helped provide the materialist and epistemological basis for a new kind of cartographic thinking. Chapter Three begins to explore the new types of imaginative manipulation the cartographic imagination made possible by examining the complex world that Edmund Spenser created in The Faerie Queene. Although he deliberately evoked the nation’s history, focusing on myth and emphasizing the antique nature of his language as a means of tying the poem to England’s medieval past, his imagined landscape reflected not just the allegorical nature of his poetry but, I would argue, the new, more precise and complex nature of cartographic organization. While Spenser’s faerieland, on the surface, displays an emblematic quality, the imaginative density of Spenser’s allegory provided a level of complexity that lent his landscape a new and greater sense of detail and precision. Within the cartographic context provided by the spread of mathematical geography and the recent publication of Saxton’s atlas, Spenser’s wealth of detailed allegorical space was transmuted into an imagined and poetically cartographic space. Appearing as it did within a culture saturated with new cartographic awareness, Spenser’s careful workmanship allowed faerieland to become a parallel of Saxton’s England, and the cartographic precision of Saxton’s atlas allowed Spenser to arrange, within the sharply evoked terrain of faerieland, a whole landscape of moral virtues and poetic models that he sought to impose on his English audience. Chapter Four builds on the previous section by exploring how the ability to imagine and manipulate geographical representations could be used, not just to evoke an imaginary faerieland, but to represent and manipulate a real but distant continent. In his narrative of New World exploration, “The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana,” Sir Walter Raleigh was obliged to produce evidence of all that he hadn’t quite found, so on his return to England he offered his audience a map. The precision and objective certainty of the map helped guarantee the truth of the story that Raleigh told. But in his reliance on the new expectations of precision and objectivity that already clung to cartographic representation, Raleigh was making use of a complex series of rhetorical and geographical strategies put into circulation by Christopher Marlowe. In both Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, Marlowe offered characters of exceptional geographic awareness. Mirroring the very different strategies of these two characters, I will argue, Raleigh struggled to develop his own cartographic rhetoric of proof and illusion that drew on the new spatial consciousness of the period. In the final chapter the cartographic discourse of certainty and precision that became so ingrained in the sixteenth century becomes a new means of negotiating the stress and political upheaval of the seventeenth. The certainty and imaginative control of the physical world embodied in the cartographic imagination appeared in stark contrast to the political and social instability of the English Revolution, when

Introduction

15

even the most solid and fixed aspect of England—the enduring nature of kingship, itself—was disrupted. In Andrew Marvell’s hands, the discourse of cartographic precision provided one of the most unexpected and interesting contexts for coming to grips with this period. As may be apparent by now, a number of criteria help determine the texts I examine in this study. They are literary because I am interested in the way the new spatial consciousness of mathematized geometric precision provided new ways of thinking about images and concepts which were not themselves geographical. That is, I’m concerned with the way the imaginative and metaphorical tools of the cartographic imagination could be used to organize ideas that were not primarily cartographic. At the same time, by looking at the intersection of mapped and literary representations, I hope to illuminate the ways in which these very different texts operated as Derridean supplements, inflecting one another and leaving lingering traces of their interrelations. For while I will be considering the reciprocal influences of a variety of spatial representations, my main focus will be on exploring the effects of these new ways of imagining space on explicitly non-spatial texts. Overall, this range of effects and concerns, from the late fifteenth century to the disruption of the Civil War, is broad and varied, and this selection of texts is not, of course exhaustive. But I have tried to consider a wide range of genres— prose narrative, drama, epic poetry, and lyric—to explore how the cartographic imagination manifested itself in different textual forms. At the same time I have focused on selected cultural moments that reveal a variety of effects and stages in the development and expression of this new spatial consciousness, tracing it through what I take to be the period of its initial development. We can’t expect there to be a single smooth, teleological evolution running through almost two hundred years. But we can see how an increasing consciousness of the measurability and mathematization of cartographic space allowed new means of imaginative precision and rhetorical manipulation in the literature of the period. The early roots of cartographic awareness blossomed into a widespread sense of the power of accurate maps. And this new belief in the objective organization and manipulation of space traced its own path through the imaginative literature of the period. The results are varied, but we can find a common thread. And as the King suggested to Alice, we might as well begin at the beginning and go on until we come to the end. We can see the foundation of all of these new strategies—Spenser’s allegorical manipulations, Marlowe’s imperialistic maneuvers, Raleigh’s careful duplicity, and Marvell’s poetic transformation—in the efforts of the fifteenth-century Digby playwright to make a new place for the world in his drama.

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Chapter 1

“To passe the see in shortt space” Re-Mapping the Medieval World in the Digby Mary Magdalen

Despite a few prominent examples to the contrary, the medieval period was a “stayat-home age.”1 Most people did not travel widely, and for every Margery Kemp and Brother Felix Fabri, whose journeys took them far afield in the pursuit of faith, there were multitudes whose only experience of the world ended a day’s walk from the villages where they were born. Until the end of the fifteenth century, the only awareness of distant lands for most people derived from pilgrimage accounts and from the occasional mappa mundi seen on public display in a cathedral or a bible. And though these maps and descriptions alluded to a wider world, the way they presented it almost completely ignored its physical geography. From medieval England, the world was seen largely as a spiritual construct, and its distant and exotic corners were imagined not as they would be today—a series of coherent regions spatially organized and precisely represented—but as a variety of separate and emblematic locales beyond the reach of precise ordering. This conception of a spiritual world profoundly shaped the experience of travel. In the early Middle Ages, pilgrimage was “the most characteristic form of exotic travel,”2 and for most people the prospect of a distant voyage continued to be rooted in the sacred. The goal of such a journey was the comfort and expiation of a local shrine or, for those hardy enough, even the distant marvels of the Holy Land. To contemplate a pilgrimage was, thus, to look beyond the limits of the earth, and even among the faithful who never left their homes, interest in such travel was widespread and absorbing. Written accounts proliferated—more than five hundred accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage, alone, have survived3—promoting the benefits of visiting sacred sites even as they located the most sacred of these at an unimaginable distance. As Mary Campbell has suggested, by positioning its holiest sites “emphatically Elsewhere,”4 Christianity was the first western religion to force pilgrims to look abroad for religious travel. This new concept of pilgrimage obliged the European Christian to think of the sacred in terms of distance as well as spirituality, and forced 1

Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 9. 2 Campbell, pp. 7, 9. 3 For a detailed discussion of the Jerusalem pilgrimage see Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narrative and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 4 Campbell, p. 18.

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onto the faithful an awareness of the wider world. But at the same time, it tightly controlled the shape that world was given. It is a paradox of the period that, while pilgrimage encouraged the faithful’s thoughts—and sometimes even their bodies—across vast distances, the way in which they conceived of those distances was markedly ungeographic. Geography is characterized by abstraction, by the need to imagine and organize what cannot be seen: the shape of the distant parts of the world in relation to the whole. But in medieval England, the far flung and exotic portions of the earth were effectively unanchored in space. “It simply did not occur to people in the middle ages to use maps to see landscape or the world in a cartographic way.”5 The wider world was imagined as a series of separate and specific locations whose chief importance derived from their relationship to biblical history, rather than their relationship to each other. It is, as Foucault suggests, the distinction between an itinerary and a map,6 which is in turn the distinction between the abstract and the concrete, between a theoretical and an empirical understanding of the earth. The medieval representation of the world divided itself between the specificity of immediate local experience and the vague arrangement of distant and emblematic sites. Within this context, pilgrimage came to define the world in more than its spiritual conception. The distant reaches of the physical world were inextricable from the most sacred imaginings, and the only way to see them clearly was through the lens of faith. In England this only gradually began to change. With the translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia in the early fifteenth century and the expansion of exploration, the beginning of a modern geographical awareness began to take hold in Western Europe among the chief maritime powers. But even as the Portuguese, Italian, and Catalan mapmakers developed increasingly accurate charts and world maps, England remained out of the cartographic main stream, and its own cartographic sophistication lagged far behind the remarkable progress on the continent.7 Throughout the Middle Ages, the popular state of English geographical knowledge was reflected more clearly in the lingering emblematic sensibilities of the thirteenth century than in the new, mathematicallybased maps of southern Europe, and these older mappae mundi continued to exercise a profound epistemological influence all the way to the end of the fifteenth century. As Marcia Kupfer has observed, medieval maps were “encyclopedic in scope,” revealing “the terrestrial sphere as the zone where macrocosm and microcosm interlock: they relate the existence of peoples, even the human body itself, to nature, the cosmic order, and beyond, to divine law.”8 Embodying, as they did, such a totalizing view of the world, these maps can be seen as enacting their own form of Foucauldian cultural control. English maps like the thirteenth-century Hereford Mappa Mundi, entered into “a dialectical process of signification” that functioned “to position viewers—from princes to prelates, cloistered monks to the lay public—within a political, social and 5

P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994). 7 For a detailed history of these development see G. R. Crone, Maps and Their Makers (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1953). 8 Marcia Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames,” Word and Image 10/3 (July–September 1994): 263. 6

‘To passe the see in shortt space’

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spiritual order.”9 The view of the cultural world that they projected was convincing and powerful because it was so inclusive and because its power to impose its view was invisibly embedded in all aspects of the culture. Reinforcing a world view whose organizing principle was spiritual and historical rather than geographic, these medieval maps would have exercised a form of cartographic discipline, bringing their influence to bear on a wide range of cultural manifestations, and fostering in England a largely church-centered and spiritual conception of the world. Into this framework the growing empirical and local awareness of geography intruded not, as we might expect, through the medium of cartography, but through another cultural discourse. For while the technological developments that made precise and accurate cartography possible did not begin to build in England until the sixteenth century, the close examination of a popular religious drama of the late fifteenth century reveals the first, spreading sense of the world as a physical, rather than purely spiritual, place. Critics like John Gillies and Richard Helgerson have centered the rise of English geographical awareness in the Elizabethan period, and with good reason.10 The spread of cartographic technology and the resulting rise of geographical knowledge in England was a product of the mid-sixteenth century. But this drama, offering in its portrayal of sacred events a reflection of the first, incipient awareness of a spatially conceived and organized world, reveals that the roots and reflections of popular geographical awareness in England, what might be seen as the incipient groundwork of the cartographic imagination, were already being laid at least a half-century earlier than expected. In many ways, a popular saint’s play is the last text in which you’d expect to find the intrusion of the secular world. Early English drama, from the Quem Quaeritis plays onward, was fundamentally rooted in sacred concerns, focusing on the events of biblical history and the spiritual journey of mankind rather than on earthly adventures. Even as dramatic forms grew more elaborate, expanding their focus and incorporating overtly secular situations and characters, the ultimately spiritual foundation endured. The world, though necessarily the site of dramatic action, remained a mere platform for the demonstration of spiritual progress. But in the late medieval saint’s play, Mary Magdalen, preserved in the fifteenth-century Digby Manuscript, the focus on spirituality grows more complex. While the play seems to offer itself as a fairly typical saint’s life, with Mary’s sufferings and sins gradually giving way to her spiritual growth and redemption, the details of staging and dramatic action reflect a new understanding of the physical, spatial world. Mary’s journey toward her sacred self, an activity that would be expected to reflect the Church’s emphasis on the spiritual shape of creation, instead projects a new awareness of the physical world through which she moves. Mary’s spiritual progress is increasingly situated within an overtly spatial context, effectively highlighting the geographical journey as much as the spiritual one. 9

Kupfer, 279. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Gillies, “Introduction: Elizabethan Drama and the Cartographizations of Space,” in John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds) Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998): 19–45. 10

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20

In so doing the play can be seen to foster some of the earliest cracks in the controlling discipline of spiritual cartography, helping to open late medieval England to the possibilities of a broader world that could be conceptualized in terms of its physical spaces as well as its spiritual component. Such a significant transformation comes about through a variety of influences. The play’s original locale in East Anglia, the position of drama within fifteenth-century English culture, and the history of mapmaking in England all conspire to make the Digby Mary Magdalen a less surprising vehicle for a new geographic awareness than at first it might seem. And taken together, the cultural context and dramatic form of this play provide evidence of the first roots of the cartographic imagination, establishing the cultural and epistemological framework upon which later developments will build. “A peculiarly English genre” The majority of dramatic texts surviving from the Middle Ages focus more on charting the annals of creation and salvation, than on charting lands and oceans. The emphasis of plot and action is much less on this life than the next, and in the ongoing exploration of the relationship between God and man, the physical world is seen—if it is noticed at all—as a place of spiritual danger and chaos in which “the perpetual intervention of God was the only guiding law.”11 This is a world organized around God’s power and intervention: the world, in short, of the medieval mappae mundi. Mappa mundi meant not map but cloth of the world—there was no medieval word for map as such—and this textile metaphor suggests the semiotic interweaving that comprised these representations. Maps like the Hereford Mappa Mundi offered a complex and vivid representation of the world, but it was one less concerned with physical geography than with spiritual history. Until the late fifteenth century, when geographical information came to dominate, world maps tended to feature a whole range of information, from the zoological to the anthropological, from the moral to the historical. Images from classical bestiaries, frequently scattered across the landscape, would have been read both for their evocation of wonder and for the moral tales often associated with them, while the illustrations of biblical sites and events provided a visual rendering of familiar religious narratives and “blended concepts of both time and space as a context for understanding the Christian life.”12 Although various examples of these maps survive from different parts of Europe, they were in many ways “a peculiarly English genre.”13 Of the large, detailed mappae mundi that survive from this period, all share English associations,14 and as a group they provide an excellent sense of the geographical knowledge in England well into the late Middle Ages. 11

Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), p. 14. David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 511. 13 Harvey, Medieval Maps, p. 25. For a complete list of extant world maps from the Middle Ages see Marcel Destombes, Mappemondes A.D. 1200–1500 (Amsterdam: la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de l’Union Geographique Internationale, 1964). 14 These world maps were not all drawn in England. The Ebstorf Map was unquestionably drawn in Germany, but it is likely to have been commissioned by an Englishman, Gervase of 12

‘To passe the see in shortt space’

21

It might seem strange to take, as a measure of fifteenth-century geographical awareness, a species of map dating from two hundred years before, but England lagged far behind the continent in geographical technology. And while there were significant improvements in Continental mapmaking and a growing cartographic sophistication arising from the expansion of maritime travel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these developments occurred in centers of cartographic advancement—Venice, Spain, and Portugal—and only gradually extended, in any general way, to England. For one thing, these new charts, being both economically valuable and politically sensitive, are unlikely to have been allowed a wide circulation. The more decorative versions that survive today would probably have spent their lives locked away in their owners’ libraries, carefully preserved from unauthorized copying, while the working copies would have been even more zealously protected.15 And even when word of the new cartographic discoveries made it across the channel to England, the maps themselves were slow to follow. Although “seamen and merchants of the Bristol Channel entry were already learning from the Portuguese of the Azores to suspect a wider world,”16 England remained well behind the continent in geographical thought, and even as late as 1520 English sailors possessed no sea-charts “except a very few drawn by foreigners.”17 Moreover, the very dominance of the old style mappae mundi in England helped foreclose new ideas, reinforcing a resistance to change—what Skelton has called “the tendency towards inertia in the continued use of cartographic images”—that kept out-of-date maps in use long after they might have been corrected in the light of experience.18 Maps based on these early medieval models were still being produced and copied in England all the way into the sixteenth century.19 When the fourteenthcentury Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden was translated into English by Caxton in 1480, it contained a mappa mundi compiled not from geographical experience but from a host of ancient sources that continued to reflect a staunchly medieval conception of the world. And another English manuscript from the same period, in the collection of the Huntington Library, contains a simplistic world map about three inches in diameter, drawn amid a series of astronomical charts.20 The drawing is schematic, with no effort to differentiate any of the features. The three continents are labeled, and England is identified with a name, but the map makes no attempt to reflect any high degree of geographical accuracy or even, it seems, geographical concern. Tilbury, living in Germany at the time. See Crone, Maps and Their Makers, p. 27. 15 See Crone, Maps and Their Makers, p. 30; and E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography 1485–1583 (London: Methuen Co. Ltd, 1930), p. 11. 16 Taylor, p. 4. 17 Edward Lynam, British Maps and Map-Makers (London: Collins, 1947), p. 13. 18 “We may note ... two behaviour-patterns which pervade the work of early mapmakers: first, the willingness to admit geographical representations, often conventional in form, derived from hypothesis, conjecture or mere rumour; and second, the tendency towards inertia in the continued use of cartographic images, whose life was often extended long after they could have been corrected or removed in the light of experience.” R. A. Skelton, Looking at an Early Map (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Libraries, 1965), p. 14. 19 See Taylor, pp. 13–14. 20 Huntington Library, Huntington Manuscript HM64.

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Even as late as 1503 a reference book known as Arnold’s Chronicle contained a section entitled The Copy of a Carete Cumposynge the Circuit of the World and the Cummpace of every Yland, which, as E. G. R. Taylor observes, may safely be taken “as fulfilling the needs of the English reading public.”21 It amounts to nothing more than a verbal mappa mundi based entirely on ancient and second-hand authorities such as Aristotle, Isidore, and Ptolemy. Within the isolated geographical culture of medieval England, out-moded mappae mundi spawned more mappae mundi in a sealed intertextual bell jar.22 And in a culture where mapping was not widespread, the few examples that were available to a general audience would have had a profound effect. Such maps, printed in bibles or displayed in churches, would have provided the only cartographic view of the world available to most people. In Benedict Anderson’s terms, these maps would have helped structure the imagined community of English medieval Christianity. As he suggests, “We are faced with a world in which the figuring of imagined reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural. Christendom assumed its universal form through a myriad of specificities and particularities: this relief, that window, this sermon, that tale, this morality play, that relic.”23 And among this list certainly belongs the range of mappae mundi available at the time. Placed, as they were, within the authoritative context of the Church and its doctrine, their understanding would have spread with the spread of Christian doctrine.24 In this light, then, if we are to imagine the general state of England’s geographical knowledge in the second half of the fifteenth century we must return to the early heyday of English cartography, to the iconic example of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (see Figure 1.1). Drawn about 1285, this large, beautiful, and intricate document stands as a useful paradigm of the likely state of geographical knowledge, at least at the level of popular consciousness, throughout the Middle Ages. To understand this map is to go a long way toward understanding how the world looked to the mass of English people through the end of the fifteenth century. The Hereford map is set in a circle fifty-two inches in diameter, surrounded by the points of the compass and figurative representations of the twelve winds. Within the limits of the ancient Roman Empire, for which classical sources existed, a large number of cities are shown, conventionally pictured and named. But across the rest of the world most of the space is filled, not with place names or locations, but with innumerable little illustrations and snippets of written information, most of it

21

Taylor, p. 6. My thanks to Claire Sponsler for this very apt metaphor. 23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, revised 1991), p. 23. 24 The appearance of many of the extant mappae mundi of the period within religious contexts suggests the likelihood that there would have been a general awareness of them spread through religious observance and linked to an understanding of religious doctrine. The Hereford Mappa Mundi, for example, was likely displayed in Hereford Cathedral, while the Ebstorf world map was drawn for a convent at Ebstorf, near Luneburg. Another world map was bound into a thirteenth-century psalter. See Harvey, Medieval Maps. 22

‘To passe the see in shortt space’

Figure 1.1:

23

The Hereford Mappa Mundi. Drawn about 1285, this world map suggests the level of popular geographic knowledge in England through to the end of the fifteenth century. Reproduced with the permission of The Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust.

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

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more mythological and religious than geographic.25 There are legendary birds and monstrous beasts, mermaids, amazons, and Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt. A pelican feeds its infants with a meal of its own blood while a swordfish swims past carrying its sword in a scabbard by its side, and a phoenix stands alone beside the wandering route of Exodus. The minotaur’s maze fills the rough outline of Crete, while an armed man rides a crocodile across an island in the Nile, and two cannibals argue over the butchered bodies of their parents beside an image of the golden fleece. And around this whole complex collection of stories and scenes, four golden letters—MORS—spell out the Latin word for death, evoking the central spiritual message of the map: “that Jerusalem and the cross are the focal point of a world dominated by death and the Day of Judgement.”26 Commissioned for the Hereford Cathedral, the map has its roots in the Church in more ways than one. It may originally have been intended as a decorative background for an altar in the cathedral, and there is even some evidence that it was meant to be shown as part of a sacred triptych of the annunciation.27 But regardless of where it was hung, the map was certainly designed for prominent, public display, and along with other, similar maps, would have served, “not only the scholastic training of the elite in convent and cathedral schools, but also the moral edification of the lay public at large.”28 With its depiction of Christian history superimposed on a representation of the world, the map would have been a means “of imparting and sustaining the Faith as well as of recording knowledge.”29 But in creating this rendering of biblical history and spiritual order, geographical precision was all but beside the point. Certainly the map’s practical usefulness would have been decidedly slight. It was too large to carry as a portable guide and would have been no more helpful than a globe in planning the day-to-day details of an actual journey. This is not to say that it is technically unsophisticated—even at its creation the Hereford Map made no claims to current geographical knowledge—but that the focus of its impressive detail is on the emblematic and historical arrangment of space rather than any attempt at cartographic, much less mathematical, precision. There was no effort to draw the map to a common scale, and little attempt to give a detailed view of the coastline. Islands were often represented conventionally, with less regard to their actual appearance than to the shape of objects they were somehow thought to resemble, so that the island of Sardinia, for example, takes on the unexpected shape of a footprint.30 The western limit of the known world is marked by the even-then mythical Pillars of Hercules, and surrounding the whole expanse is the great outer ocean studded with islands, many of them apocryphal. Various parts of the map are 25

For a detailed description see P. D. A. Harvey, Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 26 A. L. Moir, The World Map in Hereford Cathedral (Hereford: The Cathedral, 1971), p. 24. 27 See Harvey, Mappa Mundi, pp. 14–15. “This would account for the more than normal emphasis on Christian features in its design, with the spectacular Christ in Majesty at the top, Jerusalem and Calvary at the centre and small pictures of Adam and Eve, the ark, Abraham, Moses and sketches from moralising bestiaries.” Moir, p. 8. 28 Kupfer, p. 276. 29 G. R. Crone, The Hereford World Map (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1948), p. 4. 30 For a more detailed discussion see Crone, The Hereford World Map, pp. 6–7.

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clearly redrawn from earlier models without regard for accuracy. The British Isles are deliberately re-shaped for reasons of aesthetic practicality rather than accuracy, with the East Anglian coast trimmed back merely to allow it to fit within the circular frame.31 And because of a lack of first-hand geographical information, most of the space on the map would have been empty if it hadn’t been filled with drawings from popular histories and bestiaries. But something more than simply a shortage of geographical knowledge is at work here. The choices evident in this beautiful and detailed rendering of the world reflect a range of priorities extending well beyond concerns with cartographic accuracy. The Hereford map represents “a view of history and eschatology,” and the representational conventions that shaped it are “the product of an intellectual schema, rather than the faute de mieux results of geographical ignorance.”32 Its shortcomings in spatial precision were not simply the results of technological inadequacies, but of its likely function and purpose. For if it fell short in geographical accuracy, it succeeded admirably as a picture book in which men could experience the wonders of the world without leaving home. In a time when few people could read, it would have been the function of these maps—along with pictures, murals, sculptures, and paintings—to provide instruction in the cornerstones of Christian belief. The map’s author, like any medieval map-maker, “was interested first in providing a guide to readers of Biblical history.”33 And the result was an historical document as much as a geographical one: an attempt to place England within classical and Christian history as well as within physical space. In modern terms the Hereford mappa mundi is less a map than a complex visual tale. In the lower left corner the map’s author wrote in French, “Let all who have this estoire, or shall hear or see or read it, pray to Jesus in God for pity on Richard of Haldingham and Lafford who has made and drawn it, that joy in heaven be granted to him.” The map is thus presented from the beginning as part history, part story. Not so very different in intent from the graphic novels of today, it may best be understood as a kind of spatial narrative, “an open framework where all kinds of information might be placed.”34 Ancient events are laid out synchronically, arranged in space rather than time. As Moir suggests, “it is an illustrated encyclopaedia, literally an all-round education.”35 The extensive notes and annotations in both Latin and French imply a literate readership drawn from clerical circles and the aristocracy, while the pictorial and emblematic content would have appealed to the mass audience. As an allegorical and moral work, such a combination of words and pictures would have 31

“Glancing at the British Isles the first impressions are that the east and south coasts are artificially rounded off; the different countries are in separate compartments; rivers are important as boundaries and cathedral cities are much in evidence…. On examining the map in greater detail it is clear that the British Isles are on a larger scale than the other countries of Europe; this suggests that what we see is an excerpt from a large scale map, and as there was no space to include it all, East Anglia and the south coast were pruned back.” Moir, p. 16. 32 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Reading the World: The Hereford mappa mundi,” Parergon 9/1 (June 1991): 123. 33 Crone, The Hereford World Map, p. 5. 34 Harvey, Medieval Maps, p. 19. 35 Moir, p. 5.

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provided “a form of enlightenment or diversion for the literate, who could read them, or for the illiterate, to whom they could be explained, conveying interesting, even entertaining, information in a learned and pious setting.”36 While it is likely that some maps—expensive products of largely ecclesiastical institutions—would have had only a limited circulation among the elite, literate population, the Hereford Map, displayed as it was in the cathedral, would have reached a much larger and more general audience. With its vivid and accessible imagery, the map may well have served as an aid to preaching, and as Letts notes, “the cities, rivers, mountains and above all the strange beasts and monsters so dear to the medieval artist are represented with a directness and skill which must have carried conviction to the simplest minds.”37 In contributing to the moral education of the general lay public, the Hereford map, like any mappa mundi of the time, would have passed on its own particular understanding of the world.38 The map’s audience would have absorbed not only a world of Christian history but an understanding of their relationship to that world, an understanding defined not in geographical terms but in the spiritual terms that the church imposed. Rather than reinforcing a perception of the world as an organized physical space to be traveled and discovered, mappae mundi may effectively have encouraged the very opposite. It has been argued that the Hereford Map might have been used to prepare pilgrims for their voyage, and some critics have seen within its sprawling detail hitherto unsuspected information about pilgrimage routes and itineraries.39 But what the map offers is a very limited and particular kind of information, and given the sense of the world it projects, it would more likely have served not to prepare for a voyage but to replace one, to provide an imaginary journey in place of the physical one. The map offers visual representations of individual sites—the walls of Jerusalem, the city of Constantinople—but no practical information about getting from one to the other. By representing the pilgrimage routes in ways that would allow people to visualize them, without actually aiding in finding or following them, the map would effectively stand in for the pilgrimage itself. Viewers of the map could derive a complex and wholistic view of the world without ever leaving Hereford Cathedral. They could take an imaginative voyage rather than an actual one. As Wogan-Browne suggests, “the map could be seen as endorsing contemplation of the world within the framework of redemption and judgement as the preferred alternative to voyaging about in its topography.”40 The mappa mundi can then be seen not as the means of traveling around the world, but as an alternative to it, helping to move people from

36

Harvey, Mappa Mundi, p. 14. Malcolm Letts, The Pictures in the Hereford Mappa Mundi (Hereford: The Cathedral, 1971), p. 29. 38 Kupfer, p. 276. 39 See Crone, Hereford World Map, and Moir. “Only recently G. R. Crone has discovered evidence that there may be unsuspected information about routes and itineraries, not only the wanderings of the Israelites to the Promised Land, or the journeys of St. Paul but important trade routes such as the Voie Regardane to the south of France, wool-trade routes and an itinerary to the Spanish shrine of St. James of Compostella.” Moir, p. 8. 40 Wogan-Browne, 133. 37

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an understanding of the world as a realm of physical travel to a more purely spiritual representation of the encompassing power of God. But even as this spiritual conception of the world was diligently maintained, new geographic ideas were nonetheless entering into cultural circulation. The effects of maritime travel were making themselves felt, particularly in southeastern England where the wool trade with the continent was increasingly crucial to the local economies. In East Anglia—the most likely source of the Digby manuscript— evidence of the new geographical understanding of the world would have made itself felt on a daily basis. A concern with area drainage, imbanking, and pasture rights would have encouraged the need for local cartographic plans, and in fact, almost a quarter of the local charts that survive from the medieval period derive from this part of the country. It is “the one area of England where there seems to have existed a real tradition of local maps in the Middle Ages.”41 At the same time, as Gail Gibson notes, the culture of the region “was influenced increasingly in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by East Anglia’s close economic and cultural links with northern Europe; indeed Norfolk and Suffolk were in some ways closer allied to Flanders than to London ... Norwich [was] a city that swarmed, like the other East Anglian ports, with Flemish merchants and sea captains and with continental pilgrims to Walsingham.”42 This melting pot of different nationalities would have brought with it an increasing awareness of the larger world and a growing view of the world as a geographical space whose distances could be crossed. With the daily evidence of this practical, empirical knowledge, a new understanding of the world began to gnaw away at the edges of the Church’s cartographic discipline, producing new geographical insights in even the most overtly religious of dramas. The World of Mary Magdalen The Digby Mary Magdalen is one of only four English saints’ plays surviving from the fifteenth century. It is a sprawling and often unwieldy play that focuses on a series of pilgrimages tracing Mary’s descent into worldliness and lechery, her subsequent repentance, and her ultimate rise to grace. Mary travels from the company of vice—personified by Pride, Flesh, Lechery, and, most interestingly, World—to the heavenly company of God, while other figures, principally the king and queen of Marseilles, find their way to holiness with Mary’s help. This sort of slow and difficult spiritual growth is a common currency of the genre, but what is remarkable about Mary Magdalen is the way the spiritual development of the main characters is mirrored in the sprawling variety of geographical settings. There are repeated journeys across the sea to Rome, Jerusalem, Marseilles, and even to an unnamed island in the middle of the ocean that becomes the site of one of the play’s 41

“It was a long-lived tradition: even if we ignore the thirteenth century map of Wildmore Fen (No. 3) as possible a chance intruder, it still extends from the mid- or late fourteenth century to the late fifteenth.” R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 34. 42 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 22.

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miracles. The entire breadth of the known geographical globe is juxtaposed against the spiritual world of Mary’s rise to grace. In the process, the anonymous playwright marks out a crucial bifurcation between the negative connotations of the World as the inevitable site of sin—the companion of Flesh and the Devil—and the good and promising associations of a world increasingly coming under human control, and thus increasingly seen, not just as a place, but as a large and potentially mappable space.43 This growing awareness of the larger world, like the popular drama of the fifteenth century, was the product of a fundamentally religious society increasingly influenced by the rise of an incipient urban, bourgeois culture.44 In her examination of the French Passion of Jean Michel, which like the Digby play tells the story of Mary Magdalen, Kathleen Ashley finds a thematic emphasis on a growing concern with the material world. “Michel’s popular Passion dramatizes a bourgeois ideology, whose major component is the right use of the goods of the world. ... What we find in the mysteres is an emphasis, not on the rejection of the world and its goods, but on the proper use of one’s wealth for pious ends.”45 Ashley sees this validation particularly in the rising importance of Martha over her sister Mary as a representative of the active rather than contemplative life. The choice between Martha and Mary, which is dramatized by the French playwright, “is not simply between life in worldly sin and renunciation of the world. Instead, Michel dramatizes a choice between false and true models of worldly behavior—between vicious and virtuous worldliness.”46 In the Michel Passion Jesus reassures Martha that she will receive celestial rewards for her service on earth. “Her earthly largess will be recompensed in heaven,” thus demonstrating that “material wealth, rightly dispensed, can accrue to one’s spiritual profit.”47 In a cultural context that stressed the spiritual life and downplayed the importance of the physical material world, this late medieval drama offered a welcome model for an active acceptance and participation in the material world. At the same time in England, a similar movement toward the acceptance of the material world was taking hold, though in a slightly different form. For the English playwright and audience, the choice between good and evil worldliness extended beyond the simple choice between Mary and Martha. If Martha as “the hostess of the Savior” was an emblem of active service and virtuous worldliness—the keeper 43

For a discussion of the distinction between place and space see the Introduction of this book and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 117–18. 44 Kathleen A. Ashley, “The Bourgeois Piety of Martha in the Passion of Jean Michel,” Modern Language Quarterly 45/3 (September 1984): 227. 45 Ashley, 228. 46 In Michel’s play the scene based on Luke 10:38–42 in which Martha rebukes Mary for sitting at Jesus’ feet instead of working is recast to place Martha as the heroine. “Michel departs from exegetical tradition to present Martha rather than Mary as the heroine of the scene. It is she, as representative of the active life, who dominates dramatically: in 170 lines (16183–352), Mary has only one speech of six lines, and her brother Lazarus one of four, while Martha has five speeches and is addressed at least eight different times by Jesus and his disciples, who compliment her on the dinner, thank her for her hospitality, and recognize her service as a paradigm of almsgiving.” Ashley, 229. 47 Ashley, 234.

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of the home and hearth—her sister Mary became in the Digby play an emblem of a kind of non-domestic virtue and a different kind of worldliness.48 In keeping with the desire to balance material success and spirituality, the Mary Magdalen makes room for virtuous activity, not just in the realm of the sacred, but in the geographical world as well. Such a model for the active acceptance and participation in the material world must surely have been welcome in a culture both increasingly concerned with the accrual of wealth and unable to escape the anxieties that such wealth carried. East Anglia in the fifteenth century was experiencing a new rise of material prosperity as a result of the expanding wool trade, but along with the new wealth came a desire for spiritual reassurance. Surviving wills of the period reveal wealthy citizens trying to ease last minute anxieties about the lurking possibilities of hell and purgatory by leaving large sums of money for masses to be said and churches to be built. The very richness of these so-called “wool churches” suggests the degree of their patrons’ uneasiness. As Gibson notes, “The straining church architecture of the East Anglian Perpendicular style has been called propitiating and slightly nervous, somewhat over concerned with materialistic demonstration of a merchant’s old piety and new wealth.”49 Certainly the widespread evidence of such rich bequests suggests a growing hope on the part of wealthy men and women that they might derive heavenly benefits from their earthly gains and somehow balance their spiritual and financial accounts. But the larger issues of this cultural moment are even more complex. A society with such a stake in foreign trade and with increasing prosperity derived from markets outside of England would need to find justification not only for their newfound wealth, but for the means of acquiring that wealth. They would need to make room within the spiritual shape of the world for the kinds of practical geography that made trade and shipping possible. Some way had to be found to re-map the spiritual order of good and evil onto the realm of countries and oceans, or rather to map the way the world needed to be seen for the purposes of trade—as a cartographic realm, ordered according to physical relationships, trade routes, and travel—within the approved and accepted paradigm of the sacred and the secular. And for this purpose, the East Anglian playwright could have found no figure more appropriate than Mary Magdalen. For what is important about the East Anglia of this period is not simply that its citizens honored Mary Magdalen, but that they had very good reasons to. The figure of the Magdalen has long been emotionally and symbolically charged. As a redeemed prostitute turned saint she provides the quintessential bridge between the secular and the holy, for though Mary, and the material world that she embodies, fall into sin in this play, that sinfulness can be redeemed. More particularly, in the Digby play this progress from sin to penitence to redemption is laid out in a way that stresses Mary’s place in the world. For in the course of her development and spiritual regeneration Mary becomes an emblem of redeemed worldliness. And in the act of redeeming the fallen nations of the globe, she effectively recuperates a vision of the world as a physical place which can be understood and described and mapped. 48 49

Ashley, 233. Gibson, p. 26.

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In the Digby Mary Magdalen we find perhaps the first attempt to represent a new kind of geographical imagination in a traditionally spiritual and dramatic form, offering an implied distinction between the World as sinful and the World as the location of human spiritual accomplishments. In the frankly religious story of the saint’s life and apostolic works of preaching and conversion, the spiritual life of Mary is placed within a world marked by its spatial breadth and organization. The geographical world provides a means of showing the widespread importance of Mary’s spiritual work, but at the same time it locates these holy works more explicitly in the physical world. The sites of miracles are no longer essentially literary or abstract. Rather they are arranged around one another, relative to one another, in a way that introduces a sense of scale and material order. The action and settings of the play suggest a kind of superimposition of a geographical impulse onto the underlying spiritual structure. The figure of the Magdalen is “closely associated with the idea of the Church itself,” and this identification meant that her character would symbolically include the members of the audience in the spiritual action of the play. But if Mary portrays an available and familiar model on which the audience is expected to base its own behavior, the precise nature of this behavior bears closer examination. The sprawling action of the drama inserts its saintly heroine into a wide variety of staged settings. And the play’s performance on the East Anglian place-and-scaffold stage, with its series of stages arranged around a central open space, would have surrounded and encompassed the audience, forcing upon them the drama’s constant emphasis on travel. Throughout this play, every aspect of the saint’s spiritual development conveys a sense of movement. She moves into the world, through the world, and then out of the world again, from one scaffold to another, across the broad space of the platea. And if we are to see in these far-ranging travels Mary’s redemption of the world, we must recognize that it is a very particular version of the world that is being redeemed. The play is centered on the city of Jerusalem, and all other settings are located in relation to this point. Such an arrangement reflects the organization of medieval mappae mundi, most frequently drawn with Jerusalem at the center, and it mirrors the sense of spiritual organization they impose upon the world. But at the same time the play gives voice to a newer awareness of physical geography by attempting to give to the world a spatial organization within the dramatic and legendary framework. It presents the material world, not just as the sinful, fallen realm which must be converted to be saved—the world of the Hereford Mappa Mundi—but as a geographical space in which travel and events take place—the worldview of an incipient cartographic imagination. Almost from the beginning, the World serves as a focal point of this play. It is introduced early on as a personified character, and in his opening speech World proclaims his own importance.

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I am the World, worthiest that evyr God wrowth! And also I am the primatt portature Next heveyn, if the trewth be sowth— And that I jugge me to Skriptur— And I am he that lengest shal induere, And also most of dominacion. (ll. 305–10)50 World presents himself in relation to God, and rests his claim to primacy, second only to heaven, on the scriptural accounts of the order of creation. He emphasizes his age and durability, his power and “dominacion” in the context of the drama. And he becomes another in the sizeable list of sovereigns claiming power in this play, as he says: Make swich to know my soverreinte, And than they shal be fain to make supplicacion if that they stond in ony nesessite. (331–3) But though this character displays the breadth of his power and influence, he is not an emblem of the geographical world, but of the world of fortune and chance. If I be his foo, whoo is abyll to recure? For the whele of fortune with me hath sett his senture. (311–12) And to make sure we don’t mistake the negative attributes of this World, he is introduced into the play in very bad company—that of Pride and Covetousness. As personified, the world is not just the secular world, but the embodiment of sin and “the personification of all that is giddy and unstable.”51 As such, the World is presented solely in order that it may be disdained, both by Mary and the audience. It is, from the beginning of the play, a character and a place, in need of redemption. But Mary Magdalen can be seen as a play of the world in more than one respect: not just the world as an actor, but the world as a stage. In the course of this drama the world goes from being a personified minion of the devil to a grand staging area for Christian redemption and human accomplishment. Clifford Davidson suggests quite rightly that the personification of the World is ultimately rejected and even defeated by Mary,52 but at the same time we must recognize how thoroughly a very 50

All references to the play are taken from “Digby Mary Magdalene,” in David Bevington (ed.) Medieval Drama, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). 51 Clifford Davidson, “The Middle English Saint Play and Its Iconography,” in Clifford Davidson (ed.) The Saint Play in Medieval Europe (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), p. 78. 52 Davidson sees the play in large part as an attempt to recuperate the world from pride. As he suggests, “Pride involves an attempt to assert one’s self-sufficiency. Ultimately the proud person’s principal concern is with himself or herself.... So too is Mary Magdalene in the play caught in Pride’s snare when she turns from her castle of virtue to move toward the city of Jerusalem where she will engage in the sports of that city. The other sins will follow in due course.” Davidson, p. 4.

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different sense of the world is also evoked, not as personification of evil but as an enactment of the geographical. And it is this other, physical world of distance and breadth that is embraced by the play’s heroine. In the way she imaginatively maps her travels and spiritual accomplishments onto the geographical world, Mary may be seen as making room for the physical, secular world within the spiritual realm of the mappa mundi. This self-conscious representation of geographical breadth is particularly striking given previous versions of this saint’s story. Although the subject of Mary and her adventures had been presented in other forms, this particular emphasis on her voyages throughout the world had not. Her story was widely popular, and versions were collected in the Latin Legenda Aurea and in vernacular works like the South English Legendary, Mirk’s Festival, and Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, but none of these versions included the Digby play’s emphasis on Mary’s deliberate travels. The evocation of the courts of Tiberius, Herod, and Pilate—and the messenger who runs between them—is peculiar to this play, and only in this play is Mary’s decision to travel to Marseilles a deliberate choice, and not just the product of chance.53 The dramatized voyaging and the emphasis on exotic and distant lands, not just narratively evoked but actually embodied in different scaffolds and locales of the set, suggest the central, specific role that a geographic understanding of the world has come to play. The spatial relationship of the world is evoked, and the need to understand and imagine the physical and geographical context of spiritual travel is implicit in the action. As demonstrated in modern re-stagings, the place-and-scaffold method of presentation would have emphasized the breadth of the world being traversed.54 The movement of characters from stage to stage across a broad platea, sometimes even taking to a “boat” to move through the crowds from one location to another, brings to the forefront the implied distances between sites of action. It is not simply that the playing area becomes as “a metaphor for the world.”55 Rather, the play obliges the audience to conceive of the world in physical terms. The world of Mary Magdalen would have appeared to the audiences as a world of distances and physical relationships, of voyages and a kind of implicit navigation between stages. And this geographical nature is continually evoked in the sheer breadth of setting and action. From Rome to Jerusalem to Betheny to Marseilles and back to Jerusalem, the characters move back and forth. As Victor Scherb suggests, the action of the play, specifically the movement of messenger figures, works to associate the staging area with the entire world so that, as Mary’s Christian message is spread, “the players and the audience progressively become able to inhabit a sacralized space.”56 But the ultimate product of all this movement goes beyond this single effect. It is not just 53

For a more detailed discussion see Victor I. Scherb, “Worldly and Sacred Messengers in the Digby Mary Magdalen,” English Studies 73/1 (February 1992): 5. 54 For a detailed description of the staging of the Digby Mary Magdalen see John McKinnell, “Staging the Digby Mary Magdalen,” Medieval English Theatre 6/2 (December 1984): 127–53. 55 Scherb, 2. 56 Scherb, 2.

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the space of the play that becomes sacralized, but the world as a whole. The sacred effects of Mary’s travels are superimposed on a geographical space, and the result is to valorize that space and differentiate it from the fleshly and sinful world/World. Messengers move all over, demonstrating not just what Scherb sees as a desire for sovereignty but the breadth of geographical space in which the play unfolds. And within this space, movement itself becomes a kind of absolute, spiritual good as Mary leads a procession of action and characters to all the known reaches of the world. She represents a spirit of pilgrimage, but in a way that sets her distinctly apart from the pilgrimages of the time. A New World of Pilgrimage In the Middle Ages, pilgrimage accounts provided a vicarious experience of the world, both for those planning to go and for that not inconsiderable audience who simply wanted to read about the travels of others. But like the mappae mundi they evoked, their emphasis was not on geography. Their purpose was not to lay out the world in spatial terms, nor to provide an accurate representation of physical organization. They concentrated on the importance of individual sites and blurred the spaces between. And even the written guides and itineraries, particularly to Jerusalem, largely described the experience of standing on holy soil, rather than the location of that soil in the larger world. The important sites of Christian history were marked and venerated as symbols of the events that occurred there, but with very little attempt to organize them cartographically. They were separate and specific places, but their value lay in their relation to scripture, not their relation to each other. This is seen clearly in a 1350 account that offered a step-by-step progress through the holy city, providing what amounted to a guided tour of the past. “Thence you shall enter the chapel of blessed Mary, and there you shall find a portion, four feet long, of the pillar to which Jesus was bound, and where He was scourged; it is placed as it were in the partition wall on the right-hand side as you go into the chapel ... . And also in the same chapel is the place in front of the altar where a certain dead man was revived by virtue of the holy cross immediately after its glorious discovery in the presence of Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine.”57 The directions give the illusion of specificity and precision, without actually being precise. They provide the means of visualizing space, but not of organizing it. The sites of biblical occurrence—Christ’s scourging, the place where soldiers cast lots for his cloak—are mentioned, but not located in space, described but not mapped. And they continue in the same vein. “Then you go out of the church, and you come to a barrier, and near there is the place where the Lord Jesus appeared to His disciples. ... Then you come to a church in the Valley of Jehoshaphat where is the tomb of the glorious Virgin very deep down, forty-eight steps leading to it.”58 Throughout the description there is an intriguing combination of imprecision and particularity. The uncertainty 57

Guidebook to Palestine (Circ. A.D. 1350), J. H. Bernard, D.D. (trans.), (London: Palestine Pilgrim’s Text Society, 1894), p. 6. 58 Guidebook to Palestine, pp. 12, 18.

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of location—“near there,” “then you come to a church”—is juxtaposed to the specificity of exactly forty-eight steps. There are locations of striking precision and vividness arranged in a vague and structureless space. In each case the purpose of these descriptions has less to do with locating a position within the larger world than with making the experience of standing there vivid to the reader. The precision of the details effectively ties each physical location to the spiritual events of the Old and New Testaments, without organizing the individual sites in space. In this way the whole experience of pilgrimage—with its earthly voyage and spiritual goal—effectively opens up a sense of the world only to foreclose it. As Mary B. Campbell suggests, “Pilgrimage ... could be seen as an intensely ambivalent experience: the real destination, the celestial Jerusalem, is unreachable, and the arrival at what might have come to seem, from far away, sacred territory would only make more vivid the absence of sacred events and presences from the mundane world of which, after all, it is a part.”59 Since the focus of these pilgrimages is ultimately on spiritual events long past, the physical locations are powerful not for what they contain but for what they lack. The pilgrim’s journey reveals the land, but only as a text in which the events of Christian history occurred. These events derive their meaning from their strict adherence to ancient events and scriptural truth, rather than from any connection to the here and now. As Campbell describes in her account of the fourth-century pilgrim, Egeria, it is never the land itself that matters.60 Egeria is not interested in organizing all the locations in her narrative, but simply in establishing the existence of each one and its role in the Christian past. A valley might be described as “vast and very flat” but there is no attempt to conjure up a more precise and evocative description. For Egeria, the only importance of a place lies in the weight of history it carries. “The plain matters as a sacred locale; what is describable about it is that it is ‘where the children of Israel lingered while holy Moses ascended the mountain of the Lord.’ That is what Egeria sees when she looks at it, not the shrubbery.”61 For Egeria, as for other pilgrims, the purpose of pilgrimage is not to experience a foreign land in relation to its physical place in the world. In its pure sense, the pilgrimage is taken in order to see the land as a symbol of the events of the past, to read, in some location or physical formation, the historical and religious meaning encoded there. Even the actual places, in these terms, exist purely as symbols. It is not the place but the meaning that is important. As Campbell suggests of Egeria, “It is the Ideas that haunt the Holy Land, and not their individual forms, to which her spirit is really attuned.”62 A site’s importance is not in its appearance or location, but in what it represents. “There are in fact no ‘places,’ only ‘places where.’”63

59

Campbell, pp. 40–41. Egeria, a fourth-century pilgrim to Jerusalem, wrote an account of her travels for her holy sisters back home, which proved influential for the next thousand years. Bede based much of De locis sanctis on it, and Brother Felix Fabri, who journeyed to the Holy Land in the late fifteenth century, refers to it in his accounts. 61 Campbell, pp. 23–4. 62 Campbell, p. 24. 63 Campbell, p. 32. 60

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And these locations of holy occurrence become virtually interchangeable with the sacred texts that describe them. When she is too pressed for time to describe a place, Egeria simply tells her sisters to look it up in the Old Testament for a proper description. The land itself has nothing to offer that is not already in the spiritual history and therefore accessible, more easily, through the scriptures. A pilgrim’s journey, then, becomes as much an act of reading as it is an act of travel. And as such, the written account of the travel would have provided as satisfying an experience of the Holy Land as the travel itself. Even in later pilgrimage narratives, through to the end of the fifteenth century, this blurring of first- and second-hand experience is central to the genre. Perhaps the most self-conscious pilgrim, certainly the most verbosely journalistic, was Brother Felix Fabri. He embarked on two separate trips to Jerusalem in the later part of the fifteenth century, and as he suggests after returning from his first voyage, the experience of journeying to the Holy Land made less of an impact on him than simply reading about it. So after I had returned to Ulm and began to think about the most holy sepulchre of our Lord, and the manger wherein He lay, and the holy city of Jerusalem and the mountains which are round about it, the appearance, shape, and arrangements of these and of other holy places escaped from my mind, and the Holy Land and Jerusalem with its holy places appeared to me shrouded in a dark mist, as though I had beheld them in a dream; and I seemed to myself to know less about all the holy places than I did before I visited them, whence it happened that when I was questioned about the holy places I could give no distinct answers, nor could I write a clear description of my journey. Wherefore I was grieved beyond measure that I had undergone such suffering, toils, and perils, and had spent such great sums of money and so much time, without receiving any fruit, consolation, or knowledge.64

Certainly this is a useful excuse for Brother Felix to argue for returning on a second trip, but at the same time it must also stand as one of the risks of pilgrimage. The fruits of the journey are not so much the experience and memory of the physical places as the spiritual associations. And these, as Egeria noted, were as available to those who stayed at home and read the bible as to those who ventured forth. Despite the dangers, discomforts, and difficulties of the long journey to Jerusalem, its benefits were evanescent and its contributions to a knowledge of the world ephemeral and insubstantial. But, if reading provided as complete a sense of the Holy Land as the journey itself, then a pilgrimage account may be seen not primarily as an emblem of travel, but as a replacement for it—one that permits “stay-at-home Christians imaginative entrance to the places and events of the Holy Land on which their thoughts so often fastened.”65 In such a light, these pilgrimages, along with their written accounts, both stimulated the longing for travel, and provided a substitute for it. They set up the possibility of travel, and then offered the means of forgoing it, substituting, instead, a more passive and vicarious method of experiencing the same spiritual satisfactions. 64

Felix Fabri, The Wanderings of Felix Fabri, vol. 1, Part 1, (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1897), pp. 48–9. 65 Campbell, p. 34.

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And if the places themselves are not important but only the events they evoke, then the physical organization of those sites and distant lands is equally without value. The emphasis falls, not on the arrangement of space, but on the ideas and spiritual memories locked within specific objects and locales. As Campbell says of Egeria, “the Holy Land in all its physical and cultural fullness is for her only a map of its former self.”66 But if it is a map, it’s a certain kind of map. Like the mappae mundi of the period, Egeria’s rendering offers a representation of Christian history rather than Christian territory, an evocation of spiritual, not physical, space. This fundamentally ungeographic nature of pilgrimage reaches its apotheosis in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, in the era just preceding the Digby play. Turning their backs on “presumptuous world-bound knowledge,” some theologians suggested a purely mental journey, claiming that, “Men do better to search for God along the itinerarium mentis than on the road to Rome.”67 There were several means available. On the mosaic floors of some Gothic cathedrals there were mazes through which a pilgrim could crawl on his knees: a metaphoric pilgrimage in miniature. These were unicursal mazes, with many twists and turns but no blind alleys, so the pilgrim had no choices to make. He or she could crawl unhesitatingly toward the goal at the center explicitly labeled heaven or Jerusalem.68 And as late as 1500 an eminent theologian, Johann Geiler von Kaiserberg, refined the process still further. Geiler considered the plight of a prisoner who could not make the pilgrimage to Rome. Estimating that it took twenty-one days to travel to Rome, seven days to visit all the churches, and twenty-one more days to journey home, the prisoner could pace the length of his cell seven miles a day for seven weeks, thus accomplishing his pilgrimage and obtaining his spiritual reward.69 In such a context, the physical reach of countries, rivers, and seas—with all their attendant breadth and complexity—becomes unimportant. In the journey for spiritual grace, there is no need for geography because there is ultimately no need for the world at all. Into this resolutely ungeographical world the Digby Mary Magdalen brought a new view of pilgrimage. In this play religious travel becomes a means of embracing the physical as well as the spiritual world, acknowledging its breadth and organization and implicitly calling up at least a rough awareness of its spatial relationships. While Mary’s pilgrimage evokes the heavenly purpose of the voyage, it also highlights, through its representational form, the vast distances and geographical nature of the journey. Every movement requires another, every development of the plot seems to call for a further voyage. After the death of Lazurus, Mary and Martha travel to Jerusalem to appeal to Jesus, then they are sent home. The body of Lazarus is carried from the Castle of Magdalen to the “place” of Jerusalem, from one of the regions nearer the edge of the world to its exact center. Mary herself then goes to Marseilles, sparking another set of voyages by the region’s King and Queen. Each of these 66

Campbell, pp. 24–5. Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 57. 68 For a more detailed discussion see Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narrative and Their Posterity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 8. 69 M. Lieberman, “Gersoniana,” Romania 78 (1957): 160. 67

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journeys brings the characters closer to spiritual growth and redemption, but at the same time the voyaging itself highlights the geographical world and draws it into this process of recuperation. At every point the emphasis is laid on the location of spiritual events, and the numerous religious conflicts of the play are located within terms of geographical placement. When Mary journeys to Jerusalem and revisits the sites of Christ’s sufferings, she seems intent on marking their specific locations, as if determined to map these spiritual events onto a specific locus. Mary Magdalen: Alas, alas, for that ryall bem! A! this percitt[h] my hartt worst of all: For here he turnyd agen to the woman of Jerusalem, And for wherinesse lett the crosse falle. Mary Jacobe. This sorow is beytterare than ony galle; For here the Jewys spornyd him to make him goo, And they disspittyd ther king ryall. (993–9) At this point what seems important is not just that Christ suffered and was taunted, but that those events could be assigned to a specific, physical place. The spiritual events, whose meaning and importance are to fill the world, are tied here to their own particular locations, much as in the pilgrimage accounts. But in a new and different way, these locations have been located in relation to the other sites of action by Mary’s self-conscious traveling. Her movements, under the watchful eyes of the audience, weave their own implicit, organizing framework over the sacred sites. Unlike the pilgrimage accounts, these travels are laid out before us as a complex but knowable pattern of action and location. The stages and platea provide a kind of rough, imagined map on which the sites can be marked and organized. Mary’s task, given by God, is not only to preach to the world but, in a sense, to encompass it. The angel Raphael says to her: Abasse the[e] noutt, Mary, in this place! Owr Lordes preceptt thou must fullfill, To passe the see in shortt space Onto the lond of Marcyll. (1376–9) Be abashed not by this place, the angel says, but also, implicitly, be not abashed by the world. The geographical world provides the shape of her spiritual quest. For in instructing her disciples to cover the earth with their teachings, she cites God’s guidance and help in terms that highlight the breadth and exotic distance of the world. Of alle maner tongges he gaf us knowing, For to undyrstond every langwage. Now have the disipilles take ther passage To divers contreys her[e] and yondir, To prech and teche of his hye damage; Full ferr ar my brothyrn departyd asondyr. (1343–8)

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The reason God has given them knowledge of every language is to be sure that his teachings are spread to every realm. And through her disciples Mary herself is seen, at least figuratively, to cover the earth. All the countries of the map are to be visited and reclaimed through God’s teachings. The act of proselytizing becomes an act of travel, a kind of geographical surveying of the newly expanding Christian world. The journeys that Mary makes back and forth across the stages and scaffolds, across the known and imagined world, effectively map the words of God onto His creation even as they focus attention on the geographical realm in which these spiritual conquests are taking place. We have seen her sail from Jerusalem out past Turkey and Asia minor, to Marseilles. In giving the lands names, within the enacted travel of the drama’s action, the playwright is orienting Mary’s journey—and the act of Godly creation that she describes—within a geographical setting. The world that was originally associated solely with Flesh and the Devil becomes a less metaphoric world of travel and danger. But if it is a world of danger, it is danger through which man can safely move with God’s help. When the King and Queen return to Marseilles they are told, “Now ar ye past all perelle;/Her[e] is the lond of Mercylle!” (1916–17). After a long and threatening voyage they have arrived at a land of safety. The sea voyage presents itself as an emblem of their spiritual danger—a danger Mary preserves them from—and in the end they are past “perrelle,” not simply because they are home from the sea, but because they have put their faith in Mary. Their return to Marseille is not just a return home, but a return to holiness and their life in Christ. The physical journey over the seas has come to be equated with the journey to spiritual fulfillment. As Mary tells them on their return: But now in yowr go[o]des agen I do yow sese; I trost I have governyd them to yowr hertes ese. Now woll I labor forth God to plese, More gostly strenkth me to purchase. (1958–61) They have had to journey away from their goods, from their possessions, in order to learn how to achieve grace. And upon their arrival Mary returns their worldly kingdom. But by then the king and queen have been irrevocably altered by their journey. Their travel through the world has prepared them to make better use of their material goods. The world as distance, the world as geographical construct, has been inscribed as a beneficial effect, as some part of what it takes to achieve holiness. In this way the journey and the experience of foreign lands are validated as the two converts receive not just the knowledge of God’s teachings and love, but the knowledge of the world. In his article on the use of messenger figures, Scherb argues that the travels of various characters in this play “act as an extension of worldly power out into the platea and—at the start of the play—they serve to define it as the space of secular power.”70 Although true, Scherb’s argument is too limited. The emphasis on the breadth of travel in this play doesn’t just define the world as a secular space. It actually serves to rehabilitate the secular, and geographical, nature of the world. As he suggests, 70

Scherb, 3.

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all the stress on geographical lists is indeed an expression of the characters’ claims to sovereignty and a means of symbolically invoking the entire fallen world.71 But more importantly, these many references can be seen as highlighting, not the worldly aspects of geography, but the geographical aspects of the world. This highlighting begins as a means of demonstrating the power of God in the world, but it ends by demonstrating the power of men to comprehend that same world and to voyage across it. With this impulse, the vision of the geographical world finds its way into the spiritual. The two ways of imagining and organizing the globe, its sacred and physical space, are brought together, reflecting a changing sense of how the world can be seen. By introducing a view of the world as a broad and imaginable space in which God’s work can be praised, the Digby Mary Magdalen allows at least the suggestion of a geographical space in which man’s work can be given its due. In offering a vision of the saint and her voyages, it demonstrates a willingness, however incipient, to see a place within the World of God, for a World of Man.

71

“The playwright further enhances the spatial metaphor inherent in place-and-scaffold staging by including geographic catalogues. Herod’s claim of lordship of Jerusalem, ‘Alapye, Assye, and Tyr,/Of Abyron, Beryaby, and Bedlem’(158–9) recalls similar lists that can be found in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Castle of Perseverance, the N-town Play, and the Wakefield Cycle, usually serving to suggest the speaker’s comprehensive power. Here the playwright turns a standard convention to his own purposes, allowing the audience imaginatively to embrace the breadth and character of the world on the brink of Christ’s entrance into history. Even the owner of the tavern, where Curiosity seduces Mary, comically presents us with a geographic catalogue of available wines (476–80). Again, the dramatist stresses the breadth of the world’s power, given concrete form in the character of Mundus,” Scherb, 2.

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Chapter 2

The Transformation of Seeing Christopher Saxton and the Development of the Cartographic Imagination

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, England was a geographical backwater separated from the technological advances of the continent by a good deal more than just a few miles of salt water. As late as 1520, only a small fraction of the population had ever seen a map, much less used one, and what maps there were did little more than preserve outmoded ideas. An English manuscript newly transcribed for the Royal Library in 1530 simply recapitulated medieval and classical concepts. And even England’s sailors, who might be thought most concerned with the practical value of finding their way, had fallen far behind their European counterparts in navigational skills, possessing even at this late date no sea-charts of their own design.1 On every level the country revealed “a lag in English geography far behind the standard reached on the Continent.”2 Yet within fifty years all this had changed. By 1579 England had taken its place at the forefront of geography, creating the first national atlas in the west and producing maps as detailed and accurate as any in the world. It was a remarkable transformation, arguably the crucial turning point in English cartography, and it signaled a transition from ancient to modern that was marked by more technological changes in the course of fifty years than in the previous five hundred. As we saw in the last chapter, medieval conceptions of cartography primarily highlighted an emblematic sense of place rather than a mathematic or objective sense of space, and while there was evidence toward the end of the fifteenth century that an incipient awareness of spatial geography was creeping into the popular culture, the fundamentally spiritual and emblematic nature of cartographic representation remained firmly in place. But in the early sixteenth century things began to change. There were breakthroughs in the use of perspective, consistent scale, and the development and dissemination of new surveying techniques. There were improvements in woodcut printing, copperplate engraving, and the widespread proliferation of the detailed maps and views that these techniques allowed. But the key differences between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cartography, between the medieval and early modern views of the world, were not simply in the way maps looked but in what was expected of them. Maps became more mathematically 1 See E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography 1485–1583 (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1930), p. 13. Also see Edward Lynam, British Maps and Map-Makers (London: Collins, 1947), p. 13; and J. R. Hale, Renaissance Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 52. 2 Taylor, pp. 13–14.

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precise and spatially accurate, more capable of representing the physical world in all its volume and detail, even as a new and wide-ranging cartographic awareness spread throughout England. The world began to look different, and England began to look differently at it. But there was more to this development than a technological revolution, more than a new ability to draw maps differently or a new willingness to use them. What fundamentally marked this period was “a revolution in the ways of thought,”3 an underlying change in imagination that culminated in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and spread throughout the culture. For with the spread of increasingly accurate surveying techniques and the resulting mathematization of mapping came a new cartographic epistemology, an array of new beliefs and expectations about the precision and objectivity with which the physical world could be imagined.4 In this light, to think in terms of maps in early modern England was to reach beyond an immediate, local world of personal experience to a newly concrete understanding of abstract space. Maps became invested with the precision and objectivity of the land itself, and this burgeoning understanding of the measurability and geometrical organization of abstract space brought with it a fundamental change in spatial consciousness. In the course of the sixteenth century, a growing belief in the measureability of mapped space established an epistemology of imaginative control that extended beyond the shape of the physical world. Even as it contributed to the production of increasingly detailed and precise maps, it enabled a broad range of imaginative tools and rhetorical techniques for organizing and manipulating abstract space. New surveying techniques and the maps they produced provided means, not just of seeing the country, but of overseeing it. The consumption of maps, their viewing and comprehension, made available to their audience new possibilities of imaginative control. The new cartographic expectations of mathematical accuracy and spatial precision, of scale and proportion, produced a corresponding belief in the objectivity of spatial representation. And as the map came to embody the territory for the first time, the possibilities for imaginatively manipulating this new identity between map and land took shape, as well. For with these new realizations of mapped precision came an attendant understanding about the broader effects of this precision. The fixity of these maps, their implicit attempt to depict and immobilize spatial relationships, provided their own means of exploiting these imagined representations. The ability to map the physical landscape with objective precision and confidence gradually enabled a corresponding ability to map the imagination on the same spatial model— and with the same precision and confidence. The new cartographic epistemologies

3

P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London: British Library, 1993), p. 15. A long tradition of cultural geography, beginning at least with Harley’s “Deconstructing Maps,” has long since marked the end of the unreflective belief in the “objectivity” of maps. It is by now widely recognized that maps are no more “objective” than any other cultural construct, reflecting as they do the assumptions and prejudices of a given cultural moment. But if recent work in cultural geography marked the end of cartographic objectivity, the development of newly accurate maps in England in the sixteenth century may be seen to mark its beginning. 4

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of the late sixteenth century gave the world a newly imagined shape, and gave a corresponding new shape to the imagination. From Survey to Map It has become a truism today that “a map is not the territory,”5 but at the beginning of the sixteenth century in England a map wasn’t even the point. While practical surveying techniques had been available in England at least since Domesday Book in 1086, and had achieved some widespread distribution as early as the thirteenth century, the desire to measure the land was rarely tied to a desire to draw it. Boundaries and limits of property ownership have always been important, and in the intricate open field system of the Middle Ages individual plots were carefully measured and differentiated, but there are only occasional examples of maps associated with such surveys. The few surviving sketches were probably intended only for the surveyors themselves, to help them complete the written description that was the usual endproduct of a survey.6 This emphasis on verbal description over visual image was slow to change. As P. D. A. Harvey has suggested, two things were necessary for the development of mapping: one purely technical, the other more broadly imaginative. First was an improvement in the ability to measure angles in the field, making it possible to plot a map with the same precision as a written description. But just as importantly, a general familiarity with “the idea of a map” was needed that would make such representations comprehensible and allow a viewer to decode the information in its new visual form.7 Only gradually did this blend of technology and familiarity converge. From about 1500, increased wealth and a rising population encouraged land owners to turn a sharper eye on their property. There was renewed interest in determining the extent and value of established holdings and, with the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, the creation of new estates brought an additional desire for new and accurate boundaries.8 More surveyors were needed, and efforts were increasingly made to refine and promote the necessary skills. A series of books attempted to reduce the technical difficulty of surveying, to make it more accessible to the general populace, for as one writer suggested, “the learned sortes of bookes (it may be) are not most necessary to be common, and yet it woulde doo well, that the common sorte of people shoulde have some instructions.”9

5

The phrase, originated by Eric Bell, was popularized by Alford Korzybksi. Two known maps, one of Shouldham, Norfolk in 1440–41 and one from Tanworth in Arden, Warwickshire about 1500, provide the only links we have between maps and surveys in medieval England. See R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey eds, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 17. 7 Skelton and Harvey eds, pp. 17–18. 8 For a more complete discussion of this see G. L’E. Turner, “Mathematical instrumentmaking in London in the sixteenth century,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: British Library, 1983), p. 93. 9 William Bourne, Treasure for Traveilers (London, 1578), p. 1 v. 6

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The first of these effforts appeared in 1523, but despite its broadly inclusive title, John Fitzherbert’s Boke of Surveyeng was less than it sounded. Primarily an instruction manual for evaluating the land’s productivity, the book’s purpose was not to map the land, but simply to ensure that the old, traditional rights and revenues of the landed gentry would be preserved. That it is necessarie to be knowen, howe all these maners, lordeshippes landes and tenementes shulde be extended, surveyed, butted, bounded, and valued in every parte; that the saied estates shuld nat be deceyved, defrauded, nor dysherited of theyr possessions, rentes, customes, and services, the whiche they have to them recerved, for mayntenaunce of theyr estates and degrees, and that there be no percell thereof loste nor imbeselde, and than may the lorde of the saied maners, lordeshippes, landes, and tenementes, have perfite knowledge, where the lande lyeth, what every parcell is worth, and who is his freeholders, copye holders, customarye tenaunt, or tenant at his wyll.10

In Fitzherbert’s view, the surveyor’s attention was to be focused not on how the land looked, but who owned it, not on drawing the land but appraising it. In these terms, “perfite knowledge” was only important insofar as it determined “what every parcell is worth.” This was no attempt to increase the general visual awareness of the country or its landscapes, no attempt to draw it. A proper description of the land depended not at all on its shape. As far as Fitzherbert was concerned, knowledge of the land amounted to nothing more than knowledge of its value. The first English surveying guide that actually focused on geometrical measurement of the land came fourteen years later with Richard Benese and the Maner of Measurynge. True to its name, the book focused on practical methods for calculating everything from the amount of stone needed to pave a chamber floor to the size of a pasture or field. “It sheweth the maner of the dividynge of one acre or mo, of woodlande from many other acres, lyenge in one pece together. Also it sheweth the diversite of pryces of al v. partes of an acre of woodlande, after the rate and diversite of the pryce of the same, from the pryce of iii.s.iiii.d for an acre, to the pryce of .vi ll.xiii.s.iii.d.”11 And if, like his predecessor, Benese was largely concerned with the land’s productivity, how to estimate the value of timber, stone, and other aspects of an estate’s holdings, he also marked the beginning of a new interest in measuring not just the assets of the land, but the land itself. It was a start, if a slow one. In each of these books, the level of technical sophistication remained low. Fitzherbert only went so far as to recommend that the surveyor carry a compass, while Benese advocated using simple geometric shapes, squares and rectangles, to estimate acreage and ease calculations.12 Yet, despite their 10

John Fitzherbert, Surveyinge (London, 1546), p. 2 r–v. Sir Richard Benese, This Boke sheweth the maner of measurynge of all maner of lande, as well of woodlande, as of lande in the felde, and comptynge the true nombre of acres of the same (London, 1537). 12 And later there were efforts to remove the need for any calculation at all. In his Treasure for Traveilers (1578) William Bourne describes the use of instruments that are calibrated so that an untrained traveler can determine the distances to various objects simply by reading numbers off the scale. 11

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technical simplicity, these books reflected a newly focused attention on precision of measurement, on gaining an increasingly accurate sense of the land. And as the familiarity and perceived value of surveying spread, the tools and techniques grew more sophisticated. In 1533 Gemma Frisius published his Libellus de Locorum Describendorum Ratione in Antwerp, containing the earliest clear exposition of mathematical triangulation,13 and in the years that followed, these techniques, along with an array of increasingly precise instruments, found their way to England.14 But new techniques and equipment were not enough to promote a wider cartographic awareness. Even with sufficient technology the perceived need for maps, the idea that they were an obvious and inevitable expression of the topography, was still slow to come. Such a large, imaginative transformation required more than just the technological ability to measure the land. It needed a new and compelling motivation, one that would encourage England to make the best possible use of its new technologies. It needed, as it turns out, the threat of war. In the 1530s, growing fearful of a French invasion, Henry VIII set out to fortify the coastal towns along the English channel and up the eastern reaches. In planning these additional defenses and renovating existing ones, military engineers found a new value in cartographic precision. In the Middle Ages, before the widespread use of gunpowder, strategies of siege warfare had meant that strong walls, regardless of shape or orientation, were the key to a strong defense. But changes in technology had raised the cartographic stakes. The spread of canon and firearms shifted the advantage to an attacking army, and town walls now had to take into account the possibility of siege guns and the need to establish effective lines of fire for the defenders. An accurate plan of a fortification provided the best means for making such calculations, but only if drawn accurately.15 Military engineers needed maps, but more importantly, they needed them to scale. This new requirement brought with it a new level of spatial representation. Until this time such maps of towns or defenses had been largely pictorial and impressionistic, evoking a rough sense of the landscape but eliding any need for precision or accuracy. Such drawings highlighted a few important buildings or structures, offering an emblematic sense of the town that could be quite vivid. But they lacked any scale or compass bearings and so fell short of any attempt at precisely organizing the space. One of the most striking examples of this early tradition is a panorama of the north coast of Kent from 1514. Drawn on a twenty-five-foot scroll that includes the river Swale and its defences from Faversham to Margate, it offers an impressive sense of scope, but without any pretensions to mathematical accuracy. Highlighted aspects of the landscape, frequently outsized and out of proportion, might evoke a general sense of the area, but the map’s lack of precision and detail didn’t permit anything more than the most rudimentary sense of spatial relationships.

13

Skelton and Harvey, pp. 30–31. G. L’E. Turner, “Mathematical instrument-making in London in the sixteenth century,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: British Library, 1983), p. 94. 15 See Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 196. 14

46

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

Imaginatively these maps presented the scene as a whole, without providing an accurate rendering of its individual parts. The viewer might recognize the general layout, but would not be able to measure or precisely relate the spatial details. But as the royal engineers applied techniques of scale and precision newly available from the continent, the representational power and possibilities of these maps expanded. In 1541 three plans of fortifications near Hull were drawn, and over time the same attention to detail and scale was applied to broader scenes. A map of Portsmouth drawn in 1545 shows a whole town drawn for the first time to a consistent horizontal scale (see Figure 2.1). And about a year later the military engineer John Rogers drew a map of the region from Calais to Boulogne scaled an inch to the mile. Although decidedly primitive by the standards that were to come, these maps provided a measure of mathematical precision unheard of in earlier years. This addition of scale transformed English maps and English mapping. It allowed the land to be represented in a way that was spatially and proportionally accurate rather than simply evocative, providing a new opportunity to visualize a stretch of landscape, a fortification, or an entire city with a level of detail that reliably fixed and precisely revealed the shape of the streets and topography. Over the next fifty years this sense of reliable accuracy lifted maps above the level of pictorial impressionism, and effectively raised the principal cartographic goal of the period from an impressionistic evocation of place to an accurate representation of physical space. And the perceived utility of this new precision spread to other disciplines in the second half of the century “as legal and economic arguments began to rely more on accurate description and, increasingly, measurement rather than on prestige and power.”16 And as it grew more widespread, the new level of precision fundamentally altered the epistemological nature of cartographic representation by changing the expectations of the cartographic audience. Possibilities of Precision With the English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry in 1570, the possibilities of mathematical calculation took on an increasingly central role in Elizabethan culture. “Many other artes also there are which beautifie the minde of man: but of all other none do more garnishe & beautifie it, then those artes which are called Mathematicall. Unto the knowledge of which no man can attaine, without the perfecte knowledge and instruction of the principles, groundes, and Elementes of Geometrie.”17 As the Elizabethan mathematician and magus John Dee goes on to suggest, Euclid’s geometery, and the mathematical geography it enabled, introduced both a new level of accuracy and a new expectation of a precise spatial representation of the landscape. “Geographie teacheth wayes ... the situation of Citeis, Townes,

16 Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 167–8, 169. 17 John Dee, “The Translater to the Reader,” in The Mathematical Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570), introduction by Allen G. Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), n.p.

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Figure 2.1:

47

Plan for the fortification of Portsmouth, 1545. This is the earliest known map of any British town drawn wholly in plan, on a uniform scale, and without pictorial elements. By permission of the British Library. Cotton MS Augustus I.i.81.

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Villages, Fortes, Castells, Mountaines, Woods, hauens, Riuers, Crekes, & such other things, vpon the outface of the earthly Globe (either in the whole, or in some principall member and portion therof contayned) may be described and designed, in comensurations Analogicall to Nature and veritie: and most aptly to our vew, may be represented.”18 As the influence of both Dee and Euclid spread, the objectivity of maps, their commensurability with both nature and truth, became a central tenet of their new and complex meaning. In the last quarter of the century, the awareness and importance of mathematical precision in geography spread, not simply among those who drew maps, but among the increasingly large audience of map-minded viewers in late Elizabethan England. “In addition to supplying a new vision of the world to aspiring English gentry and merchants, geography provided an impetus to the new mathematized vision of the world, part of the transformation of ‘science’ in this period… It allowed scholars to reconceptualize the globe as an abstract, geometrical grid on which they could situate England and the rest of the known world. Its practitioners reduced the world to a carefully bounded and controllable system, one they could understand and begin to subdue.”19 While mathematical geography was primarily centered in the universities, the implications of this new mathematized spatial consciousness broadened through the substantial influence and public careers of its numerous practitioners, not just within the scientific community but into the overlapping and contiguous literary circles.20 Sir Thomas Harriot was a mathematical tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh. Edmund Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey studied mathematical geography at Cambridge. And a list of influential teachers and writers had roots in mathematical geography, not least of them John Dee, for whom “the study of mathematics was essential to both the individual in search of spiritual excellence and the nation in search of European supremacy.”21 The burgeoning mathematizion of geography provided an increasing sense of “control and superiority” to those who practiced it, providing them “with tools and assumptions with which to tackle the ever more complex world they saw before them.”22 And while, as Lesley Cormack suggests, this burgeoning geographical knowledge reinforced the creation of an ideology of nationalism and imperialism in early modern England, inculcating an attitude of English superiority and encouraging the nation to cast its eyes abroad with colonization in mind,23 it also had effects closer to home. It offered a sense of imaginative control that rested largely in the new conception of the world as a precisely measurable and organizable space. And this increasing emphasis on mathematics found expression in a series of surveying manuals in the second half of the century that outlined increasingly sophisticated techniques and equipment for accurate measurement of complex landscapes. 18

Dee, n.p. For a thorough discussion of the rise of mathematical surveying in the early modern period see Cormack and Edwards. 19 Cormack, p. 15. 20 Cormack, p. 120 and Chapter Three generally. 21 Cormack, p. 165. 22 Cormack, p. 15. 23 Cormack, p. 1.

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While William Cuningham’s Cosmographical Glasse in 1559 introduced the broader concerns of cosmography to an English audience, an assortment of authors including Leonard Digges, Edward Worsop, and Radolph Agas brought an emphasis on precise measurement and the newest technologies to the field of surveying. Digges’ Boke Named Tectonicon in 1556 and his Pantometria in 1571, and Worsop’s A Discoverie of Sundry Errours and Faults Daily Committed by Landemeaters published in 1582 laid a new emphasis on the importance of geometry and the need for more precise measurement and calculation. And in Radolph Agas’ A Preparative to Plotting of Landes and Tenements for Surueigh (1596) we see the first real evidence of the use of the theodolite by an English surveyor.24 In pamphlets and manuals like these, surveyors trumpeted the precision and accuracy of their work. Digges claims confidently that the accuracy of his measurements “shall never be impugned, being so firmely grounded, garded, and defended with Geometrical demonstration, against whose puissance no subtile Sophistrie or craftie coloured arguments can prevaile.”25 These authors laid out practices before the reader, which “rooted as they are in mathematics, lend to surveying the credibility of a science. Thus, surveys begin to make scientific truth claims; they take on the status of fact.”26 Cartography was, as Jess Edwards has observed, “noisily rhetorical, signifying not just ‘outwards’ to the spatial world, but ‘sideways’ to discourses of legitimate and truthful representation. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mathematicians and geographers worked hard to establish the parameters of truth and virtue within which their knowledge and work would be understood.”27 But these claims to objective precision were not unproblematic, and a number of critics have noted the seam of anxiety that ran through the discourse of surveying in the Elizabethan period.28 Even a cursory look at the manuals of Worsop and Agas suggest the degree to which they are trying to counteract a suspicion of surveyors. Worsop’s title, alone, suggests the tenor of his manual: A discouerie of sundrie errours and faults daily committed by lande-meaters, ignorant of arithmetike and geometrie, to the damage, and preiudice of many her Maiesties subiects with manifest proofe that none ought to be admitted to 24 For a full discussion of this see Allie Wilson Richeson, English Land Measuring to 1800: Instruments and Practices (Cambridge, MA: Society for the History of Technology and MIT Press, 1966); Jess Edwards, Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America: Circles in the Sand (London: Routledge, 2005); and F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors: the growth of a profession (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) Chapters One and Two. 25 Digges, Panometria (1571), quoted in Edwards, p. 26. 26 Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 41. 27 Edwards, p. 12. 28 F. M. L. Thompson was among the first to note that the reliability of a large number of surveyors operating in the period was questionable, and in more recent years a number of critics have provided thoughtful deconstructions of these surveying narratives. See Andrew McRae, God speed the plough: The Representation of agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape; Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Edwards.

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that function, but the learned practisioners of those sciences: written dialoguewise, according to a certaine communication had of that matter. By Edward Worsop, Londoner. Euery one that measureth land by laying head to head, or can take a plat by some geometricall instrument, is not to be accounted therfore a sufficient landmeater, except he can also prooue his instruments, and measurings, by true geometricall demonstrations. And in A Preparative to Platting, Ralph Agas criticizes “the infinite and extreame imperfections, that I finde in most places where I become, to be daily committed, aswell in measure, as platting of lande to any vse, or purpose whatsoeuer: which are such and so manie, as the people generally beginne to doubt, whether there be any certainety, and perfection, in the operation of such instruments as are applied thereunto, yea, or not.” 29 Yet it is unclear to what extent such manuals actually undermined Elizabethan faith in the precision of surveying. Certainly that is unlikely to have been their intent. As McRae says, “These texts undoubtedly present an overdrawn image of a disorganized field, littered with poorly trained and part-time workers; however, their descriptions and arguments, intended both to educate fellow practitioners and to reshape the public perception of surveying, document the gradual definition of a set of professional ideals and objectives.”30 Agas, who had been surveying for twenty-five years by the time he wrote his pamphlet, was certainly not suggesting that his own work was imprecise. Quite the contrary. “The practise hereof for surueigh of lands and tenements, is but new, and scarsely established: notwithstanding I doe affirme and vndertake, that it is certaine, perfect, and true, without any want or defect: and to the saide use of Surueigh of all other deuices by bookes or otherwise most sure and lasting.”31 In this light, apparent anxieties about mathematical accuracy embodied in such manuals may effectively be taken as a species of self-promotion, raising the cultural capital of accomplished surveyors like Worsop and Agas, at the expense of less expert practitioners. For example, in writing against the use of the plane table instead of the more precise theodolite, Agas concedes that he himself used the plane table for the last twenty-five years before he embraced the new technology. And it seems unlikely that a man so given to publishing self-promoting pamphlets would have denigrated his own work. Nor does he: “And I wil not doubt, in such or & any other quantity of land, as is aforsaide, forme & set out in portraiture (if you shew me his shape) as well Euclid himself, as euery one of his works and conclusions.”32 We are thus left with the impression that, while unscrupulous and badly trained people might try to pass themselves off as surveyors, with the anticipated poor results, the techniques and practices of the craft are mathematically precise and reliable. But comtemporary anxieties about surveying extended beyond its potential accuracy. A number of recent studies have noted the upsurge of popular opposition to surveyors in the sixteenth century, citing in particular John Norden’s The Surveiors 29

Radolph Agas, A Preparative to Platting of Landes and Tenements for Surueigh (London: Thomas Scarlet, 1596), 1–2. 30 McRae, p. 171. 31 Radolph Agas, A Preparative to Platting of Landes and Tenements for Surueigh (London: Thomas Scarlet, 1596), 1–2. 32 Agas, 10–11 (misprinted as 14–15).

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Dialogue, first pubished in 1607. In Norden’s dialogue, the farmer’s anxiety about surveying is clear from the beginning. As he says to the surveyor, “you are the cause that men lose their land: and sometimes they are abridged of such liberties as they have long used in manors: and customs are altered, broken, and sometimes perverted or taken away by your means….[and] many millions disquieted, that might live quietly in their farms, tenements, houses and lands, that are now daily troubled with your so narrow looking thereinto, measuring the quantity, observing the quality, recounting the value, and acquainting the lords with the estates of all men’s livings.”33 As McRae and Klein have both convincingly shown, the nature of this complaint serves to highlight the anxiety about changing relations to the land as traditional customs and rights were eroded in the sixteenth century.34 In a fundamental way, “the mere fact of the inclusion of such complaints in pamphlets intended to promote the ‘art of surveying’ indicates the anxieties generated by this popular reasoning and shows that the surveyor was liable to be perceived as a socially disruptive force.”35 But in a sense, these anxieties only underscore the faith, and fear, that people had in the precision of the new surveys. The anxieties demonstrated in The Surveiors Dialogue arise not just from the potentially constraining authority of the new surveys but from the expectations of their accuracy. The farmer who fears the surveyor’s new measurements, the “so narrow looking thereinto,” is afraid of the new knowledge of his land that the landowner will have. As the surveyor observes, “I perceive that the force of your strongest arguments is … your feare and unwillingnesse that the Lord of the Mannor, under whom, & in whose Land you dwell, should know his owne:”36 In this light, the anxieties of people like Norden’s farmer, people who work the land without owning it, do not undermine belief in the surveyor’s accuracy; they may be taken as a measure of the survey’s perceived accuracy. It is the very exacititude of measurement, aligned with the inherent power of ownership, that threatens the customary rights of the tenant farmer. For as Klein readily notes, the main thrust of the manual, written as it is by an established surveyor, is to refute the farmer’s arguments and assuage his complaints. “Mistrust of geometry, a sentiment evidently widespread among tenants, is immediately disqualified by reference to scientific impartiality; surveying clearly appeals to a higher order of truth and justice.” 37 And while, as Klein insightully adds, “Yet to suggest the mere possibility of its misuse is already to openly register geometry’s potential complicity with forces of social division, even of politial oppression,”38 we are left with the precision of surveying, however problematic, as the controlling discourse. “One must be careful not to discount the multiple ways in which maps could (and can) be used and understood,” notes Sullivan. But at the same time, “it is important to stress that the new geography, fueled by the technological advances in surveying and an increase in information made possible 33 34 35 36 37 38

John Norden, The Surveior’s Dialogue (1607), pp. 3, 4. See McRae, Chapter Six. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 46. Norden, pp. 3–4. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 45. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 45.

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by voyages of commerce and exploration, must only have enhanced the belief that maps were objective and transparent representations of the natural world.”39 This is not to say that faith in the objectivity of maps was universal. There were dissenting voices.40 But the anxiety about the nature of the map’s representation, the concern that it did not reflect the social networks of responsibility and interconnection that comprised the relationships of people on the land, underlined the increasing power of the map as a perceived marker of reality. “This new quality of scientific accuracy gave their maps a special utility and, inevitably, much of their meaning.”41 It made it possible to invest a map with an objective sense of capturing the world in all its spatial organization, so that the map could stand in for the land in ways that hadn’t been possible before. Revising the Cityscape The line between maps and pictures is not hard and fast. The early modern viewing subject responded to a map not simply as a representation of mathematical calculations, but as a visual image, and “despite the undoubted technical improvements in Tudor cartography ... maps still retained some of the crucial communicative properties of pictures.”42 As pictures, these maps derived their power to conceptualize space from developments in other visual media. “Art,” as J. R. Hale has observed, “helped the mind to think spatially by first training the eye.”43 And in many ways it was the art of the Italian Renaissance, translated to England through a new series of woodcuts, 39

Sullivan, Drama of Landscape, pp. 102–3. Samuel Daniel wrote, “We must not looke vpon the immense course of times past as men ouer-looke spacious and wide countries from off high Mountaines, and are neuer the neere to iudge of the true nature of the soyle or the particular syte and face of those territories they see. Nor must we thinke, viewing the superficiall figure of a region in a Mappe, that wee know strait the fashion and place as it is. Or reading an Historie (which is but a Mappe of Men, and dooth no otherwise acquaint us with the true Substance of Circumstances then a superficiall Card dooth the Seaman with a Coast never seene, which alwayes prooves other to the eye than the imagination forecast it), that presently wee know all the world, and can distinctly iudge of times, men, and maners, iust as they were.” Samuel Daniel, “A Defense of Rhyme,” in G. Gregory Smith (ed.) Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904 [1950], pp. 370–71. And see Sullivan, Drama of Landscape, p. 103. Not to make too fine a point of it, but Daniel is effectively focusing on chorography, not geography. He is arguing that you cannot derive from a map immediate, social and experiential qualities of locale, “the fashion and place as it is.” But to say that is not to argue that a map cannot provide an accurate ordering of space. And as Sullivan suggests, while there were certainly instances of misreading and misunderstanding maps, the overall expectation was of reliability and transparency. 41 J. B. Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: British Library, 1983), p. 28. Harley was speaking specifically of Christopher Saxton’s maps of the counties of England and Wales, but his insight applies more generally, as well. 42 Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 24. 43 J. R. Hale, Renaissance Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 51. 40

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that introduced a crucial sense of imaginative volume to the new representations of the cityscape and, by extension, to the larger regions of mapped space. City views were not new in the Renaissance. There had been town maps and representations throughout the Middle Ages. But these older images “fulfilled different, and an undoubtedly more limited range of functions from their successors.”44 Like many maps of the period they were abstract and emblematic, offering an evocative suggestion of a scene in place of an accurate rendering. The fifteenth-century view of Wells by Thomas Chaundler provides an example of what may be recognized as a distinctly medieval visualization of space (see Figure 2.2). The representation is fundamentally metonymic, with a few symbolically arrayed details standing in for the whole. The figures and buildings, though vivid and evocative in themselves, are drawn out of all proportion, looming within the walls to suggest the idea of the town instead of any spatial reality. There is a sense of crowding but no real sense of volume. Such an image drew as much on the rules of medieval art as on a sense of cartographic history, for both cartographers and painters of the period were “indifferent to empirical acccuracy,” more concerned with an “affective experience of the world”45 than with any sort of objective rendering. In such a representation, the size and placement of objects had more to do with their figurative and semiotic value than with distance and realistic proportion. The space of medieval cartography—like that of medieval art— was “‘naïve’ or discontinuous,”46 concerned more with metaphoricity and symbolic meaning than spatial accuracy, so that the organization of objects and people within the frame was all but unrelated to their actual physical arrangement. But by the start of the sixteenth century, visualizations of the landscape had evolved from an emphasis on the flat surface to a concern with enclosed space, from what Sir Kenneth Clark has called the “landscape of symbols” to the “landscape of fact,”47 and a new type of topographical representation had begun to appear, offering a more precise sense of spatial organization. Drawing on new developments in perspective,48 Italian artists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century were creating increasingly complex cityscapes with a new illusion of realistic volume. They weren’t quite maps; their purpose was still more evocative than practical. But they introduced a degree of visual sophistication to the representation of the landscape that reflected an ever increasing drive for precision and specificity, what one critic has called the Renaissance’s “thirst for space and its eventual mastery.”49 Drawn from either real or imaginary viewpoints, these new panoramas provided an overview of the city that invested it with a more familiar and convincing sense of accuracy than any map to date.

44

Delano-Smith, p. 182. Ronald Rees, “Historical Links Between Cartography and Art,” The Geographical Review 70/1 (1980): 66. 46 Rees, p. 66. 47 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962) [originally published in 1949 by John Murry, Ltd., London], p. 14. 48 The laws of perspective were attributed to Brunellesci, first put into words by Leon Battista Alberti and given its fullest treatment by Piero della Francesca. 49 Rees, p. 71. 45

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The earliest of these cityscapes is the so-called Catena map of Florence, dated 1480–85, and in the years that followed, a variety of similar views were produced by artists as renowned as Leonard da Vinci.50 But the finest example of this new level of precision and specificity is a woodcut view of Venice done by Jacopo de’ Barbari in 1500 (see Figure 2.2). It was enormous, measuring seventy-nine inches by two hundred and twenty on six sheets of paper, and it offered a stunning illusion of depth and detail. Drawn from a bird’s-eye view, seen obliquely from an elevated position, it offered a topographical representation “so exact that the entire fabric of the city is recognizable.”51 Its rendering of buildings, drawn in elevation, recalls the crowded and abstract city scenes of the Middle Ages, but here the structures and landscape are arranged with an eye to realistic physical organization and volume, combining empirical observation of the city’s buildings and streets with the technological and mathematical precision of the new perspective techniques. The result is a stunningly complex and technically sophisticated interpretation of spatial volume. It is also something of a lie. For in offering a sense of comprehensiveness and volume, a sense of representational specificity that helped lend the image its compelling vividness, the artist has foregrounded the illusion of precision over precision itself.52 Presented from a point of view that was physically impossible at the time, the cityscape is a masterpiece of the imagination, overcoming the limits of a single, restricted, earthbound point of view and offering a complete and wholistic landscape “seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed.”53 Rather

50 Some, like Leonardo da Vinci’s map of Milano, were explicitly cartographic, while others were more self-consciously decorative. Leonardo da Vinci drew a plan for the redevelopment of Milan, drawn in 1497, helped pave the way for modern cartography. In this schematic and sketchy drawing he offered two circular plans of Milan, one above the other on a single page. The top plan very roughly lays out the city from a vertical, mapped perspective while below it, in marginally more detail, the same plan is offered from a bird’seye perspective. The two drawings imaginatively superimpose the cartographic accuracy of the city plan with the imaginative illusion of space offered by the panorama. But if Leonardo’s conflation of the ichnographic diagram and the bird’s-eye view provided an early linkage between the organizational power of a map and the imaginative evocation of space inherent in a mapview, its impact, as a manuscript diagram, was limited. Of broader concern was the new generation of mapviews that developed in Italy at about this time. They were printed, rather than manuscript sketches, and they carried the new sense of the cityscape to a new level of complexity and a new range of impact.See Naomi Miller, Mapping the City: The Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 182. 51 Miller, p. 188. See also Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography Before the Year 1500,” Art Bulletin, 60 (1978): 436. 52 Although surveyors at the time had tools that could accurately measure angles and triangulate distances and heights of structures and terrain, such tools were all but useless in the crowded and irregular environment of Venice. Line of sight was limited and the twisting streets and canals would have made it impossible to accurately measure distances beyond the most limited stretches. Surveyors could have achieved an exact plot of the city’s more visible towers, but much of the woodcut’s impressive detail would have been impossible to achieve accurately. 53 de Certeau, p. 92.

Figure 2.2:

Cityview of Venice, 1500, by Jacopo de’ Barbari. By permission of the British Museum.

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than a carefully surveyed and transcribed map the woodcut is “a studio fabrication,”54 assembled from a variety of small drawings taken from heights throughout the city, all adjusted and foreshortened to fit a single, imaginary view. And even the laws of perspective, which appear at first so rigorously precise, prove unreliable, and the topography “is everwhere a good deal less exact than is usually assumed.”55 But the fact that this precision is largely false, that the “game of illusion transgressed the bounds of truthfulness,”56 is in the end much less important than that the illusion is so convincing. For along with this vivid sense of precision came an impression of spatial objectivity and realism that invested the visual landscape with a new level of imaginative accessibility. The goal of these mapviews was not an accurate representation of a town so much as a true one. The profile view is offered “as a form of empirical knowledge,”57 that evoked personal, felt experience and visual sensation rather than simply intellectual understanding. While not actually done to scale, such panoramas offered the city as a scene which could be taken in as a whole. What J. R. Hale has said of Renaissance landscape painters applies equally well to the creators of these cityscapes: By helping men to ‘see’ the countryside as a whole, rather than as a mass of separate impressions, and training their imaginations by presenting them with imaginary but perfectly believable landscapes, the painter was enabling them to project the imagination beyond the frame of a painting, beyond what was visible to what could be conjectured, and similarly to urge it from the known part of the map to envisage its unexplored regions as knowable.58

This new way of seeing, the new possibility of imaginatively inserting the viewer into a representation of space, offered a perspective that allowed people on the ground a wholistic view of their world that would not otherwise be possible. It allowed them to conceive of the town, and the landscape, in totalizing ways that may have gone beyond the possibilities of physical reality, but that stayed well within the bounds of imagination. Capturing the entire cityscape in one compelling glance, these panorama summed it up and made it newly accessible. This new illusion of physical volume created an increasingly compelling awareness of realistic and inhabitable space that provided a new means of imaginative entry into the scene. In effect, the sense of volume and detail made the city—and by extension the larger mapped landscape—available for a new kind of imaginative inhabitation. Newly precise maps, and the habits of thought that allowed them to be invested with their new weight of meanings, produced something similar to de Certeau’s “space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions.”59 They provided the same sense of familiarity and knowability that de Certeau found in looking down from a great height, effectively transforming the 54

Schulz, 439. Schulz, 439. 56 Lucia Nuti, “Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance,” in Denis Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 100. 57 Nuti, p. 99. 58 Hale, Renaissance Europe, pp. 51–2. 59 de Certeau, p. 93. 55

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world into “a text that lies before one’s eyes.”60 The details of topography became readable in a new way, and maps became the means to “construct the fiction that creates readers ... and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.”61 This is made explicit in a finely detailed woodcut of Augsburg published in 1521. A small box of text in the lower left corner describes the print as “a gift to all those who long nostalgically for Augsburg or are attracted by its fame, that they may fulfil their desires in feeding their eyes upon that view.”62 In this instance, the inscription suggests, “the view is the city.”63 And because these new cityviews were produced as woodcuts instead of manuscript sketches, they could be reproduced, sold, and widely distributed, putting into cultural circulation a new awareness and expectation of spatial complexity, evocation, and imaginative precision. It was this awareness, amounting in its broadest terms to a new epistemology of spatial organization, that carried over into the realm of maps. In their pursuit of “the mirage of a total vision”64 these city-scapes served as imaginative microcosms of the larger landscape, providing all the technological and imaginative breakthroughs that would later be reflected on a much broader scale in English cartography. For, in England, the impulse toward more realistic cityscapes was embodied in a form that combined the precision of scale maps with the panorama’s imaginative evocation of space. Building and enlarging on the military maps of the 1530s and 1540s, there began to arise in the mid-sixteenth century a series of city maps by the likes of William Cuningham, John Norden, William Smith and others, which quickly grew in popularity.65 Over time these cityscapes became increasingly accurate, gradually coming to emphasize the ichnographical precision of the true plan over the bird’seye view, but even in the beginning they helped reinforce a widening belief in the power of maps to objectively represent and organize space. Cuningham’s view of Norwich from 1558, is the earliest surviving printed map of an English town (see Figure 2.3), and it provides a vivid example of how English cartography had evolved. The map is not large, 31 x 41.4 centimeters, included as a fold-out page in Cuningham’s Cosmographical Glasse, but it offers an impression of much more detail than its moderate size can accomodate. The town is laid out from a bird’s-eye perspective, showing more in common with de’ Barbari’s panorama of Venice than with later city plans, with the roads and buildings drawn representationally in profile rather than with true ichnographical precision. Yet at the same time, the map offers a sense of spatial organization that is compelling and evocative. The buildings are drawn with a sharpness of detail that suggests not just a sense of specificity but of volume, and if the viewer can’t actually see every turn of the roads and every space between the buildings, he is certainly encouraged to imagine them. And this sense of inclusive volume is extended even to the foreground, where two figures are taking up their own measure of volume in the picture, thereby demonstrating 60 61 62 63 64 65

de Certeau, p. 92. de Certeau, p. 92. Schulz, 470. Schulz, 470. Nuti, 100. See Delano-Smith, Chapter 5 and particularly p. 185.

Figure 2.3:

Cityview of Norwich, by William Cuningham. Dating from 1558, this is the earliest surviving printed map of an English town. By permission of the British Library. British Library, 59.i.28.

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“the inhabitability of the mimetic space of the image,”66 and so helping to draw the viewer into the clearly articulated scene. In their complex evocation of representational space, maps such as this could be seen to function, not simply as precise spatial diagrams, but as landscapes per se.67 And as such they dovetailed both science and art, drawing on new and intricate practices of viewing and interpretation. In the sixteenth century, an awareness and appreciation of landscape painting was spreading across Europe from both Italy and the Netherlands, bringing with it new ways of seeing and understanding natural topographies.68 A study of landscape painting in this period reveals “how little it owed to the painter’s eye and how much to his imagination.”69 The new painters were not simply reproducing the topographies they saw, but creating their own. But as James Turner notes, “If an aesthetic structure seems both convincing and comprehensive ... then it will come to be accepted as a form of reality—a version of the world.”70 In creating these new, “convincing and comprehensive” representations of the land, painters were implicitly instructing their viewers how to read them according to rules based both upon how the land looked and what it was expected to mean. This sense that a representation of the land not only could but needed to be read and interpreted carried over into the realms English cartography, for like the new landscape paintings, early modern cityscapes drew much of their imaginative power not just from what they showed, but from what they suggested. Incorporating a number of visual tropes of landscape painting, maps like Cuningham’s view of Norwich encouraged a new kind of reading that effectively lured the viewer into the scene. The cityscape offered its own version of a painting’s “indirect prospects”: those locations within the spatial representation that suggest the possibility of further views. Such prospects provide a sense that the landscape, though limited by the point-of-view of the artist, is implicitly available in other permutations from other vantage points.71 Implicitly, then, the landscape may not only be viewed but occupied. These scenes, with all their spatial complexity, hold out the possibility of a series of imagined vistas that entice the audience with the expectation that “if the observation point is moved forward along the vista, further vistas ... will be revealed.”72 In this 66 Andrew Gordon, “Performing London: the map and the city in ceremony,” in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds) Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 74. 67 In this conception of landscape as both a representation and a culturally constructed re-imagining of topography I am indebted to Garrett Sullivan’s insightful theorizing in The Drama of Landscape. 68 See Walter S. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth”: The World Landscape in SixteenthCentury Flemish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 37, and E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), p. 110. 69 See Gombrich, p. 117. 70 James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 48. 71 See Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 90. 72 Appleton, p. 91.

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way the sense of volume continues to expand, effectively creating for the viewer an experience of implicit space between, behind, and within the structures and settings represented. In Cuningham’s cityview of Norwich, for instance, the complex paths and spaces act as a series of “indirect prospects.” As with a landscape painting, “the eye tends to fit together the visible components in such a way as to construct imaginary paths between its various parts.”73 Paths, roads, open spaces all promote a sense of available movement, what one critic has called “locomotion,” which provide the viewer with a means of imaginative participation, offering both a sense of spatial organization and an implicit invitation into the scene. In this way even the roads and vacancies behind the buildings, which are never actually seen, draw the viewer in, providing an implicit, imaginative means of negotiating the space. But at the same time, another set of expectations and dynamics was informing the complex reading of this cityscape, for maps differ from landscape paintings in crucial ways. “The incidental details have no role other than to give the impression that this representation is like reality itself; a narrative meets the eye, just as in reality, in its very unpredictable contingency. The map is thus penetrated by the landscape, which partially disperses its structure as a narrative accident and a ‘picturesque’ detail.”74 Far more than a painting, a map gains its authority, not simply from its representation, but from the relationship of that representation to the preexisting reality of the landscape. “In its reflection of a world ‘out there’, a map needs to import into its visual display certain properties of the original it purports to represent; indeed, its claim to convey an ‘accurate’ representation of geographical fact rests on the degree of identity it manages to establish between itself and its object of description.”75 And part of this “identity” with the physical space of the city is tied to the function of its social space. There is in the representation of the cityscape a measure of what Andrew Gordon has called spatial performance in which the knowledge of social formations illuminates an understanding of space. “The city was enacted before it was visualised, it walked before it was drawn, and the early modern viewer or imager pictured a city in terms of the organised spatial practices which were the first statement of the city as concept.”76 Thus, an understanding of the city, as a space to be performed and occupied, undergirds the imagination of the map. And a sense of performing the space opens the viewer’s mind to a perception of inhabitable space within the map.77 In this way, the view of Norwich becomes implicitly linked to the experience of the city itself, and like Augsburg or the 1550 73

Appleton, p. 119. Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, R. A. Vollrath (trans.) (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 209–10. 75 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 138. 76 Gordon, “Performing London,” pp. 69, 70. 77 Gordon goes on to argue that Cuningham’s map is an example of resistance to the purely geometric space of cosmography, but I would argue that this representation of Norwich, with its suggestions of social patterns overlaying a sense of spatial exactitude, complements the implied precision of geometrical space at least as much as it resists it. This map serves a function similar to the civic performances that Gordon examines, providing a mimetic, lived sense of the space even as it suggests the representability of it. 74

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view of Trier by Sebastian Munster, it “describes a landscape of trade and travel, a space in which to move rather than rest.”78 But if Cuningham’s Norwich brought the illusion of imaginatively inhabitable space firmly into the English cartographic mainstream, it was another map that linked that illusion more closely to the crucially important precision of scale. The socalled Copperplate Map of London provided a combination of mathematical control and spatial evocation that was new to the genre. Compiled and etched between 1553 and 1559, it was much larger than the Norwich map, about 3’ 8” by 7’ 5”, and like all maps of London created before the Great Fire of 1666, it was done in a so-called “map view.” Such a view combines an ichnographical rendering of the streets with a bird’seye view of the topography that shows the churches, houses, and other structures with at least an attempt at architectural detail.79 This is a step above the Norwich map, offering as it does a more accurate rendering of the streets and boundaries. The Copperplate Map, and the map-views that followed, effectively organized space in an accurate and proportional way while still maintaining the illusion of the landscape as it might actually be seen. Tied as it is to a scale map of the streets, the map-view provides both the assurance of precision, and the representation of spatial organization, for while many of the buildings are generalized in shape, they offer the enticing illusion of specificity. At the same time, the roads and alleys, though often obscured by the houses, are implicitly there, imaginatively evoked through a series of indirect prospects. This combination allows the whole city to be seen in a way that offers a sense of both its precision and its inhabitable space. The map’s audience could take in the entire city at once, but with enough detail to imagine the buildings as houses, churches, and taverns rather than simply locations on the map, creating an illusion of volume into which the imagination could insert itself. This illusion of precision and inhabitable space, drawn from landscape painting and adapted within a series of increasingly accurate maps, provided a new imaginative schema in which the cartographic imagination could operate. Instead of a purely symbolic evocation, like the medieval images of towns that filled the plane of the picture, flattening the perceived depths of the scene into a crowded and planar image, these new mapviews provided a sense of vacancy as well as structure. Each scene had empty portions—streets and fields—as well as the crowded mass of buildings. There was an awareness of multiple planes that enticed the imagination to occupy not just the available surface, but the implied space behind it. And in offering these increasingly complex and precise renderings, maps implicitly established new 78

Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 30. Only three of the engraved plates survive, out of perhaps twelve or fifteen. In addition other slightly less detailed versions of the map were produced from a rather rough woodcut between 1561 and 1570. For more on the Copperplate Map see John Fisher, A Collection of Early Maps of London, 1553–1667 (Kent: Harry Margary, 1981), introduction; and DelanoSmith, p. 190. For more on map-views see Nuti, p. 17; Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-Making (London: British Library), p. 18; and Fisher. “By the end of the sixteenth century a genre of town plans had been established in England, and with it a clear distinction between the straightforward view and the map, which might have all features shown pictorially but which was based firmly on a plan that was at least notionally drawn to scale.” Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, p. 76. 79

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ways of reading cartographic representations that went beyond even the illusion of accuracy which the cityview provided. The growing faith in cartographic objectivity, coupled with an evocative sense of spatial representation, turned the mapped city into a new kind of space. These maps provided the means of reading the visually evocative clues of the landscape within a cultural context of self-conscious precision. They offered a view of the world that was both intellectually believable and visually convincing. And the imaginative habits of thought which they helped reinforce lent to cartography a much broader power. For England’s scale maps embodied a mathematical and objective assurance, a sense of reproduced and surveyed accuracy, that was missing from the largely imaginative artistic creations of de’ Barbari and others. The combination of evocative spatial renderings and mathematical precision created a generation of maps in which the illusion of realistic and objective space became not just convincing but familiar. And familiarity breeds its own a kind of inhabitability. As Bachelard suggests, “Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.”80 As the mapped landscapes and cityviews became more familiar, shaped by the growing expectation of accuracy and objectivity, they became more comprehensible. They came to take on what Bachelard has called “the notion of home.”81 Operating within the developing epistemological expectations of mathematized precision and objectivity, the new cartographic representations became suggestive of, and on some level imaginatively equivalent to, the familiar and intimate spaces of village, town, or locale. It was not unlike Bachelard’s description of an occupant’s relationship to a house. “A house contitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”82 Obviously England exists on a much larger scale than a house, with necessary levels of abstraction and distance that complicate the perception, but within the context of the new cartographic imagination, the possibility of imagining the entire country as a knowable, even intimate, space came into being, and it allowed the whole nation to be organized and spatially imagined. Making the Nation Local In 1579 Christopher Saxton fundamentally altered the face of England. With the publication of his atlas of the counties of England and Wales, the English surveyor created the first national atlas in Europe and gave the English people, or at least the Court of Queen Elizabeth, the first precise and detailed image of the rivers and forests, towns and parklands that was England at its most local. Over the next few years the maps were revised and republished until by 1590 the final version was in 80 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. xxxvi. 81 Bachelard, p. 5. 82 Bachelard, p. 17.

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place. It would serve as the standard and basis for virtually all maps of the country for the next two hundred years. In conducting his survey, Saxton was doing more than simply providing a visual representation of what had been until then largely an abstract concept—the shape of a nation whose boundaries could now be seen and whose topography and details of landscape could be encompassed at a glance. He was turning upon the whole breadth of the country the same urge to organize, measure, envision, and map which had been developing on a smaller scale throughout the century. Drawing on more than fifty years of imaginative and technological development, he established “a new standard of cartographic representation” in England, effectively broadening the power and scope of the cartographic imagination to a new national level.83 For what Saxton produced with his county maps, and then in 1583 with his smaller-scale wall map of England and Wales, was more than a gesture of description; it was an act of instantiation. It was an attempt not just to know the outlines and layout of the country, but to fix them, to stabilize them beyond the reach of varying opinion or custom or traditional local knowledge and to invest them with a sense of certainty and objective rendering that had never been attempted on such a scale (see Figure 2.4). To map the well-known, well-settled, and well-used lands of England was, on the one hand, to attempt to define the limits of that land and to evoke for all who lived there a common visual sense of their country. Through his imposition of a unified representational structure the diversity of the countryside coalesced into the imposed order of the mapped country. This was in many ways an administrative gesture of sovereignty and nationalism, and a number of critics in the wake of Richard Helgerson’s groundbreaking work have explored this aspect.84 But examined in a different light, the change in the way England was quite literally seen, was even more fundamental. With Saxton’s maps, the land at its most local could be visualized in all its precision. The whole country became knowable and familiar in a way that had never yet been possible, for with Saxton’s work, we find the gradually developing expectations of geometrical precision and imaginative representation applied on a national scale. The technological developments and epistemological effects, which had evolved and accrued in a series of increasingly larger and more complex landscapes, were here 83

Tyacke, Christopher Saxton, p. 30. During the period before Saxton’s work two maps of the British Isles were published. The earlier map of the British Isles, drawn in Rome by George Lily, chaplain to Cardinal Pole, was to illustrate Bishop Paolo Giovio’s Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae et Orchadum (1548) It was based on a number of previous sources, some of them English. Lily probably consulted a version of the fourteenth-century Gough Map. In 1564 a wall map of the British Isles was engraved and published by Gerard Mercator. He was sent the map from a “distinguished friend” in England for him to engrave, though it’s not clear who compiled the map. Each of these maps, a map of the British Isles referred to as the “Cotton” map of 1534–46, Lily’s map of the British Isles 1546, and Mercator’s map of Britain 1564 all show detailed coastlines, but they offer much less detail and specificity in their representation of local sites and terrain than Saxton, and were insufficiently detailed to use as as the basis for a memory theater. 84 See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); McRae; Sullivan, Drama of Landscape; Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space.

Figure 2.4:

County of Wiltshire by Christopher Saxton, 1579. By permission of the British Library. British Library G.3604.

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applied to an entire nation. The whole country became precisely and specifically imaginable. Until that point, to visualize the land, to know its shape and spatial organization, you had to see it, walk through it. But with the publication of Saxton’s maps the country became available in a precisely representable form. It became what de Certeau has termed “an instantaneous configuration of positions,” a representation which is both fixed and stable.85 At a time when most people didn’t travel widely, Saxton’s atlas succeeded in making available a new sense of the country, a visual evocation of landscape and spatial organization, to anyone who looked at his map. He made the whole country local. By allowing an immediate familiarity with the shape and order of the land, these maps liberated the imagination to experience parts of the country outside the immediate area. To an Elizabethan who had lived all his life in Surrey but was entirely ignorant of the geography of Northumberland, the fact that the latter county was depicted in the atlas of 1579 by means of hills, forests, rivers, towns, churches, and parks, ipso facto made it a more immediately credible landscape. The image, in short, mediated the features of the unknown country with the viewer’s own experience of the English landscape. Places were transformed from a state of separation to one of proximity, and this viewer was placed ‘inside’ a countryside which would have otherwise been invisible to him.86

In part this new sense of familiarity was, as Harley suggests, a result of the immediate accessibility of the maps’ visual cues. But more than that, it depended on the fundamantal epistemological change embodied in the new cartographic imagination. The interpretive cues imported from landscape painting and the earlier cityscape maps provided the imaginative means of inhabiting even the broader reaches of the countryside. And these new ways of imagining cartographic space made it possible for the map’s audience to perceive distant parts of the country not just in terms of the countryside they already knew but in terms of the map they were reading. This is not to say that Saxton’s maps made the individual aspects of the varying landscape familiar. As Klein notes, “The national image Saxton’s maps create is almost devoid of detail, consisting largely of gaps and vacant land—and thus hardly (aesthetically at least) a mirror of England’s ‘internal morphology’.”87 But the important aspect of Saxton’s maps was not that they provided an accurate illusion of the morphology of the countryside. Their value lay in the way they organized the space of the landscape. Maps are different from landscape paintings in this way. They both draw on the power of illusion to convince, but the illusion in the case of the painting is based on its realism. The painting strives to reproduce the accurate appearance of a landscape, and so the illusion is based upon the viewer’s recognition of the tropes and aspects of the countryside. The vital point is not that the painting reproduces a known scene, but that it produces recognizable tropes and dynamics of 85

de Certeau, p. 117. Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 25. 87 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 103. Klein reads this map quite correctly, I think, as a strategy for rendering national unity, though he overlooks the effects of the map’s spatial precision. 86

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a scene that create a sense of familiarity and reliability. But in a map like Saxton’s, the illusion of realism is of a different order. It is not the realism of appearance, but the realism of organization. It is a matter of accuracy, not merely precision: a measure of how closely something adheres to a previously established mark. The map’s realism derives from the knowledge that it accurately maps the existing spatial relationships of a pre-existing space. Its primary relationship is to the idea of a preexisting landscape. It binds itself not just to the representation of the landscape— those visual cues and relationships that signal the spatial depth and complexity of the scene—but to the landscape itself. Within this context, the spreading expectation of cartographic precision and objectivity allowed the viewer to extend an empirical familiarity with an immediate and personal landscape to an imaginative understanding of the country as a whole. Local knowledge was thus expanded to an awareness of the national without loss of that individual imaginative specificity. Saxton’s maps served as a kind of lens for his audience, allowing them to imaginatively recreate a whole country based on small, personal, precisely described scenes. The individual sites, like the individual experiences of the countryside, were imaginatively extrapolated into a whole realm, so that even a strange and distant landscape could be familiarized and imaginatively inhabited. Saxton’s stylized representation of the landscape within a precisely measured scale functioned as “a cartographic lingua franca” that helped to “fashion mental geographies at a variety of territorial scales away from the limited ‘eyewitness’ experience of individual observers.”88 In other words, the representational quality of the images and details—the trees, the hillsides, the buildings—situated within a self-consciously precise, scaled visual field, allowed more readily an imaginative and affective entrée into the space of the map. They acted as “mirrors to reality.”89 Although the signs used to evoke the terrain were conventional and generalized, open to interpretation by anyone, they also operated within the cartographic epistemology that invested them with the assumption of spatial precision and objectivity. The generic symbols of a single hillside or a tree thus carried the weight of the map’s acknowledged accuracy, and embodied very specific sites and aspects of the terrain.90 This made it possible to invest a map with a sense of accurately capturing the world, so that the map could stand in for the land in a way that hadn’t been possible before. With this sprawling and remarkable endeavor Saxton at once put England at the cutting edge of cartographic development. And yet, while his achievement was enormously important, it was remarkable less because of the technology involved— many aspects of which had been around for fifty years or more—than because of the scope of its ambition and, even more importantly, the enormous range of its 88

Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 25. Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 27. 90 As Harley observes, “Whether at the scale of the cosmos, of the world, a continent, Great Britain, a single county, or of a town or estate, the acceptability of the cartographic message began to be coloured by a perception of its detailed accuracy in representing what was believed to be scientific or geographical truth.” Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 27. 89

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distribution. In publishing his atlas, Saxton “succeeded in introducing cartography to the literate public at large.”91 The many copies surviving today suggest how widely they were sold, extending cartographic understanding throughout the popular consciousness and achieving “a crucial break-through in general understanding.”92 Maps became a common cultural currency, and an awareness of their power to represent and organize space rapidly spread. Until this time, the maps that were most accurate tended to have the smallest circulation, often limited to groups of engineers or administrators. But Saxton’s maps, in their various versions, found their way into the homes of the rich and famous. His atlas became “usual with all noblemen and gentlemen and daily perused by them for their better instruction of the estate of this realm touching the quantity, situation, forms and special places of note.”93 The queen had at least one copy of his wall map hanging in her gallery at Whitehall, as did Lord Burghley at his house in Hertfordshire.94 Even Mercator had a copy in his workshop at Duisburg from which he probably extracted his own regional maps of England and Wales. By the 1590s maps were not only consulted for a variety of purposes by men of affairs, but were also printed on playing cards, woven into tapestries, engraved on medals and used in biblical illustrations.95 As the awareness of maps crept into all aspects of literate society, the vocabulary of maps, the epistemology of cartographic accuracy and objectivity, became available to be tapped into. Maps became “an integral part of the ways of thinking about the country.”96 And as more and more people began to use the new maps, they also began to think about them in new and innovative ways. The spread of the cartographic imagination changed not just the way people thought about reading the world but the way they thought about writing it. Re-Writing the World “Acts of mapping are creative, sometimes anxious, moments in coming to knowledge of the world,” observed Denis Cosgrove, “and the map is both the spatial embodiment of knowledge and a stimulus to further cognitive engagements ... . Any map may thus be regarded as a hinge around which pivot whole systems of meaning.”97 The act of mapping leads not to a simple representation of the world, but to an ongoing imaginative engagement with an array of cultural issues and constructions. With the increasing awareness of maps as cultural objects, their impact must be seen to extend to issues far beyond the purely geographic. In the sixteenth century, the increasing mathematization of maps, and their widespread 91

Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, pp. 60, 64. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, pp. 64–5. 93 Quoted in Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 27. 94 Tyacke, Christopher Saxton, p. 41. 95 Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, p. 7. 96 Sarah Tyacke, “Introduction,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: The British Library, 1983), p. 18. 97 Denis Cosgrove, “Introduction: Mapping Meaning,” in Denis Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 1–23, 9. 92

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inclusion in cultural circulation, produced more than a familiarity with accurate cartographic representations. By introducing a new awareness of precisely measured space, the cartographic imagination altered the basic relationship between viewer and viewed. It fundamentally changed the way people thought about the world, and, just as importantly, it changed the way they thought about thinking about the world. The new epistemology of spatial precision expanded the way an individual could imagine both the country and his relationship to it, because suddenly the country became not simply an abstract social and political entity of which he was a part, but a physical whole which he could imaginatively encompass and manipulate. It produced, I would argue, the same kind of imaginative ownership that Andrew McRae sees in estate maps of the period. “The map, laid out before the landowner at a distance from the actual fields, reinforces the ultimate logic of the surveyors’ representations of the land: that the ‘owner’ of any plot has complete control over it.”98 The perceived precision of Saxton’s maps would have extended this potential for imagined ownership on a large and general scale. These maps imposed on the unwieldy abstraction of national space a new and precise understanding, which in turn produced the associated possibility of imaginative, manipulative control. The sixteenth century’s ongoing dialectic between reading and producing, between the perceived fixity of mapped precision and the ability to manipulate the metaphorical implications of these cartographic schemata, mirrored the complex dynamic that de Certeau has posited between his conceptions of “strategy” and “tactics.” The maps’ producers, and the new technologies themselves, attempted to define the ideological strategies within which these maps were intended to be read and understood. But at the same time, the new understanding of cartographic possibilities served to “teach the tactics possible within a given (social) system.”99 The rules and assumptions put into circulation by these mapping technologies provided their own means of subversion and revised use. “Once created, map images, like images in art in general, acquired an independent life and survived beyond the society into which they were born.”100 As de Certeau has observed, consumption is its own form of production, and the consumption of the new surveying and mapping techniques produced its own relation not just to the new artifacts of representation but to the broader imaginative patterns of expectation and understanding that they implied. The act of reading a map put into circulation a set of interpretive strategies which could be used, not simply to consume the encoded information—information invested with a variety of ideological and disciplinary functions—but to reinterpret it. The act of reading a map mobilized not just the map’s own text, but the viewer’s desires and intentions as well. By the end of the sixteenth century the intricate cultural blend of ideology and science that formed the English cartographic imagination had come to center on the idea that even the most distant and abstract physical landscape could be measured and ordered, that a map offered a new and reliable vision of the world, a version of the world, unaffected by distance or memory or desire. The land itself was fixed and 98 99 100

McRae, p. 193. de Certeau, p. 23. Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity,” p. 22.

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stable, and the map which represented that land with all its precision and accuracy became just as fixed, just as objective. A new realm of concrete understanding was mobilized for broader imaginative use. Images of a town or sea front or countryside, which once floated freely in the larger context of a vaguely imagined place, were now precisely anchored within a specific and measurable space. The accuracy and detail of Saxton’s atlas, the idea that these images, painstakingly surveyed and drawn, precisely represented a landscape that actually existed, allowed maps to serve as templates for a larger, imaginative view of the landscape and the country. And in perceiving and consuming these new maps, the cartographic audience of the sixteenth century created a correspondingly new relationship to the organization of space, a new way of conceiving of space as something with metaphoric as well as concrete manifestations. For the inflexibility of maps, with their implied assumption that the world, the country, the county, and the estate were exactly and precisely as shown, provided its own complex means of manipulating these spaces. As the epistemology of cartographic precision and objectivity spread through the culture, assumptions about how the world could be represented—a rising awareness of what Bachelard has called “the immediate dynamics of the image”101—led inevitably to an awareness of how the representations themselves could be manipulated. The spreading belief in the objectivity of a mapped image—an image whose accuracy and scaled precision allowed it to stand in for all that it represented—provided new ways of considering the very idea of spatial organization. And this in turn suggested new means and metaphors, new imaginative and poetic models, for the organization and manipulation of other ideas, as well. For if something as unquestionably real and fundamentally abstract as a distant landscape can be precisely measure, organized, and representationally manipulated, then other abstract ideas can be treated in the same way. The mathematicized mapping of space provided an epistemological model for the imaginative measuring, organizing, and manipulation of literary images, concepts, and themes. Just as “a relation (always social) determines its terms, and not the reverse,”102 so these maps, with their expression of precise and objective spatial organization, created a new sense of how space could be imagined and controlled. In organizing and making familiar the country as a whole, Saxton’s maps provided a totalizing view comparable to de Certeau’s “Solar Eye, looking down like a god.” In de Certeau’s terms it is the very distance and abstraction of the total view which allows the city, or the landscape, to be interpreted. Such a distant view “transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it.”103 But at the same time, by turning the world into a text that can be read, these maps also enable it to be re-read, re-interpreted, and re-written. The rules and expectations of cartographic representation—mathematical accuracy, spatial organization, visual precision, the fixity of space—were open to their own form of subversion that allowed new kinds of imaginative manipulation as 101 102 103

Bachelard, p. xviii. de Certeau, p. xi. de Certeau, p. 92.

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the scientific and technology discourse of cartography was effectively transformed into “ordinary language.”104 In re-directing the rules of cartography, a sixteenthcentury audience could be seen to be “‘metaphorizing’ the dominant order to make it function in another register.”105 The cartographic imagination, with its new ways of visualizing the fixed and physical world, enabled new means of making concrete the most abstract imaginings. And within this new epstemology of mapped certainty other ideas of accuracy and precision could be tied to the corroborating proof of cartographic representation. Uncertain concerns about authority, about the shape of new ideas, about the nature of proof itself could all be tied to the evidence of mapped objectivity, so that even the most disorganized or suspect notions could take on the imprimatur of cartographic accuracy. And even larger, more inchoate issues of morality, poetic order, rhetorical manipulations of power, and political instability could be locked within the metaphorical mold of cartographic understanding and analogically imbued with the precision and certainty of the new maps. The most unstable and fluid of ideas and desires could borrow from the rigor of cartographic order to lend themselve a more convincing structure, taking shelter beneath the cloak of a mapped representation. As Lefebvre recognized, there is a complex and formative relationship between space and culture, between the physical fact of the world and how it is perceived, represented, and lived. “Representations of space must therefore have a substantial role and a specific influence in the production of space,”106 helping to mold and modify the “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols.”107 In the sixteenth century the effects of this cultural production of space were paradoxical, for the maps that organized the world in a rigid and precise way also enabled new and more fluid means of undermining the very precision and control they evinced. The reading of maps, like the reading of any text, is culturally imbedded: “a silent production,” featuring “the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words”108 or, in the case of maps, from a few images. Even as they read maps, sixteenth-century viewers would have been producing, from their understanding of those maps, their own cultural constructions not just of space but of a broader imaginative reality. They would have been deriving from the ideological rules implicit in the new cartography their own types of manipulations and constructions. By providing a newly intimate and accessible knowledge of physical space, the new cartographic epistemologies opened the whole imagination to a new kind of conquest. In these terms, then, the cartographic imagination may be seen as an expression of the imaginative framework that developed at the nexus of representational precision and spatial organization. It embodied the culturally constructed belief that cartographic epistemologies of mathematical accuracy and spatial precision could 104

de Certeau, p. 6. de Certeau, p. 32. 106 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 42 107 Lefebvre, p. 39. 108 de Certeau, p. xxi. 105

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be applied to a range of discourses, that the new ability to evoke and imaginatively manipulate specific and concrete details of topography brought with it a variety of metaphoric and poetic techniques for the manipulation of other imaginative realms. As we will see in succeeding chapters, the familiarity with spatial organization, the imaginative manipulation of physical space, the belief in the reliability of mapped representations, all these aspects of the cartographic imagination could find applications within the broader realm of written culture. Metaphors of mapping, paradigms of spatial representation, imaginative manipulations of precision and accuracy, could all be transposed from the scientific context that established their initial meanings to the wider purposes and varied functions of literature.

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Chapter 3

From Allegorical Space to a Geographical World Mapping Cultural Memory in The Faerie Queene1

Edmund Spenser set out to write The Faerie Queene with his eyes fixed firmly on the past. In his self-described effort “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,”2 the poet was effectively recreating a view of England’s moral and historic past and superimposing it upon the England of his day. Even as he sought to position himself within the contemporary political and literary culture, his conscious choice of archaic language and chivalric subject matter suggests the degree to which he was drawing upon the literary concerns and cultural paradigms of the Middle Ages. Embedding his poem within the native romance tradition, Spenser was calling up a wealth of familiar tropes and imagery that helped anchor the poetic triumphs of the Elizabethan present, his own chief among them, within a continuing English literary tradition.3 1 In this discussion I consider only the first three books of the poem, which appeared in 1590. Written during the years following the publication of Christopher Saxton’s atlas of the counties of England and Wales, this initial version reflected Spenser’s first and most marked response to the period’s burgeoning sense of cartographic awareness, and stands as a coherent representation of his poetic issues and concerns. And as Deneef observes, “The poet’s decision to publish the first three books as a completed unit also implies that his essential principles have been sufficiently articulated by Book III to provide the reader with the terms necessary to understand the installment as a whole.” A. Leigh Deneef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), p. 157. All references are to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 2 Letter to Raleigh. 3 As Paul Rovang notes, “Spenser knew and drew upon ... chivalric texts such as Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and Tale of Sir Thopas, Huon of Bordeaux, Bevis of Hamptoun, Arthur of Little Britain, and Lybeaus Desconus, and was influenced via the existing corpus of the chivalric romance tradition by works which he had quite likely not read, such as the prose Lancelot and Tristan and the works of Chrétien de Troyes.” For a discussion of Spenser’s romance influences see Patricia Parker, “Romance,” The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 609–18 and R. W. Hanning, “Chrétien de Troyes,” The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 149–50; and Paul R. Rovang, Refashioning “Knights and Ladies Gentle Deeds”: The Intertextuality of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Malory’s Morte Darthur (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), especially p. 17. Spenser’s other sources are myriad and have been well examined over the years. His debts to the bible, to classsical sources, and to Ariosto and Tasso and the European tradition of epic romance are well documented. By narrowing my focus to his

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But in doing so he was forced to negotiate a wide cultural divide. In setting his poem within such a self-consciously medieval context, he was effectively blurring the lines between literary past and present, between the cultural assumptions of the Middle Ages and the new epistemologies of the early modern period. By incorporating so many tropes of medieval romance into his new English epic, Spenser was weaving together not just two divergent literary genres, but the very different cultural moments within which these genres were set. He was moving between what were, in a very real sense, two different ways of imagining the world. As we’ve seen in Chapter One, medieval geography was fundamentally unconcerned with the physical. The mappae mundi of the period focused on ideas and meanings beyond immediate concerns of spatial organization, offering the representation of a world in which “[t]here are in fact no ‘places,’ only ‘places where.’”4 And the Middle English romances, which Spenser drew upon, reflected this world. They evoke what may be seen, despite the risk of overgeneralization, as a fundamentally medieval sense of space. I’m not speaking here of the old-fashioned and simplistic “medieval world picture” that critics like Harry Berger have rightly dismissed5 but a more complex consideration of how abstract physical space was understood and manipulated: not simply how the world was seen, but how the spatial organization of all those parts of the world beyond immediate, physical experience, was imagined. From the twelfth-century poems of Chrétien de Troyes to the Middle English tales of Havelok and Sir Bevis of Hampton to the fifteenth century and Malory, the romance landscape was a place of barely differentiated locations whose physical representations and spatial relationships were far less important than the heroic actions that took place within them. The gardens, cities, forests, and plains were ordered and arranged not by their locations in space, but by their roles in the moral development of the characters. They were described and even named, but not organized; arranged within the narrative but not the world. They could be imaginatively evoked but never precisely mapped. Or rather, if they were mapped,

English influences, I am attempting to focus on a narrower range of factors, isolating English cartographic reflections from the more advanced technologies of the continent, and allowing me, I hope, to address the developments in English literature and cartographical culture in a more precise way. A general sense of Spenser’s sources and the influence of Ariosto and Tasso can be found in Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery; Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 384–7; Josephin Waters Bennett, “Genre, Milieu, and the ‘Epic-Romance,’” in Alan S. Downer (ed.) English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 95–125; C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 297; M. Pauline Parker, The Allegory of the Faerie Queene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 284; and Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 95. 4 Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 32. For a full discussion of this see Chapter One. 5 See Harry Berger Jr., Revisionary Play (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 23.

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the result would look a great deal like a section of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, with all its imaginative vividness and beauty, but lacking any sense of spatial precision.6 In drawing on these medieval works, Spenser drew as well on the geographical ideas and epistemologies that informed them, and at least at first, he seemed to adhere closely to the sense of the world they embodied. His poetic evocations of landscape are clearly related to the emblematic renderings of both medieval romance and medieval world maps. But while Spenser’s poetic realm has, on the surface, an emblematic quality similar to its medieval romance sources, it exhibits a fundamental and qualitative difference. For Spenser was operating within a culture permeated by a burgeoning confidence in cartographic precision. As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, the years leading up to the publication of The Faerie Queene were marked by new technologies of surveying and a growing confidence in the mathematical accuracy and spatial objectivity of cartographic images. By the time Spenser created his own poetic landscape, Saxton’s groundbreaking atlas of the counties of England and Wales had been in circulation for almost ten years, helping to create the cartographically charged cultural matrix within which Spenser’s epic was both written and received. In creating his land of Faerie as a template of Elizabethan England, the poet was necessarily positioning that new poetic landscape—whether deliberately or not—alongside an almost equally new, and precisely visualized, map of the nation. Of course, a poem is not a map. And we cannot know for certain whether Spenser had Saxton’s maps in mind when he wrote The Faerie Queene. But it seems all but inevitable that he would have had experience of some similar work of cartographic precision. And Saxton’s atlas was enormously influential. In proposing that Spenser could have imaginatively invested such maps with the mythic narrative and allegorical virtues of the English past we have only to look at a slightly later development of Saxton’s work to see the possibilities. In 1611 John Speed published the Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, a regional atlas of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland invested with a wealth of historical, local, and cultural information. Most of the Theatre’s maps were based on Saxton’s with some debts to John Norden and William White, but Speed has crowded into the margins of Saxton’s protoypes a sometimes bewildering array of pictorial material. City views, historical sites, place names, battle scenes, details of regional landscape or local buildings, references to English and Roman history, and more all take up room within the cartographic space7 (see Figure 3.1). As Klein observes, “The pictorial richness of his cartographic images confers on Speed’s maps both a partisan political vision of national history and the immediacy of a narrative presence. Producing a detailed network of causal relations

6

For more detailed discussion of the medieval maps and the Hereford Mappa Mundi in particular, see Chapter One. 7 For a further discussion of Speed’s maps see Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 173; and Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2001), especially p. 107.

Figure 3.1:

County of Lincolnshire by John Speed, taken from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, first published in 1611. By permission of the British Library. Map c.7.c.20.

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across time and space, these maps move beyond the basic ‘plotless’ structure of Saxton’s cartographics.”8 The rich elaboration of Speed’s visual text is, indeed, striking compared to the work of his predecessors. But even if we admit Saxton’s “plotless structure,” we must recognize the organizational potential of this unplotted space. Saxton’s atlas may be seen to embody the broad possibilities of what another critic has called a map’s “generative itineraries,”9 and the fact that Saxton’s maps lent themselves to Speed’s “narrative presence” suggests their ability to provide an organizing schema for a variety of other ideas. For in using Saxton’s maps to produce “a detailed network of causal relations across time and space,”10 the later cartographer is doing something very similar to what I am arguing for Spenser. And we can see in Speed’s use of Saxton’s work—the way he adapts these maps as an evocative context for organizing complex ideas—their intrinsic potential. “With the help of the mimetic icons spread over the surface of the maps, the representation of an autonomous land is linked to a recognizable set of historical personae moving through the semi-fictional space of the national theater, giving it temporal depth and a distinct cultural profile.”11 The terms in which Klein analyzes Speed, as a narratized version of Saxton, might as easily be said of Spenser in his cartographic imagining of Faerieland.12 Saxton’s maps may lack a “plot,” but they provide a very precise setting and organizational structure. And Speed’s imposition of such a variety of attendent historical and cultural imagery upon the cartographic arrangement of space reflects the potental for Spenser to do something very similar. Within the developing context of what P. D. A. Harvey has famously called “mapmindedness,”13 Spenser could be seen to organize the narratively imagined landscape of his poem within a dense matrix of new cartographical developments. And under the pressure of this growing awareness, I would argue, his evocation of the medieval emblematic approach to the world underwent a fundamental change. The imagined world of The Faerie Queene came to reflect not just the emblematic representations of medieval space, but the new cartographic imagination as well. The Elizabethan confidence in the precise and objective nature of mapped space 8

Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 107. William Boelhower, “Inventing America: a model of cartographic semiosis,” in Word & Image, vol. 4, no. 2 April–June 1988, 475–97: 484. 10 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 107. 11 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 109. 12 Klein comes to a different conclusion, arguing for the qualitative difference between Saxton’s work and Speed’s. “If national history has to be told and retold before it takes root in social memory, and if the space visually displayed on a map needs to be strictly temporalized in its service, then Saxton’s maps lack the narrative dimension consititutive of the national idea: a route, an itinerary, a specific narrative progression may only be speculatively extracted from the ensemble of landscape elements they offer, and in each concrete instance these routes are not realized but articulated only as the abstract sum of their possibilites.” Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 110. But that “abstract sum of their possibilities” is precisely what I’m concerned with, and the awareness that these possibilities provided their own organizing potential in the cartographic shape of the maps. 13 P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London: British Library, 1993), p. 15. 9

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mobilized a series of epistemological tools that allowed Spenser to organize and manipulate the imagined space of his national epic in unexpected ways. As I hope to make clear, Spenser’s engagment in the new spatial consciousness of the late sixteenth century invested his work with a series of cartographic strategies which provide new means of understanding the complex spatial effects of the poem. Writing within the allegorical mode, Spenser created a narrative in which symbolic and metaphoric associations derived much of their meaning from the precise interaction of people and places. Encoding the complexities of spiritual and moral development within a series of long, circuitous journeys, the poem necessarily depended for a moral understanding of its characters upon a spatial understanding of their movements. But in Spenser’s hands this allegorical structure became the means of understanding not just the shape of the characters but the shape of the landscape as well. And if at first glance that landscape’s shape seems like nothing more than a verbal mappa mundi, with its figurative rendering of English mythic history and an emphasis on spiritual rather than spatial organization, it gradually grows more complex. As he intensifies the level of specificity, Spenser moves from the emblematic landscape of the romances to a detailed allegorical topography. Descriptions of place develop from the generic simplicity of medieval romance to the vivid complexity of allegorical association, and in the process, descriptions of landscape and character develop a new level of specificity that inflects the sense of space. There is an increase not just in physical detail but in a kind of semiotic connectivity between sites of action. The allegorical meaning of the various places and landscapes organizes the details of topography in relation to one another, creating and imbuing the oncegeneric space of the medieval romance with a level of organizational precision that is fundamentally cartographic. Characters move from place to place, from one site of moral development to another, and as they do, the details of allegorical description fill in the shape of the action with a network of precise interconnections and relationships, articulating and organizing the imaginative space of the poem. And in this intensive doubling of meaning—moving back and forth between vehicle and tenor, between physical movement and moral development—Spenser can be seen to draw upon an essentially cartographic understanding. By rendering the moral topography in such a specific way, conferring on the landscape a new sense of descriptive accuracy and interconnected order that parallels the mathematized spatial organization of late-Elizabethan cartography, he is effectively operating within an epistemology of mapped precision that allows him—and on some level constrains him—to organize his allegorical meanings into a landscape that can be individually read and yet visualized as a whole. And it is within this dynamic, within this nexus of “allowing” and “constraint,” that we can read the interpellating force of the new spatial consciousness and the extent of its effects. For in the dialectic between text and context, between authorial intention and cultural discipline, The Faerie Queene is constructed on a fundamental contradiction. The competing epistemologies of medieval and early modern cartography meet in Spenser’s representations of Faerieland, and the emblematic conceptions of medieval space alter under the pervading pressure of the new cartographic imagination. In offering his own elaborated and enlarged vision

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of medieval romance, Spenser is engaging in an act of Derridean différence, both a differentiation of meaning and its deferral. The technologically sophisticated and cartographically precise epistemology of the late-sixteenth century serves as an implicit and inevitable supplement to the conceptual dictates of medieval romance, supporting and undercutting them simultaneously. While the imagery and narrative description of Spenser’s epic suggests a poem subsumed in its medieval vision of emblematic space, the late-Elizabethan confidence in a mappable, precisely knowable world comes through, “compensatory and vicarious,”14 imprinting itself on the shape of the poem. And this precision of spatial organization, mobilized within the imaginative territory of the action, is central to the poem’s effects. For it is not so much that the characters move within an explicitly mapped space, but that the reader understands their diverse travels and wanderings in the coherent and comprehensive way that a map allows. The implicitly cartographic rendering provides a new epistemological schema within which the reader can organize the narrative’s complex structures, offering a new way of visualizing and manipulating the imagined space of the poem. And with this new precision Spenser is able to draw on the classical Art of Memory in new ways, enabling him to map onto his representation of Faerieland the virtues and mythic history he was trying to graft onto England’s literary past. For within a cultural context of mapped accuracy and objectivity, Faerieland itself becomes a variation of the classical memory theater, in which an individual can organize and imaginatively store a complex series of ideas and recollections for later use and manipulation. With the precision and specificity inherent in its evocation of cartographic organization, the Faerie landscape can be made to serve, not so much as a classical Theater of Memory, but as an imagined Map of Memory. By effectively juxtaposing an imagined map of Faerieland against the contemporary awareness of the precise mappability of England—perhaps against the very maps that Saxton provided—Spenser could superimpose the real and the imagined. The consciousness of spatial measurability and precision which was in circulation throughout Elizabethan scientific, literary, and intellectual circles—and which was so vividly embodied in Saxton’s atlas—allowed Spenser to arrange, within the sharply evoked terrain of his epic romance, a whole landscape of moral virtues and poetic models. And then, using techniques reminiscent of neo-platonic magic, Spenser could organize the images of his imagination within the mind of his English reader, impressing not just the allegorical precision of the Faerie landscape but his own version of the English cultural past onto his audience, the kingdom, and the national memory. A World of Places The world of medieval romance was in a fundamental sense the world of the medieval romance writer. Middle English poetry and prose from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries reflected not just the ideological matrix of political, religious, and social 14

For more on the function of the supplement see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 1976), especially pp. 144–5.

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concerns within which it was embedded, but the geographical epistemologies as well. The imagined shape of the world necessarily dictates its literary representations, and like the physical landscape, the poetic landscape of the medieval romance was seen not as an arrangement of sites and cities within a fixed and articulated world, but as a series of locations important only for the nature of the activity taking place there and for the role each played within the extended moral development of the hero. In this way the travels and adventures of a romance protagonist can be seen to parallel the travels of a medieval pilgrim, with a focus not on where the characters travel or how they move through space, but what occurs when they arrive and what the moral meaning of each destination is.15 A similar emphasis runs through the representations of medieval romance. Although the nature of the quest undertaken by the knightly protagonist was rarely explicitly religious, the travels he undertook were important largely for what he accomplished, for the moral growth they brought about, rather than for where they led. Like the pilgrimage maps of Matthew Paris, these poems suggested a path through a series of emblematic milestones which, though separate and distinct, were unrelated in any precise geographical way (see Figure 3.1). The separate locations were unanchored in space, connected only by the narrative of the poem. As in the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the place names were emblematic, evoking an impression of a specific locale and of the events that occured there, but they did not establish a spatially precise representation of the physical landscape. A look at the twelfth-century romance Erec and Enide by Chrétien de Troyes can begin to illuminate the matter. The poem marked the early establishment of the Arthurian romance form, and although Spenser is unlikely to have read it, Chrétien’s poetry had a profound effect on the shape of later chivalric romance and therefore ultimately upon The Faerie Queene.16 With the very first episode, the nature of romance geography is made clear, demonstrating a “lack of narrative specificity, especially as regards time and place.”17 Describing the scene in which Erec’s participation in the royal hunt for the white stag is interrupted by the approach of an unknown knight, Chrétien tells us only that Erec, Guinevere, and her attendant “rode speedily on/and came straight to the forest” (115–16). In following the noise of the hunt, “all three had stopped in a clearing/beside the road” (136–7).18 This sense of spatial organization, typical of the poem, is vague at best. We are aware that Erec travels—in fact, he travels a great deal—but at no time is his movement described with any precision. 15

For a complete discussion of pilgrimage see Chapter One. “Although it is hardly possible that Spenser ever read these works, they established literary traditions of love and adventure of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere that flourished in the thirteenth-century French ‘Vulgate Cycle,’ became well-known in England through Malory’s adaptations, and ultiamtely exerted a strong influence on the form and content of The Faerie Queene.” R. W. Hanning, “Chrétien de Troyes,” The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 150. 17 Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 22. 18 For all references to the poem see Chrétien de Troyes, Erec and Enide, edited and translated by Carleton W. Carroll, volume 25, series A of the Garland Library of Medieval Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987). 16

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Erec kept on following The armored knight And the dwarf who had struck him, Until they came to a fortified town, Well situated and strong and fine; (342–6) The journey is rendered without the attempt to organize it within the landscape. The characters ride in an unstated direction until they get wherever they’re going. They reach the next moment in the plot rather than the next point in space. And while there are occasional town names to provide a passing specificity—mentions of Tintagel, Limors, Nantes, and a list of exotic place names associated with some of the secondary characters19—they provide at best a narrative evocation of the familiar or exotic, without any sense of precise geography. The forest is the source of evil and surprising dangers, the plain or valley provides a setting for battle. Each locale is important, not for where it is, but for what happens there and for the role it plays in Erec’s development. Even the most vivid of places, the garden setting for the climactic Joy of the Court, is remarkable for its beauty and its mysterious and metaphorical resonance rather than for its location in space. The garden is magically enclosed, but its shape is unspecified. There is no sense of a cartographic overview, no sense of spatial organization. While crowded with every sort of beautiful and beneficial plant and flower, it offers no clue to their arrangement. This is not a mappable landscape, but merely a place whose only importance lies in its metonymic association with the battle fought there. This scene, like the whole poem, takes place not within a geographical matrix but within the vaguer confines of what might better be termed emblematic space. And this same emblematic representation is found in the native romances of England even as they diverge from the early French and Anglo-Norman tradition.20 19 “There were many counts and kings,/Normans, Bretons, Scotsmen, Irish;/from England and from Cornwall/there was a rich gathering of barons,/from from Wales all the way to Anjou,/in Maine or in Poitou,/there was no important knight/nor noble lady of fine lineage;/the best and the most noble of them/were all at the cour tat Nantes” (6599–608). 20 Beginning in the thirteenth century, native romances were increasingly written in English, and an “educated and broadly middle-class interest in native verse romance remained intact well into the sixteenth century.” King, 27. Although there isn’t time or place in this book to offer a detailed treatment of the native romance tradition, even a brief examination of a few selected texts demonstrates the degree to which Spenser draws on this tradition, and the medieval sense of space and geography which underlies these early models. My interest in these medieval romances, however, is not to identify the specific texts and versions that would have been available to Spenser, or to offer any explicit and definitive insights into which texts he drew upon and to what extent. Rather in examining the versions of these romances that predated the sixteenth century I wish to establish the earlier, medieval cultural and geographical context which Spenser both used and subverted. The most famous of the stories and characters retained a central place in the literary awareness well into Spenser’s time, and his dependence on them was clear from the beginning. As Andrew King suggests, “the setting of The Faerie Queene, its language, characters, and events would be compellingly familiar, not necessarily in terms of precise borrowings but rather as the narrative and linguistic world of the native romances.” King, p. 41. And along with the “language, characters, and events,” this “narrative

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In Havelok, dating from the thirteenth century, the sense of space established in Chrétien’s romances continues into the Middle English form. Movement is once again presented in generic and unanchored terms. Early in the poem, for example, King Athelwold seeks advice from his nobles. He sende writes sone onon After his erles, evere-ich on, And after hise baruns, riche and poure, Fro Rokesburw at into Dovere (ll. 136–9) The reference to place names suggests the breadth of the kingdom, stretching from Roxburgh in Scotland to the south coast, but despite the apparent specificity of the two cities, the reference functions in a purely generic way. The fact that virtually this same phrase is repeated a hundred lines later, “Al Engelond to faren thorw, Fro Dovere tin Rokesborw,” (ll. 264–5) suggests its formulaic quality, offering a sense of vague distance, but not precise location. Like similar references to Winchester later on, these references act as names, rather than places, conferring on the poem a sense of specific Englishness without any geographical precision.21 The world of the romance, like the world of the mappa mundi, is invested with a sense of history rather than a sense of space. As Andrew King suggests, the specificity of placenames offers a level of familiarity and rootedness in an awareness of the local, “relating the actions of the romance to the real world known to its readers.”22 But though King refers to these place names as “geographical references,” they do not actually represent a true geographical awareness. However specific the names, they do not function to locate these sites in space. Their importance in the poem has to do with their emblematic associations rather than their physical location. While the names offer the illusion of familiarity, they again serve merely as “a way of placing England within the larger rhythms of world history.”23 The country, along with the individual cities and locations which emphasize its particularity, is an idea rather than a location, and that idea is unconnected to any precise awareness of the country’s spatial organization or its position within the larger world. This organization of ideas rather than locations is particularly pertinent in the fourteenth-century romance Bevis of Hampton. Dating from about 1324, Bevis was one of the most popular and durable of Middle English verse romances, continuing in at least eight editions and revisions all the way into the sixteenth century.24 Just as and linguistic world” would have carried with it other, broader cultural assumptions about the organization of physical space and its geographical representations. 21 As Andrew King suggests, “the use of precise placenames invokes the historical mode as well as inciting in the readers a sense of territorial, even national, identity.” King, p. 48. 22 King, p. 50. 23 Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury, Introduction, “Bevis of Hampton,” in Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury (eds) Four Romances of England, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), p. 197. 24 Wynkyn de Worde, William Caxton’s assistant and successor published three editions of Bevis of Hampton (STC 1987 (1500), STC 1987.5 (c. 1500), STC 1988.6 (1533?) and at

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important, a number of obvious parallels with the action of The Faerie Queene make it all but certain that Spenser knew the poem and drew upon it.25 In this light, Bevis serves as a particularly useful example in looking at Spenser’s treatment of romance tropes and imagery, for an examination of the earlier romance suggests the medieval world view that Spenser was both drawing upon and subverting in his creation of Faerieland. Like Erec and Havelok, Bevis inhabits a world of names rather than places. Mention is made of Almaine, Damascas, Babylon, Jerusalem, but while the names evoke a sense of unspecified and exotic distance, there is no attempt at placing them in the world. What one critic has called “the incredible geographic sweep” of the poem involves nothing more than the specificity of placenames that we’ve seen in Havelok, and even this grows “more and more misty and impressionistic the farther we go from England.”26 The lack of spatial concern is highlighted in the handling of the numerous voyages throughout the poem. As a boy, Bevis is sold into slavery to a Pagan king. But while the realm of King Ermin is implicitly foreign and exotic, the description of Bevis’ trip offers no sense of its location or spatial relationship to England. The childes hertte was wel colde, For that he was so fer isolde; Natheles, though him thoughte eile, Toward painim a moste saile. Whan hii rivede out off that strond, The king highte Ermin of that londe; (ll. 511–16) The boy may be grieving at the great distance he must travel, at how “fer” he was “isolde”, but the journey is accomplished without any sense of time or distance passing. The poem highlights the exoticism and fear of the pagan kingdom, but completely elides its direction and location. No place is represented in precise spatial relation to another. The sense of a cartographic epistemology, organizing and articulating the space between locations, is entirely absent. Where there is a sense of movement in the poem, it functions with a kind of fundamental imprecision. While it is important that the action change location, it doesn’t matter where that location is. When Bevis flees prison in Damascus, he does so in no particular direction. A restede him ther a lite tide, His gode stede he gan bestride And rod over dale and doun, Til he come to a gret toun; (ll. 1827–30)

least one edition of Guy of Warwick (STC 12541 (1497?) in addition to others. See King, p. 30. 25 Numerous details in the climactic battle between Redcrosse and the dragon in Book I seem to come directly out of Bevis, and a host of other more general similarities of tone and action suggest the connections. 26 Herzman, p. 197.

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The sense of motion is all but unconnected to the landscape. He rode “over dale and doun.” But such a phrase functions as a narrative marker of movement rather than space. And as for direction, distance, or any description of the passing landscape that might insert Bevis’ journeys into a concrete and organized landscape, there is nothing. He rides “Til he come to a gret toun.” That is, he rides until he stops. Clearly for the poet, it is the act of riding, not the space through which he moves, that is important. Even late in the medieval romance tradition, in Sir Thomas Malory’s great fifteenth-century prose compendium the Morte Darthur, the generic space of the earlier poetic versions is retained and reproduced.27 The landscape is evocative, but more in terms of tone and character than geography. The various settings serve as mirrors of their occupants. In “The Tale of Sir Gareth,” the first villain we meet, the Black Knight, occupies “a black launde,” featuring “a black hauthorne, and theron henge a blak baner, and on the other syde there henge a black shelde, and hit stode a black spere, grete and longe, and a grete black hors couerd with sylke, and a black stone fast by.”28 Even the hero and his lady move through a landscape that is atmospheric but not geographical. “And on the morn the damoisel and he took their leue and thanked the knyght, and soo departed and rode on her way vntyl they came to a grete forest, and there was a grete ryuer and but one passage.”29 And later, “they toke their horses and rode thorououte a fair forest, and thenne they came to a playne.”30 Like Bevis and Havelok before him, Malory’s Beaumayns rides until he gets where he’s going. And while there are specific place names mentioned, “Wyndsoure,” London, and “the medowe besyde Wynchestir,”31 they function like those in Havelok, as markers of familiarity and nationalism rather than geography. Despite one critic’s assertion of Malory’s “own kind of geography,” this is simply the geography of the medieval romance, an evocative landscape without precision nor any suggestion that the action is taking place within measurable and organized space.32 Like the mappae mundi that existed alongside them, medieval romances 27

Although there has been a long history of contention over the degree of influence that Malory’s Morte Darthur had on The Faerie Queene, it seems all but certain that Spenser would have at least been familiar with it. For the adamant argument against any influence see Josephin Waters Bennett, “Genre, Milieu, and the ‘Epic-Romance,’” in Alan S. Downer (ed.) English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 95–125. For a more recent rebuttal and an argument for an ‘intertextual’ relationship between the texts, see Rovang. For more on the landscape of the Morte Darthur see W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London: Longman, 1987), p. 149; and John Arthos, On the Poetry of Spenser and the Form of Romances (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1956), p. 86. 28 Malory, 163.40–164.2. All references are to Sir Thomas Malory, Caxton’s Malory, James W. Spisak and William Matthews (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 29 Malory, 163.11–13. 30 Malory, 173.14–15. 31 Malory, 509.38–9. 32 Joseph D. Parry, “Following Malory out of Arthur’s World,” Modern Philology 95/2 (Nov., 1997): 148. Parry later agrees that “Malory’s narrative geography certainly possesses neither the global nor the local rigor and precision essential to our modern sense of ‘geography’ and its visual realization in ‘cartography.’” Parry, 158.

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such as Bevis and the Morte Darthur were anchored in an epistemology of narrative rather than spatiality, and such references to place as they provided fixed the story in the idea of England, without rooting that idea in a geographical world. But something happens when these narrative tropes are translated from an epistemology of emblematic space into a culture of cartographic precision. The Faerie Queene’s landscape, with its Arthurian characters, ongoing quests, and ubiquitous chivalry, is superficially a medieval one, and at first glance it might have been lifted directly out of Bevis or Malory. But the sixteenth century is not the fourteenth. And when Spenser draws on these romances, he translates the signature tropes and imagery into a very different ideological context, a context which transmutes their cultural character and inevitably alters them in fundamental ways.33 Geographic Awareness At first glance Spenser seems to be placing The Faerie Queene firmly in the tradition of medieval romance. In the opening stanza we find ourselves thrust into the middle of the ongoing action and are forced to make sense of it in terms of familiar tropes and expectations. A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remeaine, The cruell markes of many’ a bloody field; (I i 1–4) With these first images—the knight riding fast “ycladd in mightie armes,” carrying with him the marks of previous battles—the reader is immediately interpellated into the discourse of chivalric courage and heroic questing that underlies the whole range of medieval romances.34 At the same time we are plunged into what is recognizably a romance geography. We’re given a plain of no specificity or location, suggesting a place for action, rather than a specific, mappable space.35 And when the journey is interrupted by a sudden shower and the three characters search for shelter, they spy “A shadie grove not farr away.”36 The grove, too, has an initially generic quality that ties it to similar locales in previous romances. This might be a description 33 In noting Spenser’s reliance on English romances I am not unmindful of his obvious and substantial roots in the Italian epic romances of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. But while Spenser draws largely, and to C. S. Lewis’ mind all but exclusively, on these Italian models, his sense of space is derived more clearly from the native romance tradition, and it is this transformation that I am focusing on here. 34 That we are necessarily immersed as well in the allegory of the poem was made clear by Rudolph Gottfried, who has pointed out the visual impossibility of the scene, in which Redcrosse is spurring, Una is riding slowly on a mule, and the dwarf is walking, and yet they all stay together. Rudolf Gottfried, “The Pictorial Element in Spenser’s Poetry,” ELH 19/3 (Sept., 1952): 203–13. 35 For a further consideration of this landscape as the impressionistic realm of romance, see Arthos, p. 47. 36 I i 7.2.

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straight out of Malory. The landscape is important for the atmosphere it lends to the characters who inhabit it, and for the impending challenge encoded in the emblem of the dark forest, but not for where it is. After Redcrosse and Una have succeeded in defeating Error and escaping the grove, the poem observes only that “He passed forth, and new adventure sought,/Long way he traveled, before he heard of ought.”37 No sense of direction or spatial specificity is suggested in this description. Spenser seems deliberately to be adhering to the model of medieval cartography—individual sites of activity and meaning separated by unarticulated distance. This is certainly what generations of readers have come to expect of Spenser. It has become a truism, with apologies to Ben Jonson, that Spenser writ no world. Critics as early and influential as Coleridge have defined the world of The Faerie Queene as solely a “mental space.”38 Alpers, in focusing on the narrative and undramatic nature of the poem, sees it “as a continual address to the reader rather than as a fictional world,”39 and C. S. Lewis takes the even more extreme position that “There is no situation in The Faerie Queene, no when nor where.”40 Other critics have variously seen Spenser’s Faerieland as “pure wonderland,”41 a form of “dreamwork,”42 a symbol of “this transitory world,”43 and “a dream of empire.”44 Harry Berger, in noting that Spenser’s world is less concerned with physical terrain than with allegorical meaning, argues for an understanding of Spenser in terms of “dynamics” rather than landscape. “Spenser’s world and its places are not actualized in advance like an obstacle course waiting to steer its assayers toward their preordained goal. They emerge out of the problems and actions of his characters. Spenserian landscape for the most part evolves from the projection of inscape.”45 In this light, Spenser’s Faerieland becomes a mere reflection of his characters, and its landscape little more than an allegorical enactment of the moral tests and developments that the characters undergo. It exists “primarily as a function of the changing psychic development of the major characters.”46 I hesitate to argue with Harry Berger. His position reflects an overwhelming consensus, and the idea of Faerieland as a domain, in Coleridge’s words, “neither of history or geography” has been so widely accepted, even in recent criticism, that it has taken on the solid implacability of common sense. But to stop at the notion of this purely “psychic” space is woefully insufficient, for to treat the landscape and the 37

I i 28.8–9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Colderidge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, Thomas Middleton Raysor (ed.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 36. 39 Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 21. 40 Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 310. 41 Bennett, p. 114. 42 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 34. 43 Parker, The Allegory of the Faerie Queene, p. 49. 44 Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 139. 45 Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 23. 46 Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 23. 38

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world of Faerieland in this way is to link the poem solely to the medieval cultural moment in which it has it roots. To see Spenser’s depiction of the physical world solely in terms of “inscape” and character development, in terms of allegory and “mental space,” is to overlook the fundamental translation that occurs in positioning a medieval genre within the late Elizabethan culture of mathematized cartographic precision and to ignore the evidence of Spenser’s own engagement with this new spatial consciousness. Yet, some recent critics have claimed, not simply that the poem is uncartographical, but that it is anti-cartographical.47 They argue that, despite the suggestions of cartographic awareness that occur in the poem, its purpose and function is fundamentally opposed to mapping. “Preparing his readers to encounter this new moral world, Spenser has to make the landscape of book I unknown in order to create a challenge to his knight and reader, to allow George, particularly, to misread the signs around him, and to misinterpret the challenges to his faith so that he becomes morally as well as physically lost … The unchartedness of Faerie land’s literary, moral and geographical territory emphasises the test of the knight and the reader.”48 Or, in another view, “it is equally difficult to see how a map could be of aid conceptually to a Spenserian knight (and thus, by hermeneutic implication, to Spenser’s readers) who need to move through an incessantly moralized landscape where the right path of virtue will only be discovered after the endurance of extensive moral trials.”49 Both statements are perfectly correct, as far as they go. The progress of the poem is necessarily a process of mistake and correction, of learning through error. But such an argument fails to acknowledge the fundamental difference between a character’s experience of the poem and the reader’s. To say that the Redcrosse Knight does not understand the landscape cartographically, and therefore must wander through it, is not to say the reader always shares the same narrow viewpoint. The characters travel along on their respective journeys only once; their experience is always in the constant present of the poem: Berger’s “sophisticated modern now of poetic utterance.”50 But the reader’s response is different. The poem doesn’t simply unroll past the eye and vanish. The reader remembers. He is free, even encouraged, to re-read, reconsider, and rework the poem. He can hold the various travels and adventures in his mind simultaneously, so that the events of the poem accrue, and what is perceived by the characters as an itinerary, is retained in the reader’s mind as a map. Over the course of the poem, all the separate wanderings and experiences accumulate for the reader into a single, complex and synchronous understanding which parallels “the map’s Olympian desire to achieve a maximum degree of stasis … by simultaneously representing all possible journeys.”51 47 See Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space; and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, “Do real knights need maps? Charting moral, geographical and representational uncertainty in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds) Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 224–38. 48 Grenfell, pp. 234, 236. 49 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 165. 50 Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 210. 51 Boelhower, 484.

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Klein argues that The Faerie Queene resists the stability of mapping, but instead “persistently invites its readers to engage actively in the dynamic performance of space.”52 But part of the way readers engage actively is to organize that space in as comprehensible (and comprehensive) a way as possible. The complex journeys of the poem—looping back on themselves, overlapping, bringing wandering characters into each other’s stories—encourage the reader to make some sense of the connections. Unlike the figures in the poem, the reader can draw on the developing understanding of all the characters to build up a more complex sense of the landscape than is available to any individual moving through Faerieland. And to recognize this act of ongoing retrospective comprehension is to complicate even such an insightful reading as Klein offers. “The poem,” he writes, “unlike the View, is deeply anti-cartographic; maps are not only absent from the text—Britomart, for instance, needs to find her way ‘[w]ithouten compasse, or withouten card’ (3.ii.7)—they are unimaginable shortcuts that render impossible the collective experience of space and undermine the didactic project of the poem as a whole, the moral education of knight and reader.”53 But maps are only unimaginable and undermining if they are read as shortcuts. In fact, a map functions in other ways. It is not only a guide to a new journey, but also a repository of past knowledge. In most cases these two aspects are combined, but in Spenser, I would argue, they are designed to be separate. For the reader of The Faerie Queene, it is not the map that creates the reading, but the act of reading that creates the map. The map is not the starting point, designed to short circuit the circuitous and instructive journey, but an imaginative end product that allows the reader to organize all that has been learned. As Grenfell says, “So it is not that real knights don’t use maps, rather that a map cannot be created until the territory becomes known and familiar.”54 I could not agree more. However Grenfell assumes the limited perspective of the characters, in which the territory never becomes familiar. And yet, whatever our experience of Spenser, we are never his characters. As readers, we can become very familiar with the imagined territory of the poem. Klein argues that “in The Faerie Queene physical space has to be mastered first before it can become fully transparent to any knight passing through it; Fairyland is above all a moral testing ground which is not accessible from the privileged position afforded by the topographical map.”55 But if, as Klein himself observes, the space “has to be mastered first before it can become fully transparent,” then it necessarily follows that once it is mastered by the reader, once it has been experienced, decoded, and understood, it can be mapped. In arguing against the permissibility of mapping in The Faerie Queene Grenfell writes, “To be sure, maps of England and the New World were in circulation, but these could offer very little help in response to the challenges to accepted conventions of

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Bernhard Klein, “Imaginary Journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the poetics of national space,” in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds) Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 210. 53 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 75. 54 Grenfell, p. 236. 55 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 167.

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morality, culture and literature which were posed.”56 But I would argue that the many maps in circulation could have provided a great deal of help to the reader, and would have. The wide range of mapped representations available to Spenser’s audience, and the increasingly wide-spread cartographic awareness, would be bound to inflect any reading of the poem, so that, for example, the fact of Britomart’s making her way “[w]ithouten compasse, or withouten card” must be seen in a more complex light. In such a cartographically aware culture, to cite this protagonist’s lack of navigational aids is to highlight the reader’s own familiarity with them. It thus implicitly places Britomart’s wandering within a space that is uncharted, but not unchartable. It could be mapped, if only she’d had the equipment. I am not suggesting that the poem cannot be read without reference to a map. But I am suggesting that, in all likelihood, it wouldn’t have been. It’s true that Spenser could have chosen to include a map, and didn’t. But as the surveying manuals attest, the evolution of cartographic precision didn’t require the immediate presence of a map in order to think cartographically. The only thing required was the abiding awareness of maps as mathematically precise and spatially accurate. And in an Elizabethan culture so cartographically aware that it put maps on playing cards and the whole nation on a map, we can safely assume a level of cartographic fluency on the part of so elevated an audience as Spenser would have drawn upon. That the poet himself was deeply enmeshed in the cartographic awareness of his culture is difficult to dispute. As a land-owner and colonial administrator in Munster the poet would certainly have been aware of the repeated efforts to survey and map the country as a means of administrative and cultural control. We know that his neighbor, Sir Walter Raleigh, had his estate surveyed, and it seems likely that, even if Spenser didn’t have his own lands measured and mapped, he would have been aware of the technologies involved.57 And while, as Baker asserts, the mapped control over Ireland was far less complete that over England, the considerable efforts at mapping Ireland suggest the larger epistemological context within which the government of Elizabeth operated. “Certainly, imperial power tried to extend the same cartography 56

Grenfell, p. 234. Ireland’s earliest estate map, dated 1598, was of Raleigh’s lands at Mogeely, County Cork, but it seems likely that the initial survey would have dated from the 1580s and likely, as well, that Spenser would have been exposed to the latest in surveying and mapping techiques. In Ireland, the Munster plantation of 1586–9 was famous for its associations with Raleigh and Spenser. “It was only with the Munster plantation that English colonists began to require an exact admeasurement of their estates, and in 1586 four surveyors were brought in to measure and map the newly confiscated portions of Counties Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Kerry. These men—Arthur Robins, Francis Jobson, John Lawson and Richard Whittaker—are the first identifiable ‘estate surveyors’ in Irish history and there are some sparse but noteworthy records of their earnings, their surveying techniques, and their conditions of work; there are also two maps (both in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) which may give some impression of their cartographic style…. After the official Munster survey some of the new landowners wrote of employing private surveyors to subdivide their estate into tenant farms. One such tenement map survives: it dates from 1598 and shows Sir Walter Raleigh’s property at Mogeely, Co. Cork.” Sarah Tyacke, “Introduction,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English MapMaking 1500–1650 (British Library, 1983), pp. 20–21. 57

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that was constucting the home territory onto the subject island. Not only did the Queen’s adminstrators establish towns, lay out roads, and so on, but in a a certain sense, they made Ireland.”58 And Spenser’s engagement with this imperial program and with “the dream of cartographic order”59 can be seen in A View of the Present State of Ireland where, in the middle of the dialogue between the voices of home authority and colonial administration, the character Eudoxus pulls out a map. “I see now all your men bestowed, but what places would you set their garrison that they might rise out most conveniently to service? and though perhaps I am ignorant of the places, yet I will take the mappe of Ireland, and lay it before me, and make mine eyes (in the meane time) my schoole-masters, to guide my understanding to judge of your plot.”60 As Avery notes, this moment is important “because it is in fact the only event in the text—the only non-verbal performance of either character,” 61 and because it imposes a new precision on the conversation, cutting through the potential for ambiguity. “The map eliminates mythopoesis, the multiple perspectives among which Irenius had wavered. Thereafter he and Eudoxus view Ireland from the single perspective forced upon them by the map.”62 But in a broader way, the View demonstrates the way Spenser, in his role as colonial administrator as well as poet, embraced the political and literary control that a cartographic epistemology of precision and objectivity provided, demonstrating a “fundamentally geographical approach to Ireland’s history and culture.”63 And the colonial administrator’s awareness of the power of cartography extends into his poetry, as well. There are a number of places in The Faerie Queene that mark its participation in the larger cartographic discourse of the period, and even critics who argue against the cartographic nature of the poem, concede the existence of a seam of cartographic understanding running through it. In his discussion of the marriage of rivers section of Book Four, Berger notes, “At moments the reference is transparently spatial and geographical, apprehending the map and countryside of Britain.”64 And while he notes that “its sole locus is the poetic imagination,”65 he still sees it as the product of an imagination rooted in cartography. “One mark of its sophistication, and a major source of its odd panoramic quality, is that the pageant seems to be a meditation on a map of the British Isles … however, the narrator works not from nature but from an artifact or schema which is itself a triumphant act of mind: the improvements over older methods of cartography introduced during 58 David J. Baker, “Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland,” in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds) Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): pp. 76–92, 81. 59 Lupton, p. 94. 60 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1997), p. 96. 61 Bruce Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,” ELH 57/2 (Summer, 1990): 263. 62 Avery, p. 268. 63 Lupton, p. 95. 64 Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 209. 65 Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 210.

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the sixteenth century by Mercator and others produced new and justified respect for this activity in which the mind projected not what the eye saw but rather its own mathematical reorganization of the data.”66 Even if the main effect here is, in Berger’s terms, rhetorical rather than cartographic, it still assumes a substantial level of cartographic understanding on Spenser’s part, reflecting as it does, “a profound revision of an earlier recreative effort which was a cartographic fancy.”67 And Klein, too, though he argues that The Faerie Queene is “anti-cartographic,” observes within the poem “the penetrating quality of the surveying eye to cut visually through a landscape.”68 “Generally,” he notes, “images of land surveying are woven into the narrative of the poem in a manner unambiguously advocating the necessity for such spatial re-vision.”69 And, citing the panoramic view of Munster provided in the Mutabilitie cantos, he states, “As a view that registers and catalogues the surrounding landscape elements from the surveyor’s ideal vantage point of Arlo Hill it is reminiscent of the spatial synthesis of the map.”70 Although, for Klein, the surveying impulse is ultimately negated, he draws attention to “Spenser’s trust as well as to his disbelief in the reforming and literally ‘ground-breaking’ potential inherent in maps and surveys.”71 In short, he acknowledges the existence of the cartographic awareness that undergirds Spenser’s work, but suggests that the Faerie Queene is a poem that directly and deliberately forecloses this. But Klein’s reading suggests an almost arbitrary response on Spenser’s part: to engage with the understandings that arise from cartography, and then to reject the cartography itself. Rather, I would argue, Spenser is using cartography in a way Klein doesn’t suggest. For almost as soon as the poet introduces his version of the romance landscape, he begins to alter it, subverting our expectations, changing the nature of the world he constructs. The allegory of the poem is rendered in terms that evoke the physical organization of its “dark conceit” and invests the narrative with an increasingly complex spatial framework. From the opening line, the poem offers a series of descriptive gestures that locate the reader in an imagined physical space. The gentle knight “pricking on the plaine” suggests the terrain through which we move, and with the plain instead of a plain, the poet offers a note of specificity that draws us into the scene. It assumes a common awareness of space, a common sense of the landscape. And just a few cantos later, when we learn there is “A shadie groue not far away”(I i 7) we are encouraged to believe that this landscape, like the action it encompasses, will be revealed in an orderly and specific way. This is, as Alpers points out, an act of narrative, a creation of language arrayed in time rather than space,72 but the reader’s reaction is necessarily phenomenological as well as intellectual, and the experience of the poem is impossible without acknowledging the sense of space that Spenser takes such pains to create. 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 211. Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 211. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 71. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 71. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 73. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 75. Alpers, Poetry.

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Take the Grove of Errour, for example, Whose loftie trees yclad with sommers pride, Did spred so broad, that heauens light did hide, Not perceable with power of any starre: And all within were pathes and alleies wide, With footing worne, and leading inward farre: (I i 7) Along with the first sense of generic locality conjured up with the Wandering Wood we perceive an increasing specificity of sensory detail, which helps solidify the reader’s perception of the landscape and offers an imagined spatiality into which the characters, and the reader, may insinuate themselves. Although the description is metaphoric as well as visual, “heauens light” as well as the “power of any starre,” it alludes to an implicit organization of spatial volume. The poem interpellates the reader into a position occupying the grove. The leaves are spread broadly over our heads. The paths, both dividing the forest and organizing movement through it, are laid out at our feet. And the stars are made more vivid by being unseen, since we are left with the impression that, were we simply to move out from beneath the branches they would be there. At the same time, the description of all the “pathes and alleies wide” suggests not simply that the space within the grove is taken up with paths but that the paths go somewhere, leading the reader in the same way that the “indirect prospect” of a landscape painting draws the viewer in, helping to imply the larger space beyond the immediate scene.73 This bewildering variety of paths may, as the poem suggests, confuse the travelers and leave them lost in the wood, but at the same time it confirms the reader in the poem’s sense of spatial organization. By noting that Una and Redcrosse “wander too and fro in waies unknowne,/Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene,”74 the language implies not just Alpers’ complex narrative structure,75 but a spatial perspective that literally oversees the action and knows where the characters are, at least in relation to their starting point, even when they do not. The “labyrint” mentioned in stanza eleven implies not just confusion on the part of its victims, but a sense of visual availability, an overhead view of the woods, that lends them a degree of wholistic organization and readability that reflects an implicitly cartographic perspective. Given the period’s high level of cartographic awareness, Spenser’s occasional, and well-noted, geographical references may be understood as something more than isolated gestures toward English imperialism or an evocation of the explorer’s mind.76 Instead, the poet can be seen to introduce a paradigm of cartographic order that helped instruct the reader in how to organize and consolidate the allegorical 73

For more on the visual manipulations and effects of landscape representations see Chapter Two. 74 I. i 10.5–6. 75 See Paul Alpers, “Narration in The Faerie Queene,” ELH 44/1 (Spring, 1977): 19– 39. 76 For more on Spenser’s evocation of exploration and English imperialism see Murrin, Allegorical Epic, pp. 139–41, and Alpers, Poetry, p. 25.

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and physical descriptions of his poem. With the familiar proem to the Second Book he makes it explicit that the poem’s myriad frames of reference include the geographic. Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th’aboundance of an ydle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which nobody can know. But let that man with better sence aduize, That of the world least part to vs is red: And daily how through hardy enterprize, Many great Regions are discouered, Which to late age were neuer mentioned. Who euer heard of th’Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessell measured The Amazons huge riuer now found trew? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew? Yet all these were when no man did them know, Yet haue from wisest ages hidden beene And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show. Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is but that which he hath seene? … Of faery lond yet if he more inquyre By certein signes here sett in sondrie place He may it fynd; ne let him then admyre But yield his sence to bee too blunt and bace That no’te without an hound fine footing trace. And thou, O fayrest Princesse vnder sky, In this fayre mirrhour maist behond they face And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery, And in this antique ymage they great auncestry. (II Proem 1–4) Along with his evocation of memory and history, Spenser invokes the organizational power of geography in order to grant his Faerieland a sense of ontological truth. The geographical frame of reference established with references to “th’Indian Peru,” “The Amazons huge riuer,” and “fruitfullest Virginia,” is used to extend a similar sense of ontological reality to Faerieland. Spenser is connecting his poetic landscape, not just to Elizabeth’s “owne realmes” of England, but to an epistemology of cartographic

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organization that extends a sense of certainty to known but unseen lands. In effect, he is “addressing a new map consciousness in this Proem, along with a belief held by his reader(s) that maps reify places in a way that mere description cannot do (or cannot do alone)—by making them visual.”77 The fact that each of these distant places has been “found trew” lends to Faerieland the same sense of knowability. And though on one hand the poet is offering a landscape too fine to be seen by senses that are “too blunt and bace,” offering, of course, an imagined landscape instead of a real one, he is still placing the poem within an implicitly cartographic frame of reference, assuring the sensitive reader that “By certein signes here sett in sondrie place He may it fynd.” Specific geographical references throughout the poem offer an imaginative connection between the “lond of faery” and the land of England. And by inviting Elizabeth to see her own realm “In this fayre mirrhour” Spenser is going even further, drawing the connection between the recently mapped certainty of England and the described, if unseen, land of Faery, and offering—among all the other historical, religious, and allegorical contexts—an implicitly cartographic framework for the rest of the poem. This goes beyond the mere inclusion of geographical references. The Elizabeth consciousness of space as subject to geometrical measurement and accurate mapping provided a new means of understanding and organizing the space of narrative action and event. The separate and overlapping itineraries of the poem, offering as they do what amounts to a chorography of Faerieland, may be seen as implictly linked to “the semiotics of the map.”78 Anchoring the narrative within a sense of knowable and mappable space effectively mobilizes the epistemologies of precise spatial measurement and organization within the imaginative realm of Spenser’s poem. Just as abstract space can be objectively represented, measured, and organized, so can the abstract ideas and developments concretized in the poem’s allegory. The moral danger of losing one’s way gains part of its meaning from its reificiation in the Wandering Wood, and the danger of thinking too well of yourself is given a shape and location in the House of Pride. The same epistemology that accustomed the literate Elizabethan audience to organize an estate, a county, or a nation in precisely mapped form, allowed and perhaps even required that the spatially organized allegory of Spenser’s epic be imagined and manipulated in the same way. In effect Spenser created an allegorical world that functioned like a geographical one, providing a degree of spatial organization and specificity that invests his allegory not just with new descriptive power, but with new powers of inscription, as well—new abilities to write the audience into the space of the poem. From Allegory to Geography That The Faerie Queene is an allegory goes without saying. It is in many ways the allegory. As the apotheosis of a literary genre dating back to the fourth-century Prudentius, it has been taken at various times to mark both the high point and the end

77 78

Sanford, p. 42. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 136.

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point of allegorical poetry.79 Over the years a mountain of criticism has been written exploring the nature of allegory in general, and of Spenser’s in particular, and the wide range of books, since even before Edwin Honig launched the most recent era of allegorical study in 1959, suggests the slipperiness of the term.80 For Coleridge, allegory was “the employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the understanding—those agents and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole.”81 Or, more simply and more recently, allegory “says one thing and means another.”82 DeNeef has called it “a metaphoric poetry that continuously announces itself as such,”83 while Empson includes it in his third type of ambiguity, “when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously,”84 and Quilligan, noting its textual basis, observes “the selfreflexive tension between the literal and the metaphorical,” and its tendency “to slide tortuously back and forth between literal and metaphorical understandings of words, and therefore to focus on the problematic tensions between them.”85 Clearly, allegory is, and does, many things, and a comprehensive definition may be, at best, unwieldy. But at its most fundamental, allegory can be seen as an ongoing negotiation between the literal level of the text, often called the vehicle, and the symbolic, metaphoric meanings and associations that may be derived from it: the tenor. It is an imaginative construction that gives us access, through the visible world, to all that is invisible, to the range of imagined ideas and relationships that comprise the world of beliefs. 79 For Rosamund Tuve it is “the sole truly powerful secular allegorical work,” Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 417; while Caldwell sees The Faerie Queene as “both the dominant force in and the sea-mark of allegorical poetry in the English Renaissance.” Mark L. Caldwell, “Allegory: The Renaissance Mode,” ELH 44/4 (Winter, 1977): 582. 80 For a more substantial discussion of allegory generally see Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1959); Tuve; M. Pauline Parker, The Allegory of the Faerie Queene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), Isabel G. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964, 1982); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); B. Nellish, “The Allegory of Guyon’s Voyage: An Interpretation,” ELH 30/2 (June 1963): 89–106; Caldwell. 81 Coleridge, p. 33. This is a revision and simplification from a slightly earlier attempt, which both suggests and enacts the complexities involved: “We may then safely define allegorical writing as the employment of one set of agents and images with actions and accompaniments correspondent, so as to convey, while in disguise, either moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the senses, or other images, agents, actions, fortunes, and circumstances so that the differences is everywhere presented to the eye or imagination, while the likeness is suggested to the mind; and this connectedly, so that the parts combine to form a consistent whole.” Coleridge, p. 30. 82 Fletcher, p. 2. 83 Deneef , p. 4. 84 Empson, p. 102. 85 Quilligan, pp. 65, 67.

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And if the physical world helps to define the imagined shape of this world of beliefs, then the devices of allegory must necessarily function in ways that parallel the understanding of physical space. “In allegory, mind makes a model of itself; more accurately, imagination offers a model of the imagining process.”86 And the shape of this imaginative model draws its fundamental rules of meaning from the epistemological structure of the cultural moment that creates it, so that the imagination runs parallel to the physical world, reflecting its basic structure of ideas and fundamental ordering principles in a more fantastic register. I would argue that, in the late sixteenth century, as the physical world was increasingly seen as something that could be mathematically measured and precisely organized, the allegory of Spenser’s Faerieland would have reflected, not just the ordering ideas of Protestant doctrine and moral virtue, but the ordering of the space in which these ideas took place. And this ordering of space was carried out in several ways. As I suggested earlier, an awareness of space is implicitly embedded in any description of physical action. Thus, in The Faerie Queene, what might be called the literal space of the poem is organized by the narrative of action and description. But the establishment of a sense of allegorical space extends beyond this literal level. It reflects what Berger has called “Poetic action”87—action which is a result, not just of the unfolding plot, but of the narrator’s descriptions, elaborations, and explanations of the imagery that accompanies it. This poetic action organizes the images and ideas on a level of moral development beyond the visible events. As each protagonist works his way on a step-by-step journey to the central virtue of each book, this progress creates its own teleogical ordering which, in turn, imposes an additional sense of precise structure on the narrative. As Bennett suggests, “Epic, like tragedy, moves toward an end foreseen from the beginning, so that the audience is delighted with the telling of a familiar story, or at least hypnotized into belief by a sense of the inevitability of every step.”88 Meaning, like Berger’s evolving landscape, gradually accrues. “The reader is encouraged by the language to search through his own experience for a hidden sense that would satisfy the tantalizing contradictions of the litera .... Our expectations are manipulated line by line, through the language of the poetry, to the final revelation.”89 At each step meaning reaches out, limiting the potential interpretations of the allegory, refining and relating them, creating an on-going sense of increasingly precise order. And this sense of expectation and inevitability provides the verbal equivalent of an overview, a conclusive narrative shape that can be imagined and envisioned as a whole. But, more than that, “[i]t is characteristic of Spenser’s narrative techniques that when he wants to discuss principles or concepts he organizes them spatially.”90 And while the poem is ultimately an act of language in which “our sense of physical 86

MacCaffrey, p. 6. See Berger, Allegorical Temper, generally. 88 Bennett, p. 105. 89 Caldwell, p. 595. Caldwell is referring here to Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island, but his insights apply just as readily to The Faerie Queene. 90 Humphrey Tonkin, “Spenser’s Garden of Adonis and Britomart’s Quest,” PMLA 88/3 (May, 1973): 409. 87

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immediacy comes specifically from our experience of words and their poetic disposition,”91 the effect is still to create an awareness of spatial organization within both the literal and the allegorical landscape. The poem’s moral structure is inextricably bound up with its rendering of the topography of Faerieland, and the medieval landscape of generic descriptions grows increasingly more concrete as Spenser turns individual sites of emblematic action into precise allegorical images. For, in the context of allegory, ideas and images have a physical nature that lends itself to spatial, and cartographic, organization. Allegory itself “assumes an attitude in which abstract nouns not only name universals that are real, but in which the abstract names themselves are perceived to be as real and as powerful as the things named. Language itself must be felt to have a potency as solidly meaningful as physical fact before the allegorist can begin; out of its magic phenomenality—out of language sensed in terms of a nearly physical presence—the allegorist’s narrative comes, peopled by words moving about an intricately reechoing landscape of language.”92 By presenting his story as “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit,”93 the poet is effectively shaping not just the nature and interpretation of characters and action—wrapping each in a complex web of interpretation and layered meaning— but the nature of the landscape itself. As Spenser himself observed in his “Letter to Raleigh,” the poem is organized in a form that is anything but straightforward. In addition to the central plot of each book, “many other adventures are intermedled, but rather as Accidents, then intendments.”94 We must, of course, take this claim generously salted. Few would attribute a truly accidental quality to any aspect of The Faerie Queene. But the concept of “intermedled” adventures suggests the way each book is constructed as an accretion of incident around the central thread of action, and this in turn suggests how the landscape itself takes shape. Descriptions of place appear initially as a series of detailed locales, vividly evoked and tied together by less precise descriptions of travel—a method suggesting the medieval mappa mundi with its emblematic places only vaguely located within an unarticulated space. But in making his descriptions so detailed, in bringing into these depictions of place an equally important and precise invocation of detailed allegorical arrangement, Spenser invests his landscape with an increasing sense of a comprehensive and unified organization that is implicitly cartographic. Allegory “is interpreted by Spenser in terms of activity,”95 and the various characters accrue their meanings by moving from incident to incident, place to place, from one moral development to the next. As the number of allegorical images and events increases, the complexity of their organization and arrangement deepens. The relationship between individual allegorical meanings—each with its separate location in the landscape—grows more complex. The Wandering Wood leads to the House of Pride which leads, in turn, to Orgoglio’s castle. But as we look back we see 91 92 93 94 95

Alpers, Poetry, p. 10. Quilligan, p. 156. Letter to Raleigh ll. 4–6. Letter to Raleigh, l. 79. Nellish, p. 99.

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that they are all interrelated in more complex ways that become clear in retrospect— ways that are necessarily both moral and spatial. We can effectively triangulate the prideful errors of both the Wandering Wood and the soporific spring with the House of Pride: each moment bears the trace of the others. And the moral relationship of the separate sites helps orient them within the imaginative space of the poem. In moving from one moral position to another—from one place in the allegorical landscape to another—the poem is linking its moral and narrative organization. And under the pressure of these increasing interconnections of meaning, the once generic landscape begins to grow more detailed. The terrain through which the poet guides his reader becomes a land of sights and sounds, morals and meanings in which individual settings are presented in often startling specificity. And though the precise relationships between individual physical sites are often cloaked and obscure, the precision of allegorical representation ties the sites together. One moral development leads to the next, just as one action leads to another, and the concreteness of this progress establishes a sense of physical organization. Allegory has always depended for its power and effectiveness on its necessarily double nature. The literal meaning both supports and gives way to the abstractions underneath, and “the connotations of the secondary meaning depend for clarity and interpretation upon the primary meaning.”96 Spenser draws heavily on this reflective quality, providing vivid physical descriptions that help guide the reader to a fuller interpretation of the moral amplitude of his allegory. In The Faerie Queene, his presentation of the literal aspect, with all its detail and imaginative density, organizes the complex structure of the allegory within an imagined figurative space that effectively orients both the characters’ journeys and the reader’s growing understanding in spatial and physical terms. For the Redcrosse Knight, Error quite literally entangles him, and earthly pride in the shape of Orgoglio cometh before the fall. Guyon’s journey across the Idle Lake models his temperate negotiation of guilt, reproach, “unthriftyhed,” and decay. And taken all together, the arrangement of the allegorical landscape refines and clarifies the individual meanings, lending them a heightened degree of metaphoric complexity and precision. But if “the connotations of the secondary meaning” depend for the full range of their significance upon the literal description, the reverse is also true. Spenser’s allegorical meanings, with their complex dynamic of moral cause and effect, construct a precise network of semiotic interrelationships, carefully ordered and organized, that effectively re-illuminates the figurative surface.97 In this light, Spenser’s use of allegory can be seen to provide an organizing principle that applies not just to the secondary, moral level of the tenor, but to the literal level of the vehicle as well. The very complexity and precision of the allegorical meaning illuminates the concrete, spatial aspects of the figurative landscape. Spenser’s allegorical details effectively organize the narrative gaps between them, imaginatively filling and articulating the space of the poem and rendering it more comprehensible. In this way, while the use of 96

Edward A. Bloom, “The Allegorical Principle,” ELH 18/3 (Sept., 1951): 164. As Bloom observes, “each layer of meaning should reinforce every other one, and it may be generally posited that such is the intention of the competent, conscious allegorist.” Bloom, 173. 97

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allegory adds to each description of place a level of moral meaning, this meaning, in turn, with all its vividness and detail, reinforces and articulates the spatial organization in a newly precise way. The experience of mathematized cartography—with its promise of precise and representable relationships—illuminates the possibilities of allegorical cartography, and provides the epistemological patterns for organizing the poem’s moral and spiritual connections in an essentially spatial way as a moral landscape. In Book Two the spatial nature of Spenser’s allegory becomes particularly pronounced. “Nowhere in the poem is the consciousness that the internal environment is potentially or imaginatively external so strong as in Book II … [it] is the most landscaped part of the poem, and its landscapes are the most explicitly allegorical.”98 And we see this almost immediately. Then Guyon forward gan his voyage make, With his blacke Palmer, that him guided still. Still he him guided ouer dale and hill, And with his steedy staffe did point his way: His race with reason, and with words his will, From fowle intemperaunce he ofte did stay, And suffred not in wrath his hasty steps to stray. (II i 34.3–9) The path that Guyon walks is simultaneously physical and moral, marked as much by the topographical signs of “dale and hill” as by the guidance of the Palmer shielding the knight from “intemperaunce” and “wrath.” For Guyon, “voyaging is representative of life as a whole, in which we have a purpose and are beset by difficulty and temptation,”99 but the allegorical meanings are deeply rooted in the literal landscape. And gradually, as the characters continue on their voyage, the extent and shape of Faerieland becomes increasingly clear and precise. Guyon and the Palmer proceed from the clearing where they have picked up the infant Ruddymane and come upon the castle of Medina, which serves as the next locus of action. So long they traueiled with litle ease, Till that at last they to a Castle came, Built on a rocke adioyning to the seas; It was an auncient worke of antique fame, And wondrous strong by nature, and by skilfull frame. (II ii 12.5–9) The castle, built as it is “on a rocke adioyning to the seas” provides another site on the map that is taking shape, but more importantly, by marking the sea shore, it helps to mark the edge of Faerieland. Positioned as it is, the castle provides the first sign of a boundary or limit to the country, and by establishing an edge and a shore, it helps to give the landscape of the poem an implicitly cartographic shape.

98

James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 326. 99 Nellish, p. 94.

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And within this implied shape, individual characters reflect their own sense of inhabiting a cartographic landscape. In his pursuit of Guyon in Canto Six, Cymochles comes to a river and is ferried across the “deep ford” by Phaedria. The boat moves effortlessly, propelling itself without apparent effort and steering through the crowded waters. The movement of the boat suggests a parallel to the generic sense of travel that appeared in earlier romances, but here Spenser offers a more complex consideration of the space through which it moves. The ability of the boat to find its own way, navigating through “rocks and flats” suggests, in turn, the need to find one’s way. The characters don’t simply ride, like Bevis or Gareth, until they get wherever they are going. Phaedria’s boat must negotiate its particular route, and the very need for navigation implies the sense of a broader and more complex space through which Cymochles, and later Guyon, are seen to make their way. In fact, the ability to negotiate the complex landscape becomes a measure and a reflection of virtue. Her light behauiour and loose dalliaunce Gaue wondrous great contentment to the knight, That of his way he had no souenaunce, Nor care of vow’d reuenge, and cruel fight, But to weake wench did yield his martial might. (II vi 8.1–6) The fact that Cymochles loses track of the boat’s progress, distracted by the “light behauiour and loose dalliaunce”100 of his pilot, suggests that his weakness lies in having “no souenaunce” of his route. The ability to find your way around the landscape, to navigate the particular and specific sites and scenes, becomes a sign of moral growth and development. And while it is true that Spenser moralizes the detailed surroundings, presenting the riot of flowers and natural beauty as a figure of man’s surrender to sensual pleasure, the topography functions simultaneously as a sign of an increasingly complex physical space which must be mastered rather than surrendered to. As the poem continues, this intricacy of landscape builds on itself, growing broader and more complex. The river where Cymochles boards the ferry flows into the “wide inland sea, that hight by name/the Idle lake.”101 And the perspective of the characters, starting out on the river bank, broadens as the lake itself widens and the complex navigational path across it is described. In negotiating their passage over the lake, the characters are orienting themselves with regard to Idleness and the dangers of sensuality, but by presenting both Cymochles’ and Guyon’s approach to Idleness in topographic terms, Spenser suggests a spatial plan that continues to plot both allegorical characteristics and character development within an organized landscape. In fact, Guyon’s awareness of the need for proper orientation is so acute that the first sight of the Island informs him that he has gone astray.

100 101

II vi 8.1. II vi 10.1–2.

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Yet she still followed her former style, And said, and did all that mote him delight, Till they arriued in that pleasaunt Ile, Where sleeping late she lefte her other knight. But whenas Guyon of that land had sight, He wist him selfe amisse, and angry said; Ah Dame, perdy ye haue not doen me right, Thus to mislead mee, whiles I you obaid: Me litle needed from my right way to haue straid. (II vi 22.) Allegorically, of course, Guyon, the knight of Temperance, fears that he has been led into excessive luxury and pleasure, but in the specific language of the stanza he has suffered from a mis-navigation. He has been “mislead” both figuratively and literally. And in counterpoint to this emphasis on the necessity for correct navigation within a readable landscape, Phaedria stakes her own self-justifying claims. Faire Sir (quote she) be not displeasd at all; Who fares on sea, may not commaund his way, Ne wind and weather at his pleasure call: The sea is wide, and easy for to stray; The wind vnstable, and doth neuer stay. But here a while ye may in safety rest, Till season serue new passage to assy; Better safe port, then be in seas distrest. (II vi 23.1–8) In denying responsibility for Guyon’s temptation, Phaedria responds not by denying that she misled him but by denying the possibility of ever knowing your way. “The sea is wide, and easy for to stray.” Not only is the wind “vnstable,” but the landscape of the sea, and by implication of the larger world as well, is nothing to be certain of. Yet even though she argues for a lack of navigational control, the poem has already suggested that the boat could find its way according to her will, and Guyon, as the moral center of the book, recognizes that misnavigation is a danger, not an inevitability. Evoking the image of a sailor who must keep his eye firmly on his map and compass, Spenser offers Guyon’s travels through the “desert wilderness”102 as a kind of negotiation through a coherent and representable space. As Pilot well expert in perilous waue, That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent, … Vpon his card and compas firmes his eye, The maysters of his long experiment, And to them does the steddy helme apply, Bidding his winged vessell fairely forward fly.

102

II vii 2.9.

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So Guyon hauing lost his trustie guyde, Late left beyond that Ydle lake, proceedes Yet on his way, of none accompanyde; And euermore himselfe with comfort feedes, Of his owne vertues, and praise-worthie deedes. (II vii 1–2.5) Again, Guyon is traversing a physical topography as well as a moral one, and the suggestion of a dependence on navigational aids contributes to a recognition and a reading of the landscape’s implicitly cartographic nature. This same appearance of navigational aids sets up a necessarily complex reading of their lack in Book Three, when Britomart travels without either. If others have used them before, then Britomart’s lack is not normative, as some have claimed,103 but a sign of a singular disadvantage in her particular travels. In contrast, for Guyon and the Pilot, the map and compass are seen as necessary “maysters” of the lengthy journey, and though the poem suggests the wide and trackless wilderness through which Guyon travels, his ability to orient himself according to his own “vertues and praise-worthie deedes” is seen in terms of explicitly navigational methods. The self-sustaining reliability of Guyon’s navigation imprints upon the literal landscape a measure of the moral certainty with which he moves, suggesting the added precision of spatial organization. As he travels from the wilderness of stanza two into the “gloomy glade,/Couer’d with boughes and shrubs,” Guyon is gradually organizing through his movements a complex and detailed landscape. When, having left the Palmer on the river bank, he ventures into the boat with Phaedria, he wends his way through the landscape to her island and then beyond, finding his way eventually to the opposite shore. Guyon has moved through and beyond the Idel Lake, but his on-going travel gains a sense of larger perspective from the recollection of those previous elements of landscape and reference. The reader retains a sense of his moving, not just from scene to scene, but through an expanding sense of space. “The whole voyage is typical of Spenser’s method at its best .... The logical inevitability of allegory disciplines what might otherwise have been simply an arbitrary collection of marvels or physical dangers.”104 And in this disciplining of the figurative level of narrative, the “marvels or physical dangers,” Spenser’s allegory is functioning in a way that imposes meaning on the literal features by organizing them in spatial, as well as moral, relation to one another. One thing follows another in a way that constructs their meaning from their physical locations. The sense of “logical inevitability” necessarily orders these allegories in a fixed relationship to one another, a relationship presented as explicitly topographical. In this way the allegory “disciplines” and precisely organizes not just moral dangers and virtues, but the physical action. In this light, the precision of allegorical meaning suggests a similar precision carried over into the spatial realm. And though the landscape may lack a sense of exact distance and direction in its immediate description, the evocation of the compass and map in the first stanza suggests a broader context of cartographic order. 103 104

See Grenfell; and Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space. Nellish, pp. 104–5.

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As Guyon and the Palmer approach the Bower of Bliss in the final canto of Book II, they have been two days at sea and are navigating their way, trying to “stere aright, And keepe an even course.”105 They negotiate a route through the Gulf of Greedinesss and past the “The Rock of vile Reproch”106 in a way that clearly charts the array of allegorical dangers. The Palmer seeing them in safetie past, Thus saide, Behold th’ensamples in our sightes, Of lustfull luxurie and thriftlesse wast: What now is left of miserable wightes, Which spent their looser daies in leud delightes, But shame and sad reproch, here to be red, By these rent relikques, speaking their ill plightes? Let all that liue, hereby be counselled, To shunne Rock of Reproch and it as death to dread. (II xii 9) In naming the Gulf and the Rock, and in highlighting the way the boat carefully avoids the dangerous shoals that have claimed others, Spenser conjures up these dangers as if they were names and locations on the “card and compass” he had previously invoked. Their positions are known. As Berger notes, “The poet affirms the allegorical character of the rock as well as the Palmer, but he also shows us natural aspects of the rock which are entirely indifferent and unrelated to the allegory.”107 Sometimes a rock is just a rock. At the same time, our experience of their spatial organization is imaginatively structured by the realization that the Palmer knows exactly what to expect, for he implicitly has knowledge of the terrain they are approaching, suggesting that, imaginatively at least, this stretch of water has already been mapped. And having passed the one rock, the travelers see before them a scattering of the Wandering Islands. At last far off they many islandes spy, On euery side floting the floodes emong: Then said the knight, Lo I the land descry, Therefore old Syre thy course doe thereunto apply. (II xii 10.6–9) The imagery is filled with mythic as well as metaphoric meaning, conjuring up Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis, the classical ferryman Charon, and even Homer’s sirens.108 But at the same time, the precise foreknowledge the characters demonstrate about their course and whereabouts suggests an overarching awareness of the scene as a whole.

105 106 107 108

II xii 3.2–3. II xii 8.1. Berger, Allegorical Temper, p. 225. See the notes to the text in Hamilton’s edition.

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When them the way Boteman thus bespake; Here now behoueth vs well to auyse, And of our safety good heede to take; For here before a perlous passage lyes, Where many mermayds haunt, making false melodies. But by the way, there is a great Quicksand, And a whirlepool of hidden ieopardy, Therefore, Sir Palmer, keepe an euen hand; For twixt them both the narrow way doth ly. (II.xii.17.5–18.4) In naming these dangers as the “Whirlepoole of decay” and “the quickesand of Vnthriftyhed”, Spenser is again organizing the dangers in physical as well as moral terms. “[T]he Boatman and the poet insist upon the thingness of the obstacles. ... The fable is not a mere metaphor; it is metaphorically described only after its reality has been affirmed.”109 And while Berger takes this to suggest the changing relationship between temperance and temptation in the first and second halves of Book II, it also serves to underline the implicit spatial organization of these metaphorical concepts. By effectively arranging the approaching threats before their eyes, the Boteman reveals his previous experience with this landscape, offering an understanding of the dangers and their positions in the space ahead of them that is striking in the unseen comprehensiveness of its knowledge. His ability to guide his passengers is predicated on an understanding of the territory, and as he describes what they can expect and what they should avoid, the Boteman demonstrates a knowledge of space which is experienced by the reader in implicilty cartographical terms. The path to the Bower of Bliss is thus defined both by the moral characteristics and developments through which Guyon must pass and by the Boteman’s verbal charting of the water. The originally formless ocean is demarcated and organized. Within the context of that “card and compass,” every name, every allegorical label, serves double duty, both as a means of evoking the moral landscape and as a cartographic referent that organizes the site within an imaginatively mapped space. The physical reality seems to exist objectively, independently of the allegorical meaning, in a landscape of vivid and orderly arrangement. And by linking individual sites in overlapping descriptions of physical appearance and moral threat, the poem orients them with respect to one another in mutually reinforcing terms. The allegorical meanings help provide a sense of causality and interconnection to the separate details of physical description. The moral relationships of the individual dangers help orient our sense of their spatial positions that confirms and reinforces the cartograpically imagined scene. In projecting these physical perils, and their embodied tests of virtue, onto a landscape that can be understood both in its individual aspects and in its wholistic arrangement, Spenser is offering the sort of topographical ordering and overview that makes the scene readable. Like de Certeau’s “solar eye,” our view of the landscape derives its meaning, not simply from the individual places, but from our understanding of their overall arrangement. 109

Berger, Allegorical Temper, p. 232.

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The poet thus creates a view that draws for its full meaning on implicit expectations of mappability and precision. The Palmer and the boatman could not guide Guyon through the moral dangers without spatial knowledge of the locations of all the threats. In this light, the geographical world serves as a Derridean supplement to the allegorical and medieval world view.110 The maps of Saxton, and the growing Elizabethan confidence in the mathematized precision and imaginative organization of physical space which they represent, serve as a kind of trace. They establish a suppressed but connected sense of deferred meaning which inhabits the allegorical presentation of The Faerie Queene. Allegorical space illuminates geographical space and draws upon it. But at the same time, the organization of allegorical imagery serves as a hinge or brisure of articulation, a place of connection and break, that allows both the metaphorical and spatial modes of organization to operate simultaneously, supporting and differentiating each other. The shape of Faerieland is thus created not just by the self-consciously topographical nature of the allegory, but by an implicitly cartographical sense of specificity and physical organization. The two modes of discourse remain constantly in play, the cartographic framework of spatial organization distinguishing itself from, and fulfilling, the allegorical organization of virtues, vices, and moral developments.111 It is a representation of space that is inherently cartographic: a space whose parts are implicitly organized with regard to one another and with regard to the whole. Interlaced Readings At the same time, the sense of mappable space that is suggested here is developed and made more vivid by the complex nature of reading that the poem requires, and by its innate draw upon the ongoing memory of its reader. As Rosamund Tuve percipiently observed, the separate events of The Faerie Queene “are not juxtaposed; they are interlaced.” Separate storylines unfold simultaneously, “and when we get back to our first character he is not where we left him as we finished his episode, but in the place of psychological state or condition of meaningfulness to which he has been pulled by the events occurring in following episodes written about someone else.”112 But this schema of psychological interconnectedness that Tuve notes draws attention to a parallel sense of topographical interweaving, for this effect of interlacement, like other aspects of the poem, operates within a spatial register as well as a psychological one. Throughout the narrative characters travel and diverge, circling back on one another, and each time we come upon them again, we return “not to precisely what we left but to something we understand differently because of what we have since seen.”113 Or, to enlarge upon Tuve, with each new adventure we have an expanded 110

“The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention, etc., come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function.” Derrida, p. 144. 111 For more on the trace see Derrida, p. 71. 112 Tuve, p. 363. 113 Tuve, p. 363.

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understanding, not just of what the characters have become but where they are and where they have been. Figures move, lead, are led along their separate journeys. Individual stories and routes circle back on one another, suggesting interrelations of plot, motivation, and causality that effectively bind together the separate experiences of the landscape into the reader’s retrospectively imagined whole. In the process, Spenser effectively creates his entire country out of an interlocking series of sites and scenes. Spenser’s reader begins with the experience of each location of physical and allegorical development and gradually assembles a larger sense of Faerieland. The poem’s individual elements and descriptions, like the separate sites of Saxton’s atlas, can be imaginatively assembled into a unified realm. Just as Saxton drew upon a series of individual views and detailed panoramas, binding them together into a comprehensive rendering of the country, so Spenser produces a series of vivid and detailed scenes, and then organizes them together. In each case the individual perspectives are limited in scope, but when incorporated, the relationships of individual sites and locations bind the parts into a coherent whole. In this light, Spenser’s weaving together of all the separate strands of his story succeeds in interlacing not only the poem’s adventures but the very topography. The individual scenes and journeys of the poem gradually build up a complex sense of a unified poetic landscape. In Book Two, for example, as Archimago manipulates Sir Guyon with his distorted version of Duessa’s defeat by Arthur and Redcrosse, he essentially succeeds in redirecting Guyon’s story, and his path, back into the landscape of Book One. So now he Guyon guydes an vncouth way Thorugh woods and mountaines, till they came at last Into a pleasant dale, that lowly lay Betwixt two hils, whose high heads ouerplast, The valley did with coole shade ouercasty; Through midst thereof a little riuer rold, By which there sat a knight with helme vnlaste Himselfr reffreshing with the liquid cold, After his trauell long, and labours manifold. (II i 24) The landscape is at first presented as “an vncouth way,” a path unknown as well as uncultivated, and as readers we assume we are exploring new ground. But gradually, as we learn the identity of the knight by the river, it becomes clear that the land is unknown only to Guyon. Archimago has directed his companion back toward the site of previous adventures, circling back on his own route so that, while the way may be “uncouth,” it is familiar to Archimago. He has already traversed it, as has the Redcrosse Knight, and as, of course, have we. Archimago becomes a guide, but one who is negotiating his way through a landscape we have already experienced, offering to Guyon his objective knowledge of familiar space. Implicitly, then, the landscape is conceived as something recoverable and organized. Guyon’s experience of it is colored by our own pre-existing awareness of what it holds. And by turning one story back onto another, by doubling Guyon’s trail back onto Redcrosse’s path, Spenser is offering a sense of a topography already comprehended, and now waiting

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for its newest occupant—a sense that draws implicitly on cartographic paradigms and expectations for its complete understanding. This becomes clear, as well, in the way these increasingly familiar spaces are negotiated differently by different characters. It becomes clear that Guyon and Cymochles approach Phaedria’s island from opposite directions. In leaving the island and continuing on his way, Guyon finds himself on the opposing river bank within sight of Atin, Cymochles’ squire, but miles from his own abandoned Palmer. And when he continues on his journey, he is headed onward toward the Bower of Bliss, effectively backtracking on Cymochles’ own steps. In doing so, Guyon is once again revisiting and re-experiencing a landscape through which the reader has already traveled, and in our efforts to understand the poem’s action we are forced to orient Guyon’s movements within a broader topography so that we see the landscape, not just from a single character’s perspective as an itinerary of discovery, but as a unified overview. As Berger says of Book III, “entirely independent actions and episodes occurring in widely separated places and moments of the Spenserian world can produce a meaningful coalescence whose import could not possibly be grasped by any of the figures involved.”114 But if the characters don’t grasp the import, the reader certainly does. And it is not only the meaning which coalesces as the various actions and episodes are folded back on one another. A sense of the larger, orderly structure of the landscape gradually takes on this same meaningful sense of wholistic understanding as we read and remember. The poem ties together the individual paths of separate characters into an interlocking text of spatial movement. And in making sense of this text as a whole, the poem implicitly invokes the epistemological tools of the new cartography, interpellating the reader within an epistemology of objective and coherent spatial organization. For as the poem progresses, the action brings together an increasing variety of characters and narratives in an interlocking series of topographies. The poem itself grows broader and more complex, and these interconnections follow suit.115 For 114

Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 37. This same effect can be seen after the dwarfe observes the Redcrosse Knight defeated by Orgoglio. He gathers up his armor and departs, almost immediately crossing the path of Una. “He had not trauaild long, when on the way/He wofull Laday, wofull Una met,/Fast flying from that Pynims greedy pray,/Whilest Satyrane him from pursuit did let:” (I vii 20.1–4). On the level of narrative, this may be seen as simply the sort of complexity that Spenser builds into his epic’s plot over and over again, tying up loose ends, spinning the story into increasingly complex shapes, and moving the plot sinuously forward. But within the context of the gradually forming and increasingly precise sense of the landscape, the existence of the landscape within a sixteenthcentury cartoraphic context, this reintroduction of Una provides one more encouragement to read the landscape of Faerieland as a precisely organized and rendered space. The poem brings together the separate landscapes and topographies of the individual characters, linking up the smaller pieces of the landscape into a larger map. With the return of Una in a new setting we get a sense of the story turning back on itself, but not to return to an old site. Rather, by offering the appearance of an old, familiar character from a distant site and a previous adventure, this scene binds together the broader landscape. And in Canto vii of Book III when Satyrane returns to the story in an entirely different portion of the landscape he achieves the same effect. “It was to weete the good Sir Satyrane,/That raungd abrode to seek aduentures wilde,/As was his 115

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instance, in Book III, when Spenser brings together the protagonists of the three books, he does more than simply tie the plots of his books together into a larger whole. He implicitly ties together the territories that the knights have covered, producing a series of overlapping landscapes that together form the broader expanse of Faerieland.

wont in forest, and in plaine;” (III vii 30.1–3) This return of Satyrane, found in a part of the map he hadn’t occupied before, effectively joins the landscape of Book I with Book III, and by extension implicitly orients all the action of the first book with regard to this seashore and the edge of the country that it implies. Effectively it serves to tighten and imaginatively solidify the landscape, creating a sense of space that is limited and inhabitable. The sites and landscape provide a fixed setting through which a number of characters and stories find their way and play themselves out. The dwarf, fleeing one battle, runs into Una fleeing another. And when the dwarf recounts the Redcrosse Knight’s adventures since parting from her, he recounts, not just their adventures, but a small schematic map of their travels. “Then gan the Dwarfe the whole discourse declare,/The subtile traines of Archimago old;/The wanton loues of false Fidessa fayre,/Bought with the blood of vanquisht paynim bold:/The wretched payre transformed to treen mould;/The house of Pryde, and perilles round about;/ The combat, which he with Sansioy did hould;/The luckless conflict with the Gyaunt stout,/ Wherein captiu’d, of life or death he stood in doubt.” (I vii 26) When the dwarf recounts the knight’s adventures he is effectively conjuring up their travels. and because of the vividness of place and the allegorial frame, which imbues each event with a sense of moral development as well as narrative action, he is also conjuring up the various steps and stages of Redcrosse’s character flaws and failings. These travels conjure up a map of their adventures, organization the characters in space as well as within the complex moral universe that Spenser creates. And when the Dwarf leads Una back to find the imprisoned knight, he is adding to his narrative guidance a more explicitly spatial guidance. “At last when feruent sorrow slaked was,/She up arose, resoluing him to find/Aliue or dead: and forward forth doth pas,/All as the Dwarfe the way to her assynd:/And euermore in constant carefull mind/She fedd her wound with fresh renewed bale;/Long tost with stormes, and bet with bitter wind,/High ouer hills, and lowe adowne the dale,/She wandered many a wood, and measurd many a vale.” (I vii 28) Although as Hamilton suggests, Una is again resuming her quest, it is striking that the travels which the dwarfe accomplished so quickly are here rendered as longer and more arduous, linking the state of Una’s unhappiness with the difficulties of her travels, but also offering a sense of the setting as an already organized space through which she must travel. The story of Hellenore, seduced from her husband by Paridell and then abandoned in the forest, suggests even more forcefully the idea that the land exists in an objective and pre-existent shape, organized and imagined, ready to be filled by a new strand of action. Wandering into the forest, Hellenore is found by the satyrs. “Till on a day the Satyres her espide,/Straying alone withouten groome or guide;/Her vp they tooke, and with them home her ledd,/With them as housewife euer to abide,/To milk their gotes, and make them cheese and bredd,/And euery one as commune good her handeled.” (III x 36.4–9) This scene provides a comic parallel of the episode in Book I when Una is adopted and adored by the salvage nation. Although these are not explicitly named as the satyrs who welcomed Una and her ass—certainly their behavior is much less innocent—they do suggest a repetition of actions and place. The parallel of Una and Hellenore provides a level of vividness and certainty to Hellenore’s wanderings, but it also provides a sense of the landscape as a set that exists and is filled with the traveling action. The action of a new character finding her way back to the forest suggests that the satyres and the forest exist as an objective and steady space through which the action movies.

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These characters are tied together with more than the “golden chaine of concord.” While the early travels of Guyon, Arthur, and Britomart originally took place over seemingly trackless regions, the effect of the accretion of topographical details, tied together by interlocking story lines, is to build up in the reader’s imagination an implicitly mapped and readable territory. The many separate locations are drawn together in relation to one another so that the landscape achieves a new level of perceived objectivity. While I agree with Berger that each character constructs the landscape through an individual sense of moral development—that Faerieland is essentially created as it appears—this means that once it has appeared, it can be imagined as a whole. The recurrence of sites, reaching across story lines, eventually coalesces into a landscape that is objectively organized and conceived. Once one character has created a landscape, it is there in the reader’s mind, and when we realize that a second or third or fourth character is moving through it on a different route or for a different purpose, we experience the landscape as already formed and laid out. It operates at a new level of independence and organization, creating the perception of an extensive but delimited topography. Within this bounded topography the poem’s myriad characters circle back on each other’s paths, filling the landscape with their adventures, tying familiar and distant settings together, and imaginatively organizing the land of Faerie in a way that is wholistically and spatially comprehensible. With the breadth and density of his allegory and description, Spenser effectively presents a world crowded with detail and meaning, a world that can be precisely read and intellectually ordered. And in offering such a density of meaning he is creating the sense of organized, articulated space that was missing from the medieval romances and the medieval maps. In offering his monumental allegorical poem within a cultural context saturated with cartographic awareness, Spenser was implicitly, perhaps even inspite of himself, creating an allegorical landscape that operated within the epistemology of the cartographic imagination. The complex and vivid network of connective ideas and imagery oriented the different locations with respect to one another, lending a new kind of readability, not just to the individual places but to the space that separated and connected them. In its rich representation of imaginative space, The Faerie Queene effectively moved beyond an allegorical world into a geographical one. It offered the space of the poem as a poetic landscape that could, and to some exent must, be imagined and treated in cartographic terms. I am not suggesting that Spenser explicitly depended on particular maps of the late sixteenth century—if he’d wanted to include a map, he certainly could have. I am suggesting instead that he operated within a cultural moment that would have allowed, and encouraged, the self-conscious application of cartographic epistemologies to a wide range of discourses. Spenser made an obvious choice to contextualize his poem in historic and antiquarian terms, but a mathematized sense of cartographic space shows through. And if, as I would suggest, the cartographic imagination organized ideas, images, and literary tropes in terms that evoked the mathematical spatial organization of scale maps, it needn’t require a specific map so much as a specific knowledge of mapping. That poetry can evoke such a cartographic awareness without actually providing a readable map is clear from other, more obvious examples. For instance, as Gillies notes in his analysis of King Lear, when Lear divides his kingdom

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in the first scene, he “engages with the immense cultural and ideological authority of cartography in the period.”116 And though Lear gestures to a literal map, it is not available to the audience except as the merest abstraction, the poetic idea of a map, “essentially a stage image compounded of a physical prop and a verbal landscape, which—for a contemporary audience—must have inevitably evoked the Saxtonian genre of national cartography.”117 Like Spenser, Shakespeare is thus drawing upon his audience’s knowledge of cartography, rather than on cartography itself. And it is in the same way that the epistemological associations tied to Saxton’s maps would have undergirded any reading of The Faerie Queene, illuminating and supporting it. This is not to say that you can map all of Spenser’s faerieland, but rather that the poem gives the impression that you could. The most important thing that the cartographic imagination contributed to Spenser’s configuration of Faerieland was not the need to draw a map but the epistemological conviction that the space of a landscape could be imagined as a whole in detail with precision and certainty. The new confidence in the ability to represent and manipulate abstract space provided the epistemological model for the organization of abstract ideas and images. It effectively rendered the diverse and related topographies more coherent and “readable,” in de Certeau’s terms, so that the landscape “transforms itself into the memorable.”118 In the process, the poem’s detail, its rendering of a complex space which could be both vividly conceived and imaginatively occupied, became open to other functions. Once the landscape of Faerieland was evoked as an organized and vivid space, it could be read and, more importantly, remembered in ways that allowed new and more complex manipulations. Mapping Memory The Faerie Queene is at its heart a poem about anxiety. Thoughout this complex interweaving of English romance and Christian virtue Spenser projects a sense that history, and the cultural memory it embodies, is fundamentally up for grabs. In his quest to fashion a virtuous gentleman, the poet depends not just on moral allegory but on the kind of imagined remembrance that historical fiction provides. Yet this central force of memory remains potentially unstable. The opening stanza at once suggests how uneasily the past sits upon the Redcrosse Knight. He rides, Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, Wherein old dints of depe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield: (I i 2–5)

116 John Gillies, “The scene of cartography in King Lear,” in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds) Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 118. 117 Gillies, “Scene of cartography,” p. 118. 118 de Certeau, Practice, p. xxi.

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The “old dints” and wounds are physical remainders of past battles, yet they are not the battles of the knight himself. He has put on the appearance of the past along with this armor. For, as Spenser explains, when the Redcrosse Knight first presented himself to Gloriana he was “a tall clownishe younge man,” and it was only when he put on the armor Una brought—Saint Paul’s “armour of a Christian man”—that “he seemed the goodliest man in al that company.”119 In this way Redcrosse learns his warlike prowess, not by the practise of arms, but by a kind of transference of memory. He puts on his martial ability—the experience and memory of battle— along with the armor itself. In a similar way the character of Britomart is introduced through an act of remembering. His presentation of this martial maid is offered as a recollection of forgotten examples of female chivalry. And Britomart herself embraces her warlike occupation through another act of remembering. Once introduced, she assumes the memory of her forebears in order to bolster her courage. And sooth, it ought your courage much inflame, To heare so often, in that royall hous, From whence to none inferiour ye came:... The bold Bunduca, whose victorious Exploits made Rome to quake, stout Guendolen, Renowmed Martia, and redoubted Emmilen. (III iii 54) And it is not just her own forebears that she embraces. In her forceful encouragement, the nurse Glauce invokes another kind of recollection when she links Britomart to one of her ancient enemies, the Saxon warrior Angela. Britomart puts on, not just the memory, but the armor of Angela and a magic spear “Which Bladud made by Magick art of yore.”120 In effect Britomart is putting on the combined feminine past of the English people. She takes up the armor of one, the spear of another. And with that same motion she embodies their martial abilities as a kind of deliberately implanted memory. This emphasis on history and the correct remembrance of past events occurs time and again in the course of the action. In speaking of Gloriana’s court, the ideological and poetic heart of Faerieland, “Whose kingdomes seat Cleopolis is red,”121 this stress is made explicit. The heart of Gloriana’s kingdom, named for Clio the muse of history, serves as the imagined center of all subsequent adventures, so that the poem and all its varied characters and developments are arrayed around the royal seat of history. And the nature of this history, the nature of the cultural past which is remembered and laid out in this poem, is carefully shaped and ordered. What is being conjured up is not just any memory, but the memory of the most noble attributes of the English people, embodied in its central mythic figure, Arthur. Spenser casts himself in the long line of “Poets historicall,” and in so doing he grants himself the freedom to play with the whole nature of history, carefully shaping it for his 119 120 121

Letter to Raleigh. III iii 60. I vii 46.

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chosen audience.122 Only Prince Arthur is worthy to serve and love Queen Gloriana, Elizabeth’s poetic stand-in: For onely worthy you through prowess priefe, If liuing man mote worthy be, to be her liefe. (I iv 17) Only the greatest figure from the past, the memory of the country’s greatest myth, is a fitting companion for the country’s queen. And it is only the molding of history, the mapping of memory onto the cultural landscape, that allows Spenser to weave this nobly remembered figure into his national narrative. In his use of memory as an active force, Spenser is working within an Elizabethan cultural matrix that included a number of detailed and specific paradigms of the classical art of memory. This system, developed by rhetoricians and orators, emphasized the imagistic nature of memory and laid out specific principles and techniques for its cultivation. It posits an essentially architectural paradigm in which images to be remembered are placed within pre-established “rooms” within an imagined theater or house. In this way what was once seen or known can be preserved as an image tied to a particular representation of place. Although there were variations in the different forms, the basic elements were always loci and imagines, places and images. More specifically, a locus must be an imagined place easily visualized and precisely organized: a house, a theater, an internal space divided into rooms. And within this place the imagines are arranged. Perhaps the clearest model of the art of memory was established by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. In this system, the orator creates the image of a building in his mind, “as spacious and varied a one as possible, the forecourt, the living room, bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated.” The speech to be memorized can then be broken down into a series of mnemonic images, and each image “placed” somewhere in the imagined building. In order to recall them “all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits demanded of their custodians.”123 In this way a series of ideas is imagistically superimposed onto a series of imagined sites, and then recovered by re-visiting each of the sites in turn. “We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorized places the images he has placed in them.”124 The act of remembering may thus be conceived as a journey made along a mapped route. In plotting this route, the choice of images and the formation of the loci are of crucial importance, and stress is laid on these aspects time and again. The goal of the orator, who must remember many speeches, is to establish in his mind a suitable set of loci, a suitable 122 “Spenser describes his romance as ‘history’ or ‘historicall fiction,’ and for its matter turns to ‘the historye of king Arthure.’ He associates himself with Homer and Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso as a ‘Poet historical.’ The term history is ambiguous, however, and may refer to a narrative (‘story’) of either true or false events, to actions of real or imaginary persons, or to a mixture of fiction and historical fact.” John M. Steadman, “Spenser’s Icon of the Past: Fiction as History, a Reexamination,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 538. 123 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1966), p. 18. 124 Yates, p. 18.

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mapping of rooms and locations, which can then be employed in the memorization of any number of different speeches. Once the precisely organized rooms are in place, a variety of different images can be imaginatively placed within them, ready to be recovered at will. It is not, I think, a large step from these techniques to the structure and imaginative shape of The Faerie Queene. Certainly there are a number of aspects of the poem that suggest Spenser’s awareness of these principles of memory. The Cave of Mammon in Book II is an all but explicit model of the classical art of memory. Guyon is guided through each room, and the message of his temptation is conveyed through visual imagery that builds and intensifies with each new setting.125 Similarly, Britomart’s experience in the House of Busyrane enacts even more vividly these same models of memory and understanding. She begins by entering a limited but vividly rendered architectural space. For round about, the walls yclothed were With goodly arras of great maiesty, Wouen with gold and silke so close and here, That the rich metall lurked priuily, As faining to be hidd from enuious eye; Yet here, and there, and euery where vnwares It shewd it selfe, and shone vnwillingly; Like to a discolourd snake, whose hidden snares Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht back declares. And in those Tapets were fashioned Many faire pourtraicts, and many a faire feate, And all of loue, and all of lusty-hed As seemed by their semblaunt did entreat; And eke all Cupids warres they did repeate, And cruel battailes, which he whilome fought Gainst all the Gods, to make his empire great; Besides the huge massacres, which he wrought On might kings and kesars, into thraldome brought. (III xi 28–29.9) Britomart moves from room to room, and every room is filled with vivid images which stand allegorically for a range of complex meanings. And in the second room the nature of the imagery and action enacted is made explicit.

125 For an exploration of the visual and imaginative manipulation of the Cave of Mammon see Patrick Cullen, “Guyon Microchristus: The Cave of Mammon Re-Examined,” ELH 37/2 (June, 1970): 153–74, especially 154; and Berger, Allegorical Temper, especially p. 20. For a perceptive study of the House of Alma and the art of memory see Grant Williams, “Phantastes’s Flies: The Trauma of Amnesic Enjoyment in Spenser’s Memory Palace,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, 18 (2003): 231–52. For an excellent study of the phantasmic in the House of Busyrane see Kennth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), especially pp. 162–7.

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And forth yssewd, as on the readie flore Of some Theatre, a graue personage, That in his hand a braunch of laurell bore, With comely haueour and count’nance sage, Yclad in costly garments, fit for tragicke Stage. (III xii 3.5–9) This room is a theater for the Masque of Cupid, an allegorical presentation of sexual corruption, highlighting Fansy, the power of the imagination to deceive with false images. Britomart, stepping into this “grotesque version of a Brunian ‘memory theater,’”126 is surrounded by the variety of allegorical figures—what might be seen as a series of active imagines—impressing themselves upon her through their vivid imagery. And in the third room, when the masque is replaced by the intense, and intensely unrealistic, imagery of Amoret, her breast torn open and her heart transfixed, the imagery functions as a self-conscious sign that extravagantly exceeds the bounds of the merely realistic, and marks itself as a source of complex and vivid meaning both to Britomart and to the reader. But the implications of the art of memory for The Faerie Queene extend even further than these all-but-explicit enactments, for if memory can be tied to the architectural space of an imagined house, it can be tied, as well, to a larger area, provided the requirements of specificity and clear organization are met. In classical and medieval versions of memory training the selection of the locus in which the images were arranged was limited to an imagined building. The architectural setting offered more precise and regular spaces, whose order and relationship could be easily visualized. As Mary Carruthers has suggested in relation to the memory system of the fourteenth-century theologian Thomas Bradwardine, what was most imporant in these settings was a sense of distancia and distancia intercepta. “By this term he seems to mean what we call ‘perspective,’ both with respect to the position of the observer and with respect to the ‘distance’ depicted in the location itself, foreground and background. The observation point is frontal, and far enough away from the scene so that everything in it can be seen clearly, fully, and at once.”127 It was this comprehensive observability that was crucial to a good locus, and it was largely the lack of such a commanding perspective that made natural settings useless. There was no way to see the natural landscape “fully, and at once,” no way to render it “readable” in de Certeau’s terms. It was impossible, in looking at the landscape from a point within it, to achieve the kind of over-arching, wholistic knowledge that would have let the imagination organize it with sufficient precision to allow the necessary manipulations. But in creating a poetic landscape within the epistemological context of the Elizabethan cartographic awareness in which the landscape could be precisely and objectively imagined as a map, Spenser was creating something strikingly similar to the sorts of structures used for organizing the imagines of memory. The new maps of the late sixteenth century, offering as they did an accurate and certain 126

Gross, p. 162. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 132. 127

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perspective on the natural landscape, provided a new measure of precision in the imaginative organization of natural space. The topography of the map could be seen and understood as a unified and comprehensible whole. It became a familiar and readable space which could, in turn, be appropriated and imaginatively colonized. The epistemologies of precise spatial representation and manipulation would be available for the understanding of more abstract spaces. The new maps of the Elizabethan period effectively re-ordered the wild unknowability of the landscape into a precisely imaginable form. What was “natural” became visually domesticated, and as such it could be manipulated like the equally domesticated architectural spaces of the trained memory. For in the Art of Memory the space of the loci is imagined, not real. And with the growing confidence in the precise objectivity of maps, the accurate organization of a landscape could be as vividly rendered and imaginatively evoked as the architectural layout of a building. The burgeoning epistemology of cartographic accuracy and precision established the cultural field for Spenser’s own act of memory training. In this light the poet can be seen to have created, not an architectural building of loci, but a whole architectonic and poetic country of them, and this implicit mirroring of mnemonic techniques plays an important role in Spenser’s poetic purpose.128 During the Early Modern period, the art of memory reached its culmination in a single intricate and complex construction. The Memory Theater of Giulio Camillo was an actual physical structure that Camillo spent his life, and his fortune, attempting to perfect. Nothing survives of it now but a few scattered descriptions, but we know it was a building large enough for a man to enter, and divided into levels and seven distinct areas laid out on the biblical model of Solomon’s Temple. In 1532 one traveler, Viglius Zuichemus, wrote to Erasmus about the nature of Camillo’s invention. He calls this theatre of his by many names, saying now that it is a built or constructed mind and soul, and now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it theatre.129

128

Sanford has also noted the possible connections of mapping and the classical art of memory She briefly juxtaposes the ideas of the classical art of memory and cartography, but she focuses on the way that various sorts of cartographical information can be mapped onto a representation of a country, rather than how the technique can be extended to information which is not explicitly cartographic. Interesting as her argument is, she does little more than suggest that a map might help someone memorize geography. This is much like saying that the classical memory theater is designed to help someone memorize the shape of a building. That was certainly the starting point, the sine qua non of memorization, but it was not the desired end result, which was to use the memorized building to remember a variety of other, less concrete things. Sanford, p. 21. 129 Quoted in Yates, Art of Memory, p. 137.

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To an extent that is no longer entirely clear, Camillo put into solid form the ideas of the classical art. He gave the mental construct a physical shape. Instead of an orator creating in his mind the image of a theater and then filling the seats with images, Camillo built a real wooden theater and filled the separate compartments with papers and calculations and lists of information. He apparently hoped not just to model the human memory, but to recreate it on demand. He seems to have been intent on creating a kind of instant, artificial memory, through which someone, stepping onto the stage of his theater, could receive the whole range of thoughts and recollections stored there. The idea was not entirely farfetched. The possibility of deliberately implanting memory was implicit in the late medieval and early modern conceptions that linked memory to magic and other “phantasmic processes.”130 This conception provided a complex mechanism for the understanding and manipulation of images and ideas, which depended for their success on the manipulation of what were called pneuma.131 Pneuma were units of matter, halfway between the physical and spiritual, which served as the medium of the imagination and the basis of memory. They were the form in which images were stored in the mind for later retrieval. But at the same time, these pneuma comprised the fundamental tools of neo-platonic magic. By manipulating pneuma and projecting them into another’s mind, the magician could control his victim’s perceptions and desires. The victim gained access to these desires by reading the implanted images in the same way that the student of memory recalled his own preserved ideas. In this way, magic was effectively an inverse of the Art of Memory, a transitive rather than intransitive use of imagery, for if the magician could implant his own choice of images and desires into the subject’s mind, he could implant his own choice of memories, as well. It was a trick Camillo pursued for his entire life, but never quite accomplished. When he died in 1544 his Memory Theater was still unfinished. But the idea seems to have remained. In writing The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s goal was not, I would argue, so very different from Camillo’s. Writing within a cultural context in which theories of phantasmic memory were still circulating, he created a vivid rendering of images and ideas, and impressed them upon his audience. Carefully crafting a model of virtue for the entire nation, he presented it in an imaginative structure that allowed it to be internalized and remembered. The sense of spatial organization that Spenser created, operating as it did within a context of Elizabethan cartographic awareness, allowed his reader to arrange not just the actions and developments of the separate protagonists but the larger understanding of virtuous behavior and a national moral character in a way that made them more easily retained. In a series of detailed and vivid imagines, he effectively superimposed a very particular memory of the English people onto a locus as large as all Faerieland, creating not so much a theater of memory as a national poetic map of memory. This may, at first, seem a bit of a stretch. The Faerie Queene, after all, is a narrative not a map, a collection of words rather than a collection of images. But the 130

Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 6. 131 Couliano, especially Chapter One.

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art of memory, too, involved the creation and organization of mental images. And a reader, looking back on his recollection of The Faerie Queene, would have had a wide selection of literature’s most vivid images to choose from, to organize, and to make sense of. And the way he would have made sense of them was essentially cartographic. John Arthos recreates the experience: If we try to remember the narrative in its proper sequence and the phases of the allegory we are lost unless we undertake a feat of memory. But if we let our minds play over the work, not to simplify but to order what we naturally retain, I think we are most likely to think first of a great forest full of light. In the wide spaces of this forest knights and squires are riding over turf, seeing each other from a long way off, coming together and clashing. At one place there will be a lady accompanied by her protector, at another we shall see one who is fleeing a pursuer, and at still another point one who is forlorn and lost. At great distances from each other there are castles rising within walls and now and then a cottage.132

As Arthos suggests, to read The Faerie Queene is inevitably to “undertake a feat of memory.” The overview conjured up may be slightly different for each reader, but its overall form is defined by the poem. We carry it with us from our experience of reading, the sense of spatial arrangement disciplined by the organizing power of the allegory. But the generic imagery that Arthos evokes leaves out a crucial ingredient. Within the cartographic epistemology that was newly established, the reader was able to make sense of the action and the allegory in relation to the specific details of the landscape, not the vaguely remembered sense of forests and “great distances.” Shaped by the new awareness of cartographic precision and objectivity, every virtuous action, every metaphorical and allegorical development in the poem, was positioned within a vivid and organized setting, where it could be called up and remembered. The Grove of Error, arising from our recollection of the poem, contains its vivid images of the hideous serpent/woman ensnaring Redcrosse, bringing him close to destruction before being destroyed in turn. Guyon’s travels among the wandering isles stand out as a series of images and points on the imagined landscape, mapped by our memories onto a locatable site on the poetic map of Faerieland, so that our own sense of temperance is remembered and internalized as a mapped journey past reproach and temptation and despair. Every vivid moral development and narrative event is organized by us in the allegorical landscape of the poem, spatially positioned in relation to one another, and therefore more vividly recalled. Like the classical rhetorician following a path through his memory theater, we can imaginatively retrace Redcrosse’s route, calling up each moral failure in turn, making our way through the landscape of temptation, misreading, and final comprehension until we are left, not just with the ultimate image of victorious Holiness, but with the whole complex structure of its development and formation, imprinted on our minds. In this light, memory can be seen, not just as a function of the reader’s absorption of the poem’s material, but as an active strategy on the part of the poet, and his effort to shape the reader’s memory is reflected in the shaping of his own characters. Throughout the poem Spenser demonstrates his concern with “the matter of just 132

Arthos, p. 92.

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memory.” He makes clear that his desire is not just to recollect the past, but to shape it as a means of shaping the national character. Memory, in the poem, becomes a powerful active force. It is used to confirm worthiness or unworthiness, to instruct and motivate, as if recollection of the past is a means to confirm the present. Memory provides characters with both the motivation for what they must do and the means to do it. At the beginning of her quest in Book III, Britomart asks for a description of Arthegal, though she knows him well. All which the Redcrosse knight to point ared, And him in euery part before her fashioned. .... Yet him in euery part before she knew, How euer list her now her knowledge, faine. (III ii 16–17) It later becomes clear that she has not been asking for information so much as for an elaboration of her own memory. As Linda Gregerson suggests, Britomart’s reaction to the sight and knowledge of Arthegal is a kind of enabling error of misrecognition: “Mistaking the beloved for the godhead buried in memory, the Phaedran lover commits the necessary, enabling, and continuous error upon which all subsequent reformation depends. Lover and beloved are progressively remade in a likeness glimpsed darkly, as if through a glass.”133 In Plato’s formulation, human love is a reflection of our love for the divine spirit, and it is controlled by the degree to which the human soul recalls its experience of the divine. The knowledge of things on earth is a pale recollection of this divine knowlege. In asking Redcrosse about Arthegal, Britomart is enacting a parallel of this platonic knowledge of absolute love, seeking a more detailed version of what she already knows and appealing for a way to sharpen her memory of the beloved she has seen but not met. Memory, rather than experience, becomes the truest way of knowing. In a similar light it is memory that constructs Redcrosse’s identity in its broadest terms and ties him both to place and time. The prophesy of Saint George’s future fame and his coming role in the country’s history depends on exactly this sort of magical, transitive memory. But when thou famous victorie hast wonne, And high emongst all knights hast hong thy shield, Thenceforth the suit of earthly conquest shonne, And wash thy hands from guilt of bloudy field. (I x 60) Even before it takes place, the event is remembered. The poem offers to the Redcrosse Knight a recapitulation of what he is eventually going to accomplish. Through vivid imagery—what amounts to a series of imaginative phantasms—the poem implants a memory of all that Redcrosse will have accomplished, and by doing so enables him to accomplish it. Memory is both the recapitulation and the source of moral action. And later it is something more. 133

Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 16.

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For thou emongst those Saints, whom thou doest see, Shalt be a Saint, and thine owne nations frend And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt called bee, Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree. (I x 61) As Saint George, the Redcrosse Knight himself will become a kind of memory for the English people. Not just his actions but his being itself is magically and poetically altered, and this magical formation of memory extends beyond the character to the poem’s audience. Through this phantasmic prophesy Redcrosse is presented as both a bringer of victory and its sign, and this sign serves as a place-marker for all the moral and martial victories that undergird England’s cultural history. The figure of Saint George works metonymically to conjure up a particular image of England, of the country itself. His character becomes a classical imagine, an instant, organizing image of the nation’s best past. For well I wote, thou springst from ancient race Of Saxon kings, that haue with mightie hand And many bloudie battailes fought in place High reard their royall throne in Britane land, and vanquisht them, vnable to withstand. (I x 65) George’s past is given to him by Contemplation like a memory that is being returned. In this recollection he receives his past, his birth, his childhood and even his name. The memory ties Saint George in a literal way to his kingdom. Thence she thee brought into this Faery lond, And in an heaped furrow did thee hyde, Where thee a Ploughman all unweeting fond, As he his toylesome teme that way did guyde, And brought thee vp in ploughmans state to byde, Whereof Georgos he thee gaue to name; Till prickt with courage, and they forces pryde, To Faery court thou cam’st to seeke for fame, And proue they puissaunt armes, as seemes thee best became. (I x 66) In this summary of his early life Redcrosse is presumably not learning anything he didn’t already know. But in connecting ancient history and the knight’s early life, Spenser is blurring Saint George’s memory with the reader’s own, placing the knight both in the context of his country’s history, and in the context of its land as well. His memory places him in the furrow of a plough and names him Man of Earth, giving him not only his past, but his future. And in providing the reader with the recollection of his journey to the faery court, a recollection Saint George presumably already possesses, Contemplation implants in the reader a version of that memory, and broadens the cultural context of the saint to include the reader’s own experience of it.

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But perhaps the best example of this transitive force of memory is represented in the remarkable crystal mirror of Book III. In Deheubarth that now South-wales is hight, What time king Ryence raign’d and dealed right, The great magitien Merlin had deuiz’d, By his deepe science, and hell-dreaded might, A looking glasse, right wondrously aguiz’d, Whose vertues through the wyde worlde soone were solemniz’d. It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight, What euer thing was in the world contaynd, Betwixt the lowewst earth and heuens hight, So that it to the looker appertaynd; What euer foe had wrought, or frend had faynd, Therein discouered was, ne ought more pas, Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd; For thy it round and hollow shaped was, Like to the world it selfe, and seemd a world of glas. (III ii 18.4–19.9) In its simplest form a mirror offers the perfect embodiment of passive memory. It captures the image of what passes and reflects it back. Yet Merlin’s mirror does a great deal more. It captures not just what is before it, but “What euer thing was in the world contaynd.” It is a true “looking glasse,” a device not just for reflecting but for seeing and constructing an understanding of the larger world. In Spenser’s poetic envisioning, then, the magical mirror, like the memory it embodies, becomes an active means of reaching out and shaping comprehension. It becomes the source of Britomart’s first, fatal glimpse of Arthegal, and the basis of her new life’s quest. When she looks in the mirror Britomart falls in love with the image of Arthegal. That image enters into her heart, and the memory of it troubles her. She fears that she loves only a shadow, an image, and worries that these images have no corresponding basis in physical reality. Nor Prince, nor pere it is, whose loue hath gryde My feeble brest of late, and launched this wound wyde. Nor man it is, nor other liuing wight: For then some hope I might vnto me draw, But th’only shade and semblant of a knight, Whose shape or person yet I neuer saw, hath me subiected to loues cruell law. (III ii 37–8) But the nurse, Glauce, recognizes that the image, this shadow, must be cast by a real body.

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No shadow, but a bodie hath in powre: That bodie, wheresoeuer that is light, May learned be by cyphers, or by Magicke might. (III ii 45) The ciphers in this case need not be magic signs, but graphic signs. The letters of Spenser’s own poem spell out the body behind the name, and provide the images that carry with them the substance. But the magic being invoked here is not simply Merlin’s magical attempts to reveal Arthegal. Rather it is an implicit enactment of the sort of neo-platonic magic in which images were seen to exercise a very real control. Britomart’s love for Artegal comes about because of the images, and the memory of them, implanted in her mind. Only after this memory is implanted by the mirror is the image made real. Arthegal is revealed to be an actual man, not just the reflection of one. In this way, the order of memory is reversed: image provokes memory which provokes awareness of the object. Memory is magically transformed into reality. Or rather, memory appears, not as the reflection of actual events, but as the creation of projected images. And this sense of active, transitive memory is broadened to include the entire English readership of the poem. Later, when Merlin instructs Britomart in her future, he is effectively telling Elizabeth her past. It is as much an act of memory as prognostication. The future he foretells is, from the reader’s perspective, already come and gone, and his prophesy of the maid’s life and progeny amounts to a narrative of the reader’s national history. For from thy wombe a famous Progenie Shall spring, out of the auncient Troian blood, Which shall reuiue the sleeping memorie Of those same antique Peres, the Heauens brood, Which Greeke and Asian riuers stained with their blood. .... Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours, Thy fruitfull Ofspring, shall from thee descend; Braue Captaines, and most mighty warriours, That shall their conquests through all lands extend, And their decayed kingdomes shall amend: The feeble Britons, broken with long warre, They shall vpreare, and mightily defend Against their forrein foe, that comes form farre, Till vniuersall peace compound all ciuill iarre. (III iii 22–3) Memory is directly linked to history. To recount the events of history is to recount a nation’s memory. But as Spenser has said, he is not a historiographer. His goal is not to recount what happened, but rather what should have happened, what is poetically rather than historically true. As he tells Raleigh, his goal is formative, not merely recollective: “to fashion a gentleman or noble person.”134 He is interested in 134

Letter to Raleigh. My italics.

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shaping the virtues of his audience through his manipulation of imagined events. By offering these poetic truths as historical narrative, Spenser is essentially creating a new national memory. The future that Merlin lays out is convulsed with war and “ciuil iarre,” as was England’s past from Roman times on. But eventually, after all the turmoil, Spenser imposes and creates a sense of peace and unity.135 Spenser presents Elizabeth as the final unifying force of ancient Britons. Tho when the terme is full accomlishid, There shall a sparke of fire, which hath long-while bene in his ashes raked vp, and hid, Be freshly kindled in the fruitfull Ile Of Mona, where it lurked in exile. (III iii 48) In referring to Angelsy, where Henry VII was born, Spenser invokes the Tudors as the spiritual descendents of the ancient Trojans, and provides a means by which “Britons will regain power not literally but symbolically in representative individuals.”136 Thenceforth eternall vnion shall be made Betweene the nations different afore, .... Then shall a royall virgin raine, which shall Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore, And the great Castle smite so sore with all, That it shall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall. (III iii 49) It may be “heavenly destiny” that guides Britomart to Arthegal, but it is also a kind of heavenly memory. For in prophesying for Britomart, Merlin foretells her marriage and her husband’s death, and then goes on at great length to tell of the long expanse of British history that her descendents will bridge. Spenser thus lays out the history of the nation from the Britons and Brutus, through the Saxons, the Danes, the Normans, to the Tudors: from his readers’ past to their present. And just as the central characters are bound and created by their place in the cultural memory, so, too, is the entire poem. The Faerie Queene itself becomes a ship voyaging to its end (I xii 42), an end which is irrevocably tied to its beginnings. As the poet himself lays out his mission in the Proem to the Second Book, the central task of the poem is a voyage of discovery.

135

As Berger observes: “All forces (Briton, Saxon, Danish, and Norman) are presented as primary elements (hostile, egocentric, and exclusive) unaware of the larger organic development to which they contribute, a development kept before us in Merlin’s frequent references to fate. Against the recurrent cycles of emergence and decline, against the apparent treadmill pattern of continual invasion, is set the increasingly complex assimilation of racial elements into a political concordia.” Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 128. 136 Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 127.

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Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th’abundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery.... But let that man with better sence aduize, That of the world least part to vs is red: And dayly how through hardy enterprize, Many great Regions are discouered, Which to late age were neuer mentioned. (II proem 1–2) Here Spenser is making explicit the connection between mapping and memory. He is, in fact, mapping his poet’s memory of a mythic England onto the physical world, and bringing together the discoveries made through both memory and exploration. The terrain of the past, recalled and invented in this poem, serves to construct the world as surely as the maps that arise out of exploration. To claim that this “famous antique history” is memory is to personalize that history, and implicitly it suggests that, as memory, it belongs to somebody, or to some people. It belongs, Spenser suggests, to Elizabeth, and by extension to the readers of this poem. And in offering these images as memories, the poet suggests that the unknown, or unremembered, aspects of the past are waiting, like undiscovered countries, to be added to his reader’s understanding of the world. Within the context of mapping which was increasingly central to the late sixteenthcentury’s conception of space, this sense of history, and the concomitant awareness of national virtue that undergirded it, was superimposed upon the very landscape of the poem. It was recoverable in the reader’s memory as a series of distinct locations, vividly rendered and evocatively placed within a figurative landscape of specific settings: the Idle Lake, the Wandering Wood, the Bower of Bliss, all organized in regard to one another. And if this poetic map was not as precisely rendered as Saxton’s atlas, if the landscape could not quite be drawn to scale, it could nevertheless be imagined as such, and would have been. The audience, which had seen all the precise and varied details of its countryside newly laid out before it, would have been predisposed to organize such a vivid and spatially rendered poem in the same terms. The cartographic epistemology of the time would have leant itself to the task. In the course of its development, English cartographic awareness impinged on a variety of social and moral discourses and was involved “in the charting of intellectual landscapes”137 as much as in the charting of physical ones. As Harley has suggested, the focus of cartographic interpretation gradually shifted “from the reconstruction of real places as revealed in particular maps to a reconstruction of the ideological or symbolic undertones of images as they were understood by the cartographers, their patrons, or by individuals or groups in the society who came 137

Harley, “Meaning,” p. 28.

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into contact with the image.”138 In writing The Faerie Queene, Spenser implicitly relied on the new precise maps of the period, not just as practical representations of the poetic country he was creating, but for the broad cartographic familiarity they represented and for their impact on the imaginative conception of physical space. Saxton’s maps appeared in the years during which Spenser would have been working on his poem. They added to the cultural context in which he operated, providing an increased awareness of vivid and accurate cartographic renderings of landscape and country. But more than simply establishing a cartographic vocabulary or set of epistemological expectations for his English epic, they gave Spenser a crucial tool for creating an English cultural past. These maps provided the means of encompassing the countryside in a single glance, and conceiving of it as a wholistic, detailed, and organized space into which the actions of a whole culture could be inserted. And in doing so they provided the imaginative means by which Spenser could create his poetic country of Faerieland. The growing visual awareness of the country laid out so precisely by Saxton allowed the English audience to see in The Faerie Queene an imaginative recreation of a geographical order that could contain, in its broad, spectacular landscape, both the English past and the Elizabethan cultural memory. Giulio Camillo’s memory theater never functioned, but Spenser’s efforts were much more successful. Although his poem, in its projected scope, was never finished, the existing portions do their work, creating an artificial setting sufficient to induce the memory of a glorious and unified history. This memory was founded on a distant past and with a mythic cast of characters in which all the virtues that go to make the perfect English knight were carefully gathered and arranged. In much the same way that Christopher Saxton gave a unified, imaginable shape to his country, these images of England, drawn from an amalgam of history and romance, fact and fancy, were laid out in all their vivid detail across the landscape of Faerieland, and by their arrangement they gave it shape.

138

Harley, “Meaning,” p. 28.

Chapter 4

Conquering Geography Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, and the Cartographic Imagination

As an explorer of the New World, trying simultaneously to recreate and diminish Spain’s rich successes and having only a passing acquaintance with the new regions, Sir Walter Raleigh was forced to practice a kind of sleight of hand on the land he was describing. In his narrative “Discoverie of the large, rich, and bewtiful empyre of Guiana,” he claimed to reveal to his audience a land that was “large, rich, and bewtiful,” yet Raleigh himself had no way of being sure of any but the last of these. He never got further than the border of Guiana, and he never found the gold he sought. In his verbal recreation of the New World, Raleigh repeatedly instructs his reader to “understand,” to “see,” to take as fact the story he offers, but he had no proof of what he claimed. In fact, most of his assertions were derived from nothing more than hearsay, legend, and myth. So in the end Raleigh had to offer his audience something less than proof of his claims. He had to ground his story in a fashion that guaranteed its accuracy and carried a sense of vividness and precision that lent the only trace of certainty to an uncertain voyage. He offered up a map. At about this time another great traveler stalked onto the world stage and called for similar visual proof of his travels. “Give me a map,” says Tamburlaine, “then let me see how much/is left for me to conquer all the world.”1 On his deathbed, Christopher Marlowe’s Scourge of God recapitulates his travels and conquests, looking to the map to give them shape within the cartographic context of the world. And then, at last, he turns to work undone. “Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground/Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line,/Unto the rising of the earthly globe.”2 For Tamburlaine, as for Raleigh, the New World carried the promise of new lands and new achievements within the distant regions of “the earthly globe.” At first glance it might seem problematic to compare these two figures. Raleigh, after all, was situating himself within the complex political and cultural context of the Elizabethan court, while Tamburlaine functioned within the equally intricate, though much less confining, realm of Marlowe’s poetic imagination. But there are striking similarities. In each case the fruits of success are as elusive as they are attractive, and the projection of ultimate conquest is rooted firmly and exclusively in the language of the map. There is no actual empire, merely the map of one. In this light, the efforts and assumptions of these two figures may be seen to be closely tied. Both are self-consciously heroic, and both operate within a cultural moment when a new 1 2

2 Tamburlaine, V, iii, 124–5. 2 Tamburlaine, V, iii, 146–8.

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belief in cartographic accuracy and objectivity was burgeoning. Together they drew upon the new paradigms of spatial organization and manipulation that were at the center of this new English cartographic awareness. For with Tamburlaine, I would argue, Marlowe was putting into cultural circulation not simply a new knowledge of geography, but a new model of cartographic manipulation, one which in turn would have been available to Raleigh for his own dramatic presentation of self. The notion of conquest through geography is not a new one. A number of critics have looked at the way the maps of the late sixteenth century sparked new ways of thinking about England’s role and its sense of itself. As Lesley Cormack has outlined, the increased development and precision of geography in this period provided new means of both imaginative and administrative control that manifested themselves in “an ideology of imperialism in early modern England.” This ideology, “claiming both the supremacy of the English nation and its right to seize control of new trade routes, riches, and foreign lands, was articulated in many of the books of geography written by Englishmen in the last twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign and the first twenty years of James’.”3 The result was a shift in the way England looked at its place in the world, sometimes quite literally. New cartographic renderings actually shifted England’s position toward the center of the map in an effort to reflect its new importance and power.4 Within this broader context of burgeoning geographical knowledge, a number of critics have focused specifically on Christopher Marlowe and his geographical influences. Some have seen in Tamburlaine an additional impetus for English imperialism and empire while others have noted the vein of geographical references running through the play.5 But these critics have seen these geographical aspects largely as the influence of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, first published in 1570. As Klein suggests, “In a very fundamental sense Ortelius’ new map of the globe ... is a defining structural principle of the entire play—more than merely its referential paradigm, it acts almost literally as the dramatic scene of action.”6 This is certainly important and illuminating. But at the same time, in reading these very different texts against one another, we may look beyond Ortelius. 3 Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 1. 4 Cormack, p. 7. 5 See Ethel Seaton, “Marlowe’s Map,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 10 (1924) for the opening of the discussion of Marlowe and geography. For more recent studies see Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., “Space, Measurement, and Stalking Tamburlaine,” Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 3–27; Crystal Bartolovich, “Putting Tamburlaine on a (Cognitive) Map,” Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 29–72; John Gillies, “Tamburlaine and Renaissance Geography,” Early Modern English drama: a critical companion (2006): 35–49; Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2001). For a discussion of Marlowe and empire see Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play,” Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Nick de Somogyi, “Marlowe’s Maps of War,” in Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (eds) Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 96–109. 6 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 16.

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For here I want to consider less the effect of these new maps than the effects of the new epistemological expectations about the nature of mapped space which accompanied them. For Marlowe and Raleigh were writing within a culture newly aware not just of geography, but of the increasingly complex and detailed techniques of its representation. As we saw in Chapter Two, a burgeoning confidence in mathematized cartography and in the precise objectivity of mapped representation produced, in the late sixteenth century, new paradigms of spatial manipulation. And the growing confidence in the ability to precisely organize abstract and imagined space extended itself into the similarly abstract realms of literary representation. I hope to show how the cartographic imagination, with its ability to transfer a belief in objective spatial manipulation from the technological field of geography into the literary sphere of imagery and narrative, provided the means for Raleigh’s cartographic conquest. The new widespread confidence in the objectivity of mapped imagery, which allowed Spenser a framework for organizing an imaginary realm like Faerieland, served to empower Raleigh’s own transformative representation of the real, though distant land of Guiana. Following the example of theatrical conquest laid out in Tamburlaine, the English explorer attempted to transfer Marlowe’s techniques of cartographic manipulation into the political sphere. But Raleigh was working at a disadvantage. While Tamburlaine repeatedly defines himself in terms of the countries he has conquered and the wealth he has accrued, Raleigh, in his “Discoverie,” must make do with much less. The “empyre,” which he had hoped to lay at his sovereign’s feet, seemed at first to promise wealth and territory to rival Marlowe’s hero, but in the end all promises amounted to little, and Raleigh was left with a land not worth the voyage. Yet in his narrative, he continues to place a remarkable degree of faith in the riches he never quite discovered, clinging to a landscape re-envisioned in the light of what he hoped for, rather than what he found. It is a remarkable re-imagining of an entire country under the guise of narrative precision. And in the way he presents this new land, the way he continues to offer its promise in place of its reality, Raleigh can be seen to draw upon Tamburlaine’s own rhetorical efforts to master the sprawling vastness of the world, and on the new expectations of cartographic objectivity and imaginative manipulation that they embodied. At the same time, however, in his evident preference for the illusory over the real, Raleigh can be seen to mirror the skills of a very different Marlowe protagonist. In Doctor Faustus we find another character whose desire for conquest expresses itself in geographical terms. And in extending the thread of geographical synchronicity from Tamburlaine through Doctor Faustus to Raleigh’s narrative, we can see a broader and more deepseated effect of the century’s new cartographic understanding. For the earth offers itself to Faustus not through force of arms but through magic. Yet the magic he embraces proves fleeting and illusory, and in the end, the magician’s control of the world extends no further than his control of its appearance. Between Tamburlaine and Faustus there yawns a gap, which is in some ways the gap between doing and seeming, between controlling the world and controlling its appearance. And it was within this gap that Raleigh struggled to operate. Like Tamburlaine, he drew on a dramatic invocation of a measurable and objective

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cartographic world as a justification and proof of his power to conquer it. But then, when reality didn’t match his ambition, he linked these strategies of geographical rhetoric to the Faustian paradigm of control through illusion to create his own new form of cartographic proof. It was a proof that rested not just on the new maps, but on the new cartographic imagination. For while the physical territory of Guiana remained cloaked in ambiguity, its representation could become fixed and vivid. The expectations of cartographic objectivity, and the new possibilities of spatial manipulation which they allowed, provided Raleigh the means to accomplish his own imaginative transformation. He made use of Marlowe’s rhetorical strategies to further his own goals of empire and self-aggrandisement—and in the process fundamentally altered them. By taking Marlowe’s rhetorical invocation of the world and transposing it into a political culture increasingly reliant on an epistemology of mapped precision and objectivity, Raleigh re-situated Marlowe’s cartographic manipulations within a context of actual conquest. Tamburlaine’s conquering rhetoric and Faustus’ illusionary power were transformed. In Raleigh’s hands the new spatial consciousness, and the cartographic imagination it revealed, served not just as a literary expression of imperialism— an emblem of conquest or a “scene of action”—but as an actual tool of England’s imperial efforts. Geographical Tamburlaine From its first appearance, Tamburlaine brought to the London stage a complex and enthralling mixture of violence, terror, poetry, and vaulting ambition. Marlowe’s hero and his exploits in laying waste the armies of the East have raised a dizzying range of critical reactions. The play is “confusing, contradictory and unwieldy,” a work “full of tumultuous energies and problematic issues.”7 It is a text “divided against itself,”8 and its protagonist has been variously seen as a bloodthirsty hero, “an imperialist, strategically constructing a self of remarkable ignominy or nobility from his spectators’ expectations,”9 “the supreme acquisitor on the Elizabethan stage,” and the very “idea of Empire.”10 But whatever else his strengths and weaknesses, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is defined from the beginning by a sharp and abiding geographical awareness. His self-creation and self-imaginings are almost unvaryingly couched in terms of geographical breadth. As he considers the nature of his conquests early on, he says,

7 Johannes H. Birringer, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1984), pp. 110, 79. 8 Troni Y. Grande, Marlovian Tragedy (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), p. 47. 9 Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 66. 10 Stephen X. Mead, “Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the Idea of Empire,” Works and Days 7 (1989): 99.

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Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world . . . Wills us to wear ourselves, and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (1 Tamburlaine, II, vii, 21–9) In his pursuit of “an earthly crown” what is crucial, Tamburlaine suggests, is not just his cruelty, fierceness, and indomitable will—all of which have been noted often before—but the soul’s ability to understand the “architecture of the world,” to know the geographical structure of what is to be conquered. A number of critics have observed the complexity of the geographical discourse and perspectives at work within this play. Klein has examined the competing and contradictory pressures of the ancient moral and social aspects of geography at odds with the new scientific and objective force of the New Geography, while Gillies has suggested the ways in which Marlowe’s evocation of Ortelian geography is complicated by the ancient vision of the world as a structure of social and cultural boundaries.11 Sullivan has observed that Tamburlaine’s conquests, his efforts “to produce an abstract spatiality in his own name and image,” reflect a concurrent cultural pressure within Elizabethan culture to impose centralized systems of measurement and control on local customs.12 And Crystal Bartolovich has seen the play, in large part, as participating in a process of primitive accumulation, helping to create a sense of globalization that interpellates the English audience within a larger political and geographical enterprise of production and trade.13 As this broad mix of insights suggests, Marlowe’s use of geography is complex, serving as a metaphor and emblem of cultural negotiations even as it offers a more practical description of the breadth of Tamburlaine’s conquests. But what concerns me here is how the geographical aspects of Marlowe’s drama function within a larger culture that is increasingly embracing an epistemology of mathematized spatial precision, what has been called “a masterimage of human perceiving, desiring, willing, and acting.”14 It is not simply that Marlowe is offering a reflection of the Elizabethan culture’s new familiarity with maps, but rather, that he is actually beginning to mold cartographic knowledge into an active means of manipulating space—albeit theatrical space. In this play, the cartographic imagination doesn’t just provide the descriptive context for Tamburlaine’s conquests. It provides the actual means by which he accomplishes them. Throughout the play Marlowe extends his protagonist’s cartographic consciousness to enormous lengths, so that even aspects not explicitly geographical are given a cartographic bent. Again and again the playwright conjures up the enormous 11

See Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space; Gillies, “Tamburlaine and Renaissance Geography.” 12 Sullivan, “Space, Measurement, and Stalking Tamburlaine,” 15. 13 Bartolovich. 14 John Gillies, “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,” in John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds) Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), p. 223.

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armies of both sides by listing their homelands, as if the countries themselves were moving and doing battle. The play gives us “revolted Grecians, Albanese, Cicilians, Jews, Arabians, Turks, and Moors, Natolians, Sorians, black Egyptians, Illyrians, Thracians, and Bithynians,” all arrayed against Marlowe’s conqueror. But even such a mighty and disparate horde is “scarce enough t’encounter Tamburlaine,” who “brings a world of people to the field.” As Marlowe tells us, All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine, Even from the midst of fiery Cancer’s tropic, To Amazonia under Capricorn, And thence as far as Archipelago, All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine. (2 Tamburlaine, I. i, 61–76) In bringing this “world of people” to the battle, Tamburlaine can be seen to manipulate, not just the forces of his army, but the map itself. Asia and Africa are “in arms with Tamburlaine” as though he has not only conquered the people, but taken the continents themselves into his control. Under Tamburlaine’s leadership, the world is at war with itself, and when the battle takes place, the results are offered in broad, world-shaping terms. The Terrene main, wherein Danubius falls, Shall, by this battle, be the Bloody Sea. The wandering sailors of proud Italy Shall meet those Christians, fleeting with the tide, Beating in heaps against their argosies, And make fair Europe, mounted on her bull, Trapped with the wealth and riches of the world, Alight, and wear a woeful mourning weed. (2 Tamburlaine, I, i, 37–44) In this description the approaching battle will not only cause the deaths of men but will alter the geography of the world. Great heaps of bodies enter into the landscape, changing the “Terrene main” into a sea of blood, and transforming a tide of water into a tide of corpses, so that Europe itself will be reduced to mourning by the carnage. In Marlowe’s grandiloquent retelling, his conqueror’s control of the world extends to the ability to re-shape its very form. And while this control can, indeed, be read as “an imaginative dramatic testimony to the impact of cartography on sixteenth-century culture,”15 I would like to suggest more specifically the nature of that impact. In his rhetorical conquest, Tamburlaine doesn’t simply evoke the scope and place names of the new maps and atlases, he mimics their ability to order and arrange space. Marlowe is not just evoking a variety of exotic places, but is instead organizing them into the precise shape of Tamburlaine’s empire. I would argue that, by transporting into his drama the conception of a world that can be both visually represented and imaginatively manipulated, Marlowe reveals a growing confidence in the geometrically precise nature of the mapped landscape. This amounts to an 15

Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 16.

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epistemological shift in register from the technological discourse of geometrical cartographic precision into the realm of dramatic literature. And in this light, the mathematized and geometric representation of the new cartography provides a paradigm for a new degree of imaginative spatial mastery. Those walled garrisons will I subdue, And write myself great Lord of Africa. So from the East unto the furthest West Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm. (1 Tamburlaine, III, iii, 244–6) With these words Tamburlaine becomes a colossus stretching his arms across the oceans. More than that, the imagery evokes medieval mappae mundi such as the thirteenth-century Ebstorf world map, on which the figure of Christ—his head, hands, and feet—comprise the framework in which the world rests. This effectively conjures up a lingering sense of medieval geographical representations, staging what amounts to “the collision between geographies new and old.”16 Yet even as he embodies the ancient map, Tamburlaine seems determined that the world he conquers will be the modern world of the new geography. As he says to Zenocrate, I will confute those blind geographers That make a triple region in the world, Excluding regions which I mean to trace, And with this pen reduce them to a map. (1 Tamburlaine, IV, iv, 80–83) In rejecting the “blind geographers” and their “triple region” of the earth, Tamburlaine is rejecting the older medieval geography as a representation of social space in favor of the scientific and mathematical precison of the new geography. He makes the implicit claim that only he sees the world clearly, discerning in it new and undiscovered sites of conquest. As Howe observes, “He implies that he understands the principle underlying the operations of the world ... [and] that he understands the geography—that is, the physical organization—of the world better than anybody else ever has.”17 But even more than that, Tamburlaine’s ability to manipulate geography itself suggests the rhetorical power of the new potential for cartographic spatial manipulation. “[W]e move from an oikumenical world-view, with its highly charged boundaries, to a model of spatial organization grounded in little more than Tamburlaine’s wilful

16 Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., “Geography and identity in Marlowe,” in Patrick Cheney (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 232. As Sullivan suggests, “What is distinctive about Marlowe is the way in which he deploys the logic of the old geography while also developing the implications of the new.” If aspects of the new geography predominate in Tamburlaine, “it is not represented as the only available spatial model in the play.” Sullivan, “Geography and identity in Marlowe,” pp. 233, 234. 17 James Robinson Howe, Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and Magic (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 62.

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and arbitrary assignation of the meridian-line to Damascus.”18 And in expressing this will, Marlowe enacts a new form of spatial manipulation. Under the power of Tamburlaine’s conquering rhetoric the “triple region” of the medieval T-O maps, which divided the world schematically into Europe, Asia, and Africa, but which offered little sense of detail or of precise geographical arrangement, is giving way. He is creating, not just a map, but a geographically accurate map, embodying the new expectations of cartographic precision and objectivity in place of the medieval mappa mundi. And as if to underline the importance of this new precision, to suggest the need to see the world in all its specificity in order to win it, Tamburlaine spends as much effort naming territories as conquering them. Or rather, since this is a drama of literature, the act of conquering becomes identical to the act of naming. At its most basic level, the play can only evoke the world through words. The play, after all, is an act of language, and all that occurs within it, all the manipulations and constructions, are equally a matter of language. But in Tamburlaine, Marlowe raises this evocation of the world—the imaginative conjuration of its imagery—to a new level and scale of control—to a kind of invocation that actively implements Tamburlaine’s desires and gives them an implicitly spatial form. As one critic has noted, Tamburlaine’s principal strength is his “supreme, self-conscious exploitation of the language of power.”19 But it is more than just the “language of power” that Tamburlaine embodies; it is the power of language. Marlowe’s dramatic rhetoric self-consciously links heroism and eloquence. The eloquence embodies the heroism and gives it shape. And if it is true that Marlowe “contrives his own sound effects” that effectively amount to a “substitute for representation,”20 it is not simply that Tamburlaine’s eloquence represents action. Rather the eloquence itself becomes a kind of action. As David Daiches has observed, “the poetry is used not so much to interpret the action as to embody it.”21 In this light, Tamburlaine’s greatest strength amounts to what may be called cartographic invocation, in which foreign and exotic territories are theatrically conquered through naming, and in which the conqueror establishes the extent of his accomplishment through the long and rolling iteration of countries and territories. In this way the constant, hyperbolic motion of continuing conquest becomes a kind of conjuration. The conquest lies in the naming. One critic has claimed that, in re-writing the world map, “Tamburlaine is a destroyer not primarily of kingdoms and customs, but of meaning itself. The geographical boundaries Tamburlaine destroys are also markers of objective reality; therefore, the audience’s frame of reference becomes increasingly Tamburlaine’s monomaniacal vision of the world.”22 I would argue, however, that in rhetorically re-mapping the world in light of the new burgeoning epistemology of mathematized cartographic objectivity, Tamburlaine is 18

Sullivan, “Geography and identity in Marlowe,” p. 235. Birringer, p. 89. 20 Harry Levin, The Overreacher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 44. 21 David Daiches, “Language and Action in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine,” in Modern Critical Views: Christopher Marlowe (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 78–9. 22 Stephen X. Mead, “Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the Idea of Empire,” Works and Days 7 (1989): 91. 19

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reconfiguring his new vision of the world, not in “monomaniacal” but in largely objective terms. Anyone opening Ortelius’ atlas was free to gaze on the world of Tamburlaine’s imagination in all its specificity. And it is this specificity—the deliberate evoking of a world imagined in newly geometric and objective terms and represented in a set of widely available and disseminated maps—that lends Tamburlaine’s conquests much of their theatrical power. For in the breadth of his conquests, his power over the world lies in his ability to know it, not schematically or approximately or symbolically, but specifically and precisely. By implicitly referring to a map that would have been available, if not familiar, to much of his audience, Marlowe is providing a kind of objective correlative for Tamburlaine’s naming and conquering. The specificity comes both from the long lists of cartographically-situated locations, and from the objective representation of the countries and territories which those names evoke. In this context, the world becomes a series of countries that Tamburlaine collects like pieces of a puzzle, and what enables him to conquer these kingdoms is his power to name them and to evoke the precision with which they fit together. This is not to say that all conquest in Tamburlaine is reduced to a single roll call of place names. There is nothing so mechanical or simplistic about it. Marlowe employs much of his most grandiloquent rhetoric to render personal and particular Tamburlaine’s conquest—to make the battles and victories a natural and inevitable outgrowth of his protagonist’s overpowering personality. The siege of Damascus, with its slaughter of the virgin emissaries, provides a vivid view of the complexity of Tamburlaine’s persona, and charges his character and the play with the sense of grandiose cruelty, determination, and willpower which is at the wild heart of the drama. But if the siege of Damascus, and, to name just one more example, the tormenting of Bazajeth in part two, provide a kind of micro-view of Tamburlaine’s world conquest, vividly rendering its personal and social aspects, it is surely the cartographic invocation that gives his accomplishments their enormous scope. And it is this scope, as much as his cruelty and fierceness, that is the sign of Tamburlaine’s heroic character. At the beginning of the play’s second part, Tamburlaine’s lieutenants explain their recent accomplishments by offering an itinerary of conquest. And I have marched along the river Nile To Machda, where the mighty Christian priest, Called John the Great, sits in milk-white robe ... From thence unto Cazates did I march, Where Amazonians met me in the field ... to Zanzibar, The western part of Afric, where I viewed The Ethiopian sea, rivers, and lakes ... to Manico ... And by the coast of Byather, at least I cam to Cubar ... And conquering that, made haste to Nubia. There, having sacked Borno ... Unto Damasco, where I stayed before. (2 Tamburlaine, I, ii, 186–205)

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This is less like war than like a hurried tour of the world. The emphasis isn’t on fighting but on seeing and speaking, as if the power of simply naming the world was enough to effect its conquest. The army is almost dashing from place to place, marching to Machda, “making haste to Nubia,” tracing their way through the Ortelian map of Africa in order to name every spot. This same cartographic invocation is played out particularly clearly for Tamburlaine himself when, lying on his death bed, he calls for the map of the world. Give me a map, then let me see how much Is left for me to conquer all the world, That these, my boys, may finish all my wants. (2 Tamburlaine, V, iii, 124–6) This viewing of the map seems, at first, as much a sign of failure as success. Tamburlaine wants the map as an indication of how much of the world he has failed to win, and in this context it threatens to become an atlas of his shortcomings. Yet the tone is anything but apologetic, and in the end, the conqueror’s ruminations on the image of the world before him become a means of projecting his ambitions beyond his own death. Tamburlaine begins by tracing the path of his conquests over the map. Here I began to march towards Persia, Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea, And thence unto Bithynia, where I took The Turk and his great Empress prisoners. (2 Tamburlaine, V, iii, 127–30) He sees the map, not as a representation of the world, but as a representation of his life. He maps his conquests onto the world, and in their repetition, in the precision of their naming and the tracing of their locations, he turns the mapped world into the circuit of his own accomplishments. But that is only the beginning. Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line, Unto the rising of this earthly globe ... And from the Antartic Pole eastward behond As much more land, which never was descried, Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright As all the lamps that beautify the sky! And shall I die, and this unconquered? (2 Tamburlaine, V, iii, 146–59) The question at the end, although real enough to the dying Tamburlaine, takes on a note of the purely rhetorical. Within the pattern that the plays have established, the answer is clear. Through his cartographic invocation Tamburlaine, even on his death bed, is continuing his conquest. He is leading the audience through the wealth of the New World, “westward from the midst of Cancer’s line,” just as surely as he led them with his armies through the countries of Asia and Africa. By invoking the cartographic world, Tamburlaine is bending it to his will in a way that is not

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so different from the way he conquered it in his prime. Geography, and the map that represents it, empowers a kind of imaginative conquest. And in presenting this notion, Marlowe creates the connection between envisioning the world, in all its precision, and winning it. Conquest, for Tamburlaine, remains to the end an act of language as much as an act of arms. By creating, in the world of Tamburlaine, a conqueror whose force lay in his imaginative understanding of the world and his linguistic ability to conjure it up and mold it to his desires, Marlowe was representing a model of conquest that would have echoed other ideas in circulation at the time. As a number of critics have suggested, Tamburlaine may have served as a means for Marlowe to praise, encourage, and validate the imperialistic ambitions of Elizabethan adventurers in the New World. The energy of Marlowe’s conqueror may well have found its roots and its reflection in “the acquisitive energies of English merchants, entrepreneurs, and adventurers,”23 and the play’s driving energy of conquest may have fueled the ambitions of real life conquerors such as Raleigh. Eleanor Grace Clark has argued even more explicitly that Marlowe was a member of Raleigh’s circle from 1583 to the poet’s death in 1593, and that, as such, he would have been aware of Raleigh’s principal concerns: the campaign against Spain and the possibilities of English imperial expansion. More than that, Marlowe would have had every reason to advance the beliefs of his patron and would have “deliberately advertised and exploited” these “particular enthusiasms” in his plays.24 In this context, Tamburlaine’s conquests in the east may easily have served as a literary mirror for Raleigh’s attempts at conquest in the west. “America ... may have been [Marlowe’s] subject, and Tamburlaine a poetic invention for his protagonist Raleigh.”25 But even if Tamburlaine was not written for Raleigh, it would certainly have been familiar to him. And just as George Chapman’s Virginia Mask, written by another member of Raleigh’s circle, was designed to support Raleigh’s efforts in the New World in the face of King James’ antipathy, Tamburlaine’s conquests would surely have resonated with the imperialist desires evident in England at the time. And among all the potential conquerors eager to take up where Tamburlaine left off, Raleigh was perhaps best situated to make use of Marlowe’s cartographic techniques. As a member of the court, he would have been immersed in the cartographic discourse that was increasingly spreading through the Elizabethan administrative culture, fueling its nationalistic drives and imperial ambitions. As evidence of this increasing cartographic preoccupation, we need look no further than the atlas of the counties of England and Wales by Christopher Saxton. More than the maps of Ortelius, Saxton’s work, first published in 1579 and republished frequently in later years, helped create a new level of cartographic familiarity and

23

Greenblatt, “Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play,” p. 194. Eleanor Grace Clark, Ralegh and Marlowe: A Study in Elizabethan Fustian (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 226. 25 Clark, p. 226. 24

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sophistication in England, and helped establish a template of precision and accuracy within the geographical and cartographical discourse of the age.26 In addition, as a new landowner in Ireland in the late 1580s, Raleigh would have been familiar with the techniques of surveying and, more importantly, with the implications of an epistemology of accuracy and precision which the spread of surveying provided.27 In short, Raleigh was a man with one eye on the importance of conquest and the other on the power of cartography to measure and delineate all that you conquered. When he turned his attention to the New World he would have brought with him this double awareness. And it was into this context of empire and courtly politics that he translated the lessons of cartographic invocation that Tamburlaine so emphatically taught. Mapping Guiana In his voyage to Guiana in 1595, Raleigh sailed with the promise of discovering gold and with the hope of establishing a land base from which the English could exert more pressure on the Spanish Empire. The report he wrote amounted to a recapitulation of his explorations and a description of the country that was designed to increase the interest of Queen Elizabeth and her government in the settlement of the area. The purpose of his account, then, was to unveil a new piece of potential real estate to the audience at home, and to display its riches to best effect. This seems a straightforward enough process. But from the beginning, the difficulties and ambiguities of the project can be seen.

26

See Chapter Two. For more on the administrative and nationalistic importance of Saxton’s maps see Helgerson. For more on Saxton’s maps generally see R. A. Skelton, Saxton’s Survey of England and Wales (Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1974); Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton: Elizabethan Map-Maker (London: The Holland Press, 1979); Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tudor map-making (London: The British Library, 1980). 27 As Barber suggests, “English estate surveyors had begun to move across the Irish Channel at the behest of private patrons as early as 1586.” See Peter Barber, “England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550–1625,” in David Buisseret (ed.) Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 62. Ireland’s earliest estate map, dated 1598, was of Raleigh’s lands at Mogeely, County Cork, and while the map itself dates from after the publication of Raleigh’s “Discoverie,” it suggests an interest in, and familiarity with, surveying that extended back into the earlier decade. For more see Sarah Tyacke, “Introduction,” in Sarah Tyacke (ed.) English Map-Making 1500–1650 (London: British Library, 1983). For more on surveying in Ireland see Bruce Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland” ELH 57/2 (Summer, 1990): 263–79; David J. Baker, “Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland,” in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds) Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 76–92; and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Mapping Mutability: Or, Spenser’s Irish Plot,” in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds) Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–115.

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The title itself—apparently so self-evident and transparent—reveals the roots of its uncertainties, structured as it is around a central vacancy. “The Discoverie of the large, rich, and bewtiful empyre of Guiana, with a relation of the great and Gold Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado) And of the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, and other Countries, with their river, adjoyning,” sounds both panoramic and grandiosely inclusive, but given Raleigh’s ultimate lack of success, it provides much less than it offers. Within the body of the text, the empire of Guiana turns out to be just barely there, all but out of sight and only evoked by the merest suggestion of proximity, while the “Golden Citie of Manoa” is missing altogether. And other markers, too, suggest an awareness of the narrative’s potential shortcomings, the word “Discoverie,” chief among them. Although the modern meaning of “exploration” or “investigation” was current at the time of Raleigh’s voyage, it was not the primary definition. The word carried a variety of meanings from “the act of uncovering or opening” and “the action of disclosing or divulging anything secret or unknown” to the “unravelling or unfolding of the plot of a play.”28 From the narrative’s very beginning, then, Raleigh’s voyage seemed to involve equal parts exploration and theatricality, a perception echoed on the title page with the knowledge that all of this was “Performed in the yeare 1595 by Sir W. Raleigh.” The whole complex dynamic that drove Raleigh to the New World and back is laid out in his choice of terms. We have first the act of exploration and then the act of disclosure, the act of viewing and then the unravelling, the attempt to fulfill the promise of gold which in turn devolved into his imperfect performance in the role of conqueror. And if the title page suggests a complex and conflicting blend of confidence and insecurity, it is not unfitting, since it is in response to just such feelings, I would argue, that Raleigh attempts his own version of Tamburlaine’s grand rhetoric. Early in the Epistle Dedicatorie, Raleigh writes: “If I had knowen other way to win, if I had imagined how greater adventures might have regained, if I could conceive what farther meanes I might yet use, but even to appease so powrefull a displeasure, I would not doubt but for one yeare more to hold fast my soule in my teeth, till it were performed.”29 In what amounts to a cross between apology and self-exoneration, Raleigh achieves a tone of near-Marlovian grandiloquence, outlining his adventure in high poetic terms. And then later, as if further echoing Marlowe’s world conquerer, he demonstrates a surprising and evocative capacity for violence. Upon arriving on the coast, Raleigh’s troop overruns and captures the Spanish town of St. Joseph. Therefore taking a time of most advantage, I set upon the Corp du guard in the evening, and having put them to the sword, sente Captaine Calfeild onwards with 60 soldiers, & my self followed with 40 more & so toke their new city which they called S. Joseph, by breake of day: they abode not any fight after a few shot, & al being dismissed but onely

28

Oxford English Dictionary, definitions 1, 2a, 2d. Sir Walter Ralegh (sic), The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, transcribed, annotated and introduced by Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), p. 121. 29

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Berreo and his companion, I brought them with me abord, and at the instance of the Indians I set their new city of S. Joseph on fire.30

The violence is not, of course, on the scale of Tamburlaine’s. It is a single city coming under the sword rather than whole countries. But both the episode and its retelling suggest that Raleigh is striving to present himself as a man of action—a man of war as well as a man of words. And yet, again and again he seems almost self-conscious about not living up to his role of conqueror, trying to capture a heroic tone even as he justifies his lack of results. “It became not the former fortune in which I once lived, to goe journeys of picorie, and it had sorted ill with the offices of Honor, which by her Majesties grace, I hold this day in England, to run from Cape to Cape, and from place to place, for the pillage of ordinary prizes.”31 In deprecating the notion of wide-ranging destruction as inappropriate to his station, he seeks to explain the fact of his coming home all but empty-handed. This is, in the end, mere excuse. But aside from the “ordinary,” which could never be associated with Tamburlaine, Raleigh is conjuring up a nearMarlovian suggestion of the wild and wide-ranging conquests of which he would have been capable, if only they had not “sorted ill with the offices of Honor.” And at other points in his narrative he is, if not mimicking Tamburlaine, at least doing his best to evoke the same conquering spirit. Where Marlowe’s hero says, I’ll make the Kings of India, ere I die, Offer their mines to sue for peace to me, And dig for treasures to appease my wrath.(1 Tamburlaine, III, iii, 263–5) Raleigh offers, which if it had not beene in respect of her highnes future honor & riches, I could have laid hands and ransomed many of the kings & Cassiqui of the County, & have had a reasonable proportion of gold for their redemption.32

And in contrast to Tamburlaine’s vow, Not all the gold in India’s wealthy arms Shall buy the meanest soldier in my train. (1 Tamburlaine, I, ii, 85–6) Raleigh promises, The common soldier shal here fight for gold, and pay himselfe in steede of pence, with plates of halfe a foote brode, wheras he breaketh his bones in other warres for provant and penury. Those commanders and Chieftaines, that shoote at honour, and abundance, shal find ther more rich and bewtifull citeis, more temples adorned with golden Images, more sepulchers filled with treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico, or Pazzarro in Peru: and the shining florie of this conquest will eclipse all those so farre extended beames of the Spanish nation.33 30 31 32 33

Ralegh 1997, p. 134. Ralegh 1997, p. 121. Ralegh 1997, p. 123. Ralegh 1997, p. 194.

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The intent here is clearly to conjure up images of wealth and grandeur, to offer a sense, deliberately or not, of near-Tamburlainian grandeur. And if, in spite of the occasional gesture toward bombast, the grandiosity of Marlowe’s rhetoric is largely missing from Raleigh’s narrative, we shouldn’t be greatly surprised. Raleigh’s use of Marlowe’s rhetoric is, in a sense, a sign of his own failure. He would not have had to depend on the playwright’s theatricality if he had produced more concrete results on his own. In the end, he is attempting to present as facts, solid and irrefutable, what amounted only to a series of claims and observations, and to draw too many parallels with one of the most popular plays of the period would have been not simply to evoke Tamburlaine’s power and accomplishments, but to risk evoking an awareness of their fictional nature, as well. Instead Raleigh borrows not language but rhetorical techniques. He adapts, again and again, Tamburlaine’s device of cartographic invocation, listing the areas of his travels and the tribes he meets, in an attempt to achieve a kind of perceived rhetorical conquest. But even more explicitly than Marlowe, Raleigh embeds his narrative in a discourse of cartographic organization. By doing so, he is able to anchor his achievements, not within Tamburlaine’s grandiose rhetoric of conquest, but within the mathematized precision and spatial objectivity of a map. As an explorer newly returned to civilization, Raleigh claims to offer nothing but the most objective representation of his discovery. “[I]t shall be found a weak policy in me,” he writes, “either to betray myself or my country with imaginations.”34 He offers his narrative as the unmediated truth and affects to present the account as if it were a simple retelling of facts—as if there were no distance between the land and his description of it. Like Tamburlaine, Raleigh falls into a series of extended cartographic lists, as if the enunciation of geographical details might bring the conquest to life. In the port townes of the province of Vensuello, as Cumana, Coro, and S. Iago (whereof Coro and S. Iago were taken by Captaine Preston and Cumana and S. Josephus by us) we found not the value of one riall of plate in either: but the Cities of Barquasimeta, Valentia, S. Sebastian, Cororo, S. Lucia, Alleguna, Marecabo, and Truxillo, are not so easelie invaded: neither doth the burning of those on the coast impoverish the king of Spayne anie one Ducket, and if we sacke the river of Hache, S. Marta, and Cartagena, which are the portes of Nuevo reyno and Popayan. There are besides within the land which are indeed rich and populous, the townes and Cities of Merida, Lagrita, S. Christophero, the great Cities of Pampelone, S. Fe de Bogota, Tunja and Mozo where the Esmeralds are founde, the townes and Cities of Morequito, velis, la villa de Leva, Palma, unda, Angustura, the Great Citie of Timana, Tocaima, S. Aguila, Pasto, Juago, the great citie of Popaian itself, Los Remedios, and the rest. If we take the ports and villages within the bay of Uraba in the kingdom or rivers of Dariena, and Caribana, the cities and townes of S. Juan de Roydas, of Cassaris, of Antiocha, Carramanta, Cali, and Auserma have golde enough to pay the King part, and are not easily invaded by the way of the Ocean, or if Nombre de Dios and Panama be taken in the province of Castillo de oro, and the villages upon the rivers of Cenu and Chagre. Peru hath besides those and besides the magnificent cities of Quito and Lima so man Ilands, portes, Cities, and mines, as if I should name them with the rest, 34

Sir Walter Raleigh, Selected Prose and Poetry, Agnes M. C. Latham (ed.) (London: Athlone Press, 1965), p. 152.

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it would seeme incredible to the reader: of all which because I have written a particuler treatise of the west Indies, I will omit their repetition at this time, seing that in the saide treatise I have anatomized the rest of the sea townes as well of Nicaragna, Jucata, Nueva Espanna, and the Ilands, as those of the Inland, and by what meanes they may be beste invaded, as farre as any meane Judgement can comprehend.35

This is a long excerpt, but its very length is part of what makes it fascinating: the fact that Raleigh would go on so long with such detail. In doing so he offers the same sort of cartographic invocation that Marlowe employed: an endless series of cities that stand, if not yet subdued, implicitly waiting for conquest. To itemize them all, suggests Raleigh, would be too long and tedious a process, and difficult to believe— “if I should name them with the rest, it would seeme incredible to the reader”—and yet he does virtually that, offering a long list which accrues victories and territories by the sheer weight of the particulars, evoking the whole world of potential conquest by the names alone. And this continues. Again and again throughout the “Discoverie” there appear long catalogues of places and peoples, tribes and towns arranged in implicitly cartographic order as part of an effort to conjure up the vast expanse of the New World. In particular, early in his narrative, Raleigh outlines the efforts that the Spaniard Antonio Berrio—Trinidad’s governor and an earlier explorer of the area— had previously made to find Guiana. But to return to the enterprise of Berreo, who (as I have said) departed from Nuevo reygno with 700 horse, besides the provisions above rehearesed; he descended by the river called Cassanar, which riseth in Nuevo reygno out of the mountaaines by the citie of Tuuja, [sic], from which mountaine also springeth Pato, both which fall into the great river of Meta, and Meta riseth from a mountaine joining to Pampelone in the same Nuevo reygno de Granada: these as also Guaiare, which issueth out of the mountains by Timana, fall all into Baraquan, and are but of his heads, for at their coming togither they lose their names, and Baraquan farther down is also rebaptized by the name of Orenoque. On the other side of the citie and hils of Timana riseth rio grande, which falleth into the sea by Sancta Marta. By Cassonar first, and so into Meta Berreo passed....36

Raleigh isn’t presenting his own itinerary. He is, in fact, offering mere second-hand information which he’d heard from the captured Berreo. Nor are the details necessary to any recounting of his own explorations, since he is effectively listing specific details of Berreo’s failure to reach Guiana. Yet when we compare these details with Marlowe’s evocation of captured cities and countries noted earlier: And I have marched along the river Nile To Machda, where the mighty Christian priest, Called John the Great, sits in milk-white robe . . . From thence unto Cazates did I march, Where Amazonians met me in the field ... to Zanzibar, 35 36

Ralegh 1997, p. 123. Ralegh 1997, pp. 146–7.

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The western part of Afric, where I viewed The Ethiopian sea, rivers, and lakes ... the parallel is clear. The detailed enumeration, the vividness and precision of the exotic names, is its own triumph and reward, and Raleigh achieves, through his list, a kind of imaginative and metaphorical conquest of these lands. In detailing all the places Berrio found, Raleigh isn’t attempting to glorify the Spaniard’s efforts. Raleigh’s purposes would presumably best be served by playing down the Spanish accomplishments. Instead this long iteration of imaginative conquests is meant to lend weight and accomplishment to Raleigh’s own efforts. He is attempting, though his own brand of cartographic description, to co-opt Berrio’s travels and to incorporate the fruits of the Spaniard’s failed attempt within his own larger efforts. In the same spirit, Raleigh evokes the gold of Guiana in terms as grandiloquent as any Tamburlaine uses to evoke the legions of fallen enemies. Although as I am perswaded, Guiana cannot be entred that way, [from the Amazon] yet no doubt the trade of gold from thence passeth by branches of rivers into the river of Amazones, and so it doth on every hand farre from the country it selfe, for those Indians of Trenedado have plates of gold from Guiana, those Canibals of Dominica which dwell in the Ilands by which our ships passe yeerly to the West Indies, also the Indians of Paria, those Indians called Tucaris, Chochi, Apotomios, Cumanagotos, and all those other nations inhabiting nere about the mountaines that run from Paria thorow the Province of Vensuello and in Maracapana, and the Canibals of Guanipa, the Indians called Assawai, Coaca, Aiai, and the rest (all which shall be described in my description as they are situate) have plates of gold of Guiana.37

Surprisingly, this description is introduced by an admission of failure—the realization that Guiana is, in one more instance, inaccessible—yet the list of tribes, each of whom has some association with Guianan gold, provides a way of ordering these peoples and, if not rhetorically defeating them, certainly organizing them for an ultimate English conquest. The Indians, their cities, and their gold are arrayed and waiting. In the end, however, despite his best efforts, Raleigh must move beyond a simple echoing of Marlowe’s cartographic invocation. It proves ultimately insufficient. For Raleigh is operating not in the realm of the theater where “[r]hetoric, indeed, is ... a form of action,”38 but in a physical and often disappointingly uncooperative New World. Unlike Tamburlaine, Raleigh needed something more than his own words to convince his audience at home. He needed a source of consolidating certainty as powerful, in its way, as Marlowe’s grandiloquence. He needed some way to prove the truth of his claims. But there was an all but insurmountable problem. Most of his claims weren’t true. Much of his “Discoverie” was derived from myths and stories, many of them from such old and questionable sources as the fourteenth-century writings of John Mandeville, and as such it was not just unproven but unprovable.

37 38

Ralegh 1997, p. 145. Daiches, p. 79.

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In response, Raleigh attempts to undergird the truth of his narrative by emphasizing the precise, cartographic qualities of his voyage. He was charting the journey as he went, and on his return he made a point of assuring Sir Robert Cecil that a map was on its way. “To speak of what passed homeward were tedious, either to describe or name any of the rivers, islands, or villages ... we will leave all those to the general map.”39 And then later, “Everie daie we passed by goodlie branches of rivers, some falling from the west, others from the east into Amana, but those I leave to the description in the Chart of discoverie, where everie one shall be named with his rising and descent.”40 Implicitly, the information in the map is seen as more vivid and accurate than the narrative itself. It provides, not just a more efficient means of conveying the information, but an implicit proof that all which cannot be said, can yet be seen. And it confers the promise of precision and accuracy which is implicit in the cartographic discourse Raleigh evokes. As Avery has noted in his discussion of surveying in Ireland, “Mistrust of the unaided eye riddles early modern discourse on chorography.”41 Maps were seen to bring an additional degree of precision to the representation of the landscape, and even when there were moments of anxiety about the accuracy of early surveys, such moments highlighted concerns about the use and ownership of the land rather than its spatial precision.42 In fact, maps were seen more and more as the source of precise and definitive information. They were increasingly used in court cases to settle boundary disputes, and the late sixteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the number of estate maps commissioned, suggesting the weight that was given to the reliability of their representation.43 John Norden, in his 1618 Surveiors Dialogue, argues for the right of the lord to know his land in all its detail, and for a belief in the surveyor’s ability to supply just that. In calling upon the superior precision of his map, then, Raleigh was positioning himself within a culture increasingly reliant on cartographic representation as a precise and defining measure of the land. And his map, providing as it did a new comprehensive perspective on the natural landscape, offered what de Certeau has

39

Sir Walter Ralegh, “A Voyage for the Discovery of Guiana,” in The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, 8 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1829), p. 458. 40 Ralegh 1997, p. 160. 41 Avery, 269. 42 See R. Dunlop, “The Plantation of Munster 1584–1589,” The English Historical Review 3/10 (April 1888): 259. 43 “Only in the last quarter of the century did surveyors begin to use ‘platts’ on a regular basis. This occurred concurrently with the use of maps, increasingly measured (as opposed to sketched) maps, as evidence in court cases, and we must see both as symptomatic of the growing map culture of the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, driven in part by the study of geography at university by these landowners and their sones. The discipline of geography helped these gentry conceptualize their own world in terms of maps rather than merely words or deeds.” Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 169. For the use of estate maps in court cases see Buisseret, “Estate Map in the Old World.”

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called “the pleasures of ‘seeing the whole’.”44 The natural landscape represented in the map could be seen and understood as a unified and readable text. Thus, for Raleigh, the map, narratively held back, provided a degree of precision that was lacking from the description, and even without showing it, Raleigh evoked its promise. He tied his account of the land to the map’s representation, linking his story to the geographical exactitude of place that only a map could provide. But here, again, he fell short in some very interesting ways. Raleigh’s Map There were, in fact, two maps associated with Raleigh’s first Guiana voyage. One is a decorative map apparently drawn by a professional cartographer—probably Thomas Hariot working from Raleigh’s notes—and intended for display rather than navigation.45 The second was very likely drawn by Raleigh himself, and so can be taken to represent, not just the country, but Raleigh’s view of the country (see Figure 4.1). At first the map reveals an impressive level of detail. Raleigh took obvious care with the coastline, and though the rivers have a diagrammatic and rudimentary quality, overall it suggests a minute attention to precision and accuracy. Only upon extended consideration does the map begin to take on a shifting and illusory quality. Much of the space between the coast and the rivers is essentially blank. This, by itself, might seem unimportant. It might seem merely to reinforce the accuracy of the details that are there, since its author is implicitly only including information of which he is certain. But in evoking and depending upon the new expectations of cartographic precision and objectivity, Raleigh has taken some liberties. He has included, as the visual center and most prominent feature of his map, something which he never found and which, in fact, didn’t exist. The large lake, with more than thirty rivers flowing into it and with the golden city of Manoa marked on its coast, was purely a product of myth, tales, and Raleigh’s own unflagging desire. Its inclusion marks the triumph of wish-fulfillment over accuracy, and it allows a degree of ambiguity to creep into the map’s semiotics of precision. For, the white space left untouched in the map provided Raleigh the room he needed to expand and elaborate his narrative of the land. He essentially wrote his story between the lines of the landscape even as his ongoing references to the accuracy and precision of his exploration underpinned the whole recitation of discovery. As Klein suggests in another circumstance, “[M]aps are not mere visual aids to memory, nor do they simply illustrate the spatial setting or colourful scenery for the drama of human affairs—rather, they are an enabling condition of historical action.”46 And the way they enabled the action in this case, was by evoking a sense, not just of vividness, but of mathematized precision and representational objectivity that extended beyond the map itself to the accompanying narrative. 44 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendell (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 92. 45 R. A. Skelton, “Ralegh as a Geographer,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 71 (1963): 140. 46 Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 17.

Figure 4.1:

This map of Guiana was drawn, following Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1596 expedition, in all likelihood by Raleigh himself. By permission of the British Library. Additional MS. 17,940A.

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Raleigh repeatedly stresses a self-consciously cartographic rhetoric in which the precisely drawn layout and position of Guiana offers an independent guarantee of its truth and reality. By clinging to a discourse of distance and direction, by essentially discussing the country in relation to a map, Raleigh is attempting, not just to fix the geography of the country, but to fix the details of his story and to guarantee its accuracy. In an enactment of de Certeau’s spatial practice, Raleigh poetically inscribes his narrative onto its own specific topography, providing a different sort of spatial text for the reader. In doing so, he implicitly makes use of a visual representation to render his narrative landscape more vivid, more “readable,” in de Certeau’s terms, so that the landscape “transforms itself into the memorable.”47 The map’s promise of readability confers its own suggestion of accuracy onto the accompanying narrative, and even when speaking of earlier stories and secondhand accounts of travel and exploration, Raleigh suggests the fixity and precision of his information. Speaking again of Berreo and his failed explorations, he writes, “[He] hoped to have found Guiana by 1000 miles nearer than it fell out to be in the end, by means whereof they sustained much want and much hunger, oppressed with grievous diseases, and all the miseries that could be imagined.”48 But, Raleigh never succeeded in making it to Guiana and never saw a more accurate map than the one he himself drew. He had no reliable way of knowing where Guiana “fell out to be in the end.” Yet despite this, he assumes a tone of absolute knowledge. By assigning the country a specific distance, and even by suggesting that he has corrected an earlier mistaken estimate, Raleigh characterizes his discussion by its cartographic precision. In such a context, even the confusion of the land can convey its own sense of authority. As Raleigh reveals, there are some places where even the indigenous people are not familiar with the geography. At one point he hires a guide from a local Indian tribe. [T]his Arwacan promised to bring me into the great river of Oroonoko; but indeed of that which we entered he was utterly ignorant, for he had not seen it in twelve years before ... and if God had not sent us another help, we might have wandered a whole year in that labyrinth of rivers ... for I know al the earth doth not yield the like confluence of streams and branches, the one crossing the other so many times, and also fair and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take.49

At first this confession of ignorance and dependence on outside help might seem to undermine Raleigh’s posture of knowledge and control: he admits he doesn’t know where he is and that the land itself is a tangle of confusion. But at the same time, by highlighting the cartographic features of the place, the account ultimately grounds the narrative in a larger sense of accuracy. For it is only when Raleigh gets another guide, an old man of that area, that he finds the correct route: “[A]nd indeed but for this chance I think we had never found the way either to Guiana or back to our ships; for Ferdinando, after a few days, knew nothing at all, nor which 47 48 49

de Certeau, p. xxi. Ralegh 1829, p. 411. Ralegh 1829, pp. 420–21.

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way to turn, yea and many times the old man himself was in great doubt which river to take.”50 This confusion and complexity serve to highlight the importance of Raleigh’s own experiences there, as if to say that nobody else—that is, no one who hasn’t already made the passage—would stand a chance of finding this route again. Raleigh’s knowledge of the land, embodied in the map, provides a new measure of certainty and accuracy. Under the aegis of his cartographic precision he gathers all information—second-hand, first-hand, story, and myth—into a single compelling tale of conquest. And by putting it all into a map, he confers upon it the new cartographic imprimatur of spatial organization and certainty, attempting like Tamburlaine before him to lay out the full scope of his empire before the audience at home. But Raleigh ran into a problem. It wasn’t that he lacked the necessary ambition or cartographic aspirations to model himself on Tamburlaine; nor even that he lacked Marlowe’s rhetorical skills. It was simply that he lacked Tamburlaine’s success. Raleigh’s expedition to Guiana was an unqualified failure. He found none of the riches he’d promised, and although there were some signs of possible mineral deposits, there was little actual gold. For Raleigh, it turned out to be a world of appearance but no substance. And under such circumstances, the bluff and confident swagger of Tamburlaine’s mapped conquests proved an incomplete model for the Elizabethan explorer. Raleigh needed a different exemplar for his narrative, and he found it, I would suggest, in a world conqueror whose achievements more nearly matched his own. Faust as Geographer In the beginning of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s protagonist turns to the study of magic as a means of gaining wealth and power, but the nature of that power is less clear than at first it seems.51 Oh, what a world of profit and delight Of power, of Honor, and Omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command. (Faustus, I, i, 55–9) From its first invocation, the study of magic promises imaginative control over the whole world. Although on its surface the play seems less overtly concerned with geographical reach and distance than Tamburlaine it, too, offers a protagonist who keeps returning to ideas of geographical imagery. In characterizing this world in terms of “profit,” “delight,” and “power,” Faustus places himself within the company 50

Ralegh 1829, p. 422. Throughout I am citing the A-text of Doctor Faustus which, although published in 1604, is more likely to represent the version of the play produced in the early 1590s than the later B-Text. For more, see Christopher Marlowe and his collaborator and revisers, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 51

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of other Elizabethan conquerors. His imagery evokes both Tamburlaine’s “wondrous architecture of the world” and Raleigh’s “large, rich, and bewtiful empyre.” And from the beginning, the power of magic is intended to give Faustus control over the world. Had I as many souls as there be stars, I’d give them all for Mephistophilis. By him I’ll be great emperor of the world. And make a bridge thorough the moving air, To pass the ocean with a band of men; I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore, And make that country continent to Spain, And both contributory to my crown. (Faustus, I, iii, 104–11) What Faustus is purchasing with his soul is the chance to cross the ocean, to conquer the world and make it “contributory to my crown.” This suggests a plan of conquest, not unlike Tamburlaine’s, that would take the form of world transformation. With Mephistophilis’ help, Faustus will rearrange the shape of the continents and build bridges across the ocean. He will re-make the world not through language and sprawling ambition, but through magic. In the end, though, he does none of this. In fact, Faustus does very little. Almost from the beginning there is a dichotomy between what Faustus seeks—what he is promised by Mephistophilis—and what he actually achieves. His magical powers never match his expectations, and over time they prove to be much less than they seem. In the course of the play Faustus’ magic “continually narrows, from shapechanging, stealing the Pope’s dinner, and calling historical heroes from the dead, to horning a skeptic and providing grapes for a pregnant duchess.”52 Despite a rhetoric of power, Faustus’ ultimate accomplishments are only “half-trivial, half-daring exploits.”53 He produces few magical transformations; he doesn’t shift the continents or “bind the Afric shore.” Instead, most of his powers are devoted to seeing rather than doing. Faustus develops his own version of Tamburlaine’s cartographic invocation, but in naming the parts of the world, Faustus doesn’t so much conquer them as simply explore. He travels. He views the world. In short, he achieves what a whole series of sixteenth-century explorers, Raleigh among them, were trying to accomplish. Through the power of magic, he gains the power to discover. In spite of his earliest ruminations on wealth and power, Faustus seems primarily concerned with magic as a source of knowledge, and it is not long before the rhetoric of world conquest devolves into a desire for world knowledge. Immediately after he has concluded his bargain with Mephistophilis, when, presumably, anything in the world is his to

52 Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 98. 53 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 196.

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possess—when he can do or make or transform anything—Faustus chooses instead to “dispute.” He asks questions. He wants to learn. Come, Mephistophilis, let us dispute again, And argue of divine astrology. Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon? Are all celestial bodies but one globe, As is the substance of this centric earth? (Faustus, II, iii, 33–7) Almost from the beginning, the focus of his knowledge is the world: not just the metaphorical “world of profit and delight,” but the physical world. Faustus’ first questions are all about cosmography, the movements of the planets, causes of eclipses, how the universe is arranged, though they very quickly narrow to the earth. His desire is to encompass all knowledge, not in the world, but of the world. In this light, Faustus’ ambitions for altering the world give way to the less extravagant desires simply to see it in all its exotic breadth and distance. As Wagner explains, Learned Faustus, To know the secrets of astronomy Graven in the book of Jove’s high firmament, Did mount himself to scale Olympus’ top, Being seated in a chariot burning bright Drawn by the strength of yoky dragons’ necks, He now is gone to prove cosmography, And, as I guess, will first arrive at Rome. (Faustus, III, i, 1–8) Faustus’ journey begins with the study of astronomy, but then he quickly returns “to prove cosmography.” As Wagner makes clear, for Faustus this cosmographic study is focused on the earth, and in particular on Rome, though later it extends to a wider range.54 Although his voyage is a good deal briefer than Raleigh’s voyage to Guiana, Faustus discovers and explores not just a New World, but the whole world. He centers much of his desire for knowledge in the cartographic understanding of the world’s geography, and in this pursuit, magic becomes a kind of instant travel, a means for the discovery of distant lands. And once having explored the world, Faustus engages in the same act of description that Tamburlaine embraced and that Raleigh displayed on his arrival at Guiana. 54 The Oxford English Dictionary makes clear that in the sixteenth century, the definition of cosmography allowed some variation in the focus of its study. The OED defines it as “The science which describes and maps the general features of the universe (both the heavens and the earth) without encroaching on the special provinces of astronomy or geography. But formerly often = geography in its present sense,”(1) and also as “A description or representation of the universe or of the earth in its general features” (2). Although Marlowe uses the word cosmography, the great majority of his protagonist’s efforts are devoted to the earth rather than the heavens.

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Having now, my good Mephistophilis Passed with delight the stately town of Trier, Environed round with airy mountain-tops, With walls of flint, and deep intrenched lakes, Not to be won by any conquering Prince; From Paris next, coasting the realm of France, We saw the river Maine fall into Rhine, Whose banks are set with groves of fruitful vines, Then up to Naples, rich Campania, Whose buildings, fair and gorgeous to the eye, The streets straight forth and paved with finest brick, Quarters the town in four equivalents... From thence to Venice, Padua, and the rest... Thus hitherto hath Faustus spent his time. (Faustus, III, i, 1–19) The power that Faustus has achieved is the power of any discoverer to shape the images of his new world, to refine it and construct it imaginatively through description and an almost compulsive need to name. But if magic allows Faustus an understanding of the world, it is both more and less than he would have gotten simply by traveling through it. The magic provides Faustus with a new perspective. His dragonflight of discovery allows him just the sort of overarching view of the world that Marlowe would have gotten by looking at Ortelius’ map. Mephistophilis’ help lifts Faustus out of the world, but not free of it. It leaves him dependent on the world’s wealth, but allows him a new perspective on the lands laid out beneath him. For Faustus, the world becomes what de Certeau termed “an instantaneous configuration of positions,” a “place” which is both fixed and stable—a totalizing view comparable to de Certeau’s “Solar Eye, looking down like a god.”55 But this God’s-eye view provides only a limited kind of power to Faustus. It is the power of understanding, but not action, the power of seeing rather than doing. For even when he thinks about using his powers for more than just sightseeing— to acquire wealth or to amaze the emperor—they seem strangely limited. Often they are presented as little more than a kind of magical voyaging. Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates. (Faustus, I, i, 81–7) Faustus could have the demons do anything, perform any “desperate enterprise.” But in the end much of what he asks is that they travel for him. Magic allows Faustus 55

De Certeau, p. 117.

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to seek after India’s gold, “orient pearl,” and even the wealth of the New World. For when he contemplates the riches that will be his: “From Venice shall they drag huge argosies,/And from America the golden fleece/That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury” (1.1.132–4), he places them explicitly in the context of the treasures of the New World. These are exactly the terms in which Raleigh envisioned his own pursuits. America was a source of gold and jewels, a distant country existing solely to be explored and conquered for the wealth it contained. Faustus, through his demons, aims to travel throughout the world, gathering treasure in a way that imaginatively echoes both Tamburlaine’s conquests and Raleigh’s own attempts. And although, by the end of the play, this sense of travel seems to fade as Faustus’ world—and his magic—shrinks to the confines of his own study, there is still a lingering memory of all his voyaging. It serves as a kind of counterpoint to the narrowly domestic space that remains. And the almost claustrophobic sense of the play’s final act effectively highlights the realization that, even at its height, Faustus’ magic allowed him the power of movement, but little else. Even Faustus’ most wondrous miracle is finally seen in terms of travel. In the Court of the Duke of Anholt, when the Duchess, wanting a display of Faustus’ skill, requests a dish of ripe grapes, Mephistophilis departs and reappears with the fruit. Duke: This makes me wonder more than all the rest, that at this time of the year, when every tree is barren of his fruit, from whence you had these ripe grapes. Faust: Please it your grace the year is divided into two circles over the whole world, so that, when it is winter with us, in the contrary circle it is likewise summer with them, as in India, Saba and such countries that lie far east, where they have fruit twice a year. From whence, by means of a swift spirit that I have, I had these grapes brought, as you see. (Faustus, IV, v, 24–35) Faustus doesn’t create the grapes. He sends Mephistophilis on a voyage to the other side of the world to bring them back. And although this, in itself, might seem miraculous enough, Faustus unintentionally deflates the magical quality. His explanation—in prose rather than poetry—seems more like a didactic lesson in geography than in the wonders of magic. The grandeur of Faustus’ powers, all that he sold his soul for, devolves into the ability to travel, dressed up in a show of spectacle. In an important sense, then, this is Faustus’ magic in miniature, divided into its two components. It is the power to travel and the power to represent to the audience at home some proof of the places that have been seen. To provide grapes, if they want grapes. And, if they want something more challenging—a visit from Alexander the Great, say—to provide a convincing illusion, a false image of Alexander. It is an ongoing balance of exploration and spectacle, and it lies at the base of Faustus’

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power. In contrast to the conquering force of Tamburlaine’s geographical invocation, Faustus remains a creature of illusion and appearance. Between the two characters lies the difference between controlling the world and simply appearing to do so. But this distinction provides a crucial key to Raleigh, for in the end he finds himself in a position closer to Faustus than to Tamburlaine. And in his own evocation of the New World we can see Raleigh attempting to conjure up aspects of Marlowe’s magician, all but referring back to them. Early on in Doctor Faustus, Valdes observes, Faustus, these books, thy wit, and our experience Shall make all nations to canonise us. As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords, So shall the subjects of every element Be always serviceable to us three. (Doctor Faustus, I, i, 121–5) It is a scene suggesting that all the greatest possibilities of magic are open to its practitioners, and Raleigh seems to be hearkening back to it when he holds out to Elizabeth the same degree of mastery over the New World: All the most of the kings of the borders are already become her Majesties vassals: & seeme to desire nothing more then her Majesties protection, and the returne of the English nation.56

And later he observes, I shewed them her majesties picture which they so admired and honored, as it had beene easie to have brought them Idolatrous thereof.57

Raleigh suggests that it isn’t only “Spanish lords” and magicians who could subjugate the world. He seems to be trying to invest both himself and his sovereign with the powers of Faustus’ books. And if in the end, despite his promises, Raleigh’s control of the New World lies only in his control of its appearance, like Faustus he tries to make that suffice. Cartographic Sleight of Hand Both Marlowe and Raleigh attempt to unfix the limits of human perspective. The map’s-eye view that Faustus achieves magically and that Raleigh imposes through the map of his voyage, allows room for a spectacular/poetic manipulation of the world. It provides the fixed point against which the poet/explorer can operate. In his own way, Raleigh embraces the magic and spectacular power of language, what one critic calls “a Faustian poetics,” in which the magician’s aspirations and ambitions “are rendered desirable by the self-intoxicating power of the language Faustus uses.”58 In 56 57 58

Ralegh 1997, p. 122. Ralegh 1997, p. 134. Birringer, p. 66.

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this, the realm of language and rhetoric, such powers are available to any man who might make use of them, and the eloquent Raleigh could manipulate them better than most. “Renaissance man felt he had the power to transform himself because he had the power of language .... Because all men are users of the magic power, language, because all men are performers with words and transformers through words, the Renaissance could figure all men under the single image of the magus, the magician.”59 In this way, Raleigh can be seen to embrace a form of “magic” that was readily available, and he uses it to transform the “large, rich, and bewtiful empyre of Guiana” into a shape more attractive to his audience at home. At the heart of Raleigh’s cartographical sleight of hand—its core and its necessity—is the simple fact of his failure. The only first-hand account he is able to provide begins at the coast and stops short just within sight of Guiana. That is as far as he got before turning back. He never actually makes it into the land he is discovering. Yet, the way in which he tells the story, blending second-hand reports seamlessly with his own experience, succeeds in blurring this crucial lapse. He offers a narrative that cloaks his failure in the illusion of success, and re-creates the country as he wants it to be, rather than as it is. Throughout his “Discoverie,” Raleigh repeatedly conjures up the richness of the land, yet the wealth remains strangely insubstantial. “I never saw a more beautiful country,” he writes, “nor more lively prospects ... and every stone that we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion.”60 Guiana, says Raleigh, is a land paved with gold, but the only proof is in the stories he tells. Now your lordship shall understand that this Morequito, one of the great lords or kings of the borders of Guiana, had two or three years before been at Cumana, and at Marguerita in the West Indies, with great store of plates of gold, which he carried to exchange for such others things as he wanted in his own country.61

The account is vivid and precise. But Raleigh wasn’t there for Morequito’s trading expedition. He didn’t see it for himself. What he wants his reader to understand as truth is mere hearsay. There is gold in abundance, but only in stories. He brings back the account of an Indian king’s wealth, and lets that stand for the wealth itself. Raleigh’s gold, and the proof of his telling, are always receding out of reach of reports and authorities, and yet they leave in their wake a penumbra of belief. Like Faustus, Raleigh’s only magic is rhetorical. And just as Faustus based his rhetoric on illusion and evocations of world travel, so does Raleigh. He confirms his stories with a spectacle of geography anchored in its representation of cartographic specificity. When these ten Spaniards were returned, and ready to put out of the border of Arromaia, the people of Morequito set upon them, and slew them all but one that swam the river, and

59 A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Arts of Illusion,” in Harold Bloom (ed.) Christopher Marlowe (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p. 111. 60 Raleigh 1965, p. 151. 61 Ralegh 1829, p. 414.

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took from them to the value of 40,000 pesoes of gold ... I myself spake with the captains of Morequito that slew them, and was at the place where it was executed.62

In this account, the place proves the event. Raleigh’s ability to get to the border of Guiana, and to the location where the gold was stolen and the men murdered, confirms the truth of the story, as if the immovable certainty of the land and the place where the event took place gave proof of the event. There is a spectacular quality to this evidence. Like Faustus, Raleigh sets out to provide one thing, but produces instead only the shadow of it. Then he offers the shadow, the appearance, the story, in place of the real. And to reinforce the story, Raleigh repeatedly offers the spurious guarantee of cartographic precision. “The empire of Guiana is directly east from Peru towards the sea, and lieth under the quinoctial line, and it hath more abundance of gold than any part of Peru, and as many or more great cities than ever Peru had when it flourished most.”63 Raleigh’s information about Guiana’s gold derives its reliability from the exactitude and precision of the cartographic discourse with which he begins the discussion. He moves seamlessly from the certainty of the country’s location, fixed and precise, to the certainty of its wealth. And later, this rhetorical cloak of mathematized specificity provides assurance for other marvels besides gold. In a self-proclaimed “digression” about the Amazons, Raleigh offers everything except the proof of their existence. I made inquiry amongst the most ancient and best travelled of the Orenoqueponi, and I had knowledge of all the rivers between Oroonoko and Amazones, and was very desirous to understand the truth of those warlike women, because of some it is believed, of others not: and though I digress from my purpose, yet I will set down what hath been delivered me for truth of these women. 64

Despite their elusiveness, the Amazons serve as a sort of geographical marker like the rivers that locate them, helping to define and instantiate the expanse of Guiana. Raleigh never sees them. Like the gold, they’re always just over the next hill. But he has proof of their existence. These Amazones have likewise great store of these plates of gold, which they recover by exchange, chiefly for a kind of green stones which the Spaniards call piedras higadas, and we use for spleen stones, and for the disease of the stone we also esteem them: of these I saw divers in Guiana.65

Here, through a useful ambiguity of pronouns, Raleigh blurs the distinction between the Amazons and their stones. The stones stand in metonymically for the unseen women, and, having seen the stones, he is confident of almost having seen the women themselves. The whole narrative spectacle of rich lands and plentiful gold is substantiated entirely by the existence of these stones. In an interlocking web of 62 63 64 65

Ralegh 1829, p. 415. Ralegh 1829, p. 398. Ralegh 1829, p. 408. Ralegh 1829, p. 409.

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mutual support, the stones prove the Amazons, and the Amazons prove both the expanse of Guiana, with its unseen wonders and plenitude, and the promise of gold. In a similar way, details of geography and the map that contains them are used to guarantee the existence of the monstrous race of the Ewaipanoma. Next unto Arvi there are two rivers, Atoica and Caora, and on that branch which is called Caora are a nation of people, whose heads appear not above their shoulders; which, though it may be thought a mere fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true, because every child in the provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirm the same: they are called Ewaipanoma.66

The existence of these human marvels is treated in the same way as the existence of mineral marvels: they are assumed to be there because of common report. They were mentioned in Mandeville, Raleigh says, and his own inability to prove their existence is merely a matter of poor timing. “But it was not my chance to hear of them til I was come away; and if I had but spoken one word of it while I was there, I might have brought one of them with me, to put the matter out of doubt.”67 The Ewaipanoma, like the gold and silver, are always out of sight. Yet, by anchoring the story in a precise location, a single locale at the branch of two rivers plotted on his map, Raleigh provides an illusion of exactitude that draws its convincing specificity from the cartographic discourse that frames it. The Ewaipanoma are made as real as the two rivers that define their home. Associating them with cartographic markers removes them from the realm of pure hearsay and inserts them into the measured and knowable space of the mapped country. In a kind of rhetorical bait and switch, Raleigh allows the place to stand in for the promise of what is there—the map for the territory. This becomes most striking in a strange moment of inexplicable digression. Late in his journey, Raleigh approaches the edge of the Guianan empire and comes almost within sight of the mountain that marks the country’s famous mine and the ultimate goal of his expedition. But instead of moving forward, he sends a detachment toward the mountain and, while the main troop heads toward its riches, Raleigh and some men “marched overland to view the strange overfalls of the river of Caroli.”68 Seemingly on the verge of success, Raleigh turns away from Guiana and the wealth it promises in order to view a waterfall. He climbs to a promontory and looks around. I never saw a more beautiful country, nor more lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over the valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plains adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the ground of hard sand, easy to march on either for horse or foot, the deer crossing in every path, the birds towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation, perching on the river’s side, the air fresh, with a gentle easterly wind; and every stone that we stopped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion.69

66 67 68 69

Ralegh 1829, p. 444. Ralegh 1829, p. 444. Ralegh 1829, p. 441. Ralegh 1829, p. 442.

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Raleigh turns away from the possibility of Guiana, and in that moment of turning, presents a rhetorical and poetic version of the land in its place. The view, as he presents it, is laid out panoramically below him. The sense of looking down on it, of seeing the natural wealth and beauty of the country spread out beneath, provides a moment of visual representation that is nearly cartographic in its perspective, and in conjunction with the added proof of its location on Raleigh’s map, it provides a sense of precision and visual control. This is Faust’s God’s-eye view, conveyed narratively rather than magically, but conferring the same sense of spatial accuracy and implicit ownership. And like Faustus, Raleigh presents his visual spectacle of the land as the sign of his conquest—and in place of it. Throughout his narrative, in a continuing gesture of metonymic substitution, the map confirms the land, and the land confirms the gold. Even more important, it confirms the precision and accuracy of Raleigh’s account. While the location of the gold is ambiguous, the land is not, so Raleigh offers one for the other. Again and again Raleigh’s efforts are marked not just by his willingness to evoke a map, but by his ability to manipulate that map and its discourse of precision. His understanding of the geographic arrangement of this new country, which began with the coasting of Trinidad, continues throughout as an affirmation of its riches. The location of its cities, the arrangement of its rivers, the details of place and scene are offered as a means of making concrete everything—the gold, the Amazons, the Ewaipanoma— that they are said to contain. Throughout his narrative, Raleigh offers the cartographic specificity of all that the land is, and lets that stand in for all that it isn’t. Raleigh drew his map of Guiana laboriously and from experience, and then he let his narrative and his life rest upon its accuracy. Again and again he stressed the difficulty of the journey and the effort he made to see every detail of the land, as if his care and difficulty, by ensuring the effort, ensured the accuracy as well. He created a cartographic framework for his narrative, and then filled it to overflowing with imagery and evocative details. Yet, again and again he returned to the cartographic precision with which he began, depending on the discourse of mapping, and the cultural assumptions of mathematized precision and spatial objectivity which it carried, to undergird the believability of his report. The discovery of Guiana, with its golden capital Manoa, was at heart an ontological problem cloaked in geography. Since it did not in fact exist, Manoa could not be located. Yet, in assuming its existence, and striving to convince his audience of it, Raleigh had to work backward from the epistemological assumptions of cartography to the ontological existence of the “Citie of Gold.” He began with the description of what he’d experienced, the breadth and specificity of the country, and worked his way back to prove the existence of what he hadn’t found. Through the legerdemain of his rhetoric Raleigh offered the map in place of the territory, and broadened the scope of cartographic precision to cover a multitude of sins. He gave his audience the sharp, black lines of a map and offered their precise certainty as a guarantee of all that was hidden in the white, blank spaces in between.

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Chapter 5

‘Tis not, what once it was, the world’ Andrew Marvell’s Re-Mapping of Old and New in Bermudas and Upon Appleton House

Seventeenth-century England was a country newly rooted in geography. Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first of the great sixteenth-century atlases, was translated into English in 1606, and Mercator’s Atlas followed it thirty years later. Christopher Saxton’s wall maps and his atlas of the counties of England and Wales had introduced a new level of cartographic precision to the late sixteenth century, and by the 1650s these new technologies, and the rising expectations of cartographic accuracy and precision which they embodied, had become all but ingrained in the wider culture. Voyages to Guiana, Virginia, and Bermuda had laid the groundwork for English colonies in the Americas so that by mid-century even the most exotic lands had become imaginatively accessible and cartographically familiar. As these outposts of the New World grew more settled, the older sense of “the strangeness of the boundaries”1 was overlaid with a new domestication. These foreign lands were described and imagined as little extensions of England, still lost in the distance, but now largely wrapped in the comfort of familiar customs, products, and agricultural goods. But if the New World’s sense of the foreign and exotic was markedly diminished, it didn’t simply disappear. It was instead incorporated into a new and changing balance of Old World and New. For while the faith in mapped accuracy and representational power of the cartographic imagination allowed even the world’s exotic edges to be folded back into the familiarity of the center, it also brought a countering pressure in which the very familiarity of the domestic landscape came to be seen through the lens of the exotic. The center became de-centered, and the aura of mystery and instability linked to distant lands was transmuted, internalized, and brought home to the most domestic of spaces. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the precision and certainty of England’s mapped representations stood in sharp contrast to other perceptions in and of the country. The political and social instability of the English Revolution filled the historical moment until even that most ancient and solid of foundations—the enduring nature of kingship, itself—was overthrown. The ability of maps to represent a fixed and orderly country now exceeded the nation’s ability to embody it. New levels of political anxiety and instability created an altered relationship between the map and the territory, so that the orderly delineation of geographical outline and landscape would have seemed all but illusory in the face of so much fundamental disruption. 1

John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 6, 25.

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In such a revolutionary period, the possibilities of cartography altered to reflect a new relationship of map and nation, signifier and signified. Mapping became an expression of political and poetic license—a way, not just to represent an ordered country, but to limit and confine the extent of its disorder. In such a period the political and poetic become fundamentally interleaved, and for no one was this more true than Andrew Marvell. As a poet he strove for a unique kind of linguistic refinement, an almost alchemical distillation of order and precision in the face of pervading anxiety. And of the various scientific and cultural discourses he incorporated into his poetry, the cultural power of maps and geography were of particular, and surprising, value. In his hands the discourse of cartographic precision became an unexpected tool for addressing the unsettling ambiguities of historical action. He focused his particular blend of lapidary precision and interrogative intelligence onto the cartographic expectations of his time, and bent them to his use. By inserting a new and lurking instability into the epistemology of precision, he turned the cultural assumptions of cartographic accuracy and objectivity back on themselves as a means of highlighting, not the familiar expectations of fixity and control, but a new and widespread anxiety about political unraveling. In his poem Bermudas, written in the heart of the century’s political upheaval, Marvell is intent on revealing an Eden untouched by the confusion and horrors of civil war. He focuses on religious concerns with freedom, with praising God, with escape from confining authorities, with the achievement of paradise. But in highlighting the spiritual and philosophical beauties of the distant islands he appears to ignore their most obvious characteristic. For despite its allegorical nature, despite its religious and pastoral emphases, Bermudas is at base a poem about the New World, yet one that elides completely the geographic materiality of its island subject. Although it has been observed that “Old and New World elements as well as wild and cultivated ones merge” in the poem,2 most critics read it as predominantly metaphorical. In these terms the poem becomes an imaginative evocation of the new paradise achieved by the Puritans in their flight from England, and critics interpret their journey largely in religious rather than historical or geographical terms.3 But 2 Jonathan Crewe, “The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds) Enclosure Acts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 274. 3 As Rosalie Colie suggests, “The Bermuda of the poem is not the real, literal island— the hogs, the summer-flies, the cockroaches have all vanished to leave a Garden of Eden ‘safe from the Storms, and Prelat’s rage’, an island always perfect, always at eternal spring.” Rosalie Colie, “Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ and the Puritan Paradise,” Renaissance News 10 (1957): 79. In this reading, the voyage to Bermuda becomes typologically linked to the flight of the Israelites from Egypt, and the “watr’y maze” may as easily be taken for the Red Sea as the Atlantic Ocean. Even Marvell’s choice of the indigenous fruits of the island suggests a typological reading. “He makes the figs our mouths to meet,/And throws the melons at our feet:/But apples plants of such a price,/No tree could ever bear them twice./With cedars, chosen by his hand/From Lebanon, he stores the land” (21–6). As Colie and others have suggested, these choices of indigenous plants can be read as religious signifiers: the cedar reminiscent of the original Temple, the apple with its Edenic associations. In a similar vein other critics argue that, though Marvell names his distant paradise after an actual place, his purpose is more metaphorical than geographical. “We know that Marvell’s

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while the poem’s geographical considerations, its implicit evocation of maps and discovery, of alienness and distance, are all subsumed in the poetic discourse, they have not disappeared. Instead they reveal themselves in unexpected ways. For like the tip of an iceberg, Bermudas marks the presence of these geographical concerns in Marvell’s poetics, concerns that run through a whole array of his works. In his seminal study The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre argues that space does not pre-exist in some fixed and objective form. Rather, it must be created or produced. Space, as he conceives it, is a “social product,” which must be understood and ordered according to the perceiving subject’s own ideas. Lefebvre has posited three levels of spatial awareness: first, a basic awareness of the physical environment; then, a representation of space, such as a description or a map, which highlights how the land is conceived and imagined; and finally what he calls representational space, which is the land as it is lived in relation to the full range of cultural and social needs and expressions. Marvell’s treatment of Bermuda—and, indeed, the cartographic understanding embodied in a broad range of his poems—reflects this complex relationship between culture and space, between the poetic expression of social relationships and the cartographic expression of spatial practice. For Marvell’s Bermudas ultimately rests upon the descriptions and map of the island colony as it was conceived and imagined in the mid-seventeenth century—what Lefebvre would call the representation of space—but the poet then uses that conception as a way to illuminate the representational space of domestic England, the land as it was lived. By focusing on Bermuda, Marvell takes a land that is distant but domesticated, and reinvests it with a sense of mystery and instability. But in so doing he implicitly problematizes that same imposed domesticity. For if a sense of exotic strangeness can still cling to a country as well-settled, well-mapped, and well-known as Bermuda, then other lands, equally well-mapped and familiar, are open to the same instability. The defamiliarizing vein of geographical imagery that emerges into the light in imagination, like Coleridge’s, was fed by accounts of exotic places. But for Marvell that new world was not an image which answered to his private dreams; it was a metaphor coming to life... Their Puritan paradise, even in the Bermudas, must be, like Eden and like Marvell’s other garden, a state of mind rather than the specific island of Captain John Smith or of Lewis Hughes.” Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 54. For Ann E. Berthoff and others, the island exists as much in Marvell’s imagination and in the larger poetic pastoral tradition as it does in the actual Atlantic, while still others see the poem in the context of religious psalms, and interpret it as Marvell’s poetic interpretation of Puritan thankfulness, “a psalm of praise, which the reader has to decode.” Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London and New York: Pinter, 1989), p. 43. In this view, by highlighting a single moment of Puritan escape and triumph, the poet places the whole Puritan movement within a larger context of religious accomplishment and destiny. Annabel Patterson refines this religious focus even further to suggest that Marvell’s concern in “Bermudas” is not just with the Puritan plight and their exodus to freedom, but with some fundamental articulation of his own religious aesthetic. See Annabel Patterson, “Bermudas and The Coronet: Marvell’s Protestant Poetics,” ELH 44 (1977): 478. The placement of this poetic reflection in an actual place, with its own historical and geographical context, appears to have little impact on her argument.

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Bermudas runs just beneath the surface of that most domestic of Marvell’s poems Upon Appleton House, and though the two operate very differently, they illuminate one another in unexpected ways. Examined within the cultural moment of the early 1650s, the poems reveal a deep-seated cartographic awareness. And more than that, they reveal a poet who, from his cultural position in the map’s most familiar center, calls into question the very certainty of mapped representation, reconfiguring the fixity of England’s landscape to reflect the strange and unsettling instabilities at the political heart of the kingdom. “Domestic” Bermuda From its first settlement by Europeans in 1612 Bermuda’s economic development was slow and difficult, but its imaginative domestication took almost no time at all.4 In his report on the Bermudas, published in 1624, Captain John Smith describes the colony twelve years after its founding in near-paradisiacal terms. The aire is most commonly cleere, very temperate, moist, with a moderate heat, very healthfull and apt for the generation and nourishing of all things, so as many things transported from hence yeeld a farre greater increase, and if it be any living thing it becomes fatter and better ... the Corne is the same they have in Virginia, and the WestIndies: of this and many other things without plowing or much labour, they have two Harvests every yeere.5

Smith’s vision is Edenic. It invests the land with all the easy fruitfulness of a cultivated garden and suggests a country which is not just fertile but positively nurturing. The air is “cleere,” and “very healthfull,” so that not just the crops but “any living thing” becomes “fatter and better.” And, as Smith goes on to suggest, this welcoming fertility has produced an amazing bounty. Now besides these naturall productions, providences & paines since the Plantation, have offered divers other seeds & plants, which the soile hath greedily imbraced & cherished, so that at this present 1623, there are great abundance of white, red and yellow coloured Potatoes, Tobacco, Sugarcanes, Indicos, Parsnips, exceeding large Radishes ... &c. briefly whatsoever else may be expected for the satisfaction either of curiosity, necessity or delight.6

Even in the short time that settlers have been there they have established a wealth of agriculture. The land, although implicitly exotic in its remarkable fertility, is presented as having been thoroughly domesticated by the time of Smith’s writing. 4

The Islands derived their English name, The Somers Islands, from Sir George Somers, whose ship sank on a nearby coral reef in 1609. Members of the Virginia Company settled it in 1612, but a year later they sold their lands to the Bermuda Company, who continued to own it until 1684. 5 John Smith, The General Historie of Virginia, New England, & The Summer Isles (2 vols, Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1907), vol. 1, p. 333. 6 Smith, General History, vol. 1, p. 335.

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But it wasn’t simply the fruitfulness of the soil that was constructed as welcoming and supportive. Almost immediately after settlement, the shape of the land itself was presented as something familiar and tamed. In 1618, at the request of the Bermuda Company, Richard Norwood drew a map of the main island and the surrounding waters. It was published in a slightly simplified form in Smith’s 1624 report, and then in all its detail by John Speed in 1627.7 In later years this same diagram became the basis for all seventeenth-century maps of Bermuda, and new editions appeared in 1631, 1646, 1662, and 1676. It was an influential map and remains well worth examining (see Figure 5.1). Norwood’s map is an emblem of cartographic precision and accuracy. The shoreline of the islands appears picked out in every detail, and the wealth of labels dotting the coast suggests that every landmark of note has been charted and named. There are small drawings of houses, churches, towns, castles, and forts, offering a pictorial representation of the islands’ varied settlements, and perhaps even more importantly, there is not an inch of the main inhabitable island which is not divided up and allocated. The plots of land, allotted among the various “tribes” of the island, are named for the major figures in the Virginia Company, and a table at the bottom of the map lists the individuals claiming each parcel. The entire island is depicted as being owned by one person or another. Even the sections not ascribed to a single owner are identified as “Part of the General Land,” so that every stretch and area is accounted for. But what is particularly intriguing in this mapped representation is that each of these parcels is laid out without any apparent attention to the island’s terrain. The boundaries are straight, slicing the land into slivers of property, imposing a system of division entirely indifferent to the natural terrain. This mixture of specificity and arbitrariness suggests both a desire to impose imaginative order on the land, and a lingering anxiety about the uncertainty still implicit in an island so recently settled. For in this act of mapping, the natural divisions of the island, along with any possibility of ambiguity or uncertainty, have been nullified in what amounts to an act of cartographic domestication. Such a move effectively lays out the land before the controlling power of the gaze.8 As Michel Foucault suggests, vision stands metonymically for absolute and fixed knowledge about the viewed subject, and it is this knowledge which immobilizes and constrains. The subject under observation absorbs the externally imposed discipline and comes to confine himself, even without the presence of an observer. Discipline becomes self-discipline. In a comparable way, the fixity of the map and its cartographic precision stabilizes the shape and meaning of the land, not to itself, of course, but to the map’s reader, who thereby internalizes the cultural discipline of order and control within the cartographic discourse. 7

The map of Bermuda appeared in Speed’s Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the

World. 8 As Michel Foucault has suggested, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan (trans.) (New York, Vintage, 1979), pp. 202–3.

Figure 5.1:

Richard Norwood’s Map of Bermuda, 1618. By permission of the British Library. Maps.4.Tab.8,9.

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In this context, Norwood’s map provides the image of a domesticated Bermuda which is the only experience of it that most of his audience would have enjoyed. The English map-reader of the seventeenth century, snugly interpellated within a hundred years of cartographic development, would have seen the map as an objective representation, a reliable image of the distant but well-comprehended land. Whatever wildness remained—and there is evidence of much—is thus visually tamed. Or rather, it is more accurate to say it is overwritten, since the orderly division of property appears only on paper. In the map’s representation the surveyed land appears thoroughly defined and fixed, every line in place, every square foot delimited. As a text, Norwood’s map reveals the century’s new confidence in mapped precision. But as with Plato’s pharmakon, the clearest and most stolid protestation of confidence can just as easily mark its antithesis.9 And part of what is so intriguing about Marvell’s treatment of Bermuda is that he manages to suggest this opposition, and the potential instability of this overwriting, in some very interesting ways. At first glance, Marvell’s Bermudas seems entirely bent on evoking a paradise on earth. The physical conditions are benign, not to say delightful. He lands us on a grassy stage, Safe from the storms, and prelates’ rage. He gave us this eternal spring, Which here enamels everything (11–14). The poet reveals a land marked by a permanent “enameled” beauty and the eternal comfort of spring. It seems a secure haven, a little Eden. Yet Marvell would certainly have known that it was no such thing. In July 1653, while serving as tutor to Oliver Cromwell’s ward William Dutton, Marvell stayed at the home of the puritan John Oxenbridge, a Fellow of Eton College. Oxenbridge had twice been to Bermuda, first in 1635 and then in 1641, and Marvell doubtless learned much of what he knew about the islands from his host’s stories and library. This particular Bermuda, the place that Oxenbridge himself experienced, was far from an unalloyed paradise. Rife with political and religious dissensions, threats, and dangers, it was at times more a Puritan hell than heaven. Even the physical conditions rendered so benignly in Marvell’s verse were rooted more in the early, anecdotal reports of pleasant weather, long growing seasons, and delightful conditions than in the lived experience of its settlers. Efforts to represent the land as fixed and serene continued to fall short, and there remained an implicitly unsettled quality in the accounts of Bermuda even into the middle of the seventeenth century. Despite Marvell’s claims of peace and comfort—the “eternal spring” and the perceived safety even from rough weather—it turns out there were storms aplenty, and a good many other problems as well. Although early statements about the island expressed concern that its apparently easy conditions might undermine the celebrated Puritan work ethic, other reports suggested a more troubling place. Even Captain Smith, who seemed intent on 9

For an extended discussion of the pharmakon see Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Barbara Johnson (trans.) Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).

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presenting the islands in the best possible light, somehow couldn’t keep the less attractive aspects from intruding. Concerning vermine and noisome creatures, there are not many, but onely Rats and Cats, there increased since the Plantation, but how they agree together you shall heare hereafter. The Musketas and Flies are also too busie, with a certaine India Bug, called by the Spaniards a Cacarootch, the which creeping into Chests they eat and defile with their ill-sented dung: also the little Ants in summer time are so troublesome, they are forced to dry their figs upon high frames, and anoint their feet with tar, wherein they sticke, else they would spoile them all ere they could be dryed: Wormes in the earth also there are, but too many, so that to keepe them from destroying their Corne and Tobacco, they are forced to worme them every morning, which is a great labour, else all would be destroyed.10

The situation, which seems so promising at first in Smith’s description, quickly turns bad. There are “not many” vermin or pests: “Onely Rats and Cats.” And there is initially some suggestion in “how they agree together” that the two pests may eventually solve their own problem by simply destroying one another. But then, when he might have ended, Smith continues on as if he can’t quite stop himself, slipping into a whole pestilential list of ants and mosquitoes, flies and cockroaches, until by the end it is clear that only constant vigilance allowed the settlers to preserve their crops against an almost continuous onslaught. Similarly, William Strachey, the author of an early seventeenth-century report on Bermuda entitled A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas, offers a distinctly postlapsarian view. Instead of Marvell’s “eternal spring,” Strachey found the Bermudan weather “often frightening, with ‘tempests, great strokes of thunder,’ etc.; the winter climate was chilly, windy, ‘heavy and melancholy’ the soil looked poor and unproductive; the colonists’ experiments in agriculture all proved failures.”11 A series of attempts to create a successful commercial venture on the basis of the island’s supposed natural gifts foundered one after another, and the first illusions of leisure in paradise quickly evaporated.12 In the same way, the vision of Bermuda as, if not an agricultural paradise, at least a religious one gradually succumbed to fact. Although painted by Marvell as a Puritan refuge, the Bermudan colony was fundamentally Anglican and royalist 10

Smith, General Historie, vol. 1, p. 337. Quoted in Toshihiko Kawasaki, “Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’—A Little World, or a New World?” ELH 43 (1976), 39. 12 “[A]fter successive disappointments with pearl, ambergris, cedar and silk, the colonists had found tobacco farming to be the only viable industry... If the first Englishmen who landed on the Bermudas thought that the islands were abundantly self-sufficient, they were sadly mistaken. History was soon to prove that this constricted space of land in the middle of the ocean could hardly support the several parties of the earliest settlers, especially while the idles were having their own way. The islanders, therefore suffered from several periods of cruel starvation. Although they finally achieved some degree of economic independence during the 1630s and ’40s, it was hardly by eating the figs and melons which God threw to them. It was by producing commercial articles, especially tobacco, and trading with the homeland as well as with other colonies. This was possible only through rigorous discipline by the government and hard work by the colonists.” Kawasaki, “Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’,” 42–3. 11

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for much of the early seventeenth century, and far from being a model of religious harmony, it was often split by controversy. The original expedition under Gates and Summers, arriving at Bermuda in 1609, suppressed its Puritan members, and later authorities on the island demonstrated themselves to be less than completely sympathetic to the Puritan cause.13 In 1616 the situation proved so bad that five men chose to sneak away and risk their lives sailing a small boat to England rather than stay. And as a contemporary said, commenting on the letter they left behind, “their hard and bad usage was so intolerable, and their hope to[o] small ever againe to see their Countrey, or be delivered from such servitude, they did rather chuse to put themselves to that desperate hazard to goe for England, in which if they miscaried, as it was much to be mistrusted, their lives and bloods should be required at their hands was the cause.”14 Doubtless then, in presenting his Puritan sailors as arriving in a land untroubled by religious divisions and marked with the fruits of paradise, Marvell is taking some liberties. But why? Marvell’s Creation of Space If, as Lefebvre observes, “[R]epresentations of space are shot through with a knowledge … a mixture of understanding and ideology—which is always relative and in the process of change,”15 then Marvell’s conception of the New World can be seen, not just as a rendering of physical space, but as a product of his knowledge and understanding of those spaces. And Marvell’s knowledge and understanding of the wider world were remarkable. Following the drowning death of his father in January 1641, the poet sold a parcel of the land he inherited to finance a trip to the continent, where he stayed and traveled for the next six years, developing a knowledge of Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, and, as Milton noted, “the gaining of these four languages.”16 He returned to England in 1647, but then in 1662 he once again went abroad, back to Holland, on a political mission and then, from 1663 to 1665, accompanied the earl of Carlisle on a lengthy if largely unsuccessful embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. Such considerable voyaging made him one of the most well-traveled writers of the seventeenth century. And with so many miles and countries under his belt, he was a man with a personal appreciation for the practicalities of geography. He displayed this appreciation, and his continuing interest, in a series of textual references throughout his career. In his prose satire Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676) he offers a deliberately garbled allusion to Captain John Smith’s Description of Virginia (1612) when he refers to “Obeshankanogh the King of Virginia.” And

13

See Tay Fizdale, “Irony in Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’,” ELH 42 (1975): 204. Smith, General Historie, vol. 1, p. 361. 15 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 41. 16 See Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell, Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 9; and John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 14

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a page later he refers in passing to an anecdote of chocolate drinking in Chiapa.17 The references are not essential. There is no innate necessity in satirizing religious intolerance to go as far afield as Mexico, and the fact that Marvell does so, dropping the story in as part of a quick and witty aside, suggests the degree to which he had internalized both an anecdotal knowledge of the world and a deeply ingrained geographical awareness.18 His interest in, and ease with, more explicitly cartographic concerns is also evident in the 1672 prose pamphlet, The Rehearsal Transpros’d. In satirizing Samuel Parker’s attack on Calvinism, Marvell offers a short and comic dialogue about the location of Geneva, which the archbishop placed in “the rank soyl on the South-side the Lake Lemane.” As Marvell writes, “Now it is strange that he having travell’d so well, should not have observ’d that the Lake lies East and West, and that Geneva is built at the West end of it.”19 The cartographical awareness of Geneva’s location becomes an opportunity to belittle both his opponent’s erudition and his religious intolerance. And in a comic personification of the Rhone as a river “so sober and intelligent, that its Waters would not mix with this Lake perilous, but ran sheer thorow without ever touching it;”20 Marvell offers the mapped route of the river itself as a form of cartographic satire on Parker’s overwrought and overwritten prose. On the one hand such a playful re-interpretation of geography is simply further evidence of Marvell’s wit and eclectic learning—a reflection of the way he “lays incompatibles side by side.”21 But at the same time, the ease with which he brings cartographic references into an unrelated discourse suggests how deeply embedded such an awareness is, even as it implies the level of cartographic understanding he expects from his audience. And that, as much as anything else, brings us back to Bermudas. For while the poet’s wide-ranging knowledge is evident throughout his writings, it becomes particularly illuminating here, where an awareness of Marvell’s cartographic knowledge and familiarity allows us to analyze the poem, not just for what it includes, but for what it leaves out. Given all the familiarity and geographical 17

Andrew Marvell, Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode, in Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble and Nicholas von Maltzahn (eds) The Prose Works of Andrew Marvel (2 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 2, pp. 103–4. 18 It is likely Marvell would have come across the Chiapa reference in a volume of Thomas Gage, New Survey of the West Indies (1648). Gage’s The English-American his Travail by Sea and Land (1648) had been dedicated to Thomas Fairfax, and it is not unreasonable to assume that Marvell would have had access to this volume, as well in the library at Nun Appleton during is stay there in 1651–2. See Patterson, Mr. Smirk, p. 104. 19 Andrew Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, in Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble and Nicholas von Maltzahn (eds) The Prose Works of Andrew Marvel (2 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 69. 20 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 71. 21 In observing this, Christopher Hill is speaking of the poetry of Marvell’s revolutionary period. He observes that it “lays incompatibles side by side, that it unites the apparently unrelated and indeed the logically contradictory, that it obtains its effects by forcing things different in kind on to the same plane of reference.” Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 307. Though clearly the sensibility behind the poet’s “conflict lyrics” extends to the prose of his later career.

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precision associated with the island colony, given Norwood’s map and the wealth of anecdotal information, the poet’s treatment of it is surprising, especially in light of one particular poetic precursor. Although Marvell is creating an image of Bermuda “shot through” with his own understanding and ideology, he is operating within the shadow of another Bermuda poem, Edmund Waller’s The Battle of the Summer Islands. Waller’s poem, published in 1645, established a poetic Bermuda of miraculous and splendid fruitfulness that Marvell implicitly acknowledges. The parallels between the two works are considerable and have been noted extensively.22 But most interesting are not the poems’ similarities but their differences. Waller’s treatment of Bermuda suggests a level of geographical indifference, if not outright ignorance,23 that effectively 22 Both poets stress the bounty of nature, Waller in particular describing a land that might have come directly from the more optimistic passages of John Smith’s Bermuda history. But in contrast to Waller’s purely secular description of paradise, Marvell uses the fruitfulness of Bermuda to frame a poem of religious thanksgiving. Where Waller evokes a secular and sensual garden:

That happy island where huge lemons grow, And orange trees, which golden fruit do bear, The Hesperian garden boasts of none so fair; Where shining pearl, coral, and many a pound, On the rich shore, of ambergris is found. The lofty cedar, which to heaven aspires, The prince of trees! Is fuel for their fires; (5–12)

Marvell emphasizes God as the provider of the Edenic paradise: He hangs in shades the Orange bright, Like golden Lamps in a green Night. And does in the Pomgranates close, Jewels more rich than Ormus show’s. (17–20)

He offers the fruits, the cedars, even the whales (or at least their ambergris) as the explicit gifts of divine Providence: With Cedars, chosen by his hand, From Lebanon, he stores the Land. And makes the hollow Seas, that roar, Proclaime the Ambergris on shoar. He cast (of which we rather boast) The Gospels Pearl upon our Coast. And in these Rocks for us did frame A Temple, where to sound his Name. (25–32)

For a more complete discussion of the parallels between the poems see Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 179–80; The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, H. M. Margoliouth (ed.) (2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 220; and The Poems of Andrew Marvell, Nigel Smith (ed.) (London: Longman, 2003), p. 55. 23 As Drury notes, “Historians of the Bermudas have delighted to point out inaccuracies in Waller’s description, and have even declared that the event which this poem celebrates is geographically impossible. There is no evidence, beyond a vague tradition, that the poet ever visited the islands, and when he says, “Bermudas walled with rocks, who does not know?” he is only crediting his audience with the same kind of familiarity with the place as he had

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removes the islands from any geographical register. Instead of a sense of location, Waller evokes an image of natural beauty so simple and poetically unambiguous, almost unimaginative, that his descriptions of Hesperian delights could be placed anywhere or nowhere. In contrast, while Marvell’s treatment is not explicitly cartographic, the sense of locational instability that intrudes into the poem highlights an acute geographical awareness. For while the subject of the poem immediately invokes the context of geography, it is a geography that just as immediately becomes vague and dissociated. Where the remote Bermudas ride In th’ ocean’s bosom unespied, From a small boat, that rowed along, The list’ning winds received this song. (1–4) By setting the action of the poem “Where the remote Bermudas ride,” Marvell is placing the reader within the context of distance and discovery that comprised the popular understanding of the New World. But while “the remote Bermudas” are the only physical point of reference in the poem and the only stable point in time or space, they seem strangely unsettled and cut off from any other geography. In fact, the Bermudas are seen to “ride” the waves as if they were no more anchored than the boat itself. At the same time, the exact relationship of the sailors to the islands is left deliberately vague. They are near them, almost certainly, but their precise relation to the land is left unexplained. It is unclear whether the islands or the boat are “unespied,” but in either case the sense of ambiguity extends to both. We can’t even be sure whether the sailors are approaching or departing since, as one critic observes, “the island we seem to have reached in earlier lines is still being approached in the last.”24 And though they appear to know all about conditions on “the grassy stage”—the natural riches to expect, the fruits and fowls “sent to us in care”—Marvell’s travelers never seem to have arrived. Although some critics have argued that this “static” quality is employed to emphasize the poem’s “emblematic” character,25 the text actually suggests a relationship which is not so much static as disoriented. Marvell’s poetic manipulation of space and perspective invokes an atmosphere of instability and mystery. The word “unespied,” with its sense of being unseen, suggests a measure of cartographic and geographical displacement. For though cartographers had by this time imposed a sense of precision on the location of the Americas in general and Bermuda in particular, the poem seems to be resurrecting through its deliberate lack of clarity the old ambiguity of location and placement. Marvell has taken the geographer’s concerns with, and anxieties about, cartographic accuracy and has internalized them into his discourse, using them as a metaphor of the Puritans’ relationship to himself, such as could be derived from the accounts of others.” The Poems of Edmund Waller, G. Thorn Drury (ed.) (New York, Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 308. 24 Philip Brockbank, “Politics of Paradise: ‘Bermudas’,” Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, C. A. Patrides (ed.) (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 176. 25 Berthoff, p. 55.

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religious freedom. But in doing so he also effectively re-introduces a suggestion of indeterminacy into the newly won sense of cartographic precision. The critic R. I. V. Hodge has suggested that Bermudas “is finally a fantasy, selfindulgently dispensing with the laws that generate Marvell’s real and imagined universes.”26 But though this fantastical element of Bermudas is real, it is far from merely self-indulgent. The laws of cause and effect, of specificity of object and place, are not dispensed with. They are instead deliberately weakened and muddied. It is not that the universe of Bermudas is lawless, but that the laws cease to function in the reliable ways that Hodge, and we, might have expected. The result is not a superficial poem, but a shifting one: a poem that highlights the instability of the physical organization of the world. And despite all the efforts at precise mapping, despite the real and imagined domestication of the island, it is an image implicitly concerned with issues of indeterminacy. The song that Marvell’s sailors sing reflects this complex instability. What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the wat’ry maze, Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own? (5–8). With his use of the “wat’ry maze” Marvell once again refines a familiar trope, offering the usual connotations of a complex and wandering path, while simultaneously inflecting it with the disorienting fluidity which inhabits the whole poem.27 Calling up this image brings with it not just the crossing of the Atlantic, but the voyages of exploration that had criss-crossed all the oceans of the world. Even as the poet focuses on the religious importance of the God who led these voyagers to this paradise, he implicitly transforms these sailors into counterparts of the earlier explorers. Their actions, while religious, are also implicitly cartographic. After all, the song of the sailors is said to echo, not just to “heaven’s vault” but “beyond the Mexique Bay” (36). The poet evokes the associations of a real, physical place set in geographical space. At the same time there is an emphasis on the paradisiacal qualities of the island. He gave us this eternal spring, Which here enamels everything; And sends the fowls to us in care, On daily visits through the air (13–16).

26 R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and Seventeenth-Century Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 89. 27 As Smith observes, the “wat’ry maze” in Bermudas is the unique use of a liquid maze, although mazes were frequent images in seventeenth-century verse. At the same time, as Smith notes, the Bermudas’ “wat’ry maze” compares to “Like the vain curlings of the wat’ry maze” which begins “The First Anniversary of the Government under H. H. the Lord Protector.” This later poem, written within a year of “Bermudas,” clearly ties the spatial disorientation evoked by the maze imagery into the political concerns of his poems. Smith 2003, p. 56.

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The “eternal spring” and the richness of fauna and flora, ready and almost eager to be eaten, bring with them the associations of Eden and their attendant pastoral reverberations. But beneath all the images of this other-worldly paradise is the realization that it isn’t only other worldly, but New World-ly, as well. In their attempts at mapping, the “new” geographers of the early modern period were not just re-drawing the world, they were re-structuring it and re-configuring the relationship of its parts. With the discovery and mapping of America, the medieval mappa mundi, centered on Jerusalem, gave way to a de-centered world. As one critic notes, “the European viewer needed to imagine America as a ‘New World’ in the sense of a teleological or perhaps erotic projection of the Old World. In pictorial terms, Renaissance maps ... might be thought of as attempts to cope with the absence of a controlling centre.”28 The geographic context within which Marvell operates—the seventeenth century’s confidence in cartographic accuracy and precision—is one that no longer orders itself around the still center of Jerusalem, and without God as the center point, the world makes sense only in relation to itself. Lacking an absolute center, the map can only relate one land mass to another rather than to some fixed point of eschatological reference, so that to create a fixed and stable sense of the world requires a fixed and stable map. In one sense, Marvell’s destabilization of the map comes with his reintroduction of God. It is God’s aid that brings the sailors to the new island. It is God, rather than a map, that leads them through the “wat’ry maze.” To an extent, then, the poet can be seen distantly to echo the medieval discourse of geography that focused on a spiritual organization of space rather than a geographical one. Yet this is the seventeenth century, not the thirteenth, and there are other sources of cartographic instability besides God. Mapping Instability By many counts the English Revolution marks the most seismically unstable period in the nation’s history, and Andrew Marvell stands as its quintessential poet, offering up to the rough changes of the civil war a series of intense and highly wrought attempts to find some balance within the shiftings of social and political power. Although his poems are notoriously hard to date, there is a small selection which, by their subject matter or associations, can be placed with some certainty in the early 1650s.29 Bounded by An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland in the summer of 1650 and The First Anniversary of the Government under O. C. in 1654, the group includes Marvell’s three poems to Sir Thomas Fairfax—Upon Appleton House, Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough, and its Latin companion piece Epigramma in Duos Montes Amosclivum et Bilboreum. Farfacio in 1651—and Bermudas in 1653. Together these six poems form a complex constellation of images 28

Ibid., p. 62. Only ten poems appeared in print in Marvell’s lifetime, including The First Anniversary of the government of H. H. the Lord Protector. The rest were published in Miscellaneous Poems in 1681, three years after his death. For further details see Smith 2003, p. xii. For details of dating see Smith 2003 throughout. 29

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and ideas set in an England that “lurched from crisis to crisis.”30 And in their various ways they mark the poet’s struggle to find a reasonable path through the political and moral upheaval. An Horatian Ode is perhaps the first great marker of Marvell’s political ambivalence, his first attempt to come to grips with the upheaval of the regicide.31 The poem was in all likelihood composed in the summer of 1650, between Cromwell’s triumphant Irish campaign in May and the beginning of his Scottish campaign on July 22, and it marks a sea change in the political landscape. Returning from Ireland, Cromwell was named to replace Sir Thomas Fairfax as commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, and with that step the extent of his power, and the inevitability of his leadership, would have become unmistakeable. In the poem, Marvell struggles to align a tumultuous past with an uncertain future, trying to balance his early royalist leanings, or at least his deep-seated loyalty to the traditions of monarchy, against a reluctant appreciation of Cromwell’s military and political power.32 As Donnelly notes, in later years “Marvell was moved to revolutionary enthusiasm by the active force and virtue that he saw in Cromwell and Cromwell’s personal rule.”33 But at this point his underlying concern is not so much with ideological loyalty to one party or the other—the wide variety of critical opinion on the poem highlights the difficulty of pinning down the poet’s political affiliations—but with a desire for political and social stability. And the manifest difficulty of achieving such a balance is evident in the vein of unmistakeable, and much-discussed, ambivalence that runs through the poem. ’Tis madness to resist or blame The force of angry heaven’s flame; And, if we would speak true, Much to the man is due: (25–8). 30 Christopher Wortham, “Marvell’s Cromwell Poems: An Accidental Triptych,” in Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (eds) The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1990), p. 16. 31 My discussion of these two Cromwell poems is necessarily abbreviated. For a more extensive discussion see Legouis; John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), Chapters Two and Three; Wortham; Hill; and Patterson 1978, Chapter Two; and the headnotes to the poems in Smith 2003. 32 As Wortham suggests, in combination these poems provide a portrait of the poet as “an essentially peaceable man living through a convulsive civil war and its unquiet aftermath,” (17) and marks what Wortham has called “Marvell’s somewhat tricky accommodation between his politics and his poetry” (18). The royalist Marvell is writing a poem of celebration of the returning parliamentary conqueror, yet at the same time the decorous and sympathetic treatment of Charles I suggests the tension. Yet, despite the tension, Cromwell is clearly Marvell’s protagonist in “a political poem that subordinates personal views to public issues.” As Wortham suggests, the nobility of Charles I is seen as essentially passive compared to the active ambition of Cromwell. Wortham, p. 21. 33 M. L. Donnelly, “‘And still new stopps to various time apply’d’ Marvell, Cromwell, and the Problem of Representation at Midcentury,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds) On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), p. 167.

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To equate Cromwell with “heaven’s flame” is to seat him firmly in the camp of righteousness, yet the reluctant and grudging tone of “And, if we would speak true” positions the poet in a liminal and hesitant space. Cromwell’s accomplishments are cast in both positive and negative terms. Who from his private gardens, where He lived reserved and austere… Could by industrious valour climb To ruin the great work of time, And cast the kingdoms old Into another mould. Though Justice against Fate complain, And plead the ancient rights in vain (29–38). The deeds are heroic in scale, entirely reshaping the “kingdoms old,” but still these actions are cast in terms of “ruin,” and the “fate” embodied in Cromwell’s indomitable force is contrasted with the fruitless pleas of “Justice.” By the end, the Ode’s embracing judgment is not that Cromwell is right, but that he is simply too strong for justice and for confining nature, and the language and syntax allow an ongoing series of alternate and contradictory readings that create their own shifting instability within the apparently settled form of the poem. For where Cromwell is allied with force and will, with ambiguous if overwhelming accomplishment and “forced pow’r” (66), King Charles plays the role of the noble, tragic victim. That thence the royal actor born The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands. (53–6) In the midst of the bloody crowd, the king becomes a courageous and serene center, providing in his “bleeding head” both the emblem of greatest tragedy and the foreshadowing of the country’s “happy fate” (72). The Ode’s delicacy and its graciousness about Charles’ behavior make it clear that while power is enough to establish political stability, it isn’t enough to quell moral doubts, doubts that make themselves felt as an almost subliminal vacillation. And this vacillation continues to be reflected in the following years. For if, during the interregnum, the leadership of Cromwell was stable and strong, the political ideas and justifications for that leadership were open to anxious scrutiny. The very stability of the moment cast into high relief the instability of the recent past and the unforeseeable nature of the future. Referring to the poem’s opening, Christopher Hill observes, “The light touch, the self-mockery, the hatred of the portentous which are obvious in these lines should not obscure for us the genuine doubts and struggles, conflicts and despairs, which had preceded Marvell’s acceptance of the position which he here states with an irony made possible only by deep conviction.”34 Certainly the force of the poet’s conflict 34

Hill, p. 308.

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reveals itself in a series of observations and images of striking power, but beneath any sense of “deep conviction” runs a concomitant streak of instability, a blurring of precision and solidity, that mirrors in Marvell’s poetic terrain the fractures running through the political landscape. He is struggling toward an expression of precarious balance, of poised and grave instability. By the time of the second Cromwell poem, with the Lord protector “at the height of his power,”35 Marvell’s attitude has clearly changed. He has come to embrace Cromwell without the ambiguity and doubt of the Horatian Ode. The First Anniversary is a more whole-heartedly positive reading of the Lord Protector, a piece of praising propaganda rather than a measured analysis. The political and moral ambivalence that had left the poet poised between Charles and Cromwell has vanished, to be replaced by a pointedly anti-monarchical certainty. In speaking of kings, Marvell has nothing but criticism to offer. Their earthly projects under ground they lay, More slow and brittle than the China clay; Well may they strive to leave them to their son, For one thing never was by one king done…. They fight by otheres, but in person wrong, And only are against their subjects strong. (19–28). In contrast, “indefatigable” Cromwell “in one year the work of ages acts” (14). And, Resigning up thy privacy so dear, To turn the headstrong people’s charioteer; For to be Cromwell was a greater thing, Than ought below, or yet above a king. (223–6) In presenting his poetic summary of Cromwell’s first year of rule Marvell touches lightly and reassuringly on all potentially destabilizing aspects, and offers an all but undiluted paen to the Lord Protector’s rule. Cromwell alone with greater vigour runs, (Sun-like) the stages of succeeding suns… Cromwell alone doth with new lustre spring, And shines the jewel of the yearly ring. ’Tis he the force of scattered time contracts, And in one year the work of ages acts. (7–14) From the beginning, Cromwell is seen as singular and extraordinary, rising above “the vain curlings of the wat’ry maze” (1), unaffected by the damping effects of time. But if Marvell no longer has any doubts about the man, he seems still to have doubts about the future of the political landscape, and he makes these doubts felt almost in spite of himself. For from the beginning he seems to be working a little too 35

Wallace, p. 110.

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hard to present the country as fundamentally united behind its Lord Protector. He strives to make even the suggestion of inerradicable differences into a strength. But the most equal still sustain the height, And they as pillars keep the work upright; While the resistance of opposed minds, The fabric as with arches stronger binds (93–6). The image of an arch, made stronger by the weight that bears it down, is certainly an attempt to represent strength and unity, but in the same moment it suggests the stresses and strains working beneath the surface. The first year of Cromwell’s rule was not without its difficulties—the Fifth Monarchist opposition, the potential assassination attempts, Cromwell’s near-fatal coach accident—and under the overriding tone of panegyric certainty lies the suppressed suggestion of a year’s worth of trials and perturbations. And after everything that Marvell says in praise of the Lord Protector, the best that he can finally offer is the famous summation, “If these the times, then this must be the man” (440), a line that witholds as much as it offers. Such language suggests a hidden but innate insecurity within the poem as within the state, a veiled and hesitant certainty trapped within the inherent doubts of the conditional mood. Thus, despite an initial tone of confidence, The First Anniversary is implicitly tied into the discourse of anxiety and instability of the previous years, and it marks a continuum of concern and awareness that runs at least from 1650 to 1654. This is arguably the period of greatest unease, the historical moment when the stakes are set but the resolution not yet determined. And the resulting uncertainty, the need to come to grips with a political landscape that has been settled by force but is not yet settled in mind, is at the heart of Marvell’s poetic sensibility. Hill observes: “Like so many other Parliamentarians, Marvell had been pushed reluctantly to approve of revolution and regicide, since otherwise ‘religion and liberty’ could not be secured.”36 But Marvell’s “approval” of regicide seems much more complicated than simply the realpolitik of a political proponent of liberty willing to accept whatever is necessary. Instead, Marvell suggests with his tone that he both accepts and regrets, honors and criticizes, the events and choices of history. It is this inherently contradictory combination of certainty and doubt that asserts itself, not just in the overtly political poems, but in the most unlikely of places. For while this moral ambivalence finds its most explicit, and relatively public, rendering in the Cromwell poems, a similar shifting anxiety, a blurring of certainty, comes to light in the much more private sphere of Upon Appleton House. In the context of the English country estate this anxious uncertainty reveals itself, not in an ambiguity of political identity or position, but in the ambiguity of landscape and the blurred geography of the country estate. The land itself reflects the politics, and all that should be most specific and precise takes on a shifting, unreliable appearance.

36

Hill, p. 329.

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The Most Domestic of Spaces Bookended between the Horatian Ode and The First Anniversary, the three Fairfax poems sit poised like a peaceful country furlough in the midst of an armed campaign. From late 1650 to 1652 Marvell served as tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary and lived at the Yorkshire estate of Nun Appleton. Having risen to chief commander of the parliamentary forces, Fairfax withdrew from public life in 1650, resigning his command rather than lead the army into Scotland. He had ostentatiously taken no part in the trial of Charles I, and in an unpublished poem had expressed revulsion at the regicide, yet he did nothing substantial to halt it. And though he initially withdrew from public life, he afterwards resumed a more active political role, returning to parliament in 1654 and eventually playing an important part in the Restoration.37 Overall he could be seen to be negotiating a political middle ground as complex and morally charged as Marvell’s own. Upon Appleton House is in large part a muted meditation on this negotiation and on Fairfax’s withdrawal from public life. But this portrait of Fairfax and his bucolic estate offers a version of beauty and seclusion much more complex than at first it seems. For even in seclusion Marvell’s poetry—what one critic has called, “the lyric of conflict”38—effectively sublimates the immanent sense of political anxiety by translating it into a very different discourse. In Bermudas the underlying sense of political and religious uncertainty is given an explicitly foreign context so that the exotic setting mirrors the strange and slippery treatment of the land. But the symbolic associations in Bermudas, tied as they are to the larger geographical context, serve as a point of entry to the poetic and geographic treatment of more domestic spaces. And when Marvell evokes a similar suggestive strangeness in his descriptions of the landscape in Upon Appleton House, he is effectively refocusing the exotic energy of geographic distance onto the most domestic and familiar of landscapes. Under the pressure of such tumultuous times even the most ordinary spaces turn strange. The geographical destabilization, which is implicit in Bermudas, appears here as a marked and unexpected sense of mystery infecting the most familiar of landscapes. In The History of Cartography, J. B. Harley defines maps as “graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.”39 It is a deliberately broad and inclusive definition, but one that helps illuminate Marvell’s efforts to re-channel his political 37

See Hodge, p. 134. Hill, p. 306. In line 180 of Upon Appleton House, “The sea-born ambergris we compose;” hearkens to the Bermudas and the roaring seas that “Proclaim the ambergris on shore” (28), just as the references from Waller extend beyond the tie with Bermuda and show a common thread of concerns running through Bermuda and the Fairfax poems. As Smith suggests, the “groves of pikes” in stanza IX of “Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough” echo lines 53–4 of Waller’s poem, “Their fixed javelins in her side she wears,/And on her back a grove of pikes appears.” This brings in both the military references of Fairfax’s career, but the references to the wracking of whales in “Bermudas.” See Smith’s extensive notes for both poems in Smith 2003. 39 J. B. Harley and David Woodward eds, History of Cartography, Vol 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xvi. 38

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anxieties. For in the larger context of this period, the effect of his poetic sleight of hand—of shifting the implicit terms of discourse from politics to geography— becomes clear. Marvell’s cartographic awareness provides a new means of addressing issues of political ambivalence and ambiguity in a way that anchors them in the heart of the country. And just as important, by refracting the political anxiety of the period through a geographical lens, the poet helps defuse the potential danger of speaking critically in such threatening times. As the poet’s career in the early 1650s shows, with the king dead, he was looking to the Puritan and Parliamentary establishment for employment and preferment. This initially took the form of direct patronage, working as tutor first to Fairfax’s daughter and then to Cromwell’s ward, and finally serving as an all-but-official poet laureate to the Lord Protector. With such ties to the ruling establishment, he would doubtless have made every effort not to alienate those in power. But at the same time, Marvell’s was an intense, refining intellect, unable simply to blow with the political wind. A poet of precise dichotomies and finely split hairs, he needed the means to express the nuances of his concern in a way that displaced his political anxieties into more harmless terms. He needed the means to translate his concerns and ambivalence onto some sphere beyond the plainly political—onto the physical world itself. And for that he turned to the imagery and discourse of maps. In Upon Appleton House, Marvell engages with exactly the sort of “spatial understanding” that Harley posits, and in a fashion that suggests interesting parallels with Bermudas. For though the two lands are thousands of miles apart, in two different hemispheres and two different worlds, one Old and one New, the imaginative representations of Bermuda and Nun Appleton show some striking, and unexpected, similarities. Despite its distant locale and dramatically charged history Bermuda—precisely divided by its settlers and so carefully mapped by Norwood—looks no more wild or exotic than any number of English country seats that had been similarly surveyed and charted. For from the end of the sixteenth century the mapping of rural estates had grown increasingly widespread. Though a few properties had been surveyed in the first half of the century following the dissolution of the monasteries, it was only with the publication of Saxton’s county atlas that the use of scale maps began to proliferate.40 From that point on, the ability to visualize precisely the layout and disposition of the rural landscape moved into general cultural circulation. In the years after 1579, Saxton and his son, Robert, alone produced at least fifty estate maps in Yorkshire.41 These maps, usually large-scale and focusing on relatively small tracts of land, provide a level of exceptional precision and detail, allowing the geography to be fixed and laid out beneath the owner’s eye in a way that was unprecedented. One of the most remarkable examples of this estate map genre is the chart drawn by Ralph Agas of Lord Cheney’s manor of Toddington, Bedfordshire, in 1581, and although it is unlikely that Marvell would have seen it, the map provides a vivid sense of the effect of these representations (Figure 5.2). Drawn on twenty pieces of parchment which together formed a map 11.3 by 8.5 feet, Agas’ work offers a 40

Saxton began surveying his county maps in 1573 and first published them in 1579. See Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton: Elizabethan MapMaker (London, The Holland Press, 1979). 41

Figure 5.2:

Radolph Agas’ Estate Map of Toddington, 1581. By permission of the British Library.

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detailed and evocative image of the estate. It includes a bird’s-eye reproduction of the village and church, with individual houses drawn from life rather than simply schematically. And if Agas doesn’t show the precise position of every tree, he does offer an evocative pictorial representation of a large and detailed scene. “[O]ne can easily imagine oneself walking along the paths, seeing what one would see on the ground; in some ways, indeed, one sees rather more on the map, for it identifies the area, the tenant, and the form of tenure of every plot of land ... and one needs little imagination to tell what one would see as one walked along every road and path: every cottage and outbuilding, every stream, gate, row of trees.”42 The land is rendered fully available to the sight of its owner—not just agriculturally domesticated but visually as well. It seems likely that Marvell would have been exposed, if not to this map, then to others like it, for while there is no explicit evidence that Thomas Fairfax had his estates surveyed, a great many other Yorkshire landowners did. There is a surviving map, drawn in 1596, which was part of a large manuscript survey of the parish of Bolton Percy, which includes the Nun Appleton estate. Although it predates Marvell’s poem by more than fifty years, and may not exactly represent the Fairfax lands as they appeared to the poet, it is certainly very close.43 And though the Bolton Percy map, like the estate plans of the Saxtons, was unlikely to have had a wide circulation, it was meant for display, and would certainly have been seen by landowners in the area. Given the large number of estate maps of Yorkshire that survive from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it seems inevitable that, as tutor in the home of a large land-owner in the heart of the county, Marvell would have been exposed to the schematic domestication of the land which they provided. Certainly, as we shall see, his poetry suggests it. Beyond a Moral Landscape Partaking of a long classical tradition, all three Fairfax poems invest the landscape with the moral attributes of its owner, offering in the description of hills and woods, meadows and gardens, a complex emblem of Fairfax’s power and military triumph. Yet, the way the three poems diverge from this classical pattern is instructive. The Latin poem, Epigramma in Duos Montes Amosclivum et Bilboreum. Farfacio, operates strictly within the classical genre, offering a view of the land untouched by geographical concerns. The two mountains are not placed within a larger world. They are treated as objects whose appearance and attributes are used simply and explicitly to praise Marvell’s patron. But part of the effect of the Latin version, with its narrow classical alignment, is to emphasize just how differently the English

42

P. D. A. Harvey, “English Estate Maps: Their Early History and Their Use and Historical Evidence,” in David Buisseret (ed.) Rural Images: Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 54. 43 In his study of the Bolton Percy map Timothy Raylor uses it to trace Marvell’s poetic journey through the estate, citing his “topographical accuracy.” Timothy Raylor, “‘Paradice’s Only Map’: A Plan of Nun Appleton,” Notes and Queries 242 (1997): 187.

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version functions. For, On the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough suggests and ultimately requires an advanced level of cartographic awareness in order to operate fully. Bilbrough was another Fairfax estate in Yorkshire, five miles northwest of Nun Appleton. The “hill” of the title was one of its principal features, and although by the standard of most montes it isn’t large, rising at the time to a height of only 145 feet, this very modesty is a crucial aspect of its larger poetic effect. The portrait of Bilbrough begins by emphasizing the mathematical precision of the hill, conferring on it the associated connotations of order and an implicitly mapped precision. See how the arched earth does here Rise in a perfect hemisphere! The stiffest compass could not strike A line more circular and like. (1–4) The image of “the stiffest compass” informs the precision of the hill’s rounded profile, and brings in the notions of balance and harmony which are extended to the owner of the property.44 But at the same time the reference puts into circulation the additional context of magnetic compass sightings, implying with the precision of the hill’s form an attendant suggestion of mapped precision. The “arched earth” certainly suggests the hill itself, rising out of the level plain, but at the same time it evokes a portion of the rounded globe and echoes the broader scene: a curving landscape that situates the hill within its larger context. This both highlights the poem’s central object and reduces it to a portion of a map. To imagine Bilbrough rising above the plain is implicitly to recall the myriad hills drawn with such detail by Christopher Saxton in his county map of the region. For though Saxton’s Yorkshire map doesn’t include the specific and eponymous hill of the poem, it provides a precise and detailed context in which to imagine it. With a wealth of visual specificity, the atlas allows a view of the landscape in which each individual hill is seen within the broader geographical context. More than that, it compels such a view. Not exclusively, of course. Perhaps not even consciously. But the cartographic imagination that was contained in and disseminated by such maps would have interpellated the contemporary viewer into an implicitly cartographic mode of visualization, so that, in addition to all the other ways of imagining and culturally interpreting a landscape, the awareness of its mapped geography would have been implicitly available. And clearly Marvell is counting on this cartographic awareness in his audience. In evoking the noble humility of the hill, Nor for itself the heigh does gain, But only strives to raise the plain, (23–4) The poet moves beyond a narrow focus on the hill to evoke the broader associations of the scene, and, more specifically, of the plain. For the stretch of level land extending 44 Certainly Bilbrough’s hill is seen, much as Nun Appleton itself in the later poem, as a marker of moderation and humility. The hill is contrasted with the thrusting greatness of ambition, an ambition that is tied to Cromwell. But at the same time, as the part becomes an emblem of the whole, the scene is implicitly recast in cartographic terms. See Smith 2003.

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northward from Bilbrough Hill contains the site of the Battle of Marston Moor, one of the key Parliamentary victories of the Civil War.45 The place carries enormous semantic weight, conjuring up one of Fairfax’s greatest triumphs and placing the landscape, and its owner, within a broader and more complex cultural context. Yet the only way Marvell gains access to this reference is through a knowledge of cartographic relationships. The battle isn’t mentioned; only the plain on which it occurred. The relationship of the two is available only through the audience’s cartographic awareness of the larger area.46 But even as he evokes the cartographic context, the poet complicates it. Within this discourse of mapped location and precise spatial relationships, Marvell inserts a shadowy sense of instability. While the poem is marked at first by an unambiguous specificity, concentrating most of its attention on a single well-located and specific locale, the broader references and metaphorization of the hill introduce an increasing sense of instability into the scene. Yet thus it all the field commands, And in unenvied greatness stands, Discerning further than the cliff Of heaven-daring Tenerife. How glad the weary seamen haste When they salute it from the mast! By night the northern star their way Directs, and this no less by day. (25–32) The poetic license here is clear. The 145-foot hill is being likened to the 12,192 foot peak on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries. On one level, certainly, Marvell is merely increasing the compliment directed toward his patron, allowing himself an exaggeration of the hill’s stature and importance as a means of increasing Fairfax’s own. But if, as Wilson suggests, the reference to the seamen in line 29 is to the boats sailing up the River Ouse to York,47 the suggestion of the importance of either the hill or the northern star is surely overstated. Travelers on a familiar, domestic river have little need of such navigational aids. Instead, by evoking the directional needs of the sailors, Marvell is implicitly situating them not on a domestic river but on the open ocean, referring, not to Bilbrough but to Tenerife. And with that doubleness of 45 Throughout my readings of these poems I draw on the excellent and thorough annotations of Nigel Smith in his edition of Marvell’s poems. For more on this, see Smith 2003, p. 206. 46 For while the poem does offer a general reflection on Fairfax’s military career, it remains unfocused. The next stanza could provide an implicit referent to warfare with the line, “Yet thus it all the field commands,” but that assumes the connotations of field as “battlefield” are immediately garnered. And while this reading is retrospectively encouraged by the penultimate stanza of the poem, which makes explicit the comparison between the landscape and the “groves of pikes” and the “mountains raised of dying men,” which marked Fairfax’s military exploits, the final result is still a generalized recognition rather than a specific reference. To access the more particular connotations requires an explicitly cartographic frame. 47 Richard Wilson, letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 31 March 1972, 367.

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vision the location and certainty, the narrow specificity, of this particular Yorkshire hill is suddenly unfixed. The poem’s cartographic focus is sent vacillating between two sites, and the power of the map to define, measure, and unequivocally represent a location or a scene is undercut. Even as he makes use of the era’s widespread cartographic awareness, Marvell simultaneously destabilizes it. The expectations of cartographic precision are first offered, then subverted. And in Upon Appleton House, “Marvell’s most sustained and comprehensive exploration of his major themes, undertaken at the height of his powers,”48 the poet carries this cartographic awareness even further. Paradise’s only map Upon Appleton House was the last of the Renaissance’s country house poems, and while it holds a place in this poetic genre, it is in many ways an odd addition.49 The traditional country house poem focused on the utility of the country estate and on the characteristics of generosity, charity, and virtue that were imputed to its owners. But while Marvell echoes this concern with moral virtue, he focuses, not on the rich and fertile productivity of the land but on “the order of Lord Fairfax’s mind and soul.”50 And rather than a concern with the consumption of the estate’s products, he offers a broad overview of the land itself. From the beginning of the poem Marvell focuses much of his attention on the appearance and layout of the countryside, demonstrating an unusual attention not simply to description, but to the visual organization of the landscape. But Nature here hath been so free As if she said, ‘Leave this to me.’ Art would more neatly have defaced What she had laid so sweetly waste, In fragrant gardens, shady woods, Deep meadows, and transparent floods. While with slow eyes we these survey, And on each pleasant footstep stay. (75–82)

48

Hodge, p. 132. The genre of the Renaissance country house poem was launched with Aemilia Lanyer’s The Description of Cookham and Jonson’s To Penshurst, and is commonly considered to include four additional poems besides Upon Appleton House: Jonson’s To Sir Robert Wroth, Robert Herrick’s Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton, Thomas Carew’s To Saxham and To My Friend G. N. from Wrest. For more on the country house poem see William A. McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 50 McClung, p. 156. Also, for a broader discussion of the country house poem see Kari Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), Chapter Five, especially pp. 158–9. For a discussion of the poem as a defense of property against the political threat of radical Levellers see Hugh Jenkins, “Two Letters to Lord Fairfax,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds) The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), pp. 144–58. 49

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The poet honors the natural beauty of the estate, but at the same time he clearly means to improve on the scene. The disorder of Nature “laid so sweetly to waste” is going to be corrected in the careful verbal mapping of the grounds. This mapping, “While with slow eyes we these survey,” provides a means of poetically organizing the landscape of Nun Appleton within a larger geographic discourse.51 For though Marvell is focusing on the limited and very local sphere of a single country estate, he seems always struggling with the impulse to capture a wider world. He quickly moves from the modesty of the house to the broader natural expanse of the estate. But it is not just the scene’s beauty that focuses the poet’s attention. The narrator is placing his meditations on Fairfax’s humility and responsibility, on the family’s history and the whole broad sweep of nature and politics—in effect, the whole content of the poem—within that slow “survey.” The estate becomes the setting for the poetic and political ruminations of the poem, providing a lens to sharpen and focus an entire cultural moment within an implicitly cartographic framework. For in reaching beyond the narrow setting of the country estate, Marvell evokes the larger countryside oriented around it. Midway through his “slow survey” the poet conjures up the gardens of the estate as an emblem of Fairfax’s modesty and conscience. It is a move that threatens to narrow the poem’s focus, reducing the man, and his entire estate, to the breadth of a flower bed. But instead Marvell projects outward. The sight does from these bastions ply, Th’invisible artillery; And at proud Cawood Castle seems To point the batt’ry of its beams. As if it quarrelled in the seat Th’ambition of its prelate great. But o’er the meads below it plays, Or innocently seems to graze. (361–8) Cawood Castle was a residence of the Archbishop of York, two miles southeast of Nun Appleton, and in taking aim at it, the poet is contrasting the seemly modesty and honorable retirement of his patron with the ambition of John Williams, the royalist Archbishop of York before the Civil War. But while the ownership and ideological associations of Cawood Castle would doubtless have been available to Marvell’s contemporary audience, the manner of its presentation—implicitly evoking the orientation and distance, the cartographic arrangement of the houses—assumes a degree of cartographic awareness in its reader, an awareness that pervades the poem. 51 This is somewhat similar to Bent Sunesen’s idea of “stationing” in which Marvell’s language helps position the reader imaginatively and emotionally within the poetic space of Nun Appleton. But for Sunesen, readers are “stationed” within the English estate, their position and perspectives framed by the poem. Instead of this I consider how the estate itself, and its poetic evocations, are positioned within the larger geographic discourse of the world. See Bent Sunesen, “Marvell’s Appleton and the Principle of ‘Stationing’ in Literature,” A Literary Miscellany Presented to Eric Jacobsen (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1988), pp. 133–63.

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Early on, Marvell voices his criticism of those overbuilders who seek “by breadth the world t’unite” (23), and yet throughout the poem he enacts precisely this wide ranging and global focus. In recollecting the military feats of Fairfax’s ancestors, And with successive valour try France, Poland, either Germany (243–4) Marvell introduces a broader geography of battlefields and foreign lands. And then he translates that geographical sense back to England itself with the exploits of the current Lord Fairfax, who, as long since prophesied, His horse through conquered Britain ride. (245–6). Such martial imagery organizes the past into a tribute to the Fairfax family, even as it proceeds to reconfigure the landscape to reflect these triumphs. The garden is laid out like a fort, a parade ground, a battlefield—constantly shifting in scale and size. And in the host of detailed descriptions the images are not of a single, bounded English estate, but of a widespread world. The poet conjures up an image of Britain as an isolated garden paradise, and then offers in the same breath a vision of the island as an entire world. Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou paradise of four seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With watery if not flaming sword. (321–6) Certainly this is painting England as a paradise, and numerous critics have examined the Edenic imagery in the poem. But at the same time Marvell uses a vocabulary that conflates in one breath both the distant Bermuda and the domestic England. His mention of the “four seas” sets the scene within a larger geographic and imaginative context, and “the garden of the world” brings an image to mind not just of a garden in the world, but of a world within the garden. Likewise, in the mowing sequence, the poem introduces the first note of unexpected transformation into the otherwise familiar setting by comparing the harvest to a battle. But it then goes on to broaden that strangeness into an implicitly geographical sense of foreign lands and exotic distance as the language conjures up images from around the globe. For when the sun the grass hath vexed, The tawny mowers enter next; Who seem like Israelites to be, Walking on foot through a green sea. (389–92)

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The image of “Israelites” crossing the green sea of grass invokes the Old Testament and offers, as critics have suggested, an extended political metaphor,52 but at the same time it introduces a sense of exotic locales, foreign in space as well as time. And later, in line 434, when the haycocks are temporarily transformed into rocks lurking in a calm sea, the poem effectively translates the English field into a distant and potentially threatening ocean. When after this ’tis piled in cocks, Like a calm sea it shows the rocks: We wond’ring in the river near How boats among them safely steer. Or, like the desert Memphis sand, Short pyramids of hay do stand. And such the Roman camps to rise In hills for soldiers obsequies. (433–40) As Rosalie Colie suggests, the imagery evokes an effect of visual illusion and misperception,53 but at the same time the gaze must be seen not just to “wonder” but to wander as well. The landscape is invested with an unstable geographical sense which briefly transports it, first to “the desert Memphis sand,” and then to the toril of Madrid, evoking a flickering representation of distant lands set in the domestic and familiar quilt of the English landscape. Like the poetic oscillation between Bilbrough and Tenerife, the imagery works to destabilize what is most fixed and familiar. Similarly, in reading the leaves on the trees as if they were “Mexique paintings” (580) Marvell is again highlighting his awareness of a wider world, imposing on the domestic country estate suggestions of foreignness, and introducing not just an exotic image, but the land from which the image came, echoing “the Mexique Bay” of Bermudas.54 Even a suggestion of the “watr’y maze” that carried the sailors to the New World can be seen here, figured as a forest labyrinth. This, like a long and equal thread, Betwixt two labyrinths does lead.

52

For a discussion of the mowers as emblems of the armies of the civil war see Hill, p. 319. For a discussion of the mowers as a parodic response to the political instability created by the Levellers see Jenkins, especially pp. 145, 153. 53 Rosalie Colie offers a magisterial discussion of the various visual traditions, taken from several different genres of painting, that are reflected in Upon Appleton House. Her conclusion that Marvell’s references to these various modes of visual distortion are used to evoke “the world’s instability” and “the fluidity of material things, and the relativity of human perception,” supports and complements my reading, though her extensive analysis doesn’t touch on the poet’s manipulation of cartographic modes. See Rosalie L. Colie, “My Echoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 192–218. See also Smith 2003, p. 228. 54 As Smith notes, Marvell’s awareness of the Mexican feather paintings may well have derived from Thomas Gage’s The English-American his Travail by Sea and Land (1648) which was dedicated to Fairfax and may well have been in the estate’s library. Smith, p. 234.

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But where the floods did lately drown, There at the evening stake me down. (621–4) The maze is there, where once the water was. The forest opens a lane through the labyrinth where “the waves are fall’n and dried” (625), and the meadow lies like the flood plain of a domestic Nile. Shortly thereafter the vision of the landscape is again transformed as the sight of distant cattle mutates into something stranger. They seem within the polished grass A landskip drawn in looking glass. And shrunk in the huge pasture show As spots, so shaped, on faces do. Such fleas, ere they approach the eye, In multiplying glasses lie. They feed so wide, so slowly move, As constellations do above. (457–64) The landscape is shifting, growing fluid and unstable. The cows are “shrunk” in the pasture, and the pasture itself transforms, under the force of the simile, to a kind of human face decorated with beauty marks. And as the transmutation continues, the cows become “fleas,” simultaneously reduced and enlarged, grown smaller and more visible. The poem creates what Colie has called “an experience of disproportion, instability, and topsy-turvydom.”55 This is, as she has noted, a play on current theories of landscape painting and perception. But it is also something larger. Marvell evokes not just a confusion of visual perception but an even larger destabilization. He suggests not just that things look strange, but that the world is strange. And of particular interest is not just the shifting sense of scale but the way the landscape, with its cows reduced to dots, recalls the tiny but detailed representation of the country offered by Saxton’s atlas. What is at first a panoramic view shifts into the more distant and schematic design of a map. There is the same sense of visible distortion—the ordinary replaced by an abstract though detailed representation—that in turn provides the ability to see the landscape as from a broader, implicitly cartographic remove. The whole vista is imbued with what de Certeau calls “readability,” subject to imaginative transformations and totalizing comprehension. And in the process of describing the landscape Marvell “reads” it as if it were a map. But in reading the land, Marvell is reading not its fixed and readily available meaning, but a new and shifting focus. He is imposing on the implicitly mapped scene a sense of instability that has no part in Saxton’s maps. As in Bilbrough and Bermudas, the cartographic discourse that the poet implicitly introduces begins to deconstruct the very sense of precision and stability it at first maintains. In the very next stanza, for instance, the scene is altered once again as the river floods the meadow.

55

Colie, p. 188.

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The river in itself is drowned, And isles th’astonished cattle round (471–2) Marvell continues his visual transformation as the distant specks of animals turn into islands, and his mapped transformation is completed as the land sinks underwater. Although in one sense this is merely the expression of the latest in cultivation techniques, in another it evokes the ultimate instability: a transformation of the land on a geographical scale. The meadow becomes a series of islands or continents, divided by the ocean, as all the variety of the globe is coalesced into this single scene. Where grass had been is now a medium in which “boats can over bridges sail; And fishes do the stables scale” (477–8). The sense of “scale” in this case is not just a play on fish scales and the scaling of the unexpected heights of a stable, but the scale of a map that provides, within a cartographic discourse, the implicit expectation of precision and accuracy. But in this case the sense of scale is shifting. It lends itself, not to accuracy and precision, but to an increasing distortion and defamiliarization. The semantic paradox of having cows feeding within a lake instead of a pasture provokes a new and rising awareness of the unreliability of visual cues. And as the language increases the sense of visual distance and alters its geographical view—as cows grow from fleas to spots to islands—the shifting precision of the scene becomes not “readable” but mis-readable. And gradually this same shifting misreadability spreads throughout the estate. Trees become “precipices tall” (375); the meadow becomes an ocean, an “abyss ... Of that unfathomable grass” (369–70). The domestic landscape shifts to include the site of sailors sounding unknown depths. To see men through this meadow dive, We wonder how they rise alive, As, under water, none does know Whether he fall through it or go. But, as the mariners that sound, And show upon their lead the ground, They bring up flowers so to be seen, And prove they’ve at the bottom been. (377–84) The exotic scene echoes a sense of exotic danger, for the men diving into the grass have lost any assurance of surviving. It seems a wonder they resurface at all, bringing flowers from a meadow that seems as distant as the bottom of the sea. All that is most familiar becomes a place of intrinsic strangeness “where men like grasshoppers appear, But grasshoppers are giants there” (371–2). The reference is potentially a biblical one,56 but much more than that, it conjures up a scene of shifting and monstrous instability. The giant grasshoppers take on properties of those other giants, monsters, and cannibals that might once have been imagined at the boundaries of the known world. But here they inhabit the very heart of England. The most fundamental order of things is transformed and subjected to new readings. And 56

Specifically Numbers 13:32–3. See Smith 2003, p. 227.

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in the same light, when the field is mown, presenting its “new and empty face,” it becomes for Marvell a whole new world. This scene again withdrawing brings A new and empty face of things A levelled space, as smooth and plain As clothes for Lely stretched to stain. The world when first created sure Was such a table rase and pure. (441–6) It is a world “when first created,” blank as a canvas and for the moment unmapped. But almost immediately it is ordered and laid out through the poet’s imagination. The poet casts himself in the reflected glow of the divine creator, but the world before him is an implicitly cartographical one, with the land ordered and divided beneath his eye. It is largely this perspective with which the poet ends. In his final catalogue, conflating the virtues of Mary Fairfax and the beauties of the landscape, Marvell steps back again from the detailed iteration of sights and sounds for a large and sweeping view. He gathers up all the elements of his landscape and sets them in order, an order that derives from the order of a world map. ’Tis not, what once it was, the world, But a rude heap together hurled, All negligently overthrown, Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone. Your lesser world contains the same, But in more decent order tame; You, heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap, And paradise’s only map. (761–768) With this, Marvell cites a general falling off of the world from its previous Edenic perfection,57 but even more than that, he raises the suggestion that the earth, as visually represented, is no longer what it had been. The maps have changed, grown more destabilized by political events and by the shifting uncertainty revealed in the poem. Although the poet is offering a view of the world as disordered and “negligently overthrown,” the perspective that allows him this view is derived from the maps that strive to order both lands and imaginations. Throughout the poem Marvell has depended on this cartographic perspective in organizing the estate, in highlighting its variety and its strangeness. For if the poet offers, as a contrast to the world’s own rough map, the more perfect order of the domestic landscape—if his imagined estate sits at “heaven’s centr”—such a view is only possible within the larger cartographical discourse of the mapped and measured world.

57

As Smith suggests, this may also refer to the contemporary theories that the earth was gradually decaying through the passage of time. Smith 2003, p. 241.

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But in seeing the local English estate in terms of the larger context, Marvell is effectively defamiliarizing the most familiar of landscapes. The cartographically inscribed exoticism and instability which remain implicit in representations of the New World—and which Marvell brings out in his evocation of Bermuda—is used here to destabilize the fixed and domestic estate. More than that, it is used to destabilize the whole epistemology of precision and accuracy which the new spatial consciousness put into circulation. The English cartographic imagination, with its ingrained confidence in mapped precision, created a sense of wholeness, of spatial order and certainty, for a land that had become physically and politically less than perfectly coherent. But the same cartographic methods that were used to tame a distant and potentially unstable landscape are re-employed in the already close, but now strangely marvelous, domestic space of the English estate. There is a kind of turn and turn about, a reciprocal cross-bracing of meaning. The wildness of nature, embodied on its grandest scale by the wildness of a whole new continent has, by Marvell’s time, been tamed. The islands of Bermuda have been settled, the landscape domesticated into tobacco plantations. The land itself has been forced to generate money. Yet within Marvell’s poetic version, there is still something uncertain, something marvelous and mysterious at play. The original wildness and uncontrollability still remains, beneath this poetic inscription of paradise. In the same way in Upon Appleton House, the inscription of domestic familiarity embodied in the country house poem is undercut by intimations of wildness. The exoticism of the New World, straining beneath its cartographic ordering, is transferred to the domestic landscape, weaving a thread of uncertainty and lurking instability into the representation of England at its most local. The representational space of Nun Appleton, its physical layout experienced within the cultural and imaginative needs of the period, reflects not just the awareness of the wider world—the world of the geographical Bermudas—but the social, religious, and political culturescape of the 1650s—the world of Marvell’s poetic Bermudas. In weaving a vocabulary of cartographic wildness and instability through otherwise familiar imagery, the poet effectively unsettles the country house landscape, unsettling along with it the social order within which it rests. The epistemology of cartographic precision, which was thought to define and domesticate the most distant of foreign lands, is here revealed as more fluid, more shifting and unreliable, than previously imagined. And within this creeping imprecision can be seen the poet’s own desperate efforts to understand and negotiate the most unstable of times. In Upon Appleton House Marvell turns the epistemological framework of the cartographic imagination back on itself to illuminate within the familiar landscape of Nun Appleton the sense of lurking instability—the potential for strange and sudden transformation—that lies at the very heart of seventeenth-century England.

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Index

Agas, Radolph 49, 176–8 allegory 94–105 art of memory 112–15

Fitzherbert, John 44 Foucault, Michel 161 Frisius, Gemma 45

Bachelard, Gaston 13, 62 de’ Barbari, Jacopo 54–56 Benese, Richard 44 Berger, Jr., Harry 86, 90, 104 Bevis of Hampton 82–4 Boke of Surveyeng 44 Bourne, William 44 n.12

Gillies, John 10, 19 Gordon, Andrew 2, 60

Camillo, Giulio 115–16, 124 Campbell, Mary 17, 34 Carruthers, Mary 114 cartographic discipline 19 cartographic domestication 161 cartographic invocation 132, 134, 139 Catena Map of Florence 54 de Certeau, Michel 12, 65 cityscapes, city views 52–61 cityview of Norwich 57–61 cityview of Venice 54–6 cityview of Wells 5, 53 Conley, Tom 10 Copperplate Map of London 61 Cormack, Leslie 8, 48, 126 Cosgrove, Denis 67 Cuningham, William 8, 49, 57–61 Dee, John 44 Derrida, Jacques 12n33 Digges, Leonard 49 Digby Mary Magdalen 19, 20, 27–33, 36–9 Ebstorf Map 3, 131 Edwards, Jess 49 emblematic space 81 estate maps 176–8 Euclids Elements of Geometry 44 Fabri, Brother Felix 35

Harley, J. B. 11 Harvey, P. D. A. 8 Havelok 82 Helgerson, Richard 19 Hereford Mappa Mundi 18, 20, 22–6 Klein, Bernhard 2, 51, 65, 87–8, 91 Kupfer, Marcia 18 landscape painting 59–61 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 159, 165 Malory, Sir Thomas 84 Maner of Measurynge 44 mappa mundi 2, 18, 20, 30 map-view 61 Marlowe, Christopher 14, 126 Doctor Faustus 14, 127, 146–51 Tamburlaine 14, 125–6, 128–35 Marvell, Andrew 15, 158–60, 163, 165–76, 178–88 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland 170–73 Bermudas 158–9, 166–70 Epigramma in Duos Montes Amosclivum et Bilboreum. Farfacio 170, 178 Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode 165–6 The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C. 170, 173–4 The Rehearsal Transpros’d 166 Upon Appleton House 160, 174–5, 181–88 Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough 170, 179–81

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McRae, Andrew 51, 68 mathematical geography 44 memory theater, 79, 115 Morte Darthur 84–5 Norden, John 142 Norwood, Richard 161 Ortelius, Abraham 126 Oxenbridge, John 163 panoramas 53 Paris, Matthew 6, 7, 80 pilgrimage 17, 33 place-and-scaffold stage 30, 32 portolan charts 2 Psalter Map 3, 4 Ptolemy’s Geographia 18 Quem Quaeritis plays 19 Quintilian 112 Raleigh, Sir Walter 125–8, 135–46, 151–5

“Discoverie of … Guiana” 125, 136–46, 151–5 Sanford, Rhonda Lemke 12n31 Saxton, Christopher 62–7, 179 scale maps 46, 62 Smith, Captain John 160, 163–4 spatial performance 60 Speed, John 75–7 Spenser, Edmund 14, 73 A View of the State of Ireland 90 Faerie Queene 73–124 Sullivan, Garrett 52 Surveiors Dialogue 142 surveying 43–5, 50 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum 126 Treasure for Traveilers 44n12 de Troyes, Chrétien 80 Erec and Enide 80–81 Waller, Edmund 167 The Battle of the Summer Islands 167–8