Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage 9789048544226

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Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage

Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World Open Access Book Series of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) Series editors: James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/ or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including, but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world, as well as comparative and global works. We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage

Katja Pilhuj

Amsterdam University Press

Parts of this book have previously been published as articles: “‘A Queen, a Woman, and a Victor’: The Rhetoric of Colonization in Defense of Queen Isabel in Cary’s History of ... Edward II.” Renaissance Papers 2009: 111-122. “‘Willing to Pay their Maidenheads’: Charting Trade and Identity in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, Part 2,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 27 (2014): 57-77.

Cover image: Johannes Willemsz, Neptune and Cybele next to a globe. Munnickhuysen, after Zacharias Webber (II), 1734-1746. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 201 8 e-isbn 978 90 4854 422 6 doi 10.5117/9789463722018 nur 685 © K. Pilhuj / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Figures

7

Acknowledgments

9

Introduction

11

1. Confuting Those Blind Geographers

47

2. ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’

93

Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body

Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism

3. ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’

143

4. ‘The Fort of her Chastity’

197

Conclusion

245

Bibliography

259

Index

273

Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce

Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue

Women as World-Writers

Fig. 1:

Fig. 2: Fig. 3:

Fig. 4: Fig. 5: Fig. 6: Fig. 7: Fig. 8:

Fig. 9: Fig. 10:

Fig. 11:

List of Figures John Speed, Detail, Proof Map of Cheshire, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University 13 Library (Atlas.2.61.1, p. 16). Frontispiece. Christopher Saxton, An Atlas of England and Wales. London: 1579. © The Trustees of the British 16 Museum (1934. 0604.1). Portrait of Henri after the titlepage, Maurice Bouguereau, Le Theatre Francoys (Tours, 1594). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département Réserve des 19 livres rares, RES-L7-2 (gallica.bnf.fr). Giacomo Gastaldi, Cosmographia Universalis c. 1561. © The British Library Board (Cartographic Items Maps C.18.n.1.)21 Queen Elizabeth I (‘The Ditchley Portrait’) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1592. © National Portrait 29 Gallery, London. WA.Suth.C.2.91.3 Anonymous Dutch, Queen Elizabeth I as a map of Europe, 1598 31 Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Frontispiece, John Case, Sphaera Civitatis [The Sphere of State] (Oxford, 1588). Newberry Library, Chicago 50 (Special Collections Case J 0. 148). Title page, Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (G1006. T5 52 1570b Vault fol). Petrus Plancius, ‘Orbis terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus’ (Amsterdam, 1599). National 54 Library of Australia (NLA MAP RM 144). Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, ‘Discovery of America: Vespucci Landing in America’ (c. 1587-89). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Estate of James Hazen Hyde, 1959. 55 Anonymous (after Jodocus Hondius), ‘Florentissimoru Regnorum Angliae et Hiberniae accurata descriptio’

Fig. 12:

Fig. 13: Fig. 14:

Fig. 15: Fig. 16: Fig. 17: Fig. 18: Fig. 19: Fig. 20: Fig. 21: Fig. 22:

(1594). Royal Geographic Society (with IBG). Shelfmark: mr British Isles Div.55. Title page, Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador: or Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth of Glorious Memory (London, 1655). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1976, U.25). Michael Drayton, title page, Poly-olbion (1612). © The British Library Board (General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 641.k.11). John Speed, ‘The Kingdom of Irland’, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London: J. Sudbury & G. Humble, 1611-1612). © The British Library Board (Cartographic Items G.7884). Hans Woutneel, ‘A Descripsion of the kingdoms of England Scotland & Ireland’ [London], 1603. Göttingen State and University Library, MAPP 4570. John Speed, Map of Scotland, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London: I. Sudbury and G. Humble, 1616) ©The British Library Board (Maps. C.7 .c20.(2)). London map from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572). © The British Library Board (Maps.C29.e.1). The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I by George Gower, c. 1588. From the Woburn Abbey Collection. Johannes Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, c. 1657. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York. Margaret Cavendish, Frontispiece to Playes (1662) and Playes, Never Before Printed (1668). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1862, 1011.236). Aaron Rathborne, The Surveyor in Foure Books (Printed by W. Stansby for W. Burre, 1616). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1875, 0814.741). Frontispiece from Britannia fortior (London, 1709). © University of Aberdeen.

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88 97

100 104 106 167 177 226 234 236 249

Acknowledgments Для моєї бабa і мого діду і мій Dа, які завжди були там To Ellen, who read it all and translated much To my cadets and students, who make me laugh To Marge, who keeps me in the neighborhood, in many ways To Dr Suzuki and Dr Hammons, who showed me the scholar I wanted to be To Falstaff and Imogen, those constant companions To Ma, Ireland is in here, too To Chris

Introduction Abstract The introduction foregrounds the argument that increasingly available geographical products provide early modern English playwrights a new discourse for women characters. This discourse objectified women as passive territory, but writers and characters subvert the typical rhetoric by revealing how women could manipulate the connection between their bodies and land to gain authority and agency. Queen Elizabeth I’s geographic rhetoric is examined, specifically how use of geography bolstered her legitimacy and provided an example for early modern dramatists. The ideological evolution of geographical understanding from the medieval to the early modern period is also described, as are relevant theories of gender and identity formation. Keywords: world-writing, early modern English drama, Queen Elizabeth I, early modern geography, women’s identity.

‘Liketh, loveth, getteth and useth, Maps, Charts, and Geographical Globes — John Dee, 1570.1

At the closing of Parliament on 10 April 1593, Queen Elizabeth spoke to members regarding the threat of a potential Spanish invasion. Despite the unprecedented victory over the Armada just five years before, England and her queen faced the very real possibility of another military attack on the island nation. Defending the justice of England’s part in the continuing quarrel with Spain, Elizabeth spoke briefly on the nature of English rule and her role in overseas expansion: It may be thought simplicity in me that all this time of my reign [I] have not sought to advance my territories and enlarged my dominions, for both 1 Dee, ‘The mathematicall praeface’, p. a.iiir.

Pilhuj, K., Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463722018/intro

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Women and Geogr aphy on the Early Modern English Stage

opportunity hath served me to do it, and my strength was able to have done it. I acknowledge my womanhood and weakness in that respect, but it hath not been fear to obtain or doubt how to keep the things so obtained that hath withholden me from these attempts; only, my mind was never to invade my neighbors, nor to usurp upon any, only contented to reign over my own and to rule as a just prince.2

Although the speech was primarily meant to thank the members of Parliament for providing a subsidy to the queen for defense of the realm, Elizabeth also felt the need to use her rhetorical skills to justify her country’s approach to imperial ventures in the face of Spain’s vast and ever-expanding colonial empire. Here, she not only defends her foreign policy but, more importantly, she puts forth an image of herself as a just and prudent monarch, despite her ‘womanly weakness’ and in contrast to the territorially voracious Philip of Spain. Issues of empire and territory during Elizabeth’s reign appear not just in speeches and policy, but also in art and the burgeoning field of geography. Women and Geography on the Early Modern Stage takes as its starting point the proliferation of English geographic texts and the popular London theater under the single rule of a queen in order to examine the development of a discourse of early modern geography, genealogy, and gender. These writers and their queen create new, often powerful conceptions of female identity by adapting and reshaping the language and images of this ‘new’ geography. The speech above provides a historical grounding of the issues Elizabeth contended with during her entire reign: the welfare of her kingdom, its place among other kingdoms and territories, and her own role as anomalous woman ruler. Elizabeth had to negotiate her ruling persona in order to be seen as legitimate and powerful; one of the ways that she and her supporters did so was through the discourse of geography, often employing the visual rhetoric found in map margins and frontispieces to project images of a strong queen and thus a strong England. For an initial and striking example of these forces at work: in the corner of a late 1590s map of Cheshire stands the figure of Elizabeth, brandishing a ruler to show the scale of miles (Fig.1). The queen wears vibrant red robes that set her apart from the green and beige background, and the bright yellow ruler extends from below her waist to above her crowned head. While the map figure functions as a rather amusing pun on the female ruler holding a ruler, this marginal drawing also encapsulates connections among women, power, and geography. Elizabeth appears as a powerful 2

Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 329.

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Fig. 1:  John Speed, Detail, Proof Map of Cheshire, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (Atlas.2.61.1, p. 16).

arbiter of measurement in her kingdom, confidently brandishing a phallic tool. For John Speed, the creator of this map, the queen to whom he would present some of these maps was a formidable female presence in the world. This Elizabeth is not one of the reclining female nudes often found in the margins of maps. Rather, her fully clothed and crowned body demonstrates an authoritative presence, ready to measure any place or any person. Connections among geography and women have been examined before, but the subject still provides fertile ground for additional research

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Women and Geogr aphy on the Early Modern English Stage

into geographic discourse and depictions of women. And much of that ground still lies unexplored in terms of individual characters in early modern plays, especially outside of Shakespeare studies. In particular, this book is a sustained look at geographically innovative writers from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing primarily on the works of Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Cary, and Thomas Heywood, with a final analysis of the prolific dramatic output of Margaret Cavendish during and after the Interregnum. Moreover, this project looks at these authors in conjunction with a broader range of geographic texts and products: not only maps but atlases, globes, estate plans, chorographies, genealogies, and other cartographic products.3 The symbolic potency of the discourse and images of geography in multiple forms was wielded by these writers to forge powerful identities for women that subverted gendered tropes in ways that prove as striking as the scale-of-miles queen.

The Measuring Ruler: Monarchs and Early Modern Geography As scholars have noted, Queen Elizabeth considered herself a singular figure of a powerful feminine and queenly ideology that she and the men around her could embrace as a political tool for legitimizing a female power that she – and she alone – could possess. Her own use of geographic discourse and imagery to construct an authoritative ruling persona as a queen regnant provides a useful initial case study, since examining Elizabeth’s strategies is important to this study: although the queen regarded herself as a unique case, dramatists of her reign and after, in particular the subjects of this study, were arguably influenced by the queen’s use of geography. In other words, these writers witnessed and then appropriated Elizabeth’s geographic strategies that allowed her to use geography in a literal sense of ‘world-writing’. She and her supporters could create and shape a view of the world where she could rule as a single queen. 3 For my consideration of ‘geographic and cartographic products’, I draw on the definition offered by Tom Conley: writings are cartographic ‘insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse’. He views many writers of the period as engaged in what he calls ‘verbal navigation’, drawing on a ‘stock of geometric and cartographic commonplaces’ in order to ‘contain and appropriate the world they are producing in discourse and space’. Geography encompasses both maps and written text, while cartography consists mainly in the maps or plans themselves. Chorographies, as descriptions of smaller local areas, fall under geography, though they can also include maps. Conley, The Self-Made Map, pp. 3 and 5. Also cited in Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory, p. 13.

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15

The work from which the above Queen Elizabeth scale-of-miles-portrait derives is a proof from John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, which covered each county in England and Wales, with subsequent editions including Scotland, Ireland, and farther locations. By the time Speed finished the first edition of his atlas in 1611, James had succeeded Elizabeth, and the map of Cheshire no longer featured her picture. But the disappearance of a ruler-wielding queen from the margins of this map did not mean Elizabeth vanished entirely; her image, her persona, and her connection to and use of geography appear again in the plays and writings of the following century. Even if only as a shadow or outline, Elizabeth becomes, like the ruler her figure holds, an instrument applied, adjusted, and adapted. My book explores the ways in which mapmakers, consumers, playwrights, and audiences in England could use the tools of geography, or ‘world-writing’, to reshape the symbolic import of the female body and territory in order to explore new ways of articulating individual women’s as well as English identity in a period of rapid expansion in trade, geographic knowledge, and entertainment. Elizabeth and her supporters were able to use geography to bolster her reigning authority because her reign coincided with increased interest in and availability of geographic texts like atlases, individual maps, chorographies (local geography and history), and other art and texts that incorporated this ‘new’ geography – even playing cards with maps were available. 4 Elizabeth, and especially mapmakers and artists supported by her government, employed the visual language of the emerging new world-writing, which ostensibly was meant to reflect increasing (male) political consolidation and colonial conquest, in order to produce spectacles of Elizabeth’s (female) authority. One of the better-known examples is the 1578 atlas by Christopher Saxton, the first large-scale survey of England and Wales (Fig. 2). Indeed, the Saxton atlas is the first national atlas produced in Europe.5 Issued in its completed form in 1579, the atlas, as John Rennie Short asserts, is not only a ‘technical accomplishment’ that allowed for a system of warning beacons to be developed. The atlas also served what he calls ‘political ends’, presenting a unified picture of England instead of one of religious and political conflict.6 The importance Elizabeth and her government placed on this message is indicated by the documentation and 4 Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, pp. 64-65. Playing cards produced in 1590 had one of the 52 counties of England and Wales from Saxton’s atlas printed on each of them. 5 Short, The World Through Maps, p. 112. 6 Ibid., pp. 112-113.

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Women and Geogr aphy on the Early Modern English Stage

Fig. 2:  Frontispiece, Christopher Saxton, An Atlas of England and Wales. London: 1579. © The Trustees of the British Museum (1934, 0604.1).

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some financial support issued to Saxton while he was compiling his atlas. Saxton was appointed to survey England and Wales ‘by speciall direccion & commandment from the Queenes Majesty’.7 Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt point out that the process also saw the government ‘giving Saxton official passes, grants of land and offices, and various subsidies’, revealing that the Crown cared much for this project.8 In the atlas’ completed form, Elizabeth appears on the frontispiece in a visual configuration that is reminiscent of those seen in the popular first world atlas of 1570 by Abraham Ortelius (Fig. 8). But instead of Ortelius’ reclining allegorical female figures (and those of his many imitators), the queen sits enthroned in that same classical arch space, flanked by figures of geometry and mathematics. Moreover, Elizabeth’s coats of arms appear in the margins of many of the map plates within, further emphasizing not only her authority over the land, but also implying that she, like a mapmaker but unlike the passive continental figures of other atlases, has authorial control over representations of England and thus herself. Elizabeth – or at least, the image of her – becomes a kind of geographer, creating an England over which she has creative cartographic and thus political control. Even among the national atlases that appeared in the next few decades, the Saxton atlas and its prominent feature of the monarch was unique. Just across the Channel, France did have cartographers and travel writers who contributed to the growing body of geographic knowledge, but none produced any work that was so clearly and publicly connected to the monarch as Saxton’s atlas. Guillaume Postel published his des merveilles du monde, et principalement des admirables choses des Indes et du Nouveau Monde in 1553; the recognition of the importance of his French homeland is only indicated by the meridian in the world map passing through Paris. The Guide des chemins de France, written by Charles Estienne and printed the year before Postel’s work, featured route descriptions and toponyms with little to no graphic representation. Francois de Belleforest’s 1575 La cosmographie universelle was a translation of Sebastian Munster’s work Cosmographia of 1544. And while the cosmographer André Thevet became Catherine de Medici’s chaplain and historiographer to her sons, he published his own travelogs and ethnographic descriptions of the new world, which, while they did encourage colonization, were not commissioned by the 7 Quoted in Skelton, Saxton’s Survey of England and Wales, p. 8. 8 Kagan and Schmidt, ‘Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography’, p. 668. See also Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, p. 54 for more evidence of the government’s approval and support of Saxton’s project.

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French monarchs.9 In a similar position was the slightly earlier cartographer and writer, Nicolas de Nicolay, who wrote accounts based on his travels to the Middle East. As Elizabeth’s nearest contemporary female ruler (albeit a regent) Catherine de Medici provides a contrast to illustrate how much the English queen deployed maps for her political benefit. Catherine did attempt to instigate some geographic endeavors at her court: she displayed 24 large maps, acquired in 1570, in the salon of her Parisian mansion. She also ordered de Nicolay in 1561 to go ‘touring and offering a general and detailed description of the kingdoms’, but de Nicolay never finished the endeavor.10 Maps were dedicated to Catherine and her sons, but domestic and familial conflict helped to prevent the Valois from taking advantage of geography to the extent Elizabeth did. Not until Henri IV, who ruled France from 1589-1610, was there a more direct encouragement of geography by a king, and even then, not until later in Henri’s reign. An earlier example, Maurice Bouguereau’s Théâtre Françoys of 1594 was dedicated to Henri, but not commissioned by him. The atlas was ‘conceived to serve the cause of the Protestant Henri IV and his campaign to win France over to his legal right’, ultimately intending to show the king ‘what he could do with maps’ after he presided over a unified France.11 Until that time, Henri was too busy reconciling the divided country to lend official help to any geographer. He would eventually do so by assembling a group of ingénieurs du roi, who drew up plans for the revitalization of the country’s defenses, but these were for governmental use and not public consumption like the Saxton atlas.12 And Bouguereau’s atlas differs in other ways from the Saxton. Although its initial visual features echo the template featured in Ortelius and the earlier English atlas, the central space framed by the arches and figures display the title of the atlas itself rather than any person. Henri only appears after the frontispiece (Fig. 3).13 Bouguereau seems to be primarily sending a message to the king through a text disseminated to the public, in contrast to the message Elizabeth and her councilors facilitated and sent to her subjects through Saxton. But the atlas is an especially clear example 9 This overview of French cartography is derived from Bouzrara and Conley, ‘Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France’, pp. 427-437. 10 Pelletier, ‘National and Regional Mapping in France to About 1650’, p. 1485. The quoted description comes from Catherine herself, in a letter to the Duchess of Ferrara, 14 October 1561. 11 Bouzrara and Conley, ‘Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France’, p. 433. 12 Ibid., p. 429. 13 Short, The World Through Maps, p. 112. See also Fordham, Studies in Carto-bibliography, British and French, pp. 128-136.

Introduc tion

Fig. 3: Portrait of Henri after the titlepage, Maurice Bouguereau, Le Theatre Francoys (Tours, 1594). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département Réserve des livres rares, RES-L7-2 (gallica.bnf.fr).

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of ‘world-writing’, even more so than Saxton’s projection of Elizabeth as unassailable ruler of her kingdom. The French atlas was composed while Henri was still attempting to assert his claim to the French throne from his base in Tours; Bouguereau’s maps show Henri a world where he rules over a unified France whose existence was still uncertain.14 Elizabeth’s other fellow ruler, Philip II of Spain, followed Catherine de Medicis’ example when it came to affording less attention to public geographic projects. While his government did commission maps, Philip, like his father Charles, used them mainly for bureaucratic as opposed to political purposes.15 The most overt geographically inflected propaganda of Spain was actually commissioned by Charles V’s aunt Mary of Hungary, and consisted of a series of tapestries, one of which featured a map commemorating the king’s conquest of Tunis.16 While Charles himself appears in the tapestries, these artworks would have only been seen by a limited number of people admitted to his palaces. The purpose and dissemination of this geographic work stands again in contrast to the Saxton atlas. Charles’ son Philip does appear in a printed map, but it is one that was not produced for him or at his behest: he appears enthroned on the Atlantic Ocean in a map by Giacomo Gastaldi and others, the Cosmographia universalis, produced in Venice around 1561 (Fig. 4). As with the French atlas, and unlike the one designed by Saxton, Philip is not a central feature of the map; rather, his figure is lost amid an overwhelming amount of detail on a large image, functioning merely as a piece of information filed onto a map by the Venetians.17 With regards to the peninsula, the Italian states at this time featured less and less in the geography market than they had in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as they were embroiled in wars and outstripped in conquest by other nations. Not many Italian rulers, with perhaps the exception of a few examples from the court of Ferrara and the pope, were visually tied to any of the maps or atlases to the extent that Elizabeth was, or even Catherine de Medici or Philip of Spain.18 Indeed, an Italian translator of Ptolemy’s Geography, Giralamo Ruscelli in 1561, ‘lamented the poor state of Italian mapping, which he attributed to the neglect of cartography by Italian princes who had been distracted from cultivating the discipline by the Italian wars’.19 This relatively brief review of the geographic 14 15 16 17 18 19

Bouzrara and Conley, ‘Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France’, p. 433. David Buisseret, ‘Spanish Peninsular Cartography’, pp. 1069-1094. Kagan and Schmidt, ‘Maps and the Early Modern State’, p. 671. See also Milanesi, ‘Guesses About the Furthest Frontiers’, pp. 108-111. Cachey, Jr. ‘Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy’, pp. 450-460.. Ibid., p. 451.

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Fig. 4:  Giacomo Gastaldi, Cosmographia Universalis c. 1561© The British Library Board (Cartographic Items Maps C.18.n.1.)

endeavors of Elizabeth’s contemporaries in rule demonstrates just how differently she approached and deployed mapmaking. In the atlases and maps of the latter half of the sixteenth century, Elizabeth stood alone, literally and figuratively, in her reign and in her country’s geographical products. And it would not be until the later seventeenth century that geography would be deployed with a specific and wide-reaching propaganda purpose in the form of the Dutch cartography trade, discussed in more detail in Chapter Four.

Theaters for the World: Elizabeth’s Dramatic Impact And while an examination of Elizabeth’s geographical usage is compelling by itself, this book is primarily interested in the impact her strategies had on the output of dramatic writers. One of the earliest examples of how playwrights could incorporate a version of Elizabeth’s strategies of identity construction through geographical discourse comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragedie of Dido, Queene of Carthage (c. 1586), a play examined at more length in Chapter One. While the character of Dido is often read as an obstacle to Aeneas’ destiny (and, indeed, that is how he ultimately views her), the drama also reveals Dido as a dynamic character in her own right, one who, albeit temporarily, appropriates the Trojan prince as both lover and political asset. Throughout much of the play, she employs language that marks Aeneas as both symbolic spouse and territory that she controls. For example, in answer to his injunction that he must fulfill his destiny, she states,

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Stout love in mine arms make thy Italy, Whose Crown and kingdom rests at thy command: Sichaeus, not Aeneas be thou called: The King of Carthage, not Anchises son: Hold, take these Jewels at thy Lovers hand, These golden bracelets, and this wedding ring, Wherewith my husband woo’d me yet a maid, And be thou king of Libya, by my gift. (3.4.56-63)

In her speech, she declares the space he inhabits within her embrace to be his fated Italy. She further insists that he change his name to that of her first husband as she bestows upon him her marital jewelry and sovereignty. Most significantly, she participates in the mapping of space and of Aeneas’ body as she renames both and asserts her ability to do so (‘by my gift’). Dido’s authority is partially drawn from co-opting Aeneas’ familial and Trojan legacy, while her renaming of space derives authority from the subject position of geographer. She shares Queen Elizabeth’s strategy of writing or speaking a world that benefits her rule and subjectivity. And although she is a tragic figure, even at the moment of her death, Dido is still seen using geographic language that forecasts continued threats to Rome’s imperial hegemony. In her transient success and eventual death, Dido is simultaneously a representation of powerful female authority and a response to that same power’s threatening implications for traditional male authority. That Queen Elizabeth and her rhetorical strategies for legitimating her rule had a wide cultural impact is not new territory. Katherine Eggert writes of Elizabeth as ‘not only a model of improvisational skill but also as a galvanizing force for a pervasive Elizabethan anxiety about female power’.20 Similarly, Mihoko Suzuki has examined how the idea of Elizabeth carried over into the following reigns: she and her speeches were often used to ‘glorify her as an icon against Stuart absolutism’ as well as a ‘legitimizing example for women who were beginning to imagine themselves as political subjects’.21 Eggert expands on the idea of Elizabeth as catalyst for a variety of Elizabethans: ‘jurists, composers, mapmakers, and alchemists were just as likely as poets and dramatists to depend either directly or indirectly on the queen’s approval or patronage for their livelihoods; and one does not need to go far to demonstrate that their work similarly was concerned with 20 Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, p. 4. 21 Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 8.

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crown policies’.22 As noted above, Elizabeth was closely associated with the new geography and its accompanying texts, more so than any other contemporary monarch. She was also unique in her status as a queen regnant. The ideas and the anxieties that necessarily swirled around Elizabeth as a woman in power combined with the new and increasingly available visuals of territory, but writers also manipulated a third discourse: ideas about a woman’s place in family and society. This fertile intersection of ideas helped to create dramatic characters who shaped and were shaped by geography into compelling articulations of how an individual could be marked feminine or masculine, English or foreign, authoritative or passive, and these markers often appear within the same play and even the same person. Christopher Marlowe, as a student at Cambridge in the 1580s, would have been well placed to experience the latest studies in the new geography. Chapter One considers how, in Dido and his two Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe uses imagery associated with the highly symbolic, often female figures that grace the fronts of atlases and the margins of maps, most notably those found on Abraham Ortelius’ 1570 atlas, the first of its kind, in order to then create his Dido in the mold of Elizabeth: a queen who parlays a geographically constructed personal image and her marriageability into an initially successful ruling persona. Her close rhetorical association with her kingdom of Carthage, along with her potential alliance with the Trojan Aeneas, makes her initially an overpowering presence that threatens to disrupt the Roman Empire’s destiny. Marlowe, moreover, draws from the atlas’ use of history as well as geography to create an authoritative text: Dido appropriates the power and prestige of Troy for her own kingdom, drawing close connections between the two territories. While Dido and Carthage, like Troy, ultimately fall, Marlowe nevertheless provides an authoritative and more threatening version of the Carthaginian queen; the reason why, perhaps, there is no known public performance of the play after it was written in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign. Less menacing in queenly presence is the character of Zenocrate in Marlowe’s later Tamburlaine plays. Seemingly a pawn, albeit an important one, in Tamburlaine’s rise to power, the Damascene princess in actuality is able to exploit her symbolic and actual position in Tamburlaine’s dynastic and territorial ambitions in order to more subtly establish herself as a disruptive feminine power. But first, Marlowe’s Scythian general reveals the importance placed on royal and aristocratic women in political pursuits brokered through marriage. As representative of families and especially territories, women like Zenocrate 22 Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, p. 4.

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were important links between factions and kingdoms. Tamburlaine, as a lowly shepherd with no royal background, at first exploits the unwilling Zenocrate as the legitimating piece of his military conquest. However, over the course of two plays, his eventual queen in turn exploits that same position and its symbolic import to destabilize Tamburlaine’s conventionally masculine and martial power through the use of her connection to territory and to family lineage. While Marlowe worked as a playwright drawing from his knowledge of geography during his time at Cambridge, Elizabeth Cary, writing in the 1590s to 1620s, offers in Chapter Two an example of how a woman writer could use a background in geography and history in combination with the examples of Queen Elizabeth’s subject formation in order to also create powerful royal women in her dramas. Mariam in The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry, is a queen whose identity and latent power stems not only from Cary’s engagement with geography texts but her direct experience of England’s overseas territorial ambitions. As the wife of Viscount Falkland, she followed her husband to Ireland when he was appointed its Lord Deputy, ultimately staying in Dublin for three years. There, Cary saw the attempted realization of King James’ imperial ambitions as derived from the ancient Roman example. Her texts include compelling reworkings of the justifications used for the Irish plantations and new world colonies. In The Tragedy of Mariam, the eponymous queen becomes equated with the land and its resources; specifically, the play examines both Mariam’s husband King Herod’s and imperial Rome’s ability (or lack thereof) to control a wife and the territories she represents. Those inabilities, and Mariam’s appropriation of geographical language, ultimately question the legitimacy of the empire. In contrast to Mariam’s more passive but still subversive role in destabilizing both her husband’s and Rome’s rule, Cary’s Queen Isabel in her hybrid dramatic prose piece The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II takes a much more active role in claiming power, but it is one in which the relationship with the land itself is still an important source of power and of justification. When Isabel takes power from her husband Edward II, Cary supports this ostensibly foreign takeover by highlighting Isabel’s connection to and careful maintenance of the English landscape. This reasoning and its language echoes even more closely the colonial ideology that underpinned English justifications for exerting rule in Ireland and North America. Conscientious use of territorial resources, often described in atlases and travelogs, bolstered claims against the native populations in America and Ireland. This geographic rhetoric allows Cary to rehabilitate the reputation of the ‘She-wolf of France’, even as in both Mariam and The History, she implicitly questions the truth behind England’s claims of careful stewardship of lands abroad.

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While Cary looked abroad for royal and foreign women to manipulate received ideas of imperial expansion, the playwright for the public theater Thomas Heywood began exploring how a different set of women could use and be used to bolster an English presence overseas, both actual and metaphorical. Specifically, Chapter Three examines how Heywood’s plays consider the role of non-aristocratic women, particularly those in the mercantile classes. In the two parts of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie and The Fair Maid of the West, Heywood draws a sharp contrast between his non-royal protagonists and Queen Elizabeth specifically, focusing on how men like the merchant Thomas Gresham in If You Know Not Me and the soldier and captain Spencer in The Fair Maid utilize English women in the plays to assert their own superior and uniquely ‘English’ identities, while the character of the queen only hovers in the periphery of the action. The non-royal women are still associated with land, but in this case not the real territory that accompanies an aristocratic bride. They are more connected to the geographic texts themselves and the ideas they contain. These maps and atlases and other geographic products do not proclaim any tenable connection to actual land ownership; rather, they signal the owner’s status in terms of wealth and intelligence. As Tamburlaine demonstrated that legitimacy to rule could be seized by a general who lacked a noble bloodline, Heywood’s characters reveal how even literal territorial conquest was unnecessary if one could acquire geographic texts and the symbolic capital they represented. The contrast between the symbolic import of aristocratic and commoner women is underscored even further by Heywood’s earlier play The Four Prentices of London. While the drama’s title would seem to indicate a play invested in depicting members of the ‘middling classes’ of successful craftsmen and merchants, the story is actually a fantasy of aristocratic exploits in the Middle Ages: the four apprentices are the sons of the Earl of Bullone who eventually regain their status and even acquire new titles. But the most significant aspect of the play for the purposes of this study resides in the female characters and how their symbolic import is deployed throughout the play. The Princess of France and the Earl of Bullone’s daughter Bella Franca do take advantage of their connections to territory as a means to achieve their own desires; however, the two women become fully subsumed by that connection before the end of the play: once autonomous travelers moving across the actual territory of Europe and the Middle East, by the end of the play, their final role as passive wives and merely figures for the lands they once traversed anticipates the eventually marginal figures that Heywood creates for his later female characters, including Queen Elizabeth.

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But while Heywood sought to minimize the representative power that the queen possessed and that could serve as an example to writers and the aristocratic women they created, that powerful persona of a geographic identity endured and inspires the numerous women in the plays of Margaret Cavendish in the 1650s and 1660s, some of which are considered in Chapter Four. Cavendish often looked to rulers in order to formulate individual sovereignty. At the beginning of The Blazing World, Cavendish admits that ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavor to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; […] I have made a world of my own: for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone’s power to do the like’.23 Cavendish takes the ideas that women can represent land and geographic texts that previous writers had used and combines them with the idea that women could also be cartographers of their own bodies and thus identities. Her plays Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo highlight how her characters parlay a virtuous body into a kind of map itself that these women create and over which they could exert control. Cavendish not only draws from the increasing practice of Dutch cartography and the ideologies of ‘scientific’ conquest it propounded; her examples also bring the book’s scope full circle and ends where it began: with Elizabeth and the studies and products of geography that flourished in her reign and were appropriated by her and others into a language both visual and verbal that created female subjectivity.

Analyzing Early Modern Geography All of these authors benefited from the ideas promulgated through these new conceptions of geography that arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even as new ideas of female identity circulated for those in the latter half of the sixteenth century during the reign of Elizabeth. This study examines how this new and increasingly available geographic discourse in particular contributed to writers who created female characters in their plays who were mapped and engaged in a kind of self-mapping in order to create new identities. John Gillies produced one of the f irst studies of this new geography; he asserts that these new maps and atlases still functioned, like their medieval predecessors, as visual representations of particular cultural and political ideologies, and he argues that the maps 23 Cavendish, The Blazing World, p. 124.

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of the Renaissance cannot be viewed as attempting a completely neutral rendering of the world. Rather, these maps should be evaluated in terms of the process of their conception, creation, and reception, instead of as an end product representing a static artifact.24 Jess Edwards extends the arguments of Gillies, claiming, ‘this discursive ambivalence is not just an aspect of the reception of geography, an effect of the passing of geography and maps through literary “circuits of meaning,” but is inherent to geography itself’. In other words, Edwards argues, ‘geography is itself a poetic art’.25 As a type of ‘poetic art’, the early modern map and, I argue, its associated terminology, images, and practices, would be employed as vigorously as elegies or sonnets in an attempt to convey a particular message. In terms of visual rhetoric, Henry S. Turner states that like ‘the emblem, epitome, portrait, mirror, or digest’, maps contained emotions, abstract concepts, and ideas in spatial form.26 Just like these other works of art, the map and associated geographical products were open to the interpretations of their various audiences, since these maps as works of art also raise the issue of the spectator. Rhonda Lemke Sanford in her examination of cartography and literature reminds us that ‘objects or places perceived become invested by one’s gaze, and become different for each gazer’. Lemke Sanford calls this approach ‘a phenomenological notion of space’, a perspective that she draws from the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, who argue against passive interactions with physical space.27 The active engagement devised by these playwrights for their women characters ultimately reveal how the symbolic connection between land and female body, so often used as a controlling and conquering discourse for men, could and was often paradoxically used as a site of resistance against those dominant discourses when writers, readers, or spectators fashioned characters or themselves as manipulators of that space and its representations. As a woman who had to rework traditional notions of female rule (primarily its unacceptability), Elizabeth herself provides the initial example that the writers examined in this study appropriated for their own characters’ 24 Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, especially pp. 54-59. Appelbaum in ‘Anti-geography’ and Helgerson in ‘The folly of maps and modernity’ make similar arguments regarding the geography of the time as often imaginative and ultimately not representations grounded in reality. 25 Edwards, ‘How to Read an Early Modern Map’, paragraph 33. 26 Turner, ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520-1688’, p. 412. 27 Specifically, Lemke Sanford draws on de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell, p. 117; and Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England, p. 12. See also Lemke Sanford, pp. 11-13.

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identities that built on the interconnectedness of bodies, land, women, family, and agency. Elizabeth did not acquiesce to the conventional metaphorical role of passive woman/territory awaiting occupation, so perfectly exemplified by Walter Ralegh in his 1596 Discovery of […] Guiana. Suzanne Scholz calls the connection a ‘quite conventional’ use of the female-land trope,28 and it is one that is repeated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ralegh writes, ‘Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought […] It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered by any Christian prince’.29 Writers like Ralegh and, as we will see, other geographers, depicted land as a passive female awaiting penetration and thus acquisition – much as sexual consummation solidified many an early modern marriage.30 However, for Elizabeth, her own virgin body could and would be deployed in the interest of protecting England’s virgin status, transforming a potentially vulnerable position into an effective rhetorical stance. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, England could be promised and political demands secured through the potential offer of the queen’s hand in marriage. Karen Newman explains this form of resistance more generally: Though there is no question that Renaissance discourses of femininity advanced social controls and the policing of female behavior, they also enabled opposing discourses, which though they often speak with the same vocabulary and from the same categories, were nevertheless tactically productive.31

Elizabeth and her government adroitly used her status as a marriageable monarch to their political advantage, without truly committing the virgin queen to any husband. In addition to a discourse of marriage negotiations, the unmarried queen regnant both deployed and was depicted with that geographic discourse that could simultaneously be used to control women and help facilitate their agency. Including the Saxton atlas above, there was considerable artistic output associated with and promoted by the queen and her government that also used geographic images and language. One of the more well-known examples is the c.1593 Ditchley portrait, where Elizabeth stands atop a cartographic rendering of England, with her feet 28 Scholz, Body Narratives, p. 149. 29 Haklyut, Voyages and Discoveries, pp. 408-409. 30 See also McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 31. 31 Newman, Fashioning Femininity, p. 30.

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Fig. 5:  Queen Elizabeth I (‘The Ditchley Portrait’) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1592. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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positioned at Ditchley in Oxfordshire (Fig. 5). The impressively large portrait (about eight feet by five feet) dramatically demonstrates the connection between Elizabeth and a particular depiction of her territory – neatly demarcated and orderly – that she shelters with her voluminous skirts. In this painting, the body of Elizabeth protects England. Elizabeth, as ruler of England, demonstrates authority by displaying her body in symbolic ways, especially by appearing in, commissioning, or supporting depictions of her kingdom. In the Ditchley portrait, she derives authority by her physical closeness and thus symbolic association with England; she stands over and protects its boundaries, as her body holds off the thunderstorm painted in the background. And because of early modern associations between territory and the female body, while male rulers can only display land, Elizabeth can also be that space. She can also represent England itself, as female bodies were, as demonstrated above, associated with territory. By 1598, the queen had become so associated with the land that a Dutch engraving envisioned Elizabeth as Europa, holding an upraised sword (Fig. 6). A fleet of ships meant to evoke the Spanish Armada is heading towards England and thus this engraving has the potential to represent Elizabeth as both intimidating but also on the defensive. While the British Isles make up her sword arm and seem to give the queenly figure strength as her face gazes steadily outwards, that same face has turned away from the very fleet of ships that poise threateningly just behind her kingdom.32 The engraving, more so than the Ditchley portrait, exemplifies the instability inherent in the connection between queen and country, female body and actual territory. The depiction highlights how close metaphorical ties between a female ruler can be deployed to generate rhetorical strength and political legitimacy, but it can also convey how other male writers or rulers enact the more traditional progression of the land-body trope wherein these rulers and husbands can just as legitimately penetrate, occupy, and control that potentially threatening body/territory. In the Dutch engraving and in the plays examined in this book, both interpretations are possible. Theodora Jankowski, building on the materialist feminist approach described by Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, articulates the productivity of these blurred boundaries and narrative outcomes: ‘What I find particularly helpful about materialist feminist criticism 32 Caterina Albano reads the Europa portrait as ‘both celebratory and threatening’ in the depiction of England and Scotland as a sword arm, ready to strike the Armada or the Continent. ‘Visible Bodies’, p. 103.

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Fig. 6:  WA.Suth.C.2.91.3 Anonymous Dutch, Queen Elizabeth I as a map of Europe, 1598 Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

is its ability to see both “the forces of oppression and the seeds of resistance” in the same situation. This ability allows women to be constructed “in a given moment in history simultaneously as victims and agents”’.33 For these critics, the same discourse and spaces – often, in the case of geography, a literal one – that seek to control and silence women into passive symbolic bodies that yield the ‘resources’ of family lineage, real estate, and children can also be sites of resistance. Again, in the case of many of the examples in this book, that resistance takes place on an actual site: the woman often takes control of her bodily territory, redirecting its symbolic potential for her own motives. In her more general study of identity formation, Judith Butler also views those same repressive forces as an integral part in the formation of the subject and thus the potential for resistance. The subject can challenge 33 Jankowski, Women in Power, p. 15. See also Newton and Rosenfelt, ‘Introduction: Toward a Materialist-Feminist Criticism’, pp. xv-xxxix. Similarly, Anne McClintock argues that colonial discourse produces the dominating and virile man attempts but fails to subsume male anxieties about the potential for engulfment and dismemberment by the female Other. McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 26-28.

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those external forces by subverting their meaning and application. Butler writes, ‘The analysis of subjection is always double, tracing the conditions of subject formation and tracing the turn against those conditions for the subject – and its perspective – to emerge’.34 Rather than being ‘forced’ in the sense of being denied a viable alternative, Butler’s work demonstrates not only that there is no alternative, but, I would argue, that the appropriation of the very elements involved in the repression of the subject creates an especially destabilizing and potentially powerful mode of resistance. Mapping and exploration, in the context of the creation of geographic texts, provided one of those spaces of both repression and resistance. Despite Elizabeth’s assurances that she had no desire to expand her realm abroad, her subjects, playwrights in particular, often explored the implications – to the nation and to identity – of exploration, mapping, and gender. In contrast to Elizabeth, English writers of the period pushed at the boundaries of their kingdom; however, they directed their endeavors towards creating, in a sense, what Jeffrey Knapp, an ‘empire nowhere’. Knapp argues that English writers solved the problem of their limited island nation and initially unsuccessful colonial endeavors by creating literary ‘no places’ as in The Tempest and The Faerie Queene that demonstrate, through poetry, that England possesses a more valuable spiritual imperialism. In other words, they created places where they could enact English and sometimes individual male superiority.35 Although the authors in this study most often use real locations, these places are just as much imaginatively constructed as Prospero’s island. All these writers and cartographers represented not just ‘what was there’ but ‘what could be’ and, in many cases, ‘what they wished were so’. And despite the preoccupation with foreign locales, the texts more often than not reflected concerns closer to home, as these writers often worked with ideologies that affected them back ‘home’ as well. In particular for this study, the authors’ imaginative journeys into dramatic locations often located ‘elsewhere’ created spaces for them to contest and rework the trope of passive land and passive woman. Of even more significance to this book is the ways in which the various female bodies represented on stage were able to harness a power that was very subversive due to a female body’s potentially important location within the rhetoric of familial, political, and eventually imperial expansion. Playwrights using the space of the early modern theater is especially apt, as the building itself was often seen as a version of geographical frontispieces’ classical architecture. Additionally, Gillies asserts that 34 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 29. 35 Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, p. 7.

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[t]he theater was cosmographic and, to an extent, geographic, in its conceptual character (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is a striking case in point). Cosmography, for its part, was ‘theatrical’, in the sense that ‘theatre’ is an important enabling metaphor. (Thanks in part to the popularity of Ortelius’ Theatrum, atlases were generally ‘theatres’ before they were ‘atlases’.).36

Thus, the theater and geography have important and very visible connections from the very beginning of the popularity of both.

Stage as the World: Early Modern English Theater This book’s focus on drama stems from a recognition of the importance of both London and the plays performed there in formulating new concepts and depictions regarding the new people, lands, and ideas that English subjects encountered, whether in actuality or in print or other entertainments. The early modern theater as a growing commercial enterprise also echoes the increasing geography market of roughly the same period. Jean Howard asserts that [b]y 1600 London was the anchor of a rapidly expanding national market and the chief port through which the nation took part in overseas trade with Europe, with the Levant, and—later in the seventeenth century— with the Americas. These economic and social developments had a direct impact on the cultural life of London, specifically on the public theater that was one of the chief entertainment institutions to emerge from this period of spectacular demographic, economic, and social change.37

Moreover, this theater ‘was important in shaping how people of the period conceptualized or made sense of this fast-changing urban milieu’.38 Howard argues for this importance of drama, and the London theater in particular, in her work elsewhere, stating that ‘[t]he theater […] was an institution where various social groups mingled – men, women, citizens, ambassadors from abroad, apprentices, country gentlemen in town for the law term […]’.39 This 36 Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, p. 35. See also especially pp. 70-80. 37 Howard, Theater of a City, pp. 1-2. 38 Ibid., p. 2. 39 Howard, ‘Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre’, p. 309.

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genre not only provided new methods for seeing the world, but it did so to a large and varied audience, making it, again along with the growing field and market of geography, one of the most widely ‘used’ literary products of London in the time period. The two male authors featured in this book, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Heywood, undoubtedly participated directly in the London popular theater, and I would further argue that such wide-reaching genres as drama and geography had discernible effects beyond the public stage, examined here in the works of Elizabeth Cary and Margaret Cavendish. Cary turns to the specifically didactic genre of Senecan drama (and, later, a dramatic rendering of historical narrative) and its associations with imperial Rome in order to explore the implications of a colonial geography for conceptions of female identity. Cavendish, more directly influenced by the popular theater for which even her own husband wrote, nevertheless uniquely combines this interest in performance with the multiple geographic images and products she encountered during her exile in the Low Countries in order to postulate new ideas concerning the role of women in the life of the, first, only anticipated and then newly restored English kingdom. All four authors are chosen, then, for their work in the genre of drama, and this literary form is highlighted for both its pervasive presence in the lives of London’s inhabitants and visitors and for the city’s economic and cultural prominence within England itself and the world at large.

Geography and Genealogy: Mapping Spaces and Families As noted earlier, the literal translation of the word geography is, David Riggs points out, ‘world-writing’. 40 While Riggs uses this term in reference to the character Tamburlaine’s ability to create an empire in his own name, this book will employ the term much more broadly, both in the sense of writing about the world as well as writing upon the world – that is, as a way of inscribing a particular reality on one’s surroundings and identity through the medium of geography. This definition is also indebted to the concept of geography that D. K. Smith espouses in The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: the introduction calls upon critics ‘to recognize that altering the way the world looks, alters the way that people look at the 40 Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, p. 164. Riggs uses what he calls the literal meaning of the word in order to make a point about Tamburlaine as creator, rhetorically as well as militarily, of his new kingdom.

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world’.41 The authors examined in this book participated in writings that not only produced altered perceptions of the world, but also of their characters’ and those characters’ perception of their own places in that world. Jerry Brotton describes the relationship among writers, maps, and the world as an ‘exceptional act of symbiotic alchemy’. Brotton explains how ‘World’ is a man-made social idea. It refers to the complete physical space of the planet but can also mean a collection of ideas and beliefs that constitute a cultural or individual ‘world-view’ […] A world view gives rise to a world map; but the world map in turn defines its culture’s view of the world. 42

Thus, maps could reflect a certain worldview or ideology (Elizabeth is England and vice versa), and that worldview could then alter the perspective of any spectator of the map. And part of the early modern ‘worldview’ that appears in maps and atlases of the period is the one, discussed above, that equates women with territory that could be explored, mapped, conquered, controlled, and utilized, as well as positing territory as a woman waiting for exploration and ownership. While the new worldview offered by Elizabeth and her government could confer authority on the queen regnant and perhaps alter a spectator’s view on women and power, early modern women would still function as cyphers for a multitude of more conventional ideas that contributed to early modern worldviews involving English expansion and men’s honor. The idea that women, especially within families, constituted important symbolic functions is not a new one. Gayle Rubin, drawing on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, asserts that ‘kinship systems [e.g. marriages] do not merely exchange women. They exchange sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people – men, women, and children – in concrete systems of social relationships’.43 Further, these exchanged women can also be symbols of alliances, conquests, wealth, and land itself. Early modern women, especially those of the upper classes, thus occupy important, albeit ostensibly silent and passive, positions within the framework of political power and territorial expansion both at home and abroad. Theodora Jankowski agrees that early modern women who married 41 Smith, The Cartographic Imagination, p. 1. 42 Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, p. 6. 43 Rubin, ‘The Traff ic in Women’, p. 544. Similarly, Amy Louise Erickson writes that early modern marriage ideology served as justification for continued male control of women. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England, p. 100.

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men in political power were, as Rubin also asserts, considered the physical embodiment of the link between men of allying families or nations. But Jankowski also describes the ways in which wives or potential brides could destabilize this system by instigating ‘unauthorized sexual intercourse’, thereby introducing at least the threat that a husband’s property and prestige would be inherited by children not of his bloodline. 44 Perhaps nowhere are these anxieties more vividly portrayed on the early modern stage than in Thomas Middleton’s and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622). Alsemero suspects his bride Beatrice-Joanna is lying about her virginity and eventually feels compelled to test her: ‘Push, modesty’s shrine is set in yonder forehead. / I cannot be too sure though’ (4.2.126-127). He then subjects her to a test, using various potions he keeps for that purpose in his cabinet. Beatrice-Joanna, anxious that her non-virginal status will be brought to light, has already searched his cabinet, worrying, ‘If that [liquid] should be apply’d, what would become of me? / Belike he has a strong faith of my purity, / That never yet made proof; but this he calls / [Reading] “A merry slight but true experiment”’ (4.1.42-44). 45 That both Alsemero and Beatrice-Joanna, with little prompting, become concerned about the status of her virginity illustrates an extreme form of the preoccupation with policing a woman’s bodily borders.46 The ensuing tragedy after the revelation of Beatrice-Joanna’s coerced intercourse with the murderer she hired confirms the calamity associated with and supposed to follow upon a woman’s illegitimate use of her body. Thus, a woman’s (non-) adherence to her virginity and chastity could be a potentially powerful force, able to disrupt the important lineages of a patriarchal system in which, Jankowski argues, any woman [a]s a wife, […] most likely served to secure some sort of business agreement between her father and her husband. If she was an upper-class or noble woman, the marriage negotiations involved large amounts of money and property. Yet even if she were a lower-class woman, an exchange of dowry was still part of the transaction. 47 44 Jankowski, Women in Power, p. 24. 45 Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama. 46 In addition, the fact that Alsemero travels with a book and cabinet that features experiments to determine pregnancy and virginity reveals his anxiety about women even before his friend Jasperino informs him about the suspicions surrounding Beatrice-Joanna. For another example, see Lemke Sanford’s examination of the question of Imogen’s virginity in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, as well as the play’s use of the language of discovery and mapping in order to determine the status of Imogen’s sexuality (Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory, pp. 59-74). 47 Jankowski, Women in Power, p. 31.

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I do not intend to argue that every woman’s marriage in the early modern period was arranged in this way; indeed, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford point out that lower-class women were often responsible for their own nuptial arrangements. 48 But I am especially interested in how marital arrangements, particularly those of the aristocratic and prosperous merchant classes, could and often did concern political alliances and economic ventures. These wives, then, contained symbolically within their bodies the joined wealth, property, and political power of the two families. As such, they became a focal point of a matrix – indeed, a map of familial and political ties, with these wives and mothers often able to tap into that network as an important component of it. Despite recognizing the potential for instability, Jankowski argues that women often became ‘trapped within the web of these conflicting social discourses’; Rubin also claims that within such a system, ‘women are in no position to realize the benefits of their circulation’.49 I contend that, for early modern women, their very position is one of those benefits, particularly for the women themselves. Occupying the prominent sites in the formation of familial and political alliances, women represented a potentially destabilizing force should they choose to disrupt the framework of familial alliances and empire. As such, women, their bodies, and the writings by and about them formed a crucial but potentially unstable foundation for the rhetoric that shaped England and the identity of its subjects, both male and female, in the early modern period. And visual representation of the framework of a family’s history and alliances became more widespread in the sixteenth century during what Daniel Woolf calls ‘the “craze” for genealogies and pedigrees’. Woolf specifies that how ‘[t]his was really a brief phase of intense pursuit of the official legitimation of lineage, with a much longer period of genealogical interest’.50 As with maps, the shape and function of these genealogical items changed over time, with an initially somewhat limited use by those of the upper classes to underscore their prestige, to their appropriation by the emerging ‘middling sort’ to denote not so much the renown of their ancestors, but their newfound ability to record and display their family history. Similar to geographical products, the rolls and other genealogical products become status symbols that aid the owner in constructing an identity and a context which supports that identity. And, as evidenced by this created context, 48 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 121-123. 49 Jankowski, Women in Power, p. 49; Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, p. 543. 50 Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, p. 105.

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genealogies share with maps and atlases another important element: Woolf emphasizes that ‘heraldic and genealogical materials, like other forms of the past in early modern England, were socially circulating commodities, continuously in a process of revision, not a set of static historical “facts”’.51 As with maps, we should not expect a linear progression of increasing rigorous accuracy in genealogies from the Middle Ages moving forward; rather, those creating or directing the production of family lineages would have chosen what connections to emphasize or omit, including more fantastical ones like Arthur or Biblical elders. As Woolf reminds us, however, these genealogies need not be taken literally; such inclusions highlight how connections could be used to make more ideological points, as examples of combined maps and genealogies featured in this book will later demonstrate. And once again, just as with geography, early modern women from history and literature navigated a complex relationship with genealogy. While women were not the primary focus or even beneficiaries of these genealogical products, nevertheless they could still alter their role in within this discourse, as they do with family and geography. Woolf explains how [g]enealogical pursuits also provided a means for women to counteract the anomaly in the English legal system that acknowledged them as kin for purposes of inheritance, but overlooked them in written records of descents, which stressed the male line. Consequently, women were not infrequently the principal source of basic information about lands, estates, and buildings whose histories had been complicated through marriage and alienation.52

Despite being officially ‘overlooked’ in genealogical documents, Woolf demonstrates how these women could still use the discourse in order to remap themselves onto a lineage as they contributed to the formal documents to construct their own sense of family and history; in fact, as Woolf describes above, these women would often eventually impact the official discourse in geographical, specifically chorographical ways, providing information about real estate inheritance that could alter ownership. But Woolf also explains how these genealogical activities could be used to alter women’s sense of themselves: ‘For many women, genealogical pursuits were less a matter of amassing superfluous erudition than of constructing a personal historical domain by applying imagination and feeling to documentary 51 Ibid., p. 121. 52 Ibid., p. 117.

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and material evidence’.53 Interestingly, Woolf’s language implies further connections to geography and identity formation, as these women ‘construct’ an identity likened to a physical space that they occupy and control. These combinations of discourses of lineage, place, and person appear in the literary works examined in this book. As with so much else in the time period, Elizabeth and those associated with legitimizing her rule provide initial examples of how a woman could use or being associated with nominally masculine representations of power in order to shape an authoritative persona. In addition to emphasizing her connection to her father Henry VIII, Elizabeth also features in genealogical products. Sara Trevisan explores Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll of 1558/60, most likely an elaborate gift from a knight and eventually successful Elizabethan politician.54 Brudenell, as a Catholic subject at the start of a Protestant queen’s reign, wished to show both his loyalty to her and his sense of her authority. Trevisan remarks of the inclusion of Biblical figures in Elizabeth’s family tree that, ‘[a]s in fifteenth-century rolls, the queen’s genealogical connection to biblical rulers highlighted the divinely sanctioned royal legitimacy she shared with them’ while also linking her to their wisdom and reminding the queen of her duty to her people.55 Trevisan admits that genealogies were also employed in arguments from Parliament for the queen to marry and produce heirs, but as detailed earlier, Elizabeth also manipulated potential marital and thus political alliances through her extended courtships done ostensibly at the behest of a concerned Parliament. To return to the Pedigree Roll, this artifact still mapped out ways that Elizabeth could chart her legitimacy and power through both ancestors and putative descendants; the roll thus becomes a kind of map to power. And these genealogical ‘maps’ and the discourses associated with them would have been intelligible to both Elizabeth and her subjects. The latter would have experienced the pedigree ‘craze’ even if just through the activities of others. Similar to maps of the period, genealogies thus also became increasingly circulated and accessible commodities associated with Elizabeth; Trevisan describes how ‘[a]ccording to the Elizabethan New Year’s Gift rolls, manuscript books of arms and pedigrees were often donated to the queen, which suggests her interest in such material’.56 Elizabeth’s and her councilors’ sponsorship of the Saxton atlas indicates they saw ideological 53 Ibid.. 54 Trevisan, ‘Genealogy and Royal Representation’, pp. 257-275. 55 Ibid., p. 263. 56 Ibid., p. 271.

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importance for Elizabeth’s authority in the project; courtiers’ recognition and response to Elizabeth’s apparent interest in genealogical products implies that Elizabeth would have understood those items’ potential for identity formation. Trevisan writes of the Brudenell Roll that the ‘purpose was not simply to exalt the prestigious origins of a unique monarch, but to visualize, celebrate, and encourage Elizabeth I’s active role in the genealogical and political continuity of the English royal line’.57 Genealogy, like geography, can therefore be understood in the early modern period as ideologically malleable and accessible to men and women seeking new ways to formulate identity. Taking genealogy – even potential family connections and progeny – as a kind of map, this book also examines how female figures – initially but not always aristocratic – could reposition themselves within that web of family ties and connections to territory, often engaging in ‘world-writing’ to reshape their identities and circumstances. As briefly touched upon above, Elizabeth offers the most prominent example, with the queen often parlaying her royal body, as representative of England and her father’s dynasty, into a negotiating tool in the European marriage market of the early modern period. To return to her 1593 speech, Elizabeth, although well past marriageable and childbearing age, still takes rhetorical advantage of stereotypical constructions of early modern women – in this case, their timidity as well as their protective maternal natures – in order to explain partially her hesitance at making overt imperial claims. Just as she transforms the potentially repressive urge to marry and bear children, Elizabeth transforms a potentially negative feminine attribute into a persuasive strategy. The example of Queen Elizabeth employing the numerous roles available to her through the personae of potential and figurative wife and mother is arguably one of the most well known. But since, as Jankowski asserts, ‘the family was still very much a social and public institution’ during the early modern period, the body of any marriageable woman, especially those of the upper class, could convey the property, lineage, and legitimacy of her family and thus substantiate that family’s claim to political power.58 Therefore, any woman’s body was, in a sense, a physical map to power: her bodily integrity represented the family’s political and economic power, which would be conveyed legitimately through her chaste body, protected by her family before possessed by her husband. But that expected journey from maid to wife could be detoured or altered by the woman herself. 57 Ibid., p. 275. 58 Jankowski, Women in Power, p. 39.

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The drama of the period reflects this ideology, as playwrights too were recognizing strategies of female empowerment through women’s uses of the potential for their bodies in marriage. In the mid-1580s, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy features Bel-Imperia, a member of the Spanish royal family, who succeeds in avenging her murdered lover by feigning interest in marrying the Portuguese nobleman guilty of the crime. To demonstrate the subversive power of queens and aristocratic women, the f irst two chapters in this book examine the ways in which the women featured in The Tragedie of Dido and Tamburlaine by Marlowe and those in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II could draw upon those family connections. Their resistance is made even more profound by also utilizing the rhetorical ties between territory and early modern women’s bodies that geography underscored; their potent combination of these tropes affords them their own potentially subversive and political power. Even after what Lawrence Stone famously refers to as the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ and the growing economic and political power of the merchant or ‘middling’ classes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the discourses pertaining to virginity remained prevalent.59 As Susanne Scholz explains, ‘in a time of increasingly capitalist economic structures a woman’s virginity was becoming of value on the marriage market, while her chastity when married made sure that property was handed down the male line’.60 In addition, Scholz argues, ‘The female body emerged in various cultural discourses as a particular, porous, and penetrable entity that must be rigidly policed in order to contain its potential subversiveness’.61 Indeed, since the wealth these men of the middling classes created through commerce was not limited by the boundaries of real estate, and all children could stand to inherit some part of their father’s goods, the patriarch must always be assured of the legitimacy of his children by constant control of his wife’s body. Perhaps more significantly, the chastity of a wife could often be used as a reflection of a husband’s honor and integrity. Just as aristocratic women brought to a marriage the legitimacy and thus power of their family, so any woman of chaste reputation could impart a new sense of honorable and legitimizing integrity to her husband’s business, social, and political standing. 59 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. 60 Scholz, Body Narratives, p. 83. Scholz also notes, ‘This preoccupation with drawing and fortifying boundaries took place on various levels of early modern English society, and it surfaces in the pictorial representations of Queen and nation’ (10). Scholz’s work on the discourses surrounding Ireland as an Othered female body also illustrates these points. 61 Scholz, Body Narratives, p. 10.

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This shift from the aristocratic female body to any virgin as a potentially valuable object is akin to maps becoming consumer products in and of themselves that could accord status to any man, as opposed to their initial primary use by sovereigns to help establish symbolic control over actual territory or plan defensive works or buildings that would eventually manifest themselves on the land represented. This book’s last two chapters examine the plays of Thomas Heywood – in particular If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, Part 2 and The Fair Maid of the West – as well as Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo by Margaret Cavendish to demonstrate the tension resulting from both men and women attempting to tap into the power of female bodies as a kind of map and how women could become imaginative geographers of their own bodies. Wherever these writers place their women characters in terms of their geographic powers, ultimately, these four authors in particular have been selected for how they used geography as world-writing, employing the discourse to map out new possibilities and new worlds for English men and women. In this work, the writers were like their fellow countrymen and women in embracing and using the ‘new’ study of geography, as John Dee, early modern polymath, describes in his preface to The Elements of Geometrie. He writes: Of this [geographic] Art how great pleasure, and how manifolde commodities do come unto us, daily and hourely: of most men, is perceaved. While, some, to beautifie their Halls, Parlers, Chambers, Galeries, Studies, or Libraries with: other some, for thinges past, as battels fought, earthquakes, heavenly fyrings, & such occurentes, in histories mentioned: therby lively, as it were, to vewe the place, the region adjoining, the distance from us: and such other circumstances. Some other, presently to vewe the large dominion of the Turke: the wide Empire of the Muschovite: and the litle morsel of ground, where Christendome (by profession) is certainly knowen. Litle, I say, in respecte of the rest.&c. Some, either for their own jorneyes directing into farre landes: or to understand of other men’s travailes. To conclude, some, for one purpose: and some, for an other, liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth, Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.62

While some use maps and globes for decoration, for history, for culture, and others to view, to travel, to comprehend, the playwrights in this book use geography to write new worlds and identities. All of these authors question and often subvert dominant ideologies of status and gender as they work towards different ways of seeing identity through these relatively ‘new’ ways 62 Dee, ‘The mathematicall praeface’, p. a.iiir.

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of seeing the world that geography presented. And these new ways of seeing are formed and reshaped by the writers and characters examined in this book. They both were mapped and mapped themselves into this dynamic and fluid discourse of writer, mapmaker, world-writer. ‘World-writing’ features as a continual thread throughout the works examined in this book as these playwrights, male and female alike, manipulate the literal and figurative borders of their realities to create their striking female characters.

Works Cited Albano, Caterina. ‘Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy’. In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 89-106. Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 2001. Appelbaum, Robert. ‘Anti-geography’. Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2 / Special Issue 3 (September 1998): 12.1-17. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/04-2/appeanti.htm>. Bouzrara, Nancy and Tom Conley. ‘Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France’. In The History of Cartography Vol. 3: Cartography in the Renaissance, Part 1. Edited by David Woodward, 427-437. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Brotton, Jerry. A History of the World in Twelve Maps. London: Penguin Books, 2013. Buisseret, David. ‘Spanish Peninsular Cartography’. In The History of Cartography, Vol. 3: Cartography in the Renaissance, Part 1. Edited by David Woodward, 10691094. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Cachey, Jr., Theodore. ‘Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy’. In History of Cartography, Vol. 3: Cartography in the Renaissance, Part 1. Edited by David Woodward, 450-460. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Edited by Kate Lilley. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Conley, Tom. The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France. Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendell. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Dee, John. The mathematicall praeface to the elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung, by H. Billingsley, citizen of London. […]. With a very fruitfull praeface made by M. I. Dee. [London, 1570]. Edwards, Jess. ‘How to Read an Early Modern Map: Between the Particular and the General, the Material and the Abstract, Words and Mathematics’. Early Modern

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Literary Studies 9.1 (May 2003): 6.1-58 . Eggert, Katherine. Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Erickson, Amy Louise. Women and Property in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1993. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Haklyut, Richard. Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. Edited by Jack Beeching. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Press, 1972. Harvey, P.D.A. Maps in Tudor England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Helgerson, Richard. ‘The folly of maps and modernity’. In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 241-262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Howard, Jean E. ‘Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage’. Modern Language Quarterly 64:3 (2003): 299-322. ———. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Jankowski, Theodora. Women in Power in Early Modern Drama. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Kagan, Richard L. and Benjamin Schmidt. ‘Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography’. In The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 1. Edited by David Woodward, 661-679. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992. Henri Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lemke Sanford, Rhonda. Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place. New York: Palgrave, 2002. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Mendelson, Sara and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Milanesi, Marcia. ‘1561: Guesses About the Furthest Frontiers of the World’. In The Map Book. Edited by Peter Barber, 108-111. New York: Walker and Company, 2005.

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Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley. The Changeling. In English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. Edited by David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, 1593-1657. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002. Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Newton, Judith and Deborah Rosenfelt. ‘Introduction: Toward a Materialist-Feminist Criticism’. In Feminist Criticism and Social Change. Edited by Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, xv-xxxix. New York: Methuen, 1985. Pelletier, Monique. ‘National and Regional Mapping in France to About 1650’. The History of Cartography Vol. 3: Cartography in the Renaissance, Part 2. Edited by David Woodward, 1480-1503. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004. Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex’. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 533-560. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Scholz, Susanne. Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Short, John Rennie. The World Through Maps: A History of Cartography. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2003. Skelton, R.A. Saxton’s Survey of England and Wales: With a Facsimiles of Saxton’s Wall-Maps of 1583. Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1974. Smith, D.K. The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh, and Marvell. Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2008. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Suzuki, Mihoko. Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2003. Trevisan, Sara. ‘Genealogy and Royal Representation: Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll for Elizabeth I (1558-60)’. Huntington Library Quarterly Vol. 81, No. 2 (Summer 2018): 257-275. Turner, Henry S. ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520-1688’. In The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 1. Edited by David Woodward, 412-426. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Woolf, Daniel. The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

1.

Confuting Those Blind Geographers Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body Abstract Marlowe draws on the ‘new geography’ to create powerful if ultimately tragic queens in Dido, Queene of Carthage and the two parts of Tamburlaine. Emphasizing her positive connections to her kingdom in order to strengthen her right to rule, Dido also appropriates the allegorical female figures found in the frontispieces to geographic texts, placing her suitors in the role of passive symbols of territory that she controls. Tamburlaine stresses his eventual queen Zenocrate’s associations with the land to bolster his military conquests, but his need to produce heirs provides the queen with the genealogical space to disrupt his cruel legacy. With his dramatic queens, Marlowe applies lessons from the strategic courtships of Elizabeth I he witnessed. Keywords: Dido, Queene of Carthage, early modern atlas, Tamburlaine, Zenocrate, Queen Elizabeth I, early modern marriage.

In his consideration of Christopher Marlowe’s life and work, David Riggs concludes that the playwright’s first popular play and its eponymous main character result from a growing interest in the changing study of world boundaries. Explaining that ‘Tamburlaine reaped the benefits of Marlowe’s MA work in cosmography’, Riggs demonstrates how the Scythian general’s desire to redraw the world-map through conquest is directly related to the evolving university curriculum that Marlowe would have studied at Cambridge; cosmography, a branch of study that combined history and geography, had supplanted music in the traditional courses of study.1 Moreo1 Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, pp. 160 and 164. I have found that the terms cosmography and geography are often used interchangeably, in both early modern and contemporary writings. In this project, I consider the scope of geography to cover writing about the world, from the global to the local and all areas in between. Cosmography is a wider field, incorporating maps of the heavens as well as places on earth.

Pilhuj, K., Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463722018/ch01

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ver, exploration of the lands of the New World, impending war with Spain, and encroachment into Western Europe by the Ottoman Empire meant that maps, atlases, and other products of cartography reached beyond the university lecture hall. As Jean Howard notes, ‘We now know how thoroughly chorography, cartography, and geography more generally engaged the attention of early modern England’.2 Within these new discourses of map-making, Tamburlaine as conqueror, asserts Riggs, is also transforming the idea and purpose of maps. In Part One’s oft-quoted speech, the general declares: 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, Calling the provinces, cities, and towns After my name and thine, Zenocrate. Here at Damascus will I make the point That shall begin the perpendicular. (4.4.78-85)3

As Riggs also points out, Tamburlaine here means to subvert the familiar medieval T-O map, with Jerusalem at the center and the east situated at the ‘top’ of the map. But Tamburlaine centers the map on Damascus, rather than Jerusalem, and he will rename regions after himself and Zenocrate. However, in conjunction with Riggs, I suggest that Tamburlaine is not completely reinventing the concept of geography; rather, the erstwhile shepherd is using the same functions of maps that had persisted since the Middle Ages. As touched on in the introduction, maps in the early modern period were never limited to a purely scientific rendering of the world. Depictions of the physical landscape in the medieval and early modern periods were manifestations of cultural knowledge and beliefs. Alongside the development of what Rhonda Lemke Sanford calls a ‘mania’ for maps that took hold of English men and women as they began learning to ‘think cartographically’ about more available, portable maps and their lives, the medieval function of maps as a kind of cultural encyclopedia, conveying various religious and cultural ideologies, persisted.4 The most wellknown type of medieval cartography is the mappa mundi, which represented contemporary ideas of the world and its relation to the Christian god. 2 Howard, ‘Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage’, p. 311. 3 All quotations from Marlowe are taken from Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, eds. Romany and Lindsey. 4 Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory, p. 3.

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With new surveying techniques and a growing bureaucratic use for rulers’ dreams of conquest, geography began in the early modern era to move from more religious objectives to secular ones. Universities were at the forefront of this ‘cartographic thinking’, incorporating geography into their curriculum. For example, all Oxford undergraduates of the late sixteenth century had to purchase John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis of 1588.5 The commentary on Aristotle features a striking portrait of Elizabeth I presiding over spheres of Majesty, Prudence, Immovable Justice and others, in imitation of the classical spheres (Fig. 7). Her head and shoulders appear above the spheres; visually, this map of political qualities seems to take the place of and be her body. As with the Saxton atlas and Ditchley portrait, Elizabeth’s body is now associated with aspects of good government, which are mapped as her body on the verso of the title page. This conf iguration of Elizabeth’s body in geographical texts and products influenced Elizabethan playwrights who wished to depict other unconventional rulers at a time when geographical products became more widespread and familiar and hence a useful language for playwrights to use to communicate ideas to audiences. P.D.A. Harvey charts the rise in surviving maps from the first half of the sixteenth century to the latter half, proposing that ‘[m]ore and more people discovered what a map was and appreciated how useful it could be in ever more varied circumstances’.6 What Marlowe finds useful and calls attention to in Tamburlaine is a kind of world-writing that takes place not so much on a piece of parchment as it does specifically on the body of the princess Zenocrate. But Zenocrate is only one example; Marlowe’s considerations of queens, their bodies, and their political power began with his character Dido, from The Tragedie of Dido, Queene of Carthage. First in Dido and then in Zenocrate, Marlowe’s queens become metonyms for maps that represent not just territory, but the power derived from that geography.

Dismembering Dido: Power in the Body of the Queen Dido, Queene of Carthage makes a pointed statement about the power and danger inherent in a single queen bestowing her body at will. Likely performed some time in the late 1580s at a private indoor theater or at court, the play demonstrates how Dido initially uses her own physical form and 5 Barber, ‘England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps’, p. 77. 6 Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, p. 15.

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Fig. 7:  Frontispiece, John Case, Sphaera Civitatis [The Sphere of State] (Oxford, 1588). Newberry Library, Chicago (Special Collections Case J 0. 148).

its symbolism to define the borders of her kingdom and to map her own power.7 Dido rewrites herself as representative of her own city and growing 7 Martin Wiggins proposes a composition date after Tamburlaine, sometime in 1588, and performed by children’s companies. Dido is often listed as earlier than Tamburlaine, Part One, and certainly before Part Two, so I examine Dido first. Wiggins also raises the question of how

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empire, making her body into an icon of Carthage itself. Her methods for ensuring her city’s integrity and strength through her own body anticipate Tamburlaine’s geographic methods and also point to the iconography in the margins and on the frontispieces of early modern maps. In a strategy that mimics Elizabeth’s emphasis on her connection to and power derived from the English landscape and her family’s lineage, Dido as queen draws a map that would place her body and her city at the center of a historical, political, and mythical topography. Through her use of the iconography of maps and her own body, the queen of Carthage positions her numerous suitors, as well as the Trojan refugees, to function as the supporting framework to her atlas of female power. Marlowe acknowledges the force of an imperial rhetoric grounded on maps, family, and the female body – even when employed solely by a female ruler – and signals his understanding of the similar courtships of Queen Elizabeth during the 1570s and 1580s. Although ultimately unsuccessful at the play’s conclusion, Dido nonetheless demonstrates how a queen regnant could remap the borders of her own body and thus her political power. Marlowe first draws from the trope of territory as a woman’s body and vice versa, most strikingly demonstrated on atlas title pages and frontispieces that his audiences would become increasingly familiar with over the course of his lifetime and beyond. Many of the most well-known geographic products, from Abraham Ortelius’ 1570 atlas to Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Blaviana of 1662 and numerous examples in between, used female figures to represent the continents and their supposed characteristics. Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first atlas ever published, features Europe enthroned at the top of the arch, with scepter in hand and orb nearby to emphasize her hierarchical position over the other continents (Fig. 8). The lower left figure is Asia, who holds a censer from which clouds of incense emerge, denoting that continent’s associations with ‘oriental mystery’.8 To her right is Africa, clothed from the waist to knees only, with the sun behind her head meant to explain her dark skin. Seated at the bottom is a naked America, holding a much of the play to accord to Thomas Nashe, asserting that more credit must be given to Nashe as co-author. Due to the prevalent themes of geography in both Dido and the two Tamburlaine plays, I discuss them all as primarily the work of Marlowe while recognizing Nashe would have contributed some scenes to Dido. Wiggins, ‘When Did Marlowe Write Dido’, pp. 521-541. Finally, H.J. Oliver argues for only minimal Nashe involvement and a pre-Tamburlaine Dido with early performances. See The Revels Plays, pp. xxvi-xxx. 8 For this explanation of the Asia figure and more interpretations of the Ortelius frontispiece’s images, see Shirley, Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons, p. 46. Ortelius’ frontispiece is also accompanied by a poem, written by an alderman of Bruges, which explains much of the art’s symbolism.

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Fig. 8: Title page, Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (G1006. T5 1570b Vault fol).

severed head and spear, with arrows and a bow under her legs. The various states of dress and accompanying props are an important indicator of each continent’s level of civilization, with the nude America, accompanied only by weapons and a further sign of savagery in the severed head, standing

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in direct contrast with the fully clothed Europe, surrounded by symbols of learning, Christianity, agriculture, and political power. The last figure on the frontispiece is a bust of a woman sitting to the right of America. Only breasts, shoulders, and head represent the theoretical southern continent of Magellanica, supposedly sighted but unexplored. Her incomplete portrait matches the incomplete knowledge of the land she represents; the bust of Magellanica makes vivid the idea of virgin territory: just as a maiden’s naked body would be unknown until (theoretically) her wedding night, so Magellanica’s body has not been mapped onto the frontispiece for the (presumably) male viewer. Rodney Shirley notes that Ortelius ‘was one of the first to depict the known continents in female form’,9 and John Gillies writes that these figures on fronts and in margins of maps were, from Ortelius onward, ‘programmatic’.10 These allegorical figures in the frontispieces thus became heavily entrenched in geographic texts: the frontispiece to Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Volume V, from 1596/7, with bird’s-eye views of the world’s cities, offers another early example of female figures who denote territory. On a central platform stand, from left to right, Europe, Asia, America, and Africa, again in decreasing states of undress from the fully clothed Europe, with props similar to those accompanying the figures in the Ortelius frontispiece. Braun and Hogenberg’s frontispiece adds to every continent but Europe a representative animal (rhinoceros for Asia, crocodile for America, and camel for Africa)11 that again underscores those continents’ supposed relative lack of refined civilization; the animals and, perhaps, the supposedly more bestial urges and interests of those continents, lurk just behind the figures. These continental allegories were not confined to frontispieces; the margins of Petrus Plancius’ map entitled ‘Orbis terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus’ (Fig. 9) features similar figures and animals placed around the world map, also with accompanying animals and each continents’ associated flora. On Plancius’ map, America has been divided into the figures of Mexicana and Peruana, they both still retain their near-nakedness and weapons. It is ‘Magallanica’ who has changed the most: she is now a fully realized and clothed figure reclining on an elephant. While the presence of clothes may indicate a hope (or guess) that the new continent could contain a civilization 9 Shirley, p. 46. 10 Gillies, Geography of Difference, p. 159. For a discussion of these frontispiece f igures as dramatic characters, see pp. 74-75. 11 As identified in Shirley, Courtiers and Cannibals, p. 56.

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Fig. 9: Petrus Plancius, ‘Orbis terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus’ (Amsterdam, 1599). National Library of Australia (NLA MAP RM 144).

more akin to Europe’s, the covered and thus hidden body of the figure can also reflect the hidden nature of this as yet completely unexplored (and largely theoretical) continent, in contrast to Mexicana and Peruana, whose bodies, and the coasts and interiors of the land they represent, are being actively uncovered by explorers and cartographers. The texts associated with increasing exploration during this time period underscored the objectified role of the female; the work of Margarita Zamora and Louis Montrose in particular has detailed how gender played a pivotal role in shaping early modern European ways of viewing and depicting the world; in particular, Montrose examines ‘some instances of the gendering of the New World as feminine, and the sexualizing of its exploration, conquest, and settlement’, most strikingly in the c. 1580 engraving by Johannes Stradanus (Jan Van der Straet) showing the explorer Amerigo Vespucci encountering a naked and potentially savage female called America (Fig. 10).12 For the producers of these atlases, their world-writing creates an ideology that promulgates the idea that any territory is a young and beautiful woman, with some, because of their wildness, needing more control and conquest than others. The Dido 12 Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’, p. 2; see also Zamora, ‘Abreast of Columbus’, pp. 127-149.

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Fig. 10:  Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, ‘Discovery of America: Vespucci Landing in America’ (c. 1587-89) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Estate of James Hazen Hyde, 1959.

of the play, however, subverts these conventional trope and instead writes the world in a way that benefits her rule. Marlowe’s Dido has been employing world-writing strategies for some time, in this case before the opening of the play. The playwright relates the familiar story associated with the founding of Carthage when he has the queen’s erstwhile suitor Iarbus inform the audience of her past mapping and her rejection of suitors. He says that upon her arrival in Africa, Dido, […] straying in our borders up and down, She craved a hide of ground to build a town, With whom we did divide both laws and land And all the fruits that plenty else sends forth, Scorning our loves and royal marriage-rites, Yields up her beauty to a stranger’s bed. (4.2.12-17)

Iarbus’ speech recalls the story of how Dido first obtained her kingdom: she tells Iarbus and the other rulers that she will only take for herself the land that can be encompassed by a bull hide. With their assent, she then cuts the hide into thin long strips and is thus able to claim a large territory through a clever tactic that remaps the African coast to her advantage. Marlowe’s

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Dido, then, allows the playwright to demonstrate the rhetorical power of the queen of Carthage and, ultimately, any ruling female. The instrument that Dido uses to map out her new territory is especially significant: by using the hide of a bull, Dido appropriates for her own use a potent symbol of masculine virility, thereby imbuing her actions with physical strength combined with a male ethos of power, ultimately redeploying conventionally masculine symbols like maps as well as the bull. Given early modern political theory disparaging women rulers, queens regnant like Dido would need to perform undertakings like that with the bull hide which in a sense redefine reality. In clever and visual ways could these women then demonstrate their legitimacy and authority against a prevailing ideology that positioned the man as ruler, father, king. Theodora Jankowski explains that the patriarchal family became the paradigm of the patriarchal state in which the monarch assumed the role of father and ruler. This idea that the monarch is father to his people means that the civil government reinforces the family structure as well as the religious hierarchy in order to create a society which, at all levels, looks toward a male figure as the one who holds supreme power.13

Given that a father was a ruler, and a king became figured as a father, a woman ruler would be anomalous. Jankowski writes that marrying the woman to ‘an acceptable consort’ and allowing her to focus on producing an heir usually solved the anomaly. But regarding a woman continuing to rule in her own right, Jankowski argues that the female sovereign faced unique challenges. First and foremost, ‘she was placed in the position of having to create her own pattern of rule, to rewrite the rules regarding the uses of power to suit her own ideas and political situations’.14 Given this reality, Dido’s creation of a kingdom from a bull hide is emblematic of the sleight of hand to which queens regnant needed to resort in order to rewrite reality and legitimize their rule. In this configuration, Dido subverts the convention of the typically male cartographer who subjects both territory and the female body to his gaze. Ultimately, in order to ‘suit’ her own ‘political situations’, Marlowe’s Dido will, like the historical Elizabeth, also reconfigure other early modern discourses involving the male gaze and the female body: those of courtship 13 Jankowski, Women in Power, p. 55. 14 Ibid., p. 60.

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and Petrarchan love poetry. She shows to Aeneas and his group portraits of her past suitors adorning the walls of her palace: ‘See where the pictures of my suiters hang, / And are not these as faire as faire may be?’ (3.1.138-139). These figures of men become, then, like the figures in the frontispieces and supporting framework of the maps mentioned above: they represent other lands, for most are foreign princes, that Dido has subjected to her will. These men are the reposed and presumably pining figures on the margins of her map. She displays these portraits of her failed suitors, which hang like war trophies in her palace halls, transforming the men’s bodies – really, the representation of those bodies – into a prized collection and thus reversing the sexualized objectification of the female beloved typical of Renaissance love lyrics.15 Dido also takes advantage of another objectifying trope connecting the female body to territory by emphasizing her body’s connection with Carthage but publicly asserting her control over both and ensuring bodily and thus territorial integrity. Although she will entertain and then reject the prospect of a marriage, she will do so in a way that enhances her chastity and thus her kingdom’s integrity. When she sends her suitor Iarbus away, she tells him, Iarbus, know that thou of all my wooers (and yet have I had many mightier Kings) Has had the greatest favors I could give: I fear me Dido hath been counted light, In being too familiar with Iarbus: Albeit the gods doe know no wanton thought Had ever residence in Dido’s breast. (3.1.11-17)

Later in the same scene, Dido syntactically links herself with Carthage, telling Iarbus, ‘Depart from Carthage! Come not in my sight!’ (3.1.44) in a burst of authoritative anger. Although the audience knows that the queen sends Iarbus away to focus her attentions freely on Aeneas, publicly and rhetorically, Dido implicitly links her concern for her chaste reputation with the political health of the realm – and indicates her awareness that others do so, too. She is quick to reinscribe herself with feminine chastity; thus, she emphasizes her integrity as a sign of her control over her kingdom’s borders and indicates her ability to dictate those boundaries by sending Iarbus away. 15 The Trojans in their marveling over these portraits confirm her words and also demonstrate that her suitors are important men that hail from around the world: one was present in Menelaus’ hall; one attended the Olympic games; and another traveled from Persia. Aeneas recognizes none of them, but confirms that they are kings.

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Dido’s multiple conf igurations of her power exemplify Jankowski’s assertion that an early modern queen often needed to reconfigure early modern political precepts. We see Dido doing just that, using her duty to marry and to produce an heir as a reason to be courted and thus entertain potential alliances. Her power stems not from actual conquest but from the metaphorical victory (through rejection) over her many suitors, who become through their portraits acquired objets d’art meant not only to demonstrate Dido’s desirability, but, more importantly, to signal her political power. The portraits can be read in much the same way as the maps that Elizabeth and her councilors displayed at their palaces and residences: as representations of territory over which the queen had power. That a rejection during a royal courtship was also very much a political affront is indicated, for example, by the French Duke of Alençon’s reluctance to expose his potential weaknesses by courting (and most likely being rejected by) Elizabeth on English soil. Likewise, Dido views the appearance of Aeneas, a Trojan prince, at her court as presenting an opportunity for a potentially advantageous courtship that showcases her power. Marlowe reveals how even before Dido meets Aeneas, the queen of Carthage has already begun appropriating Trojan iconography into her rule. Like the ancient Romans and other Renaissance writers, Marlowe has Dido and the other characters in his play look to Troy as a lost paragon of culture and civilization that lent weight to any other society that claimed connection to the fallen city. Near Carthage’s edges, the shipwrecked Aeneas and his crew encounter statuary meant to represent Priam and his royal house. Gazing upon the stone figures, Aeneas immediately rewrites Carthage as his Trojan home: ‘Methinks that town there should be Troy, yon Ida’s hill, / There Xanthus’ stream, because here’s Priamus’ (2.1.7-8). Here, the figures that exist on Carthage’s margins serve as the iconographic marginalia in contemporary maps that were meant to convey important information about the geographical space that they bordered. Aeneas reads the cartographic markers on the edge of the city as indicating another Troy on the coast of Africa. Aeneas becomes enraptured by the statues, still insisting to his companion, ‘Achates, though mine eyes say this is stone, / Yet thinks my mind that this is Priamus’ (2.1.24-25). He only accepts the city’s true name after his son and then his mother, Venus, insist upon the original Troy’s irrevocable fall. While Aeneas reads this border iconography as evoking his fallen city, Dido’s use of space and symbols is calculated to convey her own power. In contrast to Virgil’s version, Marlowe’s Dido does not include murals of Troy in the more centrally located temple of Juno, the city’s tutelary goddess. Rather, the Trojans view the figures from their past on the edges of the city,

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where encountering a maiden hunting (as they do Venus) is not surprising. Through these statues, Dido has literally and figuratively pushed Troy to the margins. The fallen city’s story is present in the margins of Dido’s city, just as Carthage itself assumes a position of preeminence in the Mediterranean with Troy’s demise. Here, the story and ideas of Troy serve as important but marginal adornments to the now more powerful Carthage. However, although visual aspects of Troy have been relegated to the periphery, the city’s legacy still figures prominently in Dido’s treatment of Aeneas. From their very first meeting, Dido places Aeneas closer to her, constructing a symbolic tableau that allows her to appropriate Aeneas’ and thus Troy’s legacy of authority and power. Even before Dido becomes Cupid’s unwitting victim, she commands that Aeneas ‘sit in Dido’s place’, already visually configuring him as her equal (2.1.91). Though she continually emphasizes the unchanging (Trojan and noble) aspects of his identity (‘Aeneas is Aeneas, were he clad / In weeds as bad as ever Irus ware’ [2.1.8485]), Aeneas balks at such treatment: ‘This place beseems me not, O pardon me’ (2.1.94). Dido, however, insists that Aeneas not only sit by her, but also don the symbolically significant clothes of her late husband. The queen emphasizes Aeneas’ royal lineage, reminding both him and her court of his status and its accompanying prestige, but nevertheless commanding Aeneas after his thanks to her ‘in all humility’ to ‘Remember who thou art. Speak like thyself; / Humility belongs to common grooms’ (2.1.99-101). These scenes where Dido publicly showcases Aeneas’ nobility, her proximity to that nobility, and most importantly, her ability to control this tableau all anticipate Tamburlaine’s strategy of making a visual spectacle of familial and noble lineages by displaying Zenocrate. Like Tamburlaine, Dido maps out these familial and geographical links herself, emphasizing her connection to Troy and the house of Priam through Aeneas.16 This early scene continually reiterates Dido’s power to reconfigure Aeneas as a potential match for her, as well as a source of authority that she controls. When Aeneas tells her that relating the story of Troy is too painful, Dido demands, ‘What, faints Aeneas to remember Troy? / In whose defence he fought so valiantly: / Look up and speak’ (2.1.118-120). This exhortation reminds Aeneas to speak like a soldier in order to be one. Her insistence that 16 Emily Bartels also notes that this focus on Aeneas’ origins is a political one as well. See ‘The Double Vision of the East’, pp. 3-24. Bartels elsewhere agrees that Dido deploys Aeneas as a spectacle that enhances her power, as she continually figures their relationship in political terms. Spectacles of Strangeness’, pp. 50-51. In addition to enhancing her prestige, Dido also rewrites her own foreign origin to strengthen her connection to Carthage, as also noted in Gibbs, ‘Marlowe’s Politic Women’, p. 171.

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he tell of his kingdom’s fall also subtly reminds Aeneas of his powerlessness; he is without a kingdom and at his host queen’s mercy. Dido, a few lines earlier, had more gently reminded him of her power to elevate his status when she tells him, ‘Lies it in Dido’s hands to make thee blest, / Then be assured thou art not miserable’ (2.1.103-104). Dido subverts the expected gender hierarchy by repeatedly highlighting her superior position in relation to the now-landless Aeneas. Once her interest in Aeneas has been cemented by Cupid’s intervention, Dido asserts her power over Aeneas through the use of geography: that of her land and her own body, as well as that of Aeneas. When describing her infatuation with Aeneas, the Carthaginian queen figures the Trojan prince’s body as a space made for her exclusive use: O dull conceited Dido, that till now Didst never think Aeneas beautiful: But now, for quittance of this oversight, Ile make me bracelets of his golden hair; His glistering eyes shall be my looking glass, His lips an altar, where I’ll offer up As many kisses as the Sea hath sands. In stead of music I will hear him speak, His looks shall be my only Library. (3.1.81-89)

Dido here transforms Aeneas’ body into what Garrett Sullivan, Jr. calls ‘affective spaces’, those locations imbued with significance by those that occupy or are connected to them, a combination of bodily and terrestrial space.17 He writes of two different geographies: those of the world, and others that are affective, or local. Sullivan describes these affective geographies as being ‘of the household [,] a physical site that functions as an important ground for the identity of a character who perceives himself [sic] as being in some way connected to that site and/or the social relations that emerge on or around it’. I extend his definition of ‘affective’ to include the bodies that inhabit those households and other locales, as Dido and other Marlovian characters employ the spaces through which the characters move and/or are moved in clearly symbolic and often geographically inflected ways; moreover, these bodies themselves often become affective spaces. In the above speech, Dido lists and demarcates Aeneas’ body parts and their uses in association with domestic spaces. In this way, she also subverts the 17 Sullivan, Jr., ‘Geography and Identity in Marlowe’, p. 236.

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conventional use of the blazon (where a female body is dismembered and objectified) to objectify Aeneas’ male body.18 In terms of the English blazon, Jonathan Sawday succinctly states that it ‘divided the female body to celebrate its partitioned exploration as a geographical entity. This organism could be “discovered” […] and then subjected to an economy of trade, commerce and mercantile distribution’.19 Caterina Albano agrees in her discussion of geography’s ‘gendered spaces’, claiming that ‘[j]ust as anatomical tables gender the body only in illustrating the female reproductive system, so cartography selects an image of femininity which can be conquered, subdued and handed over’. 20 The male geographer, poet, and spectator can thus occupy a position of authority and control over female territory, body, and person. Dido here dramatically reverses the roles of geographer, poet, and spectator: she now occupies these more active subject positions. Moreover, she further upends the convention by making Aeneas’ separate parts not only into objects, but also, more subversively, into often specifically feminine tools and spaces that she can use. Dido employs his eyes and hair as a mirror and bracelets, rendering Aeneas into feminized accessories for her use; additionally, she casts the remaining images as potentially more public and civic in nature (an altar, a library), once again emphasizing her role as queen. Moreover, this ‘map’ of Aeneas corresponds to actual maps and their evolving purposes during the early modern period and points to Dido’s courtship as conquest; Dido’s blazon details the physical ways in which Aeneas’ body will be divided and the resources that will come from these ‘regions’ that Dido controls. Nick de Somogyi describes the new study of military science in the early modern period, and how success in war was more than ever grounded in a careful inventory and study of the boundaries and characteristics of the territory to be conquered. 21 With the new science of maps being used by the government just across the river from the theaters, Dido’s catalog of Aeneas’ virtues becomes imbued with similar military import. Her mapping of Aeneas combines both conventionally feminine and masculine qualities to establish her as a powerful leader through world-writing. 18 For the blazon and its rhetorical effects, see Vickers, ‘Diana Described’, pp. 95-108. 19 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned’, p. 198. I refer also to Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, who assert, ‘In cosmographical thought the world has always been imagined in terms of the human body, and the conceptual identity between cartographers and anatomists is one of the founding tropes of mapping’. Gordon and Klein, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 20 Albano, ‘Visible Bodies’, p. 101. 21 De Somogyi, ‘Marlowe’s Maps of War’, pp. 102-103.

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Dido also demonstrates political power by naming Aeneas king, displaying him as such, and punishing any who may object. When Aeneas says he will stay, she decrees for him to ride ‘As Dido’s husband through the Punic streets, / And will my guard with Mauritanian darts, / To wait upon him as their sovereign lord’ (4.4.67-69). She further emphasizes her ability to use her husband as a manifestation of her own political power, declaring: Those that dislike what Dido gives in charge, Command my guard to slay for their offence: Shall vulgar peasants storm at what I do? The ground is mine that gives them sustenance, The air wherein they breathe, the water, fire, All that they have, their lands, their goods, their lives, And I the Goddess of all these, command Aeneas ride as Carthaginian King. (4.4.71-78)

Despite her rhetorical appropriation of divine powers, the very foundation of Dido’s power truly lies in the territory that she gained, according to tradition, by her own cleverness rather than by inheritance. This speech re-establishes her as a ruler of that territory, here described as an all-encompassing kingdom that includes the air itself. Dido’s continued blazons of her territorial assets serve as visual inventories and signs of her power. With her exclusive and absolute control of the land, demonstrated by her knowledgeable mapping and assertion of all that is hers, Dido combines her marriageable body with the territory that body would convey to a husband. Her physical body and royal lands together form the foundation of her power, which she constantly emphasizes in her speeches like the one above and that enable her to choose Aeneas as her king. But Aeneas will eventually use these same rhetorical strategies against Dido, objectifying her body as territory and leading to the destruction of both. For example, he also deploys the blazon to transform Dido into a purely physical monster: Yet Dido casts her eyes like anchors out To stay my fleet from loosing forth the bay. “Come back, come back!” I hear her cry afar, “And let me link thy body to my lips, That, tied together by the striving tongues, We may as one sail into Italy. (4.3.25-30)

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Aeneas describes Dido in terms of grotesque body parts that reach out like the mythical Scylla in order to devour sailors. The ridiculous images that Aeneas describes – Dido tosses her eyeballs out to sea; she wants their ‘striving’ tongues tied together – serve to undermine her power by turning her body into the kind of monstrous creatures that would inhabit the corners of the new atlases as well as the medieval mappae mundi. In addition, the linked lips and tongues of the last three lines represent highly sexualized imagery, suggesting that Aeneas’ justifications for leaving stem from an attempt to depict Dido as overtly and sexually aggressive, even masculine, in her desire to control him. However, Aeneas’ graphic excoriation of Dido’s transgressive actions still reveals a woman with the potential to ensnare the Trojan, thus indicating the queen’s potent, if rather disturbing, agency. But Aeneas now takes up the rhetorical position of the mapmaker as well as the objectifying gaze, and the two rulers become engaged in a battle of competing geographies and lineages. While only a few scenes before, Aeneas was content to build a new city named for his father, he now dismisses the Carthaginian queen as body parts that weigh him down. Aeneas prefers to seek out Italy, a place that he alone can conquer and chart. In Italy, too, he will find a female body available for his sole possession, upon which he can impose his own Trojan legacy, rather than have another ruler use that authority to her own advantage, as Dido seeks to do. But Dido upon her funeral pyre in the last act still reveals the power of her body, since she is still able to create her own Carthaginian heir whom she will birth from her very ashes: Grant, though the traitors land in Italy, They may be still tormented with unrest, And from mine ashes let a Conqueror rise, That may revenge this treason to a Queen, By plowing up his Countries with the Sword. (5.1.304-308)

This statement is both powerful and true: Aeneas and his men meet with much war and death in the Aeneid, and history would bring Carthaginian Hannibal to Rome’s door. The speech is also significant because Dido describes Aeneas’ betrayal in political terms, emphasizing her power as queen to lay the charge of treason and mete out punishment. She also reverses the image of the woman as fertile territory to be cultivated and sown, calling on her Conqueror instead to ‘plow up’ Rome with a sword. However, the audience would know that Carthage would ultimately be defeated and absorbed into the expanding Roman Empire. Ultimately, Dido herself and Carthage become pushed to the

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very margins that the queen initially reserved for Troy. For Rome, Dido would come to symbolize the threatening and exotic Other lurking at the boundaries of the empire; she would be resurrected in the threat of Cleopatra. Both are symbols of Roman conquest, but are still potentially dual in nature: from their marginal positions, both women are still able to threaten the Empire precisely because they are still a presence, even if lurking on its borders.22 Although the Romans would move Carthage to the margins of its ever-expanding map and legacy of conquest, Marlowe leaves the audience with a provocative portrait of Dido, with his play drawing from and subverting his source material in order to depict a woman who very powerfully remaps territory and her body to increase her power. This female map of power, which admittedly ends in defeat with a queen dying and no heir, may have proved too unsettling for the public late in Elizabeth’s reign.23 There is no record of a public performance beyond the title page’s reference to ‘the Children of her Majesties Chappell’. However, with Tamburlaine, Marlowe’s first commercial success, the playwright solves the problem of the frightening queen regnant by splitting her into two dramatic characters. Tamburlaine’s literary inheritance from Marlowe’s Dido is the political rhetoric that builds authority upon the foundation of the female body; however, to defend against the threatening potential of that body (which, like Dido’s, could function as a location of instability in an imperial project), Marlowe continues Aeneas’ dismemberment of Dido by infusing the power of her intact, heir-producing royal body into that of the princess Zenocrate, while Tamburlaine inherits Dido’s skilled geographic rhetoric. He will use both to legitimize his conquests. Matthew N. Proser also sees some parallels between the Carthaginian queen and the Scythian general, noting, ‘we see Marlowe’s aggressive spirit even in his earliest tragic figure, a female, Dido. The victimized Dido turns Tamburlainian at moments, and in such cases, her language augurs the cruelty and omnipotent clamor in the rhetoric of Marlowe’s rampaging Scythian’.24 However, I would argue that Tamburlaine becomes Didonian at times, inheriting her geographic mindset but in a ‘safer’ male character. Employing a similar strategy of world-writing by explicitly referring to geographic and female territory, Tamburlaine and, later, Zenocrate in her subversive use of her body, are both literary heirs to Dido. 22 The image of an avenger rising from Dido’s ashes is also reminiscent of the phoenix, the mythical bird reborn in its own ashes. The phoenix imagery also provides another connection to Elizabeth, who favored the mythical bird as one of her emblems. 23 Caro-Barnes argues that the play both praises Elizabeth as an unwed monarch and also warns what could have happened following a marriage with a foreign prince. ‘Marlowe’s Tribute to His Queen’, pp. 1-15. 24 Proser, The Gift of Fire, p. 72.

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Mapping Zenocrate and Outlining Authority in Tamburlaine, Part One Tamburlaine’s use of Zenocrate’s body proves to be the catalyst of his rise to power and the focus of my analysis of the two Tamburlaine plays. Because of the implications surrounding the female body as representation of familial status, lineage, and claims to territory, Marlowe has his main character, a Scythian shepherd without a drop of noble blood, use Zenocrate as his primary means to power. This princess’ body, symbolizing in its purity her family and their status, becomes the corporeal sign of Tamburlaine’s right to rule. He displays her just as he displays the color-coded banners that proclaim his siege plans, relying on the visual impact of her royal body. Just as the white banners signify Tamburlaine’s mercy to those cities that surrender without a fight, so Zenocrate’s body is visually coded by early modern cultural assumptions to signify both territory and Tamburlaine’s valid conquest thereof. The audience that watched Marlowe’s play would have understood the visual dramas that accompanied royal authority. Having been exposed to the ceremonies and progresses of Elizabeth and her court, playgoers would have expected to see Tamburlaine acting the part of the conqueror. What makes Tamburlaine exceptional is that the audience is now privy to the processes that contribute to ‘making’ a ruler. Marlowe explicitly details what Englishmen and women may have only known implicitly: that the spectacles, like geographic products, which surround royalty are not necessarily the manifestations of an innate power given only to those nobly born. Rather, Tamburlaine reveals how anyone, even a Scythian shepherd, can use symbols and performance as a part of conquest.25 Continually linked to both maps and Zenocrate, the performative nature of his authority would be further highlighted by the fact that Tamburlaine’s spectacles were being dramatically portrayed on the stage. To legitimate their sometimes tenuous claims to power, leaders like the base-born Tamburlaine or Elizabeth, who had formerly been declared illegitimate, would have to create a consistent and powerful persona to project to their subjects. For Elizabeth, that strategy culminated in spectacles like Saxton’s atlas and the Ditchley portrait. Marlowe has Tamburlaine use Zenocrate’s body to produce a noble identity 25 Sara Munson Deats concurs with this theatrical reading of Tamburlaine’s rise to power: ‘Lacking the imprimatur of royal or even aristocratic birth, Tamburlaine must legitimate his self-creation through the strategies available to him, many of which are highly theatrical’. Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe, p. 126.

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for himself and the corresponding reactions of obedience from his new subjects. He emphasizes the conventional attributes of the royal female body – vessel of legitimacy and bearer of heirs – as a key, fixed point on his metaphorical map of conquest. The other spectacles of Tamburlaine’s power – his geographical conquests – are explicitly tied to his impending physical possession and conquest of Zenocrate. As daughter to a sultan and a marriageable woman, Zenocrate already occupies an important political position. When the audience first sees Zenocrate, she is on her way to wed the prince of Arabia to forge an important political alliance between her father the sultan and the Arabian prince, while also providing for the latter a noble progenitor of his bloodline. Upon capturing her, Tamburlaine declares, ‘This fair face and heavenly hue / Must grace his bed that conquers Asia / And means to be a terror to the world’, the erstwhile shepherd lays claim to his means to power (1.2.36-38). Tamburlaine utilizes Zenocrate’s body as the foundation and eventual continuation of his empire and as emblem of his right to rule, just as the Arabian prince and her father have used the princess for their own political ends. He locates her literally in his bed and figuratively at the center of his claims to rule, creating them both as the Jerusalem (traditional focus of medieval ‘T-O’ maps) on his new world map. Just as Tamburlaine and Zenocrate’s father use her person as a connective piece in dynastic plans, Elizabeth as queen similarly deployed herself as a connection to a powerful familial past, particularly with references to her father in speeches and letters.26 That Elizabeth’s connection to her royal lineage was an important one in affirming her sovereignty is also seen in a map from 1594 (Fig. 11). While the map primarily features a relatively accurate rendering of England, Wales, and Ireland, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the right-hand side of the map by the large portrait of Elizabeth. Surrounded by vines that indicate her family tree, she is at the center of an encompassing lineage, taking up a quarter of the map and couched just against the eastern English coast. Thus, in this artifact, the map of her kingdom is visually connected with a chart of her family, with the latter ‘map’ giving her the right to rule England, Wales, and Ireland. However, unlike Zenocrate, who, in Marlowe’s play, is proffered by men as a potential connection to other 26 As an example, see the 1573 letter to the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland, where Elizabeth writes of her displeasure at a councilor’s action. She threatens, ‘If this had been in my father’s time […] you may soon conceive how it would have been taken’. The queen here is able to deploy a masculine threat under the guise of reference to her father. The line is also a reminder of the legitimacy bestowed upon her through her lineal descent from Henry. From Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 220.

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Fig. 11: Anonymous (after Jodocus Hondius), ‘Florentissimoru Regnorum Angliae et Hiberniae accurata descriptio’ (1594). Royal Geographic Society (with IBG). Shelfmark: mr British Isles Div.55.

families, the mapmaker pictures Elizabeth as an enclosed culmination of her family, protected by rather than offered through them, demonstrating the impenetrable integrity of Elizabeth. In this map’s case, as well as in the example of Zenocrate, the importance of lineage, itself often represented as a kind of map, is conveyed visually. Zenocrate represents her family’s nobility and legitimacy, as well as any land or territory that helped confer elite status. As such, sexual conquest could be described in terms of territorial acquisition and vice versa. As written above, the new maps being produced during latter half of the sixteenth century, and which Marlowe would have encountered in his university studies, present territory and especially the New World as a female body, often nude and lying open to the conventionally male gaze. Even before the appearance of those figures in the maps of Plancius or the frontispiece of Ortelius’ atlas, female bodies were explicitly linked to territory. Some sixty years earlier, during Henry VIII’s trial to determine the illegitimacy of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, courtiers presented evidence that the Queen’s first marriage to Prince Arthur had indeed been consummated by relating that the late prince had declared the morning after his wedding

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night that he had ‘been in the midst of Spain’ the previous night.27 Similarly, in Marlowe’s play, beginning with the visual imagery that links Zenocrate in his bed with himself in Asia, Tamburlaine layers multiple meanings onto Zenocrate’s body: royal legitimacy, territory, and imperial conquest. As Gayle Rubin argues, brides become representatives of alliances between men.28 However, for Tamburlaine, Zenocrate represents not so much an alliance with any other man as she comes to symbolize his connection with the ideas of territory and thus nobility themselves. Marlowe continually links Zenocrate’s appearances on stage with speeches and spectacle that further her connection to land in general, which further help to legitimate Tamburlaine’s growing power. Joanna Gibbs, drawing partly on the ideas of Mark Thornton Burnett, similarly argues that her capture is ‘an act of appropriation or colonization’ that makes Zenocrate into a visual object where ‘Tamburlaine mark[s] out the extent of his empire’.29 While Gibbs (and, to an extent, Burnett) sees Zenocrate as an estheticized object rendered in artistic worshipful terms, I argue that Tamburlaine focuses on Zenocrate’s more physically tangible qualities: the sexuality Tamburlaine desires to control, the womb he seeks to sow, the family lineage he wishes to appropriate, and the land he wishes to possess, all to ultimately help garner political legitimacy as a shepherd-turned-king. Significantly, one of these most important connections between Zenocrate and land comes from the princess herself when she (arguably) chooses to ultimately ally herself with Tamburlaine. When Agydas, one of her entourage, questions Zenocrate on how she can tolerate her role as captive, she surprises him by praising Tamburlaine: ‘Ah, life and soul still hover in his breast / And leave my body senseless as the earth, / Or else unite you to his life and soul, / That I may live and die with Tamburlaine!’ (3.2.21-24). Here, Zenocrate views herself as potentially lifeless, fallow earth until she becomes fused with Tamburlaine’s life force. While Zenocrate’s speech explicitly links her body to a topography that will be renewed by her union with Tamburlaine’s soul, the passage also points implicitly to an equally important role for Zenocrate. Plowing and seeding the earth – bringing forth life in the form of crops – was used as a metaphor for conceiving and bearing children, most famously in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. His third sonnet provides a well-known example: the speaker asks his bachelor beloved, ‘For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?’ 27 Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII, p. 162. 28 Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, pp. 533-560. 29 Gibbs, ‘Marlowe’s Politic Women’, p. 172.

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(ll. 5-6).30 Zenocrate’s identification with the earth here anticipates the princess’ role as wife and mother. Through her, or more specifically through her body, Tamburlaine will not only establish his legitimate rule but also ensure its continuation through rightful heirs. Zenocrate’s body as carrier of noble legitimacy and Tamburlaine’s as the director of spectacular authority work together to make the Scythian shepherd’s campaign so successful. Here, Zenocrate herself seems to positively identify herself as fertile territory that requires Tamburlaine’s solar touch. And Tamburlaine is more than aware of Zenocrate’s worth as a symbol of literal and figurative territory. During her first appearance, Zenocrate’s kidnapping is a rape only in the sense of abduction. She is important as virgin territory, and Tamburlaine’s conquering strategy compels him to preserve and to proclaim Zenocrate’s integrity. The body of the princess represents the integrity of her family’s political rule; descended from the sultan, she is the continuation of his line and thus his power. By only kidnapping Zenocrate, Tamburlaine alone has access to her body, the integrity of which he preserves until he can secure her father’s blessing (albeit under duress) for their marriage. The Sultan and others misconstrue this aspect of Tamburlaine’s power. As the invading army marches to Damascus, the Sultan is anxious that Tamburlaine has ‘kept the fair Zenocrate so long / As concubine, I fear, to feed his lust’ (4.3.41-42). The Sultan, the Arabian prince, and their entourage fail to see what Tamburlaine has so adroitly perceived and utilized: for all their talk concerning the ‘revenge of fair Zenocrate’ (4.1.43), the Sultan and the prince are concerned for their own political and social honor, embodied in Zenocrate. Their continued power and legitimacy depend also on their ability to bestow Zenocrate’s body – in her father’s case – and lay sole claim to that same body – in the case of the Prince. While these two men assume that a ‘base’ shepherd like Tamburlaine would not have hesitated to fulfill his lustful appetites, Marlowe reveals the general’s understanding of the political importance of her intact maidenhead: Tamburlaine asserts to her father, ‘And for all blot of foul inchastity, / I record heaven, her heavenly self is clear’ (5.1.486-487). The Sultan declares that he is happy in defeat, since it seems that Tamburlaine ‘has with honour used Zenocrate’ (5.1.484). With himself a captive and his daughter’s former betrothed killed in battle, the Sultan has little choice but to acquiesce to the general’s staging of this marriage proposal. At the conclusion of Part One, the Sultan and the audience realize that Tamburlaine has established 30 All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition.

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Zenocrate not just as a sign of his sexual (and thus martial) virility, but that his sexual control of her virgin body represents control of territory and thus legitimacy. Tamburlaine himself calls attention to Zenocrate’s passive but still powerful position vis-à-vis his own sovereignty when he returns victorious from the battle. Rather than crown himself or have one of his generals or the defeated Bajazeth crown him, he calls on his betrothed to ‘take the Turkish crown from her, Zenocrate, / And crown me emperor of Africa’ (3.3.220221). Using Zenocrate and the crown of the conquered Bajazeth, the scene demonstrates the symbolic place of upper-class women especially in the early modern period, as passive vessels of status. By having Zenocrate crown him, Tamburlaine once again calls attention to the political legitimacy that he draws from the princess. Although Zenocrate is only able to take the crown from the empress because Tamburlaine has vanquished Bajazeth, the initial spur to Tamburlaine’s conquest was his opportunistic capture of the princess, a feat that owes its success to his military prowess and his ensuing use of her legitimating geographic symbolism. Tamburlaine’s power is here revealed to be self-perpetuating; his military victories and possession of Zenocrate are mutually reinforcing aspects of his political legitimacy. Tamburlaine further underscores the geographic or world-writing power he now possesses when, after his coronation, he makes the following speech in which he gives his imperial ambitions a geographic definition. He speaks a new world into being through mapping: So from the east to the furthest west Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm. The galleys and those pilling brigantines, That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf, And hover in the straits for Christians’ wrack, Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant Until the Persian fleet and men-of-war, Sailing along the oriental sea, Have fetched about the Indian continent, Even from Persepolis to Mexico, And thence unto the Straits of Jubalter, Where they shall meet and join their force in one, Keeping in awe the Bay of Portingale And all the ocean by the British shore. And by this means I’ll win the world at last. (3.3.246-260)

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While Tamburlaine will later speak of redrawing the medieval T-O map with his conquest of Damascus, here he charts the earth in circular form, as a globe. His speech describes the route of his conquering fleets and the lands they will vanquish, eventually meeting back where they began, encompassing the entire planet just as his arms encompass Zenocrate as his bride. This ‘new’ map corresponds to Tamburlaine’s route to power, one that combines military might with mapping – both of which began with the claiming of Zenocrate. This scene, itself located in the middle of the play, highlights Tamburlaine’s world-writing. He traces his power onto his own map of the world, a path that leads him back to his own geographical beginning; moreover, this map can be connected to the seizure, charting, and protection of Zenocrate’s body: combined with Tamburlaine’s martial conquests, the royal female body marks a place in the circular reasoning of the shepherd’s centripetal power to which he can also always return. Tamburlaine is indeed rewriting the world, through conquest and in the form of his verbal maps; he uses and subverts both the medieval and the more recent examples of geography. He also utilizes gender ideology when he appropriates the cultural associations of territory with the female body in order to draw authority from the land and family Zenocrate represents. In this strategy, he follows the earlier example of Dido; however, the use of this powerful world-writing is now placed in ‘rightful’ male hands, albeit low-born. In this play, Marlowe has detached the Carthaginian queen from the power of her world-changing, geographic rhetoric. The hyper-masculine Tamburlaine now appears the sole world-writer. But is he the only geographer in his plays? Since Tamburlaine dramatically appropriates the power of world-writing, it would seem that Marlowe, through Tamburlaine’s actions and speech, has relegated the princess to the traditional role of passive ‘vessel’ of royal authority, from which her husband derives power as a result of his sole access to her. But if Tamburlaine reveals the ideology behind empires to be self-constructed, he also opens up a possibility for Zenocrate to use the constructed nature of her position. Therefore, although Zenocrate would seem stripped of the power Dido possesses to depict and dispose of her own royal body, the princess in fact reclaims for her own use the very discourse of land, legitimacy, and body into which she has already been inscribed. Her identity, then, proves to be double: she can be both the enabler of and subversive force against Tamburlaine’s rule. Zenocrate at first seems to accept the role of passive territory that Tamburlaine assigns her, as demonstrated by her initial speech to her companion Agydas, in which she calls herself the earth that will be given life by the sun

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of Tamburlaine. Agydas implores his mistress to remember how terrible her captor has been just as Tamburlaine and his generals enter. Zenocrate sees Tamburlaine enter behind Agydas, prompting her to continue and elaborate the compliments she had earlier bestowed on Tamburlaine when he was not present. In response to Agydas she replies, As looks the sun through Nilus’ flowing streams, Or when the morning holds him in her arms, So looks my lordly love, fair Tamburlaine; His talk much sweeter than the Muses’ song They sung for honour ’gainst Pierides, Or when Minerva did with Neptune strive; And higher would I rear my estimate Than Juno, sister to the highest god, If I were matched with mighty Tamburlaine. (3.2.47-55)

This longer speech, more elaborately poetic than her first, emphasizes his power through topographical terms; Tamburlaine is the sun reflected in the earthly Nile. But, significantly, Zenocrate employs mythic terms as well: Tamburlaine’s speech surpasses the victorious Muses in their ‘battle’ with mortal daughters. The scene appears to point to Zenocrate’s acquiescence to Tamburlaine’s power; however, this speech is a performance for her just-arrived captor and demonstrates her own rhetorical power. While her mythological references overtly praise Tamburlaine, their subtle celebration of female power also indicates Zenocrate’s potential to wield control in her situation. As Zenocrate appropriates the same terms that Tamburlaine and others would use to subjugate her – the comparisons to land and worshipworthy yet passive goddesses – she also subtly provides examples of a mythical female’s triumph. Although Zenocrate claims that Tamburlaine’s talk is sweeter than that of the Muses, they – the mythological recorders of both heroes and gods – ultimately triumphed over the daughters of Pierus. In recalling the battle between Neptune and Minerva for the patronage of Athens, she implicitly reminds the audience of Minerva’s ultimate victory. Zenocrate thus calls attention to an instance when a female deity triumphs over a male one. Significantly, in this example, the prize is a city, the center of an ancient empire. What can be seen as a woman’s access to empire through domestic means (providing the necessities of home life in olive oil, wood, and food) links intriguingly with Zenocrate’s next example, which again praises Tamburlaine but subtly points to feminine power. In this final comparison, Zenocrate believes that she will be superior to Juno herself

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should she match with Tamburlaine. However, given the infamous battles between Jove and his consort as she frustrates his sexual conquests, the compliment is a dubious one. Instead of praising Tamburlaine, Zenocrate here could be contesting her husband’s power just as Juno did. This reference to one continually problematic woman puts the potential sexual relationship in a new, less harmonious light. These examples encourage an assessment of the captive Zenocrate as less subservient. This rhetorical strategy is one that will resurface in Zenocrate’s later speeches when she deploys a mythic discourse that finds subversion not in deities but in mortal women. As the play progresses, Zenocrate’s seemingly enthusiastic rendering of Tamburlaine is checked in the final act by his intention to brutally conquer her father’s stronghold in Damascus. When he threatens to hoist his black banners, signifying slaughter for all the inhabitants of the city, Zenocrate begs, ‘Yet would you have some pity for my sake, / Because it is my country’s, and my father’s’ (4.2.123-124). Tamburlaine replies simply: ‘Not for the world, Zenocrate, if I have sworn’ (125). Indeed, his occupation of Damascus is a key component to his conquest of the world. Through control of the city, Zenocrate’s father, and Zenocrate herself, Tamburlaine hopes to impart further legitimacy on his marriage to a sultan’s daughter and thus his entire bid for power. However, from her place within the web of power that connects families, wealth, and land, the noblewoman could withhold, redirect, or complicate the path of power that flowed through her body. Zenocrate has already begun to associate herself with women of classical mythology who exhibited disruptive power, allowing Marlowe to begin indicating her role as a principal element in Tamburlaine’s eventual downfall in the play’s sequel. Even in Part One, once Tamburlaine’s cruel razing of Damascus seems imminent, Zenocrate’s role in supporting Tamburlaine’s conquest becomes unstable. The general himself, before the siege, promises to make the riches of her home of Damascus comparable to the glory of ‘Jason [and] Colchis’ golden fleece’ (4.4.9). The allusion to the treasure of Colchis sought and won by the Argonauts is an ominous one, since the tale involves Medea, the princess of Colchis, who helps Jason to gain the fleece and to escape her father. Once married, Medea spectacularly brings about Jason’s downfall when he forsakes her and their children for a more politically advantageous marriage.31 The allusion to Medea also highlights another potentially danger31 Following Euripides’ play, Medea perverts her maternal power to give life by killing her two sons by Jason. She plays the obedient wife who submits to her husband in all things, even her own rejection, by sending his new bride a gift: a poisoned dress that kills the Corinthian

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ous aspect of Zenocrate: her foreign birth. Just as Medea’s power and thus threat stemmed partially from her position as a non-Greek, so Zenocrate, whose name calls attention to her foreignness, can also remain opaque and potentially menacing. Finally, at the conclusion of the play, Marlowe imparts Zenocrate’s character with further portentous foreboding. In addition to vivid evocations of Virgil’s Aeneid, Marlowe also has Tamburlaine compare Zenocrate once again to Juno. After sparing her father and his city, he talks of marriage, which ‘shall work [the soldiers’] rest’ (5.1.504). The speech, however, is fraught with ominous undertones. He says of his bride: As Juno, when the giants were suppressed, That darted mountains at her brother Jove, So looks my love, shadowing in her brows Triumphs and trophies for my victories; Or, as Latona’s daughter, bent to arms, Adding more courage to my conquering mind. (5.1.510-515)

While comparing Zenocrate to the spouse of a triumphant Jove creates the right aura of divine triumph, invoking the king of the gods and his wife Juno again recalls the many instances of marital strife between the two deities. By indicating, albeit obliquely, the numerous times that Juno frustrated Jove’s meddling with mortals, the passage becomes more negatively tinged; Zenocrate may be as lovely as Juno, but she may also prove to be just as troublesome; his line that she ‘shadow[s]’ in her brows his ‘triumphs and trophies’ provides sinister undertones, offering an image of victory that is not only presaged in Zenocrate’s face, but, in an alternate reading, darkened by her. Most telling of all might be Zenocrate’s own response to Tamburlaine’s assertion that he does not doubt that she will consent to marriage. Zenocrate gives the ambivalent answer, ‘Else should I much forget myself, my lord’ (5.1.500), quietly asserting that she will not forget her position in this network of power – nor, possibly, her own power to effect its ruin.32 princess. Medea’s knowledge of magic and the supernatural – she escapes in a chariot drawn by dragons – heightens her frightening image as an ‘Other’. While Jason’s union with her was at first politically and economically advantageous (he gains the fleece of Colchis and renown for his deeds), the power granted Medea by means of the marriage with the Greek Jason ultimately imparts on her the power to destroy that union and its consequent advantages (sons, wealth, power). 32 In addition to comparisons to Juno, Tamburlaine’s comparison of Zenocrate to ‘Latona’s daughter’ Diana also carries ominous undertones, as her jealously guarded virginity proves lethal to men like Actaeon who would dare to look upon her.

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This last scene also features examples of world-writing that will not escape the ominous tone that has pervaded so many of the lines in the conclusion. Tamburlaine’s declaration that his soldiers will ‘Hang up [their] weapons on Alcides’ post’ (5.1.528) would seem to be a reference to the traditional boundary of the known world, the pillars of Hercules that mark the Strait of Gibraltar. This geography, however, contradicts Tamburlaine’s earlier conception of his conquest. In Act Three, scene three, Tamburlaine specifically describes a round earth that includes even the Americas, and one that his ships will circumnavigate and claim before meeting again in the Mediterranean. The circular nature of this map also implies that the ‘circle’ of his conquest would remain unbroken in time and place. Yet, with his reference to Gibraltar as the physical stopping point where his men will hang their armor, Tamburlaine here seems to favor a more ancient and limiting map like the Hereford mappa mundi, perhaps one with the inscription Non plus ultra just to the left of the Pillars.33 With nothing beyond the Straits, Tamburlaine’s empire here seems smaller and finite. On this map there is an end literally within sight, and it is one that will be reached quickly in Marlowe’s Part Two. Though Tamburlaine partakes of and controls the world-writing in this play, his use of the older, classical map contrasts with his earlier calls for redrawing the world. His shift bespeaks a corresponding change from a globe with circular endlessness to a map demarcating finite space. While Tamburlaine initially marks his territory upon the world and the body of Zenocrate in maps of his own making, it is those very objects, imbued by Tamburlaine with political significance in empire-building, which will also contribute to the loss of his imperial territory.

‘Their Mother’s Looks’: Duality and Decline in Part Two At first, in Part Two, Zenocrate – even in death – seems only to underscore Tamburlaine’s imperial success. He first configures her death as a jealous Jove taking her to be his new queen, then responds to his loss in terms of marriage, mapping, and conquest, precepts that he has used throughout his rise to power. Once certain of her death, the general proclaims, What, is she dead? Techelles, draw thy sword, And wound the earth, that it may cleave in twain, And we descend into the infernal vaults To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair 33 See https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/mappa-mundi/.

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And throw them in the triple moat of hell For taking hence my fair Zenocrate. (2.4.96-101)

Qualities of Zenocrate that Tamburlaine has much admired and used are present in this death scene, particularly the close connection to land (wounded at her death) and her function as an impetus to conquest, depicted as a battle against the Fates themselves. This continued motivation to conquer, despite and even because of Zenocrate’s death, reminds the audience of his similar impetus from the princess in the first play. His military enterprise, begun with the taking of Zenocrate, will continue to the ends of the earth as a result of and for her royal presence. Even in her death, Tamburlaine carries out this strategy, even to the point of descending to hell to fight the ‘Fatal Sisters’. So powerful a symbol is Zenocrate that Tamburlaine still clings to her even in her death, both literally and figuratively, as an emblem of his legitimate and powerful rule over a wide swath of territory. He again makes Zenocrate’s connection to the land and to his own martial prowess very clear, seeking to keep at hand some physical representation of her even in death: her portrait will carry him into victory in battle, as Zenocrate, while living, did. Tamburlaine declares, At every town and castle I besiege Thou shalt be set upon thy royal tent, And when I meet an army in the field, Those looks will shed such influence in my camp As if Bellona, goddess of the war, Threw naked swords and sulphur balls of fire Upon the heads of all our enemies. (3.2.35-42)

Her physical presence in the form of the portrait now evokes Bellona, the goddess of war, employed to assert the Scythian general’s reign. Her representational power is still channeled by Tamburlaine into the acquisition of more territory, though he must alter its form as a result of her death. She will still accompany him, her picture gracing his tent and her hearse following his army. Zenocrate’s connection to land is further emphasized by Tamburlaine’s order that the town where she died be burnt to the ground. Before he sets out for more battle and conquest, Tamburlaine leaves behind this symbolically dead and bereft land as another indication of Zenocrate’s close link with territory. Though he will continue the conquering endeavors she initially catalyzed, the razing commemorates how Zenocrate’s body affects land even after death, as the land mirrors her now lifeless body.

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Described by Sara Munson Deats as ‘an immobile corpse’, Zenocrate becomes relegated to a marginal, albeit important supporting role in the framework of Tamburlaine’s map of conquests.34 As symbol of her husband’s martial power, Zenocrate here can be likened to Dido at the conclusion of her tragedy: both Aeneas and Tamburlaine reduce their partners to enshrined objects in the margins of their maps of conquests. These rhetorical moves serve to maintain the males’ central position in both the narrative and martial maps and also alleviate any threat of women’s power by transforming them into inert war trophies (Dido) and an untouchable demi-goddess (Zenocrate). In these plays, Marlowe’s heroes sap their female counterparts of much of their agency by attempting to render them as immobile and decorative as the female figures that grace the frames of the new atlases. This ability to deploy and then control the object of the gaze (and, significantly use that object militarily) can be found in one of the first geographical texts designed for mass consumption. William Cunningham’s 1559 The Cosmographical Glasse, conteinyng the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Navigation, expounding upon the many virtues of cosmography, uses language that equated sight with knowledge, and knowledge with power. The cover features male geographers like Ptolemy who, with their surveying tools, are placed above the female allegorical figures like Geometria, emphasizing the authority found in male mapping. Within, Cunningham praises his ideas of cosmography as possessing ‘ample use’ and ‘manifold benefites’. ‘For by her’, he exhorts, we are taught whiche way to conduct most safely our ooste [host], where to pitch oure tentes, where to winter: yea, and where most aptlye to encounter with them in the field. Which thing Alexander the mighty Conqueroure understanding, accustomed to have the Mappe and Carte of the Country, by his Cosmographers set out, with which he would warre. [And then he] Commaund[ed] it also to be hanged in open markets for men to behold.35

Cunningham reveals that men like Alexander, and later the ancient Romans, used charts to further their unprecedented conquests. Moreover, Alexander’s public placement of these maps not only educates his soldiers, but also serves as an expression of his authority as a knowledgeable general who can command the creation and display of visual signs of his empire. Cunningham 34 Munson Deats, ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris’, p. 150. 35 Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glasse, The Praeface, p. sig. A4r.

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also writes, ‘Vesputius Americus […] (by his knowledge in Cosmographie) found out America, the iiij parte of the world, (unknowne in all ages before our time) to the great benefites of all Europe’.36 The knowledge gained from looking at maps, argues Cunningham, has and will lead to the discovery and possession of real lands to the ‘benefit’ of European powers. Tamburlaine uses Zenocrate as a map to benefit himself, to plan his empire and then display its legitimacy and integrity while maintaining control (however much it later proves tenuous) over Zenocrate’s body and their issue. But Zenocrate, just before her death, is intent upon regaining control over her own body, emphasizing her mortal, transient nature and thereby undercutting Tamburlaine’s appropriation of her death and his continued reliance on her. She tells him, ‘I fare, my lord, as other empresses, / That, when this frail and transitory flesh / Hath sucked the measure of that vital air / That feeds the body with his dated health / Wanes with enforced and necessary change’ (2.4.42-46). Like Tamburlaine, she focuses upon her physical body; however, she strips that body of any of the abstract rhetorical qualities that Tamburlaine has attributed to it and instead focuses upon its limited earthly duration. The physical representation of power, land, and legitimacy upon which Tamburlaine has relied throughout the first part will soon be leaving him. In fact, Zenocrate insists on her passing, asking her husband, ‘But let me die, my love, yet let me die, / With love and patience let your true love die. / Your grief and fury hurts my second life’ (2.4.66-68). Her resistance to Tamburlaine’s wishes – that she, as he exhorts his wife earlier in the play, simply ‘sit up and rest [herself] like a lovely queen’ (1.1.16) – can be viewed both as an assertion of power over her own body and an indication of Tamburlaine’s loss of control. Despite his continued use of her body after death, Tamburlaine’s interactions with Zenocrate in the second part still raise the specters of decline and defeat that began to haunt the last scenes of Part One. Not just in geography but in genealogy does Zenocrate confound her husband. Early in Part Two, Tamburlaine describes his family: So, now she sits in pomp and majesty, When these my sons, more precious in mine eyes Than all the wealthy kingdoms I subdued, Placed by her side, look on their mother’s face. But yet methinks their looks are amorous, Not martial as the sons of Tamburlaine. (1.3.17-22) 36 Ibid., pp. sig. A5r-v.

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Although he praises his wife and children, his answer also strangely questions his sons’ legitimacy. Here, Marlowe immediately recalls the dual nature of Zenocrate and the potentially destabilizing role she can play through genealogy as well as geography: the roles of wife and mother to which she is relegated still have the subversive potential to disrupt the purposes to which they are traditionally assigned. The threat of a female body not under the husband’s control, resulting in sons not of the correct bloodline, was seen in the early modern period as a very real problem: Patricia Crawford summarizes that ‘[o]nly if men fully controlled their wives could they be confident that the children born within marriage were indeed their own’.37 That ‘control’ specifically had to be a sexual one, since ‘[a]t all social levels, a wife’s adultery reflected ill upon her husband: he had failed to sustain order in his family, and was defeated in the male competition to perpetuate his “bloodline”’.38 Anne McClintock makes a geographic connection, arguing that the male desire to name both ‘discovered’ territory and children demonstrates the anxiety associated with what she calls the ‘sexual doubling of origins’. ‘The father’, McClintock writes, ‘has no visible proof that the child is his; his gestative status is not guaranteed. The name, the patrimony, is a substitute for the missing guarantee of fatherhood; it is only the father’s name that marks the child as his’.39 The reliance on the power ascribed to naming can be seen in exploration and colonialism, as McClintock notes that Europeans continually (re)named the new geographical features they encountered in order to mark feminized territory as their own. In the control he (attempts to) exerts over his wife’s body in Part Two, Tamburlaine uses the same language that he has been employing since his first conquest: the rhetoric of sexually charged discovery and the accompanying proprietary role such language affords. They must be his sons since ‘I know they issued from thy womb, / That never looked on man but Tamburlaine’ (1.3.32-34). He describes his sons’ births as a kind of journey; he has seen them ‘issue’ forth from Zenocrate’s womb. In this line, he reveals that, in a fashion similar to the activities of William Cunningham and the readers of his Glasse, he has surveyed Zenocrate’s body, in particular her most intimate parts, since he has also witnessed the literal passage of his heirs through that body. In addition, he asserts that he is the only one with this visually derived knowledge of a passive body, for his wife has never looked upon, never charted, any other body herself; nor has she been charted 37 Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 117. 38 Ibid., p. 119. 39 McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 29.

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by another. Tamburlaine’s control of his wife through his gaze recalls the authorial power of a geographer or surveyor. His continual praise and use of Zenocrate’s appearance over two plays culminates in her presence as an actual object (a portrait) carried before his army, a ‘mappable object’ with no exploratory sight of her own. This use of the spectacle of exploration and mapping to def ine and control women’s bodies appears again very memorably in Shakespeare’s 1611 Cymbeline. Acting on a bet to test the fidelity of Posthumus’ wife Imogen, the villainous Jachimo sneaks into the lady’s bedchamber and surveys both her body and her room: To note the chamber, I will write all down: Such and such pictures; there the window; such The’adornment of her bed; the arras, figures, Why, such and such; and the contents o’the’story. Ah, but some natural notes about her body, Above ten thousand meaner moveables Would testify, t’enrich mine inventory. (2.2.24-30)40

He then makes careful note of a birthmark on her left breast. Furnished with a stolen bracelet, this ‘inventory’ or map of Imogen and her chamber convinces Posthumus that Jachimo has attained sexual access to his wife, and this belief drives much of the play’s subsequent action. For Posthumus and Jachimo, as for Tamburlaine and Cunningham, seeing is knowing, and knowing is akin to sexual knowledge. 41 The audience knows that Jachimo has not possessed Imogen in any sexual manner, but such is the power of his world-writing – of the authority inherent in map and map-maker – that Posthumus eventually accepts his seeing as knowing, and that knowing as confirming sexual possession. Also acting as a kind of surveyor, Tamburlaine continues to assert his power through his actual and visual possession of Zenocrate’s body. Upon being brought to her hearse, he declares, ‘Now, eyes, enjoy your latest benefit, / And when my soul hath virtue of your sight, / Pierce through the coffin and the sheet of gold / And glut your longings with a heaven of 40 Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. 41 Lemke Sanford discusses this use of mapping and spectacle at great length: Jachimo is a kind of mapmaker and traveler, who first accurately records and then embellishes the story of the territory he has visited. Despite her innocence, ‘Imogen is nevertheless punished’, Lemke Sanford argues, ‘for having been the subject of description’. Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory, p. 71. For the full discussion of Imogen, see pp. 59-74.

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joy’ (5.3.224-227). Even as his own death approaches in these final scenes, Tamburlaine relies on his male gaze, which, in turn, relies upon the discourse that often conflated the geographer-explorer with that of sexual conqueror. He commands his eyes to ‘pierce’ her coffin and ‘glut’ themselves on the joy contained therein. Once again, Zenocrate is the object to be seen, penetrated, and consumed. Tamburlaine’s eyes alone can feast and partake of this sight, piercing the coffin with preternatural power, emphasizing his controlling gaze and sole possession of the body that gave him legitimacy and land.

All in the Family? The End of Tamburlaine Popular early modern dramatic tradition supposedly calls for the bloody tyrant to experience an equally bloody and spectacular end, yet Tamburlaine is often remarked as notable for avoiding any punishment: he is only ‘stayed’ by feeling ‘distempered’ a few dozen lines after burning holy books (5.1.217). However, I argue that Tamburlaine does suffer a punishment that is very destructive to the general, especially given his preoccupation with power, legitimacy, and land. Though Zenocrate, without much protest, in Part One, functions as a useful tool for Tamburlaine’s empire building and his geographic rewriting, his reliance upon her, coupled with the play’s emphasis upon the duality of her position – as both the prize and, potentially, its cost – contribute to her husband’s downfall. She does seem aware that her body and its symbolism are needed by her captor/husband: Zenocrate arguably crafts her speech and actions as supportive to Tamburlaine’s ambitions and thus helpful to her as a captive with little choice and seeking better treatment. But in Part Two, she seems willing, even eager, to finally remove that symbolic body from view, while also passing on important parts of herself to her sons. Significantly, although Tamburlaine’s three sons seem to be undoubtedly his, they also inherit Zenocrate’s ‘softer’, more sympathetic nature, which causes her to lament the deaths of her enemies, to beg for her father’s life, to recoil at the slaughter of the virgins, and to long for Tamburlaine to cease warring. 42 Her traits, present in her sons, disrupt Tamburlaine’s dynastic hopes and his violent conquests, on which so much 42 Corinne S. Abbate similarly notes that, while Zenocrate is ‘an economically viable asset, powerfully connected to a political and social establishment to which Tamburlaine has no other legitimate access’, she also shows Tamburlaine a more ‘compassionate’ way to rule. While I agree that Zenocrate is more compassionate than her husband, her more sympathetic viewpoint is, rather than another method of ruling, a threat to Tamburlaine’s rule. ‘Zenocrate’, p. 19.

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of his identity as ruler rests. Tamburlaine’s lines in 1.3, noted above, hint at the potential threat Zenocrate’s adultery would entail: they don’t seem to have inherited his warlike abilities. His sons’ skill at dancing, courting, and preening make Tamburlaine ‘think them bastards, not my sons’ (1.1.32). Here, the general himself raises the possibility of Zenocrate’s dangerous subversive power that lay in a wife’s ability to produce children who were not her husband’s. As we have seen, Tamburlaine quickly asserts his control over her in visual terms: only he has ‘seen’ her body, and her eyes have never looked upon another man. However, his self-reassuring claims of possession over his wife’s body still indicate his anxiety about their offspring and thus his authority. And, of course, his sons do not need to be bastards to have inherited ‘troubling’ traits from their mother. Because, in addition to Tamburlaine’s doubts, Zenocrate counters her subjection by using her location in Tamburlaine’s genealogy. At the beginning of Part Two, Zenocrate seemingly reassures Tamburlaine of his sons’ parentage: ‘My gracious lord, they have their mother’s looks, / But when they list, their conquering father’s heart’ (1.1.35-36). While Zenocrate’s answer seems calculated to allay her husband’s anxieties, she in fact hearkens back to Part One, where her references to subversive wives pointed to her ability to be both legitimizing and destabilizing. Zenocrate raises the idea of a similarly dangerous duality in her sons: they may behave as Tamburlaine’s sons when – indeed, perhaps if – they so wish, but they are also their mother’s sons. And while they are the general’s legitimate heirs, they can also share in their mother’s supportive/destabilizing duality, one that will eventually come to be more harmful to Tamburlaine’s empire than sons of another man. Indeed, just following this exchange, when Calyphas expresses his preference to stay and attend his mother rather than to join his father and brothers in battle, Tamburlaine flies into a rage. Calyphas, in particular, seems to have inherited his mother’s more pacific nature, much to the anger of Tamburlaine. Just as he had expressed his wish to stay with his mother and away from battle, after her death he refuses to take part in his father’s test of his sons’ mettle. Upon stabbing himself, Tamburlaine orders them, ‘Come, boys, and with your fingers search my wound / And in my blood wash all your hands at once’ (3.2.127-128). While Calyphas recoils, the other two comply and demand wounds of their own. While this scene is indicative of Calyphas’ passivity, it also reveals Tamburlaine’s increasingly futile attempts to continue asserting his authority through geography and sexuality; he calls attention to how he brought the robe of the Afric potentate to the walls of Damascus before subduing the city (3.2.123-125), naming two points his empire encompasses before ordering

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his sons to partake in this pseudo-sexual penetration of his body and the wearing of his blood. However, although in this scene Tamburlaine still uses the language of discovery and sexuality – he orders his sons to ‘search’ his wounds, mimicking exploration as well as intercourse – the incestuous and ultimately fruitless nature of the act only serves to underscore Tamburlaine’s faltering authority over his and Zenocrate’s sons and his imperial legacy. Tamburlaine will eventually murder his own son in Act Four, scene one, when Calyphas tries to avoid battle by remaining in his tent. This son has clearly failed him; yet, the two remaining do so as well, though not in so obvious a fashion. While on his deathbed, Tamburlaine once again calls for a map to determine what Amyras, his successor, shall conquer: ‘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’ (5.3.123-125). However, the map in actuality provides more of a review of Tamburlaine’s conquests, with only a few seemingly pointless and impossible tasks left for his sons, like cutting a channel for easier access to India, and sailing to the Antipodes as well as the Antarctic Pole. The scene, instead of providing a glimpse into a successful dynasty, reveals how the sons of Tamburlaine have nothing left to do but attempt to retain their father’s territory: there is nowhere left to map. Indeed, Tamburlaine clearly indicates Amyras’ inferiority when he informs his eldest, ‘The nature of thy chariot will not bear / A guide of baser temper than myself’, so Amyras will have to conduct his conquest by ‘piecemeal’ (5.3.242-243, 240). Tamburlaine’s language here also recalls the story of the doomed Phaeton, who was unable to drive his father’s sun chariot and so perished, again indicating the ultimate failure of Tamburlaine’s dynastic empire through the very individuals – Zenocrate and her sons – used to propagate his rule. Even Tamburlaine’s efforts to counteract this impending doom illustrate its seeming inevitability. He insists to his sons, ‘My flesh, divided in your precious shapes, / Shall still retain my spirit though I die’ (5.3.172-173). But Tamburlaine’s legacy is represented here as too diffuse, split among his remaining sons. Their inferiority is further compounded by their inheritance of their mother’s ‘softer’ emotions. Amyras’ very name, so similar to the ‘amorousness’ that Tamburlaine fears is in his sons’ looks, does not speak well for the continuation of Tamburlaine’s martial legacy. For all his admonitions to his son to follow duty, his orders will now likely have little to no effect, a reality revealed by his decree earlier in the scene to ‘[s]trike the drums, and, in revenge of this [illness], / Come, let us charge our spears and pierce his breast / Whose shoulders bear the axis of this world, / That if I perish, heaven and earth may fade’ (5.3.57-60). His final attempts at world-writing

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fall flat – the earth will continue to exist despite his order to attack the mythical Atlas – and demonstrate once again that his geographic rhetoric is just that, only words that constituted much of his power. Marlowe’s plays employ a particular type of world-writing that reveals the need for women’s bodies in a geographic map of power, but also the instability of that method when those women refuse to be pinned to one location. Marlowe’s singular explorations of these women, which ultimately point to their problematic (for men) agency, is underscored by an examination of the similar plays that Tamburlaine’s popularity spawned during the last years of the 1580s and the first few of the 1590s. While these plays also featured foreign and ruthless men seizing power, they do so without recourse to a female figure like Zenocrate. This absence does not negate the power that Zenocrate or Dido possess; rather, it reveals just how much inspiration Marlowe drew from another problematic – and real – female ruler, Queen Elizabeth. According to Daniel Vitkus, the Tamburlaine plays were staged in the winter of 1587-1588. 43 Two later plays of the period directly reference Tamburlaine and serve as revealing comparisons: Alphonsus, King of Aragon (c. 1588) and Selimus (printed 1594), both attributed primarily to Robert Greene, who sets out to specifically imitate the successful Tamburlaine plays in his Alphonsus. The titular character and his father have been dispossessed of their rightful throne of Aragon, so they do have that noble blood that Tamburlaine lacks. However, Alphonsus also starts from nothing, and he first allies himself to other soldiers and kings, whom he then betrays and usurps, much as Tamburlaine does in his climb to power. However, as a prince reclaiming his throne, he has no need to create a new map of power through the body of a royal princess; he only takes a royal bride after his conquest is done. The use of Iphigenia to solidify his claim and strengthen his position reveals, again, the important political symbolic power women’s bodies could have, but she is an additional metaphorical means to secure the throne and only used as such at the very end of the drama, as opposed to the central and early role that Zenocrate plays. Indeed, although the play specifically imitates and even names Tamburlaine (‘[…] remember with yourselves / What foes we have; not mighty Tamburlaine […]’ [4.3; p. 58; no line numbers]), Alphonsus, King of Arragon seems beholden to an earlier, less dynamic form of world-writing. Three characters at different times refer to ‘the triple world’ (1.1, 3.3, 5.1; pgs. 13, 43, 62). 44 This formulation consistently 43 Three Turk Plays, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus, p. 18. 44 All Alphonsus quotations are from Greene, The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon, The Mermaid Series, pp. 2-76. All are in-text.

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hearkens back to the medieval T-O map, making the geography of this play more traditional and perhaps less innovative than that employed by Marlowe through Tamburlaine. The other play that owes much to Tamburlaine in subject and plot yet still highlights the former’s unique world-writing is that of Greene’s Selimus, whose titular character usurps the throne from his father. Indeed, just as with Alphonsus, the characters reference Tamburlaine, in this case comparing his conquests to those of Selimus; the latter compares as the worse conqueror, as he overthrows his own father. While also following a less conventional path to power, Selimus still lacks the central female character that is both a map and a disruptor of male mapping, even though characters still employ geographic terms to chart and describe characters. Cherseoli, a courtier of Selimus’ father, Bajazet, claims that Selimus is ‘A map of many valors’ (1.171). 45 The valors that Cherseoli maps onto Selimus are eventually proven to be incorrect; however, that he uses such language points to the efficacy and meaning inherent in geographic metaphors. And Bajazet responds in kind, rendering his son and his qualities as a kind of topography: ‘Is he a prince? Ah no, he is a sea, / Into which run nought but ambitious reaches, / Seditious complots, murther, fraud, and hate’ (1.179-180). Bajazet figures his son as an ocean, fed by rivers of deceit and containing dangerous stretches of coast. The use of the word ‘complot’ also recalls a map, in this sense a plot of land, while directly referring to his son’s scheming. In justifying his path to power, Selimus too uses geographic language, in this case to demonstrate his right to limitless conquest: his ‘body doth a glorious spirit bear / That hath no bounds but flieth everywhere’ (2.119-120). Selimus respects no boundaries or borders in his conquest – not even those of kin. Although Selimus lacks any claim to an actual royal female body, he does employ marital language when conceptualizing his rule. He explains, ‘As many labors [as Hercules] Selimus hath had / And now at length attainèd to the crown. / This is my Hebe, and this is my heaven’ (17.87-89). Selimus here configures his crown as the reward that Hercules was given after his apotheosis: the hand of the goddess Hebe in marriage. He writes his rule as a crown likened to a goddess, a metaphor that is still linguistically potent but also avoids having to deal with any real-world female counterpart who may serve as an eventual threat. Indeed, family alliances do not figure at all in Selimus’ rule; he requires no map of genealogy: ‘So Selimus hath proved a cockatrice / And clean consumed all the family / Of noble Ottoman, except himself’ (29.64-66). The declaration has a note of pride in it, and Selimus 45 All Selimus quotations taken from Vitkus, Three Turk Plays. All are in-text.

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serves as another example of a character created by a playwright that deploys geographic and genealogical rhetoric – even if to acknowledge the absence of women and family. That Selimus relies solely on his own world-writing in conceptualizing his rise to power is evident in one of his last speeches: Now as the weary, wandering traveler That hath his steps guided through many lands, Through boiling soil of Africa and Ind, When he returns unto his native home Sits down among his friends with delight Declares the travels he has overpassed, So mayst thou Selimus; for thou has trode The monster-guarded paths that lead to crowns. (29.35-42)

Selimus in his description combines elements of the new and old geography. His reference to the ‘monster-guarded paths’ recalls the creatures drawn on medieval maps, while the connection of himself to a returning wanderer with tales points to the travelers’ accounts that were so popular at the end of the sixteenth century and often were accompanied by maps. 46 In addition to writing the world of the Ottoman Empire as he saw it, Greene also supplies an alternative path to power that nevertheless underscores Marlowe’s distinct rendering of Tamburlaine’s rise, since throughout the two parts of Tamburlaine, the infamous Scythian is the one who uses the royal and female body as an atlas upon which he charts his territorial conquests, his dynastic lineage, and his political legitimacy. But from her powerful signifying position, Zenocrate proves a subversive agent in frustrating Tamburlaine’s imperial goals. Through her death, she reclaims her body, attempting to take with her its accompanying political significance. Although Tamburlaine is still able to evoke her powerful presence in the form of her picture and her hearse, his use of her is ultimately a kind of absence, a blank map. Moreover, Zenocrate imparts her own qualities onto her sons and thus displaces at least part of their father’s martial inheritance. The necessity of Zenocrate as bearer of sons and legitimacy for Tamburlaine 46 This popularity is attested to by Richard Hakluyt’s work compiling multiple traveler accounts. Claire Jowitt argues that his Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, f irst published in 1589 (with an expanded editions in 1599 and 1600), spurred early modern playwrights to incorporate more geography of faraway lands in their plays, providing for audiences a kind of performed atlas, and making drama ‘one of the most popular and easily accessible sources of information about the wider world for a nation of armchair travellers’. ‘Hakluyt’s Legacy’, p. 295.

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in this drama means that her sons will also bear a (potentially disruptive) part of her within them. Ultimately, Tamburlaine afforded Christopher Marlowe his first popular success, primarily through his bombastic hero’s unique path to power. The general himself in Part One acknowledges his less noble past and glorious future: ‘for all [his] birth’, he will demonstrate how ‘virtue solely is the sum of glory / And fashions men with true nobility’ (Part One, 5.1.188-190). Yet, in reality, it is Tamburlaine himself, and not virtue, who constructs the very virtue, or qualities, needed to make him a man of nobility and imperial power, drawing upon the rising popularity and increased availability of maps and their meanings. Tamburlaine’s own dramatic and figurative parentage is both Marlowe and Elizabeth Tudor, who created and appeared in maps and royal processions as a sign of her legitimate rule. In the two parts, the virgin queen only appears fleetingly in more obvious forms, through references to Cynthia and Bellona; however, the emphasis that Tamburlaine places on Zenocrate’s family lineage and marriageability as the daughter of a Sultan reveals that Marlowe made use of the same ideology of royal courtship as did his queen. 47 Indeed, contemporary observers noted how Elizabeth subverted expectations of the marriageability of a single female monarch, maintaining sole control over her body, much as Zenocrate does at the end of Part Two. The duke of Parma included his opinion on the lengthy marriage talks in a letter to the Spanish ambassador in London: The marriage of that queen seems to me like the weaving of Penelope, undoing every night what was done the day before and then reweaving it anew the next, advancing in these negotiations neither more nor less than has been done and undone countless times without reaching a conclusion one way or the other. 48

The duke astutely observes that Elizabeth uses the delay tactics of Odysseus’ wife while she awaits his homecoming amid a crowd of suitors. However, the duke applies this story of wifely duty to illustrate how Elizabeth continually puts off her duty to become a wife: the woman again as unstable signifier. Like Dido, Elizabeth employs the process of royal courtship as a means 47 Similarly, Crystal Bartolovich argues that Tamburlaine looks forward in his use of force and spectacle but also ‘back’ to the idea of family ties. Her main argument calls for an interpretation that has the play reveal the violence of accumulation present in nascent capitalism. ‘Putting Tamburlaine on a (Cognitive) Map’, pp. 29-72. 48 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, Marcus et al., 211, fn 7. Also cited from the Parma State Archives in Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt in the Netherlands, pp. 74-75.

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Fig. 12: Title page, Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador: or Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth of Glorious Memory (London, 1655). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1976, U.25).

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both to maintain the desired political balance in Europe and assert her own authority to alter that balance. In Zenocrate and Tamburlaine, Marlowe diluted the geographical and genealogical power seen in Dido by sharing it between two characters, one male who nonetheless needs his female counterpart to rule successfully. In Elizabeth, these powerful qualities come together again, even after the queen’s death. In 1655, The Compleat Ambassador: or Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth of Glorious Memory by Dudley Digges was posthumously published in London. The text, which included the letters of Elizabeth, Francis Walsingham, Robert Dudley, and William Cecil during the French marriage negotiations from the early 1570s, also features a cover that mimicked the Saxton atlas (Fig. 12). Elizabeth sits under a classical arch flanked not by figures of geography but by her councilors Cecil and Walsingham. The letters, which earlier students studied, were published as an example of diplomacy to the wider public. 49 The emphasis on Elizabeth’s courtship with Anjou as part of a larger political design, coupled with the geographic frontispiece, serves as an important reminder that, even fifty years after her death, Elizabeth, like Dido and Marlowe’s other women, was still seen as an important public figure because of the world-writing strategies she employed to strengthen and continue her reign.

Works Cited Abbate, Corinne S. ‘Zenocrate: Not Just Another “Fair Face”’. English Language Notes 41.1 (September 2003): 19-32. Albano, Caterina. ‘Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy’. In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 89-106. Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 2001. Barber, Peter. ‘England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550-1625’. In Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Buisseret, 57-98. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 49 Kelsey, ‘Digges, Sir Dudley (1582/3-1639), politician and diplomat’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Digges’ father was Sir Thomas Digges, Member of Parliament but also a famous geometer who studied under his guardian John Dee, the vocal and oft-published proponent of English imperialism. The senior Digges’ father Leonard was also a scientist, an astronomer whose almanac his son had posthumously published. Digges thus had his own very geographic genealogy. See also Johnston, ‘Digges, Thomas (c. 1546-1595), mathematician and member of parliament’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Bartels, Emily C. ‘The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part One’. Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 3-24. ———. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Bartolovich, Crystal. ‘Putting Tamburlaine on a (Cognitive) Map’. Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 29-72. Caro-Barnes, Jennifer M. ‘Marlowe’s Tribute to His Queen in Dido, Queen of Carthage’. Early English Studies Volume 1 (2008): 1-15. https://www.uta.edu/ english/ees/fulltext/caro-barnes1.html. Crawford, Patricia. Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004. Cunningham, William. The Cosmographical Glasse, conteinyng the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Navigation. [London: Ioan. Daij, 1559]. De Somogyi, Nick. ‘Marlowe’s Maps of War’. In Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Popular Culture. Edited by Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts, 96-109. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996. Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Fraser, Antonia. The Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Knopf, 1992. Gibbs, Joanna. ‘Marlowe’s Politic Women’. In Constructing Christopher Marlowe. Edited by J.A. Downie and J.T. Parnell, 164-177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gordon, Andrew and Bernhard Klein. Introduction to Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 1-12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Greene, Robert. The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon. In The Mermaid Series: Robert Greene. Edited by Thomas H. Dickinson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909. Harvey, P.D.A. Maps in Tudor England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Howard, Jean E. ‘Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage’. Modern Language Quarterly 64:3 (2003): 299-322. Jankowski, Theodora. Women in Power in Early Modern Drama. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Johnston, Stephen. 2009 ‘Digges, Thomas (c. 1546-1595), Mathematician and Member of Parliament’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7639.

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Jowitt, Claire. ‘Hakluyt’s Legacy: Armchair Travel in English Renaissance Drama’. In Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt, 295-306. Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2012. Kelsey, Sean. 2004 ‘Digges, Sir Dudley (1582/3-1639), Politician and Diplomat’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7635. Lemke Sanford, Rhonda. Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral. https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/ mappa-mundi/. Marlowe, Christopher. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin Press, 2003. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Montrose, Louis. ‘The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’. Representations No. 33, Special Issue: The New World (Winter, 1991): 1-41. Munson Deats, Sara. ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris’. In The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Edited by Patrick Cheney, 193-206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Oliver, H.J. The Revels Plays: Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris. London: Metheun and Co., 1968. Proser, Matthew N. The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004. The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. Edited by Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, and G. Blakemore Evans. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex’. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 533-560. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Shirley, Rodney. Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons: The Art of the Decorative Cartographic Titlepage. Houten, The Netherlands: HES & DE GRAAF Publishers BV, 2009. Sullivan, Jr., Garrett. ‘Geography and Identity in Marlowe’. In The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Edited by Patrick Cheney, 231-244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado. Edited by Daniel J. Vitkus. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2000. Vickers, Nancy J. ‘Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme’. In Writing and Sexual Difference. Edited by Elizabeth Abel, 95-108. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Wiggins, Martin. ‘When Did Marlowe Write Dido, Queen of Carthage?’ The Review of English Studies Vol. 59, Issue 24 (1 September 2008): 521-541. Wilson, Charles. Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt in the Netherlands. London: Macmillan, 1970. Zamora, Margarita. ‘Abreast of Columbus: Gender and Discovery’. Cultural Critique, No. 17 (Winter, 1990-1991): 127-149.

2.

‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’ Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism Abstract Cary appropriates geographic discourses about Ireland and the potential for English colonialism to create queens who gain legitimacy and authority by underscoring their connection to and appropriate control of their kingdoms. In The Tragedy of Mariam, the titular queen derives power and undermines her royal husband through her associations with ‘his’ kingdom. Moreover, Palestine’s status as a colony of Rome means that Mariam’s rebellion has larger imperial implications. In The History of Edward II, Isabel’s marital and political rebellion derives support from the queen’s connection to and proper care of English land in contrast to her spouse-king’s neglect of the same. Keywords: Roman empire, The Tragedy of Mariam, imperialism, queens, The History of Edward II, early modern women writers, Ireland.

The availability and popularity of maps and atlases that inspired the geographic rhetoric of Dido and Tamburlaine continued in the last decade of Elizabeth’s rule. About four years after Marlowe’s death in 1593, twelveyear-old Elizabeth Tanfield translated a geographical treatise as a present to her great-uncle, who had recently been made a Knight of the Garter. She chose a French edition of Abraham Ortelius’ atlas. Although this gift to Sir Henry Lee is a translation, Tanfield had a choice not only of literary works, but also of multiple editions of Ortelius’ treatise, and her selection of the nearly similar 1588 and 1590 editions of the Epitome du théâtre du monde d’Abraham Ortelius reveals a preference for those works that engaged in world-writing.1 Moreover, even within this deceptively straightforward translation, there are clear moments where Tanfield departs from or adds 1

Peterson, ‘The Source and Date’, p. 257.

Pilhuj, K., Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463722018/ch02

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to the original text, marking the start of lifelong literary endeavors in which Tanfield, later Cary, used geographical discourse to reshape her world. Some fifteen years after her translation of The Mirror of the Worlde, Cary wrote and saw into print The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry. In her drama about the wrongfully executed wife of Herod, Cary takes up Marlowe’s themes of queens and their relation to territory. Within the context of James I’s interest in the Roman Empire and potential colonial ventures in Ireland and beyond, Cary’s female characters in The Tragedy of Mariam and her later History of the Life, Reign, and Death Of Edward II continue the geographic concepts articulated by Marlowe, based on the trope that equates the female body with land and allows early modern noble and royal women’s bodies to be mapped and claimed by men. Similar to Marlowe’s Dido but decidedly different from Zenocrate, both Cary’s royal wives openly rebel against their husbands and their rule, but while still using their roles as both spouse and territorial possession to formulate political resistance. Both Mariam and Edward II link the same themes of territory, the female body, and its possession, which Marlowe utilizes in his dramas. However, the two texts are additionally inflected by the English colonial enterprise that centered on the conquest of Ireland. Surrounded by the activities and people that sought to colonize Ireland, Cary found the discourse surrounding the ‘Irish question’ to be useful in relating the character and agency of her two queens. In particular, she draws on the early modern rhetoric of colonization that placed great importance on knowledge and proper use of the physical characteristics of the territory to be conquered, a knowledge and authority often gleaned from and reinforced by geographic texts. In this colonial discourse, both the people and the land stood in need of ‘civilizing’, a process that would first entail describing (and thus knowing) the territory. Those who possessed the ability to map or could own and decipher geographical texts gained special authority: they could now see and thus control the landscape and its inhabitants, delineating how the colony and its people were to be properly used. In addition to this use of geography, Cary’s Mariam and Edward II, centered on ruling families, still look back to Marlowe’s use of upper-class women’s location in genealogy as the connecting point of families’ political and economic power. While Elizabeth’s adept use of her marriageable body in potential courtships faded into the past, the queen was often maintained as a political presence throughout her successor’s reign, in particular as a positive example of leadership to criticize James I. Moreover, a wife of noble or royal birth still could hold – and even control – political significance in her genealogical and marital ‘location’, and Cary’s subversive appropriation

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of Irish colonial projects’ discourse adds another level of meaning, and thus potential agency, to the bodies of her female protagonists. We have seen how a woman could gain agency and foment resistance by manipulating the line of inheritance through how she depicted her body and its location in figurative space; Marlowe’s Dido uses such a political strategy for herself, while Zenocrate’s role as Tamburlaine’s wife affords him political legitimacy even as her role of mother to his children dilutes the qualities inherited from their father and thus his dynastic authority. For Mariam and Isabel, however, disruption of male rule derives not just from their location in the family lineage, but from the idea of place itself in the form of their kingdoms. These women become connected to lands marked as colonies and thus constituted parts of empires: control and use of these territories served as markers of imperial existence and strength. If these appropriated locations (both the women and the territory to which they are insistently connected) of domestic harmony and productive fertility become rebellious and uncontrollable, what then of the empire? The women in Cary’s works, particularly in Mariam, embody the land and resources through which their husbands and empires seek the consolidation and expansion of political rule. Moreover, as a result of this connection, the resistance of Cary’s female characters to their husbands’ ideology of domestication has widespread political effects. The philosophical and educational objectives associated with works of historical narrative (as the two texts can be classified) also highlight the political implications of the two queens’ appropriation and hence subversion of the patriarchal discourses of marriage, genealogy, and colonization. As representatives of a ruler’s or even an empire’s control of land and resources, Mariam and Isabel use that connection to their own personal and political advantage as they disrupt their husbands’ control of their bodies and the land the men are supposed to tame and exploit.

The ‘Nymph of Ireland’ The foundation of Mariam’s and Isabel’s resistance rests on the early modern geographic discourse that linked women and territory. But Cary also relies on ideas about colonialism, sometimes found in geographic texts that called for control of resources. As discussed earlier, Ralegh’s 1596 Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, included for general public consumption in Richard Hakluyt’s collections of travel narrative, provides not only a ‘quite conventional’ description of the virgin-land trope as noted

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in the introduction, but also a call to colonization for the exploitation of resources.2 Ralegh’s account describes the physical attributes that accompany the land, with much focus on and repetition of the possibilities for discovering gold: he claims at one point that of the bread he and his starving men find, ‘nothing on the earth could have been more welcome to us, next unto gold’.3 Ralegh continues to emphasize the allure of the country’s mineral wealth, writing that ‘every stone that we stooped to take up, promised either gold or silver by his complexion’. 4 He promises his investors that he has found in these stones el Madre del oro, the mother of gold, and is absolutely certain that ‘the sun covereth not so much riches in any part of the earth’.5 His description of the precious metals that the land holds parallels the property and goods that any marriageable virgin would bring to her husband’s family, in addition to any children produced.6 Barbara J. Harris notes that women’s dowries often ‘constituted a large, welcome infusion of cash into the coffers of their husbands and fathers-in-law’.7 Guiana’s resources – in particular her minerals – will provide Ralegh and other Englishmen with increased wealth and status, so long as they ‘consummate’ this relationship before the king of Spain does. Ralegh’s treatise, transforming territorial possessions into a female body replete with untouched resources, employs a trope that appears repeatedly in geographic texts. England itself would often be rendered as female: in the title page to Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion of 1612, a seated Britannia wears a map that depicts not cities and borders but topographical features that hint at the organic resources that could come from the land. The cornucopia of produce she holds in one hand confirms her and the land’s fecundity, which has been used by some of the male figures (representative of past waves of conquest) who are arranged around her (Fig. 13).8 The discourse surrounding Ireland’s colonization would also use this idea of feminized territory awaiting proper care and ‘fertilization’. A treatise published in 1620 provides an example of how sexualized England’s 2 Scholz, Body Narratives, p. 149. 3 Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries, p. 395. 4 Ibid., p. 401. 5 Ibid.. 6 For more on Ralegh’s Guiana and the commodifying of the sexual Other, as well as the effort to differentiate the English colonial endeavors from the Spanish, see Scholz, pp. 148-173. 7 Harris, English Aristocratic Women, p. 49. 8 Cary would most likely have been familiar with this work in particular; Drayton dedicated two of his Englands Heriocall Epistles to her in 1597, praising her linguistic abilities. See HodgsonWright, ‘Cary [née Tanfield], Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Fig. 13:  Michael Drayton, title page, Poly-olbion (1612). © The British Library Board (General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 641.k.11).

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occupation of Ireland could be rendered in these texts. In A Discourse of Ireland, Luke Gernon describes the island: This Nymph of Ireland is at all points like a young wench that hath the green sickness for want of occupying. She is very fair of visage and hath a smooth skin of tender grass […]. Her breasts are round hillocks of milkyielding grass, and that so fertile that they contend with the valleys. And betwixt her legs (for Ireland is full of havens) she hath an open harbor, but not much frequented.9

Gernon’s description parallels Ralegh’s account of Guiana, awaiting with maidenhead intact, in its correlation between fertile land and nubile female. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley also note that ‘[t]he personification of Ireland as a suppliant female is a figure of long standing in Irish culture’.10 As husbands were expected to control access to their wives’ sexuality and be sole ‘cultivators’ of her fertility, colonists were expected to take control of ‘suppliant female territory’ through control and cultivation of the land’s resources. Patricia Seed writes that ‘sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Englishmen usually constructed their right to occupy the New World on far more historically and culturally familiar grounds: building houses and fences and planting gardens’.11 While Seed’s analysis focuses on the English in the Americas, she also argues that basing ownership on building and planting stemmed from practices in England that traced their origins to the first millennium. The English perception of Ireland’s conquest is part of that tradition; the markers of possession on the Irish plantations would prefigure those on the other side of the Atlantic. In addition to explaining 9 In Elizabethan Ireland, p. 242. For more examples of the ways that the female body (in particular the Irish female body) was rhetorically linked to both land and race, see Cavanagh, ‘“The fatal destiny of that land’”, pp. 122-125. 10 Hadfield and Maley, ‘Irish Representations and English Alternatives’, p. 5. The authors also discuss Edmund Spenser’s f igure of Irena in The Faerie Queene, among many other English accounts of Ireland in the same period, pp. 1-23. For more on Ireland, Spenser, Elizabeth and the idea of imperial unity in the 1590s, see Scholz, pp. 127-147. In addition, Dympna Callaghan reminds us that ‘[r]acially marked others in the English Renaissance included Africans and Celts, Jews, and the “wild Irish’” (p. 165). She further argues that Cary ‘invariably writes through the experience of woman as other’ (p. 166). Callaghan’s article focuses primarily on the racial marking formulated in the play by skin color and religion, and its connection to gender. While she mentions the ‘geographical otherness’ of Mariam, her criticism discusses the location of the play only, rather than the specific geographic and chorographic discourse employed in the play (pp. 170, 177). ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam’, pp. 163-177. 11 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 18.

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the significance of ‘fixed markers’, Seed also describes how ‘[o]wnership of land could be secured simply by using it, engaging in agricultural or pastoral activities’.12 By physically establishing borders and then utilizing the space within in order to generate a fertile relationship with the land, the English legitimized their claims of ownership. Of course, this claiming and mapping of colonies and bodies, especially Ireland, was not always so straightforward, as the English and Cary’s Herod and Edward would discover. In the case of Ireland, the work of Edmund Spenser demonstrates the difficulty in securing full ownership. For example, although a map is brought into the discussion of Eudoxus and Irenius featured in A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Bruce Avery points out that the text does not present a unified answer in regards to controlling Ireland.13 Moreover, Andrew Hadfield notes how in The Faerie Queene’s marriage of the Thames and the Medway, the Irish rivers’ attendance is discussed somewhat ambivalently: ‘Though I them all according their degree, / Cannot recount, nor tell their hidden race, / Nor read the saluage cuntreis, thorough which they pace’.14 Their history and topography is unknown, and thus unmapped and uncontrolled; additionally, a gendered threat is implied if the spelling of ‘cuntreis’ is read as a pun. These rivers and thus Ireland herself, are emphatically not the eagerly waiting and supine ‘nymph’ described by Gernon.15 Nevertheless, in following an ideology that gave the land to those who have discovered and appropriated its ‘maidenhead’, as Ralegh so vividly claimed of Guiana, the English at least theoretically and potentially establish themselves as the rightful owners of ‘newly’ discovered land and its resources. This claim to land by right of ‘first’ discovery and penetration/ exploration can be likened to the initial consummation just before or after marriage: the husband has first access to his bride’s virginity in order to 12 Seed, p. 25. 13 Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other’, pp. 263-279. I have specifically excluded any extensive examination of Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland in my discussion of texts on Ireland, since the text was only circulated in manuscript among councilors, unavailable to the general public until the mid-seventeenth century, and unlikely to have been read by Cary. For a discussion of Spenser, mapping Ireland, colonizing its land and people, and an analysis of View of the Present State, see Reinhard Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability’, pp. 93-115. See also Baker, ‘Off the Map: Charting Uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland’, pp. 76-92. Baker writes that ‘Ireland was a colony in which, from the perspective of English officials, spatial coordinates were often conjectural and muddled’ (p. 78). Even the officials, like Spenser, charged with bringing order to the land through plantations and maps of those establishments, found it extremely difficult to chart the ‘wild’ Irish landscape. 14 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book IIII, Canto XI, p. 40. 15 Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Drayton, and the Question of Britain’, pp. 582-599.

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Fig. 14:  John Speed, ‘The Kingdom of Irland’, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London: J. Sudbury & G. Humble, 1611-1612). © The British Library Board (Cartographic Items G.7884).

ensure that the wealth and other resources she brings to the union are appropriated by him and his legitimate heirs alone. In her study of English marriage contracts from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Kathryn Jacobs writes that, despite changes in law pertaining to verb tense in contracts and the location of the exchange of vows, ‘popular opinion continued to hold that consummation was essential to a marriage, and popular rituals such as the “bedding” of the bride continued to emphasize it’.16 Even at the highest ranks, the question of consummation and therefore a marriage’s validity could become a crucial point: as noted previously, Henry VIII’s initial pursuit of a divorce from Katherine of Aragon in the late 1520s rested on determining if Katherine and her first husband Arthur had consummated the union. But, just as Ralegh’s treatise proposes a continual occupation of Guiana to protect its resources from the Spanish, so the husband would need to consistently police his wife’s bodily boundaries to ensure the legitimacy of any further offspring. Thus, first penetration/discovery is not the only right to ownership; indeed, a marriage, particularly one of the upper classes, 16 Jacobs, Marriage Contracts, p. 3.

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would only be considered successful once multiple legitimate, preferably male, children were produced. That is, the marriage would be final and felicitous only through its consummation and ensuing fertility. This measure of success recalls the exhortations of the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man to reproduce his beauty, often employing the trope of farming to describe the reproductive process. Such agricultural imagery would be applied to claims of ownership over new land in both Ireland and the New World. Seed asserts that ‘[i]t was not a law that entitled Englishmen to possess the New World, it was an action which established their rights’.17 That is, using the land would solidify the right of ownership to the discovered and demarcated territory. One of the main tenets that established the right of the English to appropriate Irish land was that the Irish natives were not properly tilling the land. Barnabe Rich in his 1610 A New Description of Ireland writes, ‘[B]etween the ill-husbandry of that which is inhabited and so much of the country again lying waste for want of inhabitants’ the English colonist could not only expect to instill the land with appropriate civility through husbandry, but also reap great profit from it.18 This ‘nymph’ of Ireland would be colonized and civilized by the English in an elaborate justification that linked the discourse governing virginity and marriage with territorial demarcation and farming. The image of the ‘wild’ Irish is one that mapmakers promulgated in their works as well, helping to create a land where English intervention was justified. John Speed’s 1611 atlas Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain includes maps accompanied by cartes à figures in the margin. These figures often represented the inhabitants of the land pictured, or at least the way the geographer wished them to be seen. The margins of Speed’s map of Ireland feature six different figures meant to convey the looks and behavior of the island’s inhabitants, showing men and women of three different classes (Fig. 14). The fur-lined cloaks, coiffed hair, and more elaborate collars of the ‘Gentleman’ and ‘Gentlewoman of Ireland’ indicate more supposed refinement than the simply dressed ‘Civill Irish Woman’ and ‘Civill Irish Man’. Both of these groups contrast with the rustic dress and unkempt hair of the ‘Wilde Irish’ man and woman, the man holding a spear indicating his potential aggression. Thus, even within one arrangement of cartes à figures, a great deal of ideological information is contained in costume and figure placement, with the gentle, well-dressed figures ensconced at the top in an arched portrait and the more unkempt Irish at the bottom. Even 17 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 31. Emphasis in original. 18 In Elizabethan Ireland, p. 130.

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the wording indicates an important status distinction: the gentleman and woman are ‘of Ireland’, while the civil and wild figures are simply Irish. The gentle couple is thus identified as inhabitants of Ireland while the latter two groups are linguistically identified as distinctly and ethnically Irish. Other genres also supported the notion that the Irish and their land were in need of control and cultivation. In Ben Jonson’s 1613 Irish Masque, the chaotic anti-masque is comprised by bumbling and comical Irish messengers speaking in stage-Irish accents and informing King James that the ambassadors would like to dance for him, ‘But tey vere leeke to dansh naked, an’t pleash Ty Mayesty; for te villainous vild Irish sheas have casht away all ter fine cloysh’ (ll. 76-78).19 The wild Irish land and seascape produces uncivilizing effects, considering the comic footmen and then with the ambassadors potentially naked under their ‘Irish’ mantles as they dance to ‘the bagpipe and other rude music’ (l.138). But a gentleman arrives and orders the Irish footmen to ‘let your coarser manners seek some place / Fit for their wildness’ (ll. 153-154). He then informs the audience of King James’ special role in governing Ireland: ‘This is the man [the bard] promised should redeem, / If she would love his counsels as his laws, / Her head from servitude, her feet from fall, / Her fame from barbarism, her state from want, / And in her all the fruits of blessing plant’ (ll. 163-167). In James’ presence, not only do the ambassadors reveal proper masquing attire beneath their Irish mantles, but their land itself will be similarly transformed if ‘she’ will only love James’ counsel. The king will then ‘plant’ blessings in her, making the country productive, according to English colonial standards, and thus more ‘civilized’. Jonson here depicts the English colonization of Ireland as a romantic relationship between the king and a feminized territory, a marriage that will increase the king’s power. The idea of James as a husband and father not just to his royal family but to all of his kingdom was an idea that he and others promoted with alacrity. James’ emphatic reiteration of the patriarchal ideology that held father and king as governors of house and realm supported and emulated the domestic discourse surrounding the government of Ireland. In his 1598 treatise The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, the text of which was reprinted and circulated after his accession to the English throne, James wrote that ‘by the Law of Nature the King becomes a naturall father to all his Lieges at his Coronation: And as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for the nourishing, education, and virtuous gouernment of his children; euen

19 Jonson, The Irish Masque at Court, pp. 133-140. Citations are in-text.

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so is the king bound to care for all his subjects’.20 James expands upon his concept of good government in both kingdom and household in Basilikon Doron, written as advice to his first-born son. He admonishes Henry to choose and treat his wife and household well and to ‘teach your people by your example: for people are naturally inclined to counterfaite (like apes) their Princes maners’.21 In James’ opinion, the need for a ruler to instruct his subjects well means that he must assert his authority, especially in the governance of his wife. He reminds Henry, ‘Ye are the head, shee is your body; It is your office to command, and hers to obey; but yet with such a sweet harmonie, as shee should be as ready to obey, as ye to command’.22 For James and other early modern rulers, the behavior of their wives and families reflects their familial and political authority, since these two locations of power rhetorically support each other.23 And although the parent-child relationship is often emphasized, the early modern English husband had similar parental authority over his wife. In his advice, then, James maps the family dynamic onto that of the kingdom, with each ‘chart’ reciprocally supporting the other. This concept of the interconnectedness of family and kingdom is visually reinforced by Hans Woutneel’s 1603 map, entitled A Descripsion of The Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland With al the Ilands adiacent unto them, also the Battails that have bin fought…expressed by the figures of Tents, in their proper places…Where unto is added the Genealogie & Portraitures of ye kings of England. Frome William the Conqueror To our Soverain Lord King James now Raigning Anno Domini 1603 (Fig. 15). The map was produced by Woutneel and his engraver William Kip, both Dutch émigrés living in England, most likely as a patriotic offering to the newly crowned king.24 The map features the entire British Isles, now under one ruler, but also depicts the genealogy of James on the right-hand side of the map, much like the anonymous 1594 Elizabeth map and genealogy discussed in Chapter One. Unlike that map, however, Elizabeth’s portrait is reduced in size to the equivalent of her half-siblings, and all three now support the slightly larger portraits of James and his queen Anna of Denmark.

20 Political Writings, p. 65. 21 Ibid., p. 20. 22 Ibid., p. 42. 23 Margaret Ferguson points out that husband murder was referred to as ‘petty treason and regarded as much more heinous than wife murder, since the former unlike the latter involved an offense against the very concept of “degree”’. Ferguson, ‘The Spectre of Resistance’, p. 243. 24 Shirley, ‘A Royal Genealogical Map’, pp. 142-143.

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Fig. 15: Hans Woutneel, ‘A Descripsion of the kingdoms of England Scotland & Ireland’ [London], 1603. Göttingen State and University Library, MAPP 4570.

But, I would argue, even Anna and James themselves are not meant to be the ultimate focal point of the genealogy and hence the map. The hands of the king and queen, husband and wife, are joined outside of their respective portrait frames. From those joined hands emanates a stalk that flowers into a crown-like rose and vines, which uphold circles containing the names and dates of their offspring. The family tree is separately titled ‘THE ROYAL PROGENEY OF THE MOST FAMOUS CHRISTIAN KINGS OF

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England issued from ye valiant monarch William Conqueror and Continued vnto his most blessed & sacred Maiesty ano 1603’.25 Here, the emphasis is not virgin impenetrability but on familial continuity, in the form of the neat and tidy tree that promises to continue sprouting. The orderly and affectionate picture of family life, mapped next to a Britain that also features battles that remain hopefully in the past, would most likely have pleased James, who, as we have seen from his advice to his son, was at pains to project such a harmonious image to his subjects. Moreover, the title of the family tree itself, with the word ‘progeny’, underscores the idea of expansion, both in terms of family and nation. This familial expansion was also joined by the idea of imperial expansion, an idea sanctioned by James in Jonson’s court masque and elsewhere. The visuals in this map are further linked to James’ imperial policies in Ireland through the depiction of the family tree with its leaves and flowers that recall the discourse of ‘planting’ English colonies in Ireland. And the Woutneel map was not the only geographic product to bolster James’ rule of England and its connection to his role as father. John Speed rushed into print (most likely in an attempt to unsuccessfully forestall Woutneel’s pirating of his map) a very similar map of the isles and a royal genealogy. The basis for this engraving is most likely a large manuscript version of the map and genealogy, also produced by Speed at the start of James’ English rule and still listed in an inventory of 1613 as a wall map hanging in Whitehall Palace.26 Barber and Harper note that this figuration was part of the ‘visual propaganda’ that asserted James’ right to the throne of England: maps were ‘an intrinsic part of the publicity drive’.27 The legitimacy of the Stuart succession is underscored on the map by depicting James ‘authoritatively at the top’ and nestled next to a smaller map of England, Wales, and Ireland. Like the Woutneel that copied it, Speed’s map also projects an image of future stability for the kingdom under James, with depictions of past battles and failed invasions of the islands.28 The Speed map also features vines that continue to sprout upwards from the images of James and Anna, suggesting further dynastic stability through fertility and the production of heirs. Linda Levy Peck views the map as part of James’ imperial objectives, which she claims dictated the way ‘James and 25 For more information on the map’s sources and other details, see Lynam, ‘Woutneel’s Map of the British Isles, 1603’, pp. 536-538. 26 Barber and Harper, Magnificent Maps, p. 25. 27 Ibid., p. 62. 28 Ibid..

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his court placed themselves in space’ – in this case, at the top of an orderly and living tree of rulers, next to a clearly demarcated and calm kingdom.29 Speed continued to support James’ legitimacy and stability as ruler through geographic means; in his completed atlas Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, portraits of James and his queen Anna flank the map of Scotland, with the princes Henry and Charles in smaller portraits just below them (Fig. 16). June Schlueter notes how these cartes à figures, like those discussed for the Ireland map above, became quite popular during the first half of the seventeenth century. She explains that these figures ‘added to the document’s attractiveness, its informative value, and its saleability’ while also ‘complement[ing] and enhanc[ing] the cartographic content through pictorial references to the political, historical, and cultural character of a particular place’.30 In light of this purpose, the inclusion of the figures of James and (most of) his family on the Scottish map point to the ‘political, historical, and cultural character’

Fig. 16:  John Speed, Map of Scotland, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London: I. Sudbury and G. Humble, 1616) ©The British Library Board (Maps. C.7 .c20.(2)). 29 Levy Peck, ‘The Mental World of the Jacobean Court: An Introduction’, p. 9. Levy Peck mentions specifically but briefly the Speed genealogy map, stating that while it promotes his James’ idea of ruling by inheritance rather than conquest, the idea of conquest is present in the lineage traced back to William (6). 30 Schlueter, ‘Rereading the Side Panels in The View From London to the North’, p. 145.

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of Scotland in that the kingdom itself is clearly charted and associated with a stable royal family who confidently flank the territory. But Cary’s writings employ her queen’s locations on maps (and the ideologies of women’s place they support) in order to dramatically subvert these ideas of stable family and stable empire, first using her character Mariam’s very visible position within the play, within her family, and within Roman imperial politics. While the connection to England in that play is a much more subtle one found in the link between the Roman empire and James’ imperial plans, Cary’s other extant dramatic work, The History of Edward II, will show a queen enacting a welcome political upheaval in England itself, upsetting the placid picture of the male-dominated kingdom that Speed, Woutneel, and James are so eager to project. The objective of the rulers in Mariam is no different, as Danielle Clarke explains when she suggests that marriage in the play can be read as a multiply nuanced metaphor that gestures towards the public world of politics and the “private” world of the family so as to reveal their interdependence and thereby adumbrate the role of women in the public sphere as guarantors and legitimators of male supremacy.31

In Cary’s tragedy, then, Mariam and her sister-in-law Salome are thus doubly signified, representing both their husbands’ spousal and political authority; indeed, more than gesturing to each other as Clarke suggests, these two spheres are inseparable as the men of the play, in particular the king, Herod, attempt to use the women as signifiers of both successful marriage and political rule. This familial political discourse, with an ideology of female territory and its agro-sexual appropriation, was also, under James, connected with ideas about the ancient Roman empire when it came to control of Ireland and creating and expanding a ‘British empire’. Enforcing English authority and displacing the Irish lords with English plantations and settlements was, according to Nicholas Canny, ‘the scheme of government which enjoyed the authority of precedent that derived from what was thought to be true of the achievements both of the ancient Romans in Britain and of the AngloNormans in Ireland’.32 In De republica Anglorum (1583), Sir Thomas Smith emphasized the Roman ‘lineage’ of British expansion in his description of the Ulster plantation where he established his own home. Although not many subsequent writers went to the degree that Smith did in establishing 31 Clarke, “‘This domestic kingdome or Monarchy”’, p. 179. 32 Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 121.

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connections with the ancient Roman empire, Canny writes that ‘we can see that they took the precedents for granted, and cited them (usually from some received or invented version of the history of ancient Rome) whenever their arguments or actions seemed questionable’.33 England’s imperial ambitions, then, rested on a discourse that combined particular ideas about geography, marriage and family, cultivation, and ancient Rome. And Elizabeth Cary would have become familiar with this discourse of colonization following her 1602 marriage to Henry Cary, eventually Viscount Falkland, whose involvement in Irish and English court politics began with the knighthood he obtained in 1599 on the Essex campaign in Ireland. While Cary herself would not arrive in Ireland until 1623, some months after her husband, she spent time at James’ court in London, since ‘her husband being made Controller of the King’s Household, she came to live frequently at his lodgings at court’.34 One of her daughters in her biography also relates that ‘[a]fter her lord’s death she never went to masques nor plays, not so much as at the court, though she loved them very much, especially the last extremely’.35 Given what we know of Cary’s life, such statements support at least 20 years’ association with the court and London and their entertainments. The works of Speed and Drayton, the wall map at Whitehall, her own Ortelius translation, and court politics and entertainment like Jonson’s Irish masque would all impress upon Cary the multiple ways geographically inflected texts, combined with ideologies of marriage and family, could be used to create paths to individual and cultural superiority and power. In attending plays and viewing masques at court, especially enjoying them ‘extremely’ as the biography asserts, Cary would have been witness to much of the theatrical propaganda supporting James and his policies, and she also would have understood the ideological power inherent in these performances, in particular some subtle modes of resistance found in the masques directed by Queen Anna. Elizabeth Cary’s personal connections to Ireland began when her husband Henry Cary was sworn in as lord deputy of Ireland in Dublin in September 1622, beginning a tumultuous tenure that lasted until March 1631.36 His feelings towards the Irish are summarized in a line from one of his letters: the rebellious lords are ‘like nettles that sting being gently handled, but 33 Ibid., p. 122. For a comprehensive list of these authors, see Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 122-123. 34 The Lady Falkland Her Life, p. 196. 35 Ibid., p. 224. 36 Kelsey, ‘Cary, Henry, First Viscount Falkland (c. 1575-1633), Lord Deputy of Ireland’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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sting not being crushed’.37 Here, Cary extends the discourse of colonial land management even to Irish men, who figure as weeds who must be roughly extricated. Elizabeth Cary joined her husband for a three-year stay in Dublin from 1623 to 1625, and she experienced Ireland in a much different light than Henry Cary, even if she had to mortgage her jointure to fund his position as lord deputy.38 Once in Dublin, Cary seems to have founded a school for Irish children to learn various trades. She also became friendly with Catholic Irish noblemen, learned to read some Irish from an Irish bible, and gave birth to two of her children there, one of whom she named Patrick after the island’s patron saint. Ultimately, Cary seems to have had an affinity for Ireland, the land, and its people, as her daughter relates that she also had ‘the desire of the benefit and commodity of that nation’.39 But Cary’s intellectual engagement with Ireland and geography began well before she even married Henry Cary. Returning to her first work, the Epitome, she makes some intriguing translation choices concerning Ireland. The country’s name and heading are one of the few, along with England and Italy, that include an added graphic symbol. While Italy’s is the most ornate, these marks seem to indicate places that Cary deems important. And for Ireland, Cary does faithfully relate some of the descriptions Ortelius provides for the land. For instance, ‘The grounde is very fertill and so fatt that sometimes they are faine to take theire cattell from the pastures least they should burst with over feeding’. 40 Here, Cary’s translation confirms the sense of overflowing fecundity that other descriptions of Ireland, such as those from Gernon and Rich noted earlier, provide as enticement for colonists. More significant are her changes to some of the descriptions of the Irish people. Lesley Peterson points out that Cary’s sentence, ‘The people of this ile are poorely apparrelled’ is translated from the Epitome’s ‘portent simples vestements’. 41 Peterson views this change as a more negative one from a line that could be translated as, ‘they wear simple clothes’. However, Cary’s sentence structure could absolve the Irish of responsibility of their poor apparel: the use of passive voice removes the agency of the people in their choice of clothing. Cary could be drawing attention to the contrast

37 Falkland to Buckingham, 1624 (Carte MS 30, fos. 211-212). Quoted in Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 261. 38 For more on Cary’s stay in Dublin, including her literary influence there, see Rankin, “‘A More Worthy Patronesse”’, pp. 203-221. 39 The Lady Falkland Her Life, p. 196. 40 Tanfield Cary, The Mirror of the Worlde, p. 128 [6v]. 41 Ibid., p. 129 [6v], fn 58.

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between the land’s fertility, mentioned earlier, with their inability to access those resources – a lack that could be seen as outside Irish control. Cary’s seeming sympathy for the impoverished Irish under oppressive English colonial control can be seen to affect her depictions of two wives suffering at the hands of imperious – and often imperial – husbands. Cary employs geography and genealogy, especially women’s symbolic places within those discourses to demonstrate how such tropes could be used by not just the courtiers and monarchs who wished to create an English empire. Those same women placed at the center of this matrix of family ties and territorial exploitation could use this discourse as a means of resistance.

‘Rome’s Last Hero’: Mariam and Colonial Resistance Although Ireland is only mentioned by name once in the later texts by Cary considered in this chapter (in Edward II, as Gaveston’s place of exile), the discourse shaping Irish colonization appears alongside that of the wife’s role in affirming her husband’s masculinity and throughout Cary’s play The Tragedy of Mariam. Just as a well-governed and resource-filled Ireland would signify English right-to-rule and superiority, so a wife’s obedience and other virtues confirm her husband’s ability to act effectively in public, often political spheres. Of course, the reverse is also true: within her play, Cary provides ample evidence for demonstrating how women’s behavior can disrupt the power of their husbands, an effect which in this play is amplified by the positions of government many of the male characters hold. 42 When Constabarus, brother-in-law to the king, suspects his wife Salome of inappropriate behavior, he exhorts her to remember her place in the relationship, stating, ‘Our wisest prince did say, and true he said, / A virtuous woman crowns her husband’s head’ (1.6.395-396). 43 Constabarus specifically relates a husband’s public reputation to what is ostensibly the private behavior of his wife. Moreover, 42 Cary herself would be seen as an extension of her husband’s political status when she acted as advocate on her husband’s behalf while he was in Ireland. Her husband wrote to Lord Conway on 26 January 1626 that ‘I must thainke hir much for hir Carefull paynes in yt [interceding on his behalf at court]’. However, when unhappy with her intercession, Henry Cary would later write again to Conway on 2 April 1626 that ‘I rather wishe shee were att home with hir Mother preuayling with hir Naturall Affection, then trauayling to procure Courte fauers for me, From whence I haue neuer receyued other since hir Arriuall there then as greate diminutions’. Thus, Cary’s own life demonstrates how a wife’s behavior could be seen to reflect back on her husband. Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, pp. 253-254. 43 All quotations taken from Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, pp. 65-150. All play citations are in-text.

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this woman’s esteem is marked as political by Constabarus’ language. The saying comes from a prince, and the woman specifically ‘crowns’ her husband with her virtuous behavior, an act that converts her chastity into his power. The relationship between Constabarus and Salome provides a salient example of just how powerful a woman’s disruption of her marriage could be, even beyond the mere dissolution of that union. Salome’s wish for a new husband motivates her to speak out against Constabarus, who figures her disobedience on a larger scale when he cries, ‘Oh Salome, how much you wrong your name, / Your race, your country, and your husband most!’ (1.6.375376). By following her desires for the Arabian Silleus, Salome defames not only Constabarus but her entire nation. The wider repercussions of Salome’s rejection of the role of loyal wife are further illustrated by Constabarus when he foresees Salome’s appropriation of the husband’s right to divorce: ‘Suffer this, and then / Let all the world be topsy-turved quite’ (1.6.423-424). After Salome turns her husband in for harboring enemies to Herod, Constabarus continues to emphasize the political ramifications of his wife’s rebellion, addressing Judean women as a whole: You are the wreck of orders, breach of laws. Your best are foolish, forward, wanton, vain, Your worst adulterous, murderous, cunning, proud. And Salome attends the latter train, Or rather [she] their leader is allowed. (4.6.332-336)

For Constabarus, Salome not only destroys their marriage and the household it represents, but also the law and order that all households and the kingdom must follow. Moreover, Salome’s subversion is here represented by her husband as continually increasing her power. From simply attending the train of wicked women, Salome by the end of his rant has become the leader of a perverted triumphal procession. Her rebellion now takes place on a larger stage, one that is both public and political. Salome’s plots eventually remove her husband from Judean politics through his execution, underscoring her destabilizing power when aided through the connection to her brother the king. But Herod must rely on his connection to Mariam to affirm his ruling authority, opening up even greater potential means for his wife to not only subvert him but all of Palestine and, given the play’s setting and time, the country’s connection to the Roman Empire. Herod needs Mariam since, initially, her prominence in the Judean ruling family – her genealogy – is one of the main reasons that Herod repudiates his first wife. Cary states in The Argument that besides

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Mariam’s grandfather and brother, Herod ‘in his wife’s right had the best title’. Once Herod eliminates those next in line to the throne, he is then able to claim political authority through his marriage to Mariam. Herod’s actions, like Tamburlaine’s, here rely upon the early modern concept that women, particularly of the upper classes, function as the vehicles for transferring their families’ property and legitimacy. As a tangible embodiment of this alliance between dynasties, marriageable virgins ensured for their husbands and their own relatives that any children produced were legitimate inheritors of the combined families’ property and prestige. More immediately, such unions could raise the status of the couple’s relatives; Mariam’s marriage to Herod helps raise a ‘base Edomite’ and his family to the throne of Palestine and ensures that his family’s descendants inherit his authority. Mariam explains, ‘My children only for his own he deem’d, / These boys that did descend from royal line. / These did he style his heirs to David’s throne’ (1.2.137-139). In recognizing their offspring as ‘his’, Herod acknowledges his marriage as legitimate and dynastic. Mariam’s place in the ruling family’s genealogy gives Herod his throne and their children a royal inheritance. However, Cary places yet another layer of meaning onto Mariam’s body when she continually links the Judean queen and her husband to the Roman Empire. By reminding the audience of the colonial nature of Palestine at the time, Cary implies that Mariam’s resistance has more global repercussions.44 Cary most significantly connects her heroine to imperialism through references to Palestine’s status as a colony of Rome; moreover, many of the play’s characters, principally Mariam and Herod, then tie the queen to this colonized land and its resources. Thus, control of Palestine is based on control of Mariam. Moreover, because Mariam and Palestine are also continually associated with Rome, her refusal to be appropriated as a resource for her husband as client-king is thus also a refusal of Rome’s government and serves to question the power of the empire itself. Mariam herself, in the opening speech of the tragedy, creates a connection with Rome when she places herself rhetorically on the same level as Caesar: How oft have I with public voice run on To censure Rome’s last hero for deceit: 44 Margaret Ferguson also considers Mariam to be a ‘type of the “disempowered” imperial subject’ set against her husband Herod as the figure of repressing tyrant. Ferguson is interested in how Cary’s drama reflects the situation of Catholic recusants who refused to participate in England’s post-Reformation imperial policies, usually by employing some form of equivocation. Dido’s Daughters, pp. 269-271.

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Because he wept when Pompey’s life was gone, Yet when he liv’d, he thought his name too great. But now I do recant, and, Roman lord, Excuse too rash a judgment in a woman: My sex pleads pardon, pardon then afford, Mistaking is with us too too common. Now I do find, by self-experience taught, One object yields both grief and joy. (1.1.1-10)

Here, Mariam describes how she would often chastise Julius Caesar for the vacillating emotions he expressed on the death of his former friend and then enemy, Pompey. Though Mariam disparages her initial reaction to Herod’s supposed death, she and Caesar are now both seen to lament men whom they previously wished dead. Mariam’s first speech anticipates the play’s numerous references to Rome. But additionally, by comparing herself to Roman rulers, Mariam in these opening lines upsets any later attempts to make use of her as a symbol of anyone else’s power, since in the first scene she has already appropriated Rome, linking herself to one its most notable generals as a means to develop her own authoritative perspective on the action of the play. Finally, by connecting herself to Caesar and Pompey and the personal nature of Rome’s civil wars, Mariam also prefigures the upheaval she will cause later in the play. Cary’s interest in Rome coincided with King James’ own investment, as discussed above, in the idea of the ancient Roman empire serving as a template for the idea of a unified kingdom of Great Britain. Andrew Hadfield, drawing on the work of Jenny Wormald, argues that James ‘was probably less committed to the goal of uniting the British Isles under his rule than has hitherto been assumed, and was more interested in a strategic plan which would advance the interests of Scots at court’. But Hadfield still notes how men such as mapmakers like John Speed still appealed to that sense of empire. Speed’s 1611 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, Hadfield points out, was dedicated to James as ruler of Great Britain. 45 These multiple uses of the idea of the Roman empire by James and the mapmakers working in his reign is reflected by the varied ways Cary’s characters approach and employ the idea of Rome and its empire. The next prominent example of this employment is when Cary offers Herod’s f irst appearance in the play as a parallel to Mariam’s; he too

45 Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Drayton, and the Question of Britain’, p. 584.

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expostulates on his spouse in connection to Rome, from where he has just returned. In an apostrophe to Rome, Herod declares: You world-commanding city, Europe’s grace, Twice hath my curious eye your streets survey’d, I have seen the statue-fillèd place, That once if not for grief had been betray’d. I all your Roman beauties have beheld, And seen the shows your ediles did prepare; I saw the sum of what in you excell’d, Yet saw no miracle like Mariam rare. The fair and famous Livia, Caesar’s love, The world’s commanding mistress did I see: Whose beauties both the world and Rome approve, Yet, Mariam, Livia is not like to thee. (4.1.21-32)

Herod’s speech first details for the audience the grandeur of Rome, signified by a description of spaces in its streets and statue-filled forum, magistrates in charge of public places, and the emperor’s wife, Livia. But after praising Rome’s glory, Herod claims that Mariam exceeds the female representative of the empire. Even given the requisite hyperbole of Herod’s celebration, the speech links Livia and Mariam and thus the center of the empire with its peripheral colonies, making Mariam at least as important a signifying space as Livia in representing the power of Rome. And despite Herod’s attempts to exalt his own wife and thus perhaps himself, Cary provides continual reminders that Herod’s rule depends at least partly on the goodwill of Rome. The play begins with and sustains this political connection to the empire when the Argument states that Herod gains his power ‘having crept by favour of the Romans’ into the throne of Judea. These images of Herod’s fortune – and thus his kingdom’s – as dependent on Roman decrees suggest that Herod, despite occupying the throne of Judea, must nonetheless defer to the empire, which is made up of many constituent parts who owe obedience to Rome. These places, including the one into which Herod has ‘crept’, also function in that obedience as markers of a successful empire. Similarly and importantly, Mariam as a wife must be obedient to her husband, and their marriage and her continued obedience reflect the legitimacy and success of his kingship (which, again, then reflects Rome’s imperial power). Both relationships thus control but are also dependent on their territorial possessions, be they land or a woman who represents that land.

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One of the most significant Roman imperial connections that Cary makes is between Mariam and Cleopatra. As members of the ruling families of their respective nations, Mariam and Cleopatra represent territories that can be claimed by Roman men through possession of their bodies. Mariam’s mother declares that she once sought advancement by offering her daughter to Marc Antony; however, Mariam denies any connection to the Egyptian queen who became partner to the Roman triumvir: Not to be empress of aspiring Rome, Would Mariam like to Cleopatra love: With purest body will I press my tomb, And wish no favors Antony could give. (1.2.199-202)

Although many of the references to the Egyptian queen, like this one, are meant to assert Mariam’s purity, the constantly evoked Cleopatra serves as a reminder of another woman whose intimate relationships with rulers worked to disrupt the stability of empire. But while Cleopatra relies on her physical availability in political alliances, Mariam draws on the disruptive power of denying access to her body. Her claim above, where she prefers the cold purity of a tomb to any favors from Antony, prefigures her later refusal to acquiesce sexually to Herod upon his return. Angered by Herod’s order for her execution should he be put to death, Mariam declares, ‘I will not to his love be reconcil’d, / With solemn vows I have forsworn his bed’ (3.3.132-133). By forswearing Herod’s bed, as she does here, she also uses a very local geography or affective space to gain agency (a strategy we also saw Dido use), figuring sexual access to her body as a space she refuses to enter. The imperial connection is created and then severed by invoking Cleopatra and then engaging in world-writing on a microcosmic level. By rhetorically placing her own body in a tomb, she removes her body from Herod’s bed to a space of her own creation, calling it specifically hers. Salome, too, significantly achieves authority when she articulates her rejection of the double standard governing divorce as a spatial one. She claims, ‘But now I must divorce him [Constabarus] from my bed, / That Silleus may possess his room’ (1.4.317-318). Here, Salome claims ownership of the bed as emblematic of their marriage and offers Silleus the physical space that Constabarus once occupied (‘his room’) in that bed. Therefore, Salome retains ultimate control over her bed, who may fill its space, and thus herself. Salome continues to highlight her potential political power in terms of domestic space. By resisting the laws concerning divorce, Salome will ‘be the custom-breaker: and begin / To show my sex the way to freedom’s door’

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(1.4.309-310). Just as Mariam refused Herod’s bed, so Salome proposes to leave the home; both seek to subvert normative wifely roles by abandoning the designated domestic space. Indeed, Salome plans to lead all women out of their homes, revealing the public ramifications of her individual act. Constabarus confirms his wife’s control in spatial terms when he exclaims that Salome is ‘a painted sephulcre […]. Her mind is fill’d with worse than rotten bones’ (2.4.325, 328). Similar to how Mariam claims that she will remove her body to the pure space of the tomb as symbolic of her removal from the expected marital role, Salome’s wronged husband also represents Salome’s domestic disruption as a space; in this instance, of bodily death. Constabarus’ anger compels him to be even more gruesomely descriptive: rather than fulfill the role of fertile land that would produce resources and heirs for her husband, Salome’s body becomes a location filled only with death and bones. 46 Salome and Mariam are women characters who illustrate how political ramifications can be tied to geographic description, and this rhetoric of territory and colonization is applied all throughout the play. Mariam first describes one of the reasons for her hatred of Herod in spatial terms: ‘For he, by barring me from liberty, / To shun my ranging, taught me first to range’ (1.1.25-26). With use of the term ‘range’, Mariam figures her husband’s control over her in terms related to animal husbandry, connecting his ownership of her to the justifications used by colonists in Ireland, who claimed the land through its farm-related uses. 47 The ever-present Chorus similarly uses land imagery in order to criticize the poor judgment and actions of the characters; like those who argue that the uncivilized nature of the Irish links to the wasting of their land, the Chorus describes ill actions and thoughts as inhospitable land. When excoriating those who continually seek different and more advantageous relationships (in this case, both Salome and Constabarus), the Chorus explains that ‘Those minds that wholly dote upon delight, / Except they only joy in inward good, / Still hope at last to hop upon the right, / And so from sand they leap into loathsome mud’ (1.6.494-496). The thoughts of those who do not follow the Chorus’ conception of virtuous behavior occupy a land that is unstable and therefore unsuitable to build 46 Irene Burgess claims that ‘there is little that is domestic about Salome; her passions and desires are wordly and focused on personal power’. “‘The Wreck of Order”’, paragraph 11. In contrast, her brother Pheroras describes the thoughts of Graphina, his obedient and mainly silent bride-to-be, who occupies an enclosed domestic space that keeps any disruptive ideas away: ‘But wisdom is the porter of her head / And bars all wicked words from issuing thence’ (3.1.25-26). 47 II.5. a. v. The act of ranging or moving about; II.6. b. n. Without article: grazing ground. The latter term arose in the 1620s during the settlement of Virginia. Oxford English Dictionary Online.

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upon. The fluctuating desires are described as shifting sand or sucking mud – both useless. The Chorus continues to represent poor political and marital judgment as ill-chosen land when they describe the plans of those who believe Herod to be dead: ‘They not object the weak uncertain ground, / Whereon they built this tale of Herod’s end’ (2.4.425-426). When discussing Mariam’s tendency to speak with others besides her husband, the Chorus asks, ‘When she hath spacious ground to walk upon, / Why on the ridge should she desire to go?’ (3.3.221-222). According to the Chorus, Mariam’s chastity in marriage rests on her remaining silent, in this case represented as a valley, bounded and protected by mountains, and presumably more suitable for her husband’s ‘cultivation’. In contrast, Mariam desires to walk upon the exposed and open ridge, a land area that, while giving her a public and elevated space from which to express herself and her opinions, is a place that her husband cannot easily control or even use. 48 In addition to her connection to the land and its uses, Mariam is also linked to the resources of that land. Most famously, Herod laments his executed wife: I had but one inestimable jewel, Yet one I had no monarch had the like, [……..] A precious mirror made by wondrous art, I priz’d it ten times dearer than my own crown, And laid it up fast folded in my heart: Yet I in sudden choler cast it down, And pash’d it all to pieces: ’twas no foe That robb’d me of it; no Arabian host, Nor no Armenian guide hath us’d me so. (5.1.119-120, 125-131)

Here, Herod represents his wife first as a piece of mineral wealth, like the gold of Guiana that Ralegh promised to Elizabeth. When a few lines later he describes Mariam as a mirror, Herod recalls the important representative function that Mariam served as the wife of the king; her honor and purity as a wife reflect his integrity as a ruler. Additionally, Herod still speaks of his possession of these objects in political terms: what he values more than his 48 The Chorus later affirms the political nature of Mariam’s association with others when it states, ‘When any’s ears but one therewith they fill, / Doth in a sort her pureness overthrow’ (3.2.247-248). With her pureness ‘overthrown’, as a usurper would a ruler or government, Mariam thus endangers her husband’s sovereignty by denying him sole access to her body.

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own crown can also potentially be taken away by foreign invaders. But as Herod asserts in the above lines, he alone has caused the loss of this resource; indeed, Herod prizes Mariam more than his own crown, for her lineage and the legitimacy she brings to the marriage affords Herod access to the political power symbolized by that crown. Here, he laments his wife in terms of a lost resource, since as we have seen throughout the play, Herod and others highlight Mariam’s ability to increase his political power. He also praises her in terms of territory to acquire, much as Tamburlaine used Zenocrate as foundation and justification for his numerous conquests. When he is first reunited with Mariam, Herod calls on her to Be my commandress, be my sovereign guide To be by thee directed I will woo, For in thy pleasure lies my highest pride. Or if thou think Judea’s narrow bound Too strict a limit for thy great command: Thou shalt be empress of Arabia crown’d, For thou shalt rule, and I will win the land. (4.3.98-104)

Herod’s language transforms Mariam into a figurehead who will preside over his territorial acquisitions. Also like his Scythian predecessor, Herod couches his plans for conquest in the terms of courtship, ‘wooing’ his nowreluctant wife to guide him to new territory. Since their marriage brought Herod greater control over ‘Judea’s narrow bound’, he naturally terms any additional conquest as the prerogative of Mariam: ‘if thou think’; ‘thou shalt be empress’. However, Herod’s lines in this speech demonstrate the true nature of these conquests. He places Mariam in the traditional role of the Petrarchan beloved, the passive figure to whom all this wooing and beseeching is addressed. It is Herod who demands she be his ‘commandress’; it is Herod who will court her, and ultimately, it is Herod who will ‘win the land’, actively acquiring new territory that can again be likened to the ideally controlled and fertile body of his wife. But, as noted earlier, Mariam has already moved to use this land-based discourse as a way of resistance. Rather than continue to yield her body and its significance to an always-increasing empire – whether of Rome or Judea – Mariam instead places herself rhetorically into an affective space that Herod can no longer control: a tomb that can potentially stand as a monument to herself alone. When Herod implores her to rely upon and to take heart in his love for her, Mariam responds laconically but appropriately: ‘I will not build on so unstable ground’ (4.3.148). Pressed into

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the service of her husband’s and, thus, Rome’s political stability, Mariam deploys territorial imagery to alter the location of her body in this discourse: she will reject the ‘ground’ of Herod’s Petrarchan love rhetoric as unstable, transforming her body into a pure tomb, a dead space that cannot be used in the territorial rhetoric that renders the land a waiting virgin and then a planted field. Mariam as tomb removes herself from any potential sexual and thus political uses by her husband. However, she continues to assert her identity by maintaining a physical presence on the land in the form of a monument that she has constructed. The play’s other queen, Cleopatra, would also avoid being made into a symbol of political conquest by committing suicide rather than be part of Octavius’ triumphal parade. Though Cary never remarks on this particular similarity between Mariam and Cleopatra, the play’s continual comparisons between the two women illustrate how each queen, in life, functions as a representative of their respective territories. These geographic connections then support the colonial association between Palestine and Rome and, in Cary’s time, Ireland and Britain. Further strengthening the connection, Mariam’s mother, Alexandra, relates how she once sent the portraits of Mariam and her brother to Marc Antony. If only, she claims, the general were not so tempted by the beauty of both, ‘Then Mariam in a Roman’s chariot set, / In place of Cleopatra might have shown:/ A mart of beauties in her visage met, / And part in this, that they were all her own’ (1.2.195-198). The lines again link Mariam to Rome, this time as part of a triumphal procession. However, it is left uncertain whether Mariam’s role in such a procession would be as a free participant or a spoil of war, the possibility that the historical Cleopatra thwarted with her suicide. In either case, Alexandra’s description of her daughter as displaying a ‘mart of beauties’ objectifies Mariam and ties her to the economic spoils of empire. As representative of Judea and beauty, the queen would be exhibited as a commodity that the Romans parade in their capital city. Mariam’s rejection of this role through her stated preference to become a tomb emphasizes her refusal to become a mere marker of empire. Whereas Mariam’s mother views any connection to Rome as a source of glory for her daughter, Mariam refuses to take part in any ceremony that would ultimately be an exploitation of the symbolic import of her body. Mariam, when later awaiting her own execution, ponders the love that Herod once had for her, claiming that Cleopatra ‘Could not my face from Herod’s mind exile’ (4.8.543). Although Mariam expresses the inability of Cleopatra to draw Herod’s love, she does so in a way that praises Cleopatra’s profound effects on the Roman Empire, referring to her as

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That face that did captive great Julius’ fate, That very face that was Anthonius’ bane, That face that to be Egypt’s pride was born, That face that all the world esteem’d so rare. (4.8.547-550)

Mariam recounts how, through personal relationships, Cleopatra is able to affect the course of empire, controlling Caesar’s ‘fate’ and embodying Marc Antony’s ‘bane’ even as she represents Egypt. But however destabilizing Cleopatra had once been, the Empire’s absorption of Egypt meant that the threat was ultimately contained, even if the victors were deprived of their attempt to objectify the Egyptian queen as spoil of war. Mariam, and the threat she represents, is not so easily contained, as evidenced by the problematic comparisons that Herod and others make when they try to praise Mariam (and really, themselves) as a desirable possession. The repeated epithet ‘that face’ recalls Dr. Faustus’ remark upon seeing the form of Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships’. 49 The allusion to Helen and the war that the pursuit of her caused again prefigures Mariam’s disruption to her husband’s rule. Herod also refers to this classical analogy when he praises Mariam at his return, stating, For on the brow of Mariam hangs a fleece, Whose slenderest twine is strong enough to bind The hearts of kings; the pride and shame of Greece, Troy-flaming Helen’s not so fairly shined. (4.7.413-416)

Mariam’s brow is juxtaposed to the Golden Fleece that Jason and the Argonauts stole, with the help of the princess Medea, and brought back with them to Greece. Again, Mariam is described as an alluring possession, specifically one gained through trial and combat and removed to Jason’s home as a trophy and symbol of his bravery. But as discussed in the previous chapter, that story, too, resulted in familial and political upheaval when Medea, angered by Jason’s abandonment of her in favor of marriage to a princess, kills their children and his new bride. The classical reference to the Golden Fleece, meant in praise of Mariam, ultimately indicates her ability to destroy, like Medea, the political and familial networks that men use to increase their power. Finally, in the passage Herod also exalts his wife by claiming that Helen of Troy ‘is not so fairly shined’. The metaphor specifically calls Helen 49 Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, Complete Works, Scene 13, l. 90.

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‘Troy-flaming’, an epithet that assigns the burning of Troy to her directly. Thus, Mariam, as superior to Helen in appearance, could also be said to surpass the Greek woman in her capability to destroy a city. In addition, by naming Helen both ‘the pride and shame of Greece’, Herod also transfers her paradoxical nature to the woman he intends to praise. Mariam will indeed be both ‘pride and shame’ to Herod; she accords him the political legitimacy to rule Palestine, yet she will also subvert her husband’s will and thus cause his emotional and perhaps political downfall. And Mariam’s wifely disobedience would be seen in early modern England as political resistance that would therefore cause political instability. Upset at her impending execution, Herod laments, ‘Oh, now the grief returns into my heart, / And pulls me piecemeal’ (4.4.243-244). The image of his fractured body points to the possibility that Palestine will suffer the same fate. The fragmentation of Herod’s kingdom would potentially reverberate to the seat of empire in Rome, and the Nuntio’s description of Mariam’s execution intimates that outcome. He tells Herod, ‘She came unmov’d, with pleasant grace, / As if to triumph her arrival were: / In stately habit, and with cheerful face’ (5.1.55-57). His language specifically relates Mariam’s procession to execution as a triumphal parade like those seen in Rome. The Nuntio describes her walk to the scaffold as graceful, ‘as if to triumph’; his account demonstrates how Mariam appropriates the traditional Roman celebration of imperial conquest, marking her usurpation of the Roman ceremony of conquest as a kind of colonial resistance. Herod, too, eventually recognizes Mariam’s political potency through associations with the land. In his lament following her death, Mariam is still a crucial resource of the kingdom, one whose absence is described economically as a loss of property. Cary links this deprivation with political repercussions when Herod claims that the loss of Mariam will deplete both the land and thus his right to control it: Judea, how canst thou the wretches brook, That robb’d from thee the fairest of the crew? You dwellers now in a deprivèd land, Wherein the matchless Mariam was bred: Why grasp not each of you a sword in hand, To aim at me your cruel sovereign’s head? (5.1.169-174)

The land is now ‘deprived’ and empty, just as Mariam’s body, in death, has been deprived of its essential meaning to Herod, one that he recognizes here. Without the political legitimacy that Mariam bestows through her

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lineage, nor the connection to the land that her body signifies, Herod expects rebellion. In giving an account of Mariam’s execution to her husband, the Nuntio explicitly reminds Herod and the audience that ‘[h]er body is divided from her head’ (5.1.90). Mariam’s body – the reflection of Herod’s power – has also been separated from the ruler, or head, who required the connection to and conquest of her body in order to legitimate his rule and reflect stability with its wholeness.50 As Scholz notes, ‘Testifying to an underlying mind-body split which situates subjectivity beyond the body, the subject who is able to govern his “private” realm, that is, his wife and household, is also entitled to rule in the public sphere’.51 Herod’s ill government of his wife and thus kingdom at the play’s end can potentially disrupt Rome’s stability if its colonies are seen as unstable. Since Rome’s control of its colonies was seen as an indicator of the empire’s general power, and early modern geographic discourse regarded colonization in marital and sexual terms, Herod’s failure to govern his wife indicates not only his inability to control Palestine but ultimately suggests a weakness in Rome’s imperial conquest. Despite seemingly limited methods of resistance, Mariam maintains her bodily integrity in the face of Herod’s threats, effectively undermining his political legitimacy and that of Rome’s through her connection to imperial territory and her location in the local ruling family’s genealogy. While the rhetoric of geography and marriage seeks to objectify women, Cary shows a way for a character like Mariam to ‘opt out’ of such a discourse, where that removal affirms the rhetoric’s power and certain women’s ability to paradoxically ‘tap into’ it even as they leave it. And though this absence is a powerful one, Cary also creates an alternative space for Mariam to occupy. Herod concludes his lament for his wife’s loss with the recognition that ‘Within her purer veins the blood did run, / That from her grandam Sara she deriv’d’ (5.1.179-180). Although this is a reiteration of the importance of Mariam’s legitimacy, Herod here is also repeating an earlier claim by Mariam before her execution. Following her speech that references the powers of Cleopatra, Mariam ultimately claims that ‘In Heav’n shall Mariam sit in Sara’s lap’ (4.8.574). Like her earlier placement in a tomb, Mariam again locates herself in a transcendent yet in many ways very tangible place. By sitting in her ancestor Sara’s lap, Mariam occupies an intimate space with one of Judaism’s important female forebears. The line both looks back to 50 Kim Walker’s examination of Mariam’s access to public speech argues that her beheading ‘can be read as a final attempt by Herod to break up the threatening integrity of body and mind that closes off proprietorial control of both’. Women Writers of the English Renaissance, p. 139. 51 Scholz, Body Narratives, p. 60.

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a specifically female lineage while affirming Mariam’s place in posterity alongside Sara. With this connection to Sara, spoken by both Herod and Mariam, Cary also makes a decisive break from Mariam’s associations with Cleopatra; the Egyptian queen’s name is Greek for glory to her father, and that name would be forever linked, in this play and elsewhere, to Caesar and Marc Antony. But Cary here imparts onto her queen of Jewry, separated by death from the land she embodies, an association that instead occupies a new location and lineage of her own making. As explained by critics like Daniel Woolfe and Sara Trevisan, early modern women could play an ‘active role’52 in creating a ‘personal historical domain’53 through the discourses of genealogy as well as geography, as both use ideas of place that can contribute to the formation of certain identities. Cary in her drama explores the implications of an early modern political and colonial discourse that continually attempted to place women, literally and figuratively, at the center of its justifications for the subjugation of other people and land. Cary’s Mariam subverts this discourse in two important ways. First, she recognizes her importance to Herod’s rule as a bearer of familial legitimacy and as a physical connection to the land that Herod will appropriate through exclusive use. Her removal from the literal space of the marriage bed precipitates Herod’s potential loss of the land that he controls through her body and then Rome’s potential weakening as an empire that cannot control its colonial territories. Second, Cary’s play, with its emphasis on the topographical and imperial nature of the drama’s political problems, allows Mariam to use the rhetoric of space to construct locations that she alone can occupy and control; in this case, a tomb, a traditional Roman triumphal parade in the forum, and finally a female ancestor’s lap. But Cary’s exploration of Mariam’s resistance remains, finally, grounded in the death of the heroine. Although unique, Mariam’s active use of the language and ideology that would subjugate her ends only in a figurative triumph, ultimately described to the audience by Herod and the Nuntio. But the genre of closet drama, to which many argue this play belongs, was regarded not as positing any one solution to a political problem; rather, the reading of such a work, often done with other company, was meant to propose various options and to spur debate among readers, especially in regards to contemporary political issues. Marta Straznicky writes that closet dramas were not confined to an enclosed, often elite literary space. Rather, these plays ‘sought to occupy a cultural position that could meaningfully intervene 52 Trevisan, ‘Genealogy’, p. 275. 53 Woolf, Social Circulation, p. 117.

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in social, religious, and political discourse’.54 Mariam’s figurative triumph could have had more concrete effects among its readers. Elizabeth Schafer argues that the tragedy could have been intended for public performance, making the play even more potentially subversive, intervening as it does in issues of empire and wives’ (dis)obedience when King James was invested in securing and promulgating both.55 And these issues again play a major role in Cary’s The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, a history that, despite its title, provides another intriguing exploration of the role of a queen in domestic and political strife.

‘A Queen, a Woman, and a Victor’: Cary’s Isabel Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II demonstrates how another queen effectively resists the rule of her husband the king; the French Isabel foments and leads a successful invasion of England, placing herself in a position of power over their young son.56 Cary follows the example of Christopher Marlowe in creating a sympathetic portrayal of the woman who was referred to as the ‘she-wolf of France’. Like Marlowe, Elizabeth Cary would be drawn to the story of Edward II, only to have her version also eventually focus on the actions and character of his wife. However, Cary’s dramatic account of Edward’s reign differs significantly from Marlowe in narrative progression and, ultimately, in the way that Cary’s Isabel constructs her identity around the ideologies of land, body, and family. Cary has her character draw her identity and thus agency from a connection to the geography of England. When connections of family and marriage fail her, Isabel relies on her selfconstructed link to the topography and people of her adopted kingdom; she positions herself as a representative of England and its people, specifically 54 Straznicky, ‘Closet Drama’, p. 426. Straznicky also writes that these texts were often approached in an active scholarly fashion, with pen, paper, and reference works at hand (pp. 422423). Similarly, Alison Shell writes that Cary followed the example of her source material’s translator Thomas Lodge, who ‘gives voice to a common Renaissance preoccupation, the moral utility of history, and – more unusually – stresses his readers’ obligation to interrogate their own lives by actively reflecting upon relevant historical exemplars, both good and bad’. Shell, ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience’, p. 53. For further discussion on how Cary uses the genre of closet drama to ‘negotiate a role as a female rhetorician’, see Corporaal, “‘Thy speech eloquent, thy wit quick, thy expressions easy”’, n. p. 55 Schafer, ‘Unsilencing Elizabeth Cary’, pp. 41-54. 56 I am referring to the longer Folio edition of Edward II. For more information on the provenance of the manuscript, see Reeves, ‘From Manuscript to Printed Text’, pp. 125-144. For the history of the octavo and folio version, see Swan, ‘A Bibliographical Palimpsest’, pp. 107-124.

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those of the lower classes with more concrete and direct connection to the land. But unlike with Mariam, Cary has Isabel actively rely on her connection to and placement within the land, invoking the topography and people of England through Isabel’s own words or by the narrator in direct relation to the Queen. While Mariam’s effect is most palpable after the kingdom has been deprived of her presence, Isabel remains a continual force in the play through the evocation of her ability to properly care for the land of England, a discourse Cary draws directly from the colonial rhetoric in Ireland, and one that imparts on Isabel both power and sympathy. Edward II, written in about 1627 but published in 1680, is not usually read as a drama. But Janet Starner-Wright and Susan M. Fitzmaurice make a case for viewing the work as dramatic, arguing that ‘Cary uses speech delivered by specially chosen characters for dramatic political effect’ as well as often reverting to the use of the present tense.57 And Cary would have seen this intersection of multiple genres in the maps and atlases of the time: her own geographic translation of the French edition of Ortelius’ atlas included, as we have seen, that text’s histories of individual regions, as well as brief narratives featuring the customs, history, and physical characteristics of the inhabitants. This overlapping of genres was also presented visually, as for example in the first English-produced edition of Ortelius. This atlas featured, like many others, pictures in the borders of the maps contained within. For example, a map of the holy land includes depictions of the life of the patriarch Abraham. Just as these atlases evoked theatrical, biblical, and historical genres along with their visual representations, so Cary’s text blends both history and drama and, within the story, the body of a queen and her kingdom. Cary first underscores Isabel’s connection to the land by contrasting the geographical terms used to describe the queen with the language that describes her husband. Cary draws her Edward II in vivid terms as an open orifice with no connections to the land, no link to the concerns of his people, and therefore diminished legitimacy. Specifically, she continually portrays Edward as an ear who allows entry to his favorite’s ‘tongue’. This king and his minion differ not only from Isabel, but from Elizabeth I, the queen Cary’s work employs as a template for the ruler’s often necessary connection to the country: for Isabel’s care for England and its people, expressed in diction that depicts Isabel with the same terms applied to the land itself, mirrors the discourse that linked Queen Elizabeth with the land. The virgin queen’s closed body signified the impenetrable nature of England itself; in contrast 57 Starner-Wright and Fitzmaurice, ‘Shaping a Drama out of History’, p. 89.

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to Isabel and Elizabeth, Edward and Gaveston are the characters whose identities are tied explicitly and only to the image of an open body. When first discussing their relationship, Cary warns, ‘[F]or where the Royal Ear is guided, there ensues a general subversion of all Law and Goodness’.58 Edward is from the outset personified only by an open body part, one that cannot physically be closed to outside influence. Where Elizabeth forestalled political threats by equating her virginity with the integrity of England (and with her virgin body, bolstered her country’s figurative strength), Edward remains only a body that he employs for his pleasure. As such, Gaveston’s return from his first exile elicits this description: ‘[T]he interview was accompanied with as many mutual expressions, as might flow from the tongues, eyes, and hearts of long-divided Lovers’ (17). Here the body parts are also regarded as porous and uncontained since they send out expressions that will commingle in the erotic fashion of lovers. In another instance, Cary continues with the imagery of the intermingled bodily fluids of the two men when she writes that Gaveston’s fawning behavior has ‘so glewed him to his Master, that their Affections, nay their very Intentions seem’d to go hand in hand’ (20). Here, they not only clasp hands but are stuck or glued to one another, an image that again emphasizes the primarily sensual nature of both Edward and Gaveston. The later favorite Spencer’s speeches to Edward are depicted as external and penetrative and thus also responsible for the corruption of the kingdom: Spencer does not find ‘contradiction in his Soveraigns ear, who made his tongue a guide to lead his actions; they are freely admited’ (86). Isabel herself similarly describes the king, as already invaded bodily; she tells her brother, ‘[H]is will, his ear, his heart is too too open to those which make his errours their advantage’ (96). Cary continues to write about Edward using physical and sexual imagery: after his accession, she writes that the new king’s subjects wait anxiously to see the ‘first Virgin-works of his Greatness’ as he takes the ‘Maiden-head of his Crown’ (8). But although the act of ruling is here rendered in sexual terms, Edward never really fulfills this metaphorical conjugal duty, as Cary describes how the king instead longs for Gaveston in a ‘kinde of Royal Fever’ (16) from which no matter of state can draw the king. This language seems to gesture towards earlier representations of Queen Elizabeth, Mariam, and other female figures discussed in relation to the connections with their physical bodies and the land they govern or reside in. But the bodily nature of the king’s identity presented here is troubling, in that this physicality manifests itself as wholly unconnected with the (hetero) sexual nature of a 58 From Cary, Edward II, p. 10. Further citations are in-text.

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state of virgin impermeability like Elizabeth and England, or any powerful demarcator of important resources like Mariam and Palestine. Furthermore, as a contrast to Edward’s purely personal and sensual motivations, Cary’s narrator admonishes the reader about how rulers should base their good governance in topographical terms, stating, ‘Those that are truely wise, discreet, and virtuous, will make him so that pursues their counsel; upon which Rock he rests secure untainted’ (31). The line advocates for more stable counsel; in this case, Cary describes such an investment in sound advice as being built upon immovable rock. Cary later has her narrator interject that ‘he that by a just desert, and credit of his own worth, hath won the Love of good men, hath laid himself a sure foundation’ (63). Both examples of good rule emphasize its connection to the land’s unchanging qualities; this ‘sure foundation’ of rock will be more stable than a slippery tongue and less accessible than an ear open to all hearing. Cary again later characterizes Edward’s infatuation with his favorites as ‘this Feaver’ (56), which causes ‘the disorders of the Kingdom’ (58). Such medical language emphasizes Edward’s misrule as a bodily condition that eventually affects the body of state as well. When Edward is seen to repeat former errors, the narrator comments in more explicit detail: ‘The customary habit of transgression is like a Corn that doth infest his owner, though it be par’d and cut, yet it reneweth, unless the Core be rooted out that feeds his tumour’ (95). Edward’s misjudgment is described in the last quotation in words that evoke infection; the infested ‘corn’ or ‘tumour’ must be cut and uprooted or it will continue to grow. Edward’s fever for Gaveston causes the kingdom’s malady, pointing back to the reciprocal and familial relationship of a monarch and his people that King James advocated in his treatises to his heir. Cary earlier has the dying Edward I similarly advise his own son, ‘The Soveraigns Vice begets the Subjects Errour, who practice good or ill by his Example’ (6). Ultimately, Edward’s ill body will affect the body politic; moreover, this representation of Edward also shows him to be unconnected to and thus unconcerned for his kingdom, as opposed to a ruler like Elizabeth, who is often geographically linked to her country. This depiction of Edward as poor father/husband to England will serve as an important contrast to Cary’s portrayal of Isabel. But even more than the fatherly role for a king, Cary’s perspective of good government relies more on the idea of a good monarch as a just and effective land manager; she writes that Edward ‘planted the foundation of his monarchy on Sycophants and Favorites, whose disorderly Proceedings dryed up all that sap that should have fostered up the Goodness of the Kingdome’ (39). Edward’s poor gardening results in a draining of the kingdom’s

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resources. The reference to the kingdom as a garden echoes Shakespeare’s Richard II, where a gardener’s assistant complains to his superior, Why should we, in the compass of a pale, Keep law and order and due proportion, Showing as in a model our firm estate, When our sea-wallèd garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars? (3.4.40-47)59

England’s upheaval under Richard’s rule is related by the gardener to a botanical disorder in their garden. His superior admonishes him with the fact that Richard’s fate has been decided and is similarly linked to the natural world: ‘He that hath suffered this disordered spring / Hath now himself met with the fall of the leaf’ (50-51). Cary’s use of the garden to reflect the political state thus has a precedent in this earlier history play. In a more famous example from the same play, John of Gaunt praises England but fears ruin: This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of the wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, […] This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it – Like to a tenement, or pelting farm. (2.1.44-52, 59-62)60

His praise ends with the pronouncement that the gardener will also later vocalize: the land is being ill-used by an unworthy inhabitant, in this 59 The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. 60 Ibid.

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case one who slaughters animals for their pelts. In contrast to the Edenic paradise that breeds strong kings without any indication of labor or waste, the pelter – Richard the king – engages in one of the bloodier and messier professions. John of Gaunt’s speech thus helps lay the foundation for the ostensible reason behind his son’s subsequent usurpation of the crown. In her own narrative of a deposed king, Cary also employs the figure of the disordered garden in order to support Isabel’s own decision to invade, referring to the idea from Shakespeare’s earlier play that a ruler’s relationship with his or her land must necessarily be beneficial to both. Referring to another favorite of the king, Spencer, and his corrupt policy, Cary writes that ‘[w]hen that the Blossomes dropt away (the Gardens glory) the season being sweet, and mildly pleasant, all men admir’d, but quickly knew the reason, some unkind hand had tainted that which fed them’ (78). This description of Spencer and his devious plans links the favorite to a gardener who gives tainted nourishment that causes blossoms to fall prematurely. The horticultural metaphors that Cary applies to Edward II’s political circumstances illustrate a belief that monarchical rule should tend carefully to the land in order for life to flourish. And Cary continues to portray how Edward’s government is akin to ineffective land management, as here when writing that the king has given too much power to Gaveston: ‘All that appertains unto the Crown and Royal Dignity are wholly in [Gaveston’s] Power, so that he might justly be thought the Lessee, if not the Inheritor of the Prerogative and Revenue’ (27). Coupled with the ideas from Shakespeare’s play pertaining to a king/ gardener’s proper role in the kingdom/garden, Cary’s writing here suggests that Edward is unfit to rule since he has ‘rented’ his kingdom to the favorite. This detailed representation of correct care of the land recalls Patricia Seed’s assertion that the English determined ownership by the proper use of it in the form of productive agriculture.61 Cary’s main justification for declaring Edward an unfit ruler is that he does not cultivate his kingdom in a manner appropriate for a just monarch. Rather, he rents it to those who not only have no familial claim to the land but also damage its productive capabilities. In using the language of the body and that of territorial management and (non-) cultivation, Cary employs a version of the early modern discourse that asserted a right to a land or a bride through the initial penetration and eventual fertilization of those spaces by men. Edward, through his refusal to seize the ‘maiden-head’ of his kingdom and his willingness to become a porous body part unconnected to the concerns of his realm beyond ‘leasing’ them out, therefore forfeits his right to govern. 61 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 25.

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Cary establishes this territorial rhetoric not just to discredit Edward’s reign but to lay the foundation for his wife Isabel’s legitimate overthrow of that rule. Like Mariam, Isabel’s rebellion reflects poorly on her husband’s ability to control wife and kingdom. However, Mariam’s resistance is predicated on a purely metaphorical subversion of Roman imperial symbolism, and her connection to the land is only affirmed completely by her absence from it, a removal that symbolically underscores Herod’s inability to rule the Judean colony for Rome. Edward II, in contrast, presents Isabel as a queen who actively rebels against her husband and succeeds in his place, an extremely subversive move that Cary justifies through the language of geography, specifically proper colonial cultivation. Examining Isabel’s claims to power, Mihoko Suzuki writes that ‘Cary’s innovation […] lies in linking the claims of a female subject in marriage, in this case Isabel, with the claims of the subjects in the polity’, particularly when she appeals on behalf of the English people to her brother in France.62 While Suzuki emphasizes the queen’s connection to the people through their similarly oppressed states, Cary uses territory itself as a political metaphor to link Isabel not just with the people but with the land the subjects occupy and use. In this case, Isabel figures not as a representation of her own family’s territory of France; she actively chooses to associate herself with England and to correct the injustices that Edward and his minions have inflicted on the land that stands for the kingdom as a whole. Cary initially figures Isabel in terms similar to that of Mariam; both are a resource their husbands have claimed: Edward travels to France for his new bride and then, ‘[t]he Solemnity ended, and a Farewel taken, he hastens homewards, returning fiefed of a Jewel, which not being rightly valued, wrought his ruine’ (19). The verb ‘fiefed’ posits the idea that Edward’s marriage is a poorly maintained estate or territory, similar to England in Shakespeare’s Richard II, since fief was defined in the early 1600s as a manor held by a knight through homage.63 In this case, Isabel as a jewel of which her husband has been fiefed serves as a metonym for Edward’s disregard for his rule, represented here through his ignorance of his wife’s importance. But the construction of the sentence renders the purportedly inanimate object as one that possesses a kind of agency; the jewel itself is what will bring his ruin. This description again contrasts with Herod’s description of Mariam, whose 62 Suzuki, “‘Fortune is a Stepmother”’, p. 94. 63 The Oxford English Dictionary Online notes a 1611 usage listed in Randle Cotgrave’s A dictionarie of the French and English tongues. The book has an entry for Fief, a Fief; a (Knights) fee; a Mannor, or inheritance held by homage.

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absence, caused by Herod’s active destruction of his ‘jewel’, is what leads to his emotional and potentially political downfall. The initial representation of Isabel, while linking her to a traditionally passive ornament or even land grant, serves to increase the power of her character, both because of the sentence’s structure, and because Cary’s later connections between Isabel and the land will not function as an objectification along the same lines as descriptions of lands and females by authors like Ralegh and Gernon. To return to Isabel the active agent: as Suzuki points out, the queen’s pleas to her brother in France explicitly connect her with the suffering of the English kingdom. She exhorts the king, ‘Behold in me (dear Sir) your most unhappie Sister […] that bears the grief of a despised Wedlock […]. [Y]et ’tis not I alone unjustly suffer; my tears speak those of a distressed Kingdom’ (96). Isabel reveals her own sufferings from her marriage but also stands as the visual signifier of the King’s injustice to his kingdom. Isabel’s tears appear frequently in her pleas for assistance, and the language Cary uses to describe them further connect her to the land as they are later described as a ‘shower’: ‘Her willing tongue would fain have moved farther; but here the fountain of her eyes poured forth their treasure; a shower of Chrystal tears enforc’d her silence; which kind of Rhetorick won a Noble pitie’ (97). Unlike Gaveston and Spencer, who are all grotesque tongue and open ear glued to one another, Cary here combines Isabel’s words with a physical reaction that instead ties her to the land. Her tears are described as a mild weather event that also possesses the properties of mineral wealth. Later, Cary will describe Isabel’s tears being ‘milde as April’s’, again emphasizing her connection to the land as a positive and nurturing force (103). But this equation of Isabel with mild showers is not simply a potentially stereotypical portrayal of the female as maternal force. Later, during her invasion, Cary writes that Isabel’s ‘Army still grows greater, like a beginning Cloud that doth fore-run a Shower’ (123). In addition to representing a benevolent force of nature for the land, Isabel can also be an active element that will cleanse the kingdom of its woes. Isabel’s relation to England is further illustrated by references to her political endeavors as tasks related to farming and husbandry. This rhetorical strategy strengthens Isabel’s connection with the discourse that English colonists employed in Ireland and the new world in order to justify their claims of land ownership. As noted above, the imposition upon the land of English domesticity – in the form of houses, gardens, and productive agriculture – served in the minds of the colonists to justify English possession. Therefore, Isabel at first ‘labours hard, but fruitless’ to be sent to France (90). The language of fieldwork here relates Isabel to those commoners who

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also literally work the land, and perhaps struggle to do so under Edward. She later begs her brother to ‘succour these two poor Ruines which else must lose their portions, being Birthright. See here, and view but with a just compassion, two Royal Plants depress’d, and like to wither, both branches of the Flower-de-luce, the Root you sprang from’ (97). Though Isabel here emphasizes her family connections, she does so in the same language of gardening that Cary earlier used to describe Isabel’s endeavors in England. Isabel claims a connection to France by birth, but does so while vividly describing herself and Prince Edward as plants that have not been tenderly cared for, rearticulating the symbol of French royalty, the fleur-delis. Moreover, she also casts their condition as ‘Ruines’, again emphasizing the corrupt domesticity that Edward’s rule has brought, implying that her brother’s aid will help her restore a specifically domestic order (in the sense of a household and garden) to England. But her brother’s refusal to help illustrates the potentially ephemeral nature of family ties; he and the other French nobles in fact are won over by gold. The French break off relations, hoping that ‘time would fitly serve them to reunite this Piece to her first Honour. Thus Kings play fast and loose with their advantage; affinity and Oaths are weak restrictions; where Profit holds the Plough, Ambition drives it’ (85). The problems of state are here represented by a perverted form of farming, where ‘Profit’, as opposed to the simple cultivation of plants, directs the plow and uproots the land with ambition. The episode with her brother the French king also reveals how genealogy or family ties could be futile or even harmful, a seeming refutation of the advantage women could have depending on their placement within a map of familial connections. So Isabel will highlight and rely on a filial connection, similar to how Zenocrate subtly hints at her own sons’ potential subversion of their father Tamburlaine’s brutal conquests. Karen Raber argues that Isabel ‘asserts property in her child. In the absence of a claim over her husband, her claim on her child can transform her projected invasion of England from an act of foreign aggression to the restoration of legitimate rule’.64 Zenocrate, if not outright claiming her sons as fully hers like Isabel does, at least alluded to the fact that, as their mother, she planted in them characteristics that Tamburlaine, having claimed and ‘mapped’ her as his wife and their legitimate mother, must acknowledge. And, as described in Chapter One, these mother’s sons, through their genealogical connection to Zenocrate and all that implies, are the ones who, arguably, cause their 64 Raber, ‘Gender and Property’, p. 217.

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father’s downfall. In terms of Isabel’s son, Edward, even Isabel’s ally and eventual lover, Mortimer, notes the mother and her boy’s implicit power. The narrator describes how the earl realizes he ‘had a Cause in hand would win assistance, when that a Queen and an heir apparent back’d it’ (92). More significantly, Isabel herself knows the power of this connection; when her pleas for brotherly help fail, she warns the French king that ‘my Off-spring will revenge a Mothers Quarrel, a Mothers Quarrel just and fit for Vengeance. Then shalt thou seek and sue, yet finde more favour from him thy Foe, than I could win, a Sister’ (108). Both of Cary’s women use genealogy to their advantage, as Isabel’s strategic use of offspring recalls Mariam’s assertion of the link to her ancestor Sara. And the statement not only predicts the future Edward III’s military victories in France, but is also strikingly similar to Dido’s call on Hannibal at the end of Marlowe’s play to be her military heir in the fight against Rome. Beyond geography, Isabel is now linked with Marlowe’s world-writing women through their use of genealogy as well. Following the rejection by her brother, Isabel finds help from those who recognize in her the representative of a healthier and more beneficial form of domesticity that will translate into better rule. Isabel turns next to the Earl of Henault, whose brother sees Isabel as an empty and uninhabited house: ‘a structure of such worth, so fair and lovely, forsaken, unfrequented, and unfurnisht, by the curst hand of an unworthy Landlord, he vows within himself to help repair it’ (110). However, rather than couching his assistance in terms of occupation, the earl’s brother significantly offers only to ‘help repair’ her distressed state; he has recognized that her structure is already sound and of ‘such worth’ that it only needs aid that Cary chooses not to represent as a more masculine invasion of Isabel’s house. This explicit linking of Isabel with the land and the domestic structures upon it is again underscored by the ways in which Cary continues to describe the domestic disorder of Edward’s rule. Specifically, Edward’s kingdom, as run by Gaveston and especially Spencer, is represented by language that recalls an unattended house. The open nature of this house echoes the openness of Edward himself, still described as allowing under Spencer the ‘Admission of the Royal ear to one Tongue only’ (62). Moreover, at the very beginning of the narrative, the reader is informed that, even before Spenser, Gaveston ‘had in the Cabinet of his Masters heart, too dear a room and being’ (5). Edward’s body and behavior have allowed access to the wrong person, one who will contribute actively to pushing England into disrepair: with ‘[t]he principal Pillars of the common good being taken away’, Cary writes, the land and its people suffer (76). With Gaveston’s reentry into the kingdom and thus the ‘interior rooms’ of the king, other invaders find their way into England,

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now made open by Edward’s personal behavior. The Scots under Robert Bruce are the first to take advantage: ‘No sooner is he advertised that the gate was open and unguarded’ than his army invades (37). Cary here uses domestic metaphors to compound the medical problems that the kingdom also faces; just as Edward’s porous body makes England open for invasion, so his carelessness with the borders of his household also make the land ripe for conquest. Indeed, Cary writes, ‘the whole interest of the State was believed little better than the fruits of an absolute Conquest’ (76). Here, Cary transforms Spencer and his father into illegitimate invaders of England; additionally, she further degrades the Spencers’ governance: representing these men as despoiling the land of its resources in a conquest likened to unnatural ‘fruits’ deflects criticism away from Isabel’s later invasion with ‘her great Strangers’ (118). The combination of land, agriculture, the body, and matters of state culminate in the statement the narrator makes after Isabel has secretly escaped to France: [A] Declaration is sent out to all the Kingdom, that taints the Honour of the Queen, but more his Judgement. The Ports are all stopt up, that none should follow: a Medicine much too late; a help improper, to shut the Stable-door, the Steed being stoln: but ‘tis the nature of a bought Experience, to come a day too late, the Market ended. (94)

The narrator first speaks of Edward’s attempt to ‘taint’ Isabel’s honor, words that recall the areas of utmost concern in relation to a woman’s body, that of her sexual purity and integrity. However, as already established, it is Edward’s physical borders that are open, a situation magnified by Edward’s inability to bar his ports and prevent his wife’s departure. Therefore, as the narrator notes, these actions rebound negatively on Edward’s ‘Judgment’ and behavior. An inversion of the early modern ideology of the whole, pure, and passive female body, the story of the active queen passing through unguarded borders underscores how Edward allows various people and their words to enter and exit his body and his kingdom. Isabel, however, actively moves between the two kingdoms, returning later with a successful colonization. Cary continues the description of Edward’s misgovernment by claiming that his port closings are ‘medicine’ applied too late, again emphasizing the bodily nature of his kingdom and his inability to keep it healthy. Finally, the narrator underlines Edward’s lack of connection with England’s spaces and thus its people, a relationship that the narrative will later show Isabel as having. The king is compared to one who belatedly and foolishly closes the

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stable; that is, he reasserts the household’s borders only after his steed has been stolen. Furthermore, Edward’s lesson is learned too late, like a farmer coming to market after it has ended. This representation figures Edward as an ill-suited caretaker of his land; unlike Isabel’s nurturing and cleansing ‘showers’, his rule will be as unproductive as a farmer too ignorant to keep livestock and sell produce to a potentially hungry populace.

A Compassing Queen: The History’s Political Advice As the dramatic narrative progresses, Cary in her language moves beyond a simple critique of Edward and Spencer’s government, writing more generally of what constitutes the practices of good government. Just as Isabel has grown in support and strength throughout the story, Cary as author now has firm grounding for her political advice. This foundation is nearly literal, as Cary’s understanding of beneficial policies is rooted in the English colonial theory of proper care and cultivation of the land itself. Cary’s descriptions unrelentingly emphasize Edward’s (or any government’s) poor rule as a domestic problem that stems from a territory whose boundaries are illdefined and unguarded, again contrasting with the control that Elizabeth held over both body and corresponding nation. The narrator remarks that [t]he power Majestick is or should be bounded, and there is a reciprocal correspondence, which gives the King the obedience, the subject equal right and perfect justice, by which they claim a property in his actions, if either of these fall short, or prove defective by willful errour, or by secret practice, the State’s in danger of a following mischief. (emphasis mine, 68)

In this statement, Cary’s describes good government using the terms of property and boundaries; the ruler’s power to fulfill his/her desires should be circumscribed or contained, since the people’s welfare and the monarch’s behavior occupy the same place both metaphorically and literally. The ruler’s decisions affect those whom s/he rules while also potentially influencing those subjects to imitate his/her behavior, be it noble or detrimental to the kingdom. Additionally, each member of the State, including the monarch, needs to be sure that they not ‘fall short’ in their responsibilities, a term that again associates matters of government with mapping by employing the language of measurement. The use of the term ‘bounded’ is, in addition to boundaries, also indicative of the reciprocal relationship with the land that Cary’s text continually espouses in her narrative. The monarch is bound to

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his subjects, with whose care he has been entrusted. Again, like a well-tended and protected garden, the kingdom and its subjects should flourish under the ruler’s guidance, reflecting his or her just and honorable reign. In her more general advice, Cary continues the language of a well-ordered household before returning to the image of a healthy and ultimately impervious physical body and corresponding kingdom. Cary reminds the reader that any advisor must be just, ‘else having the keys of the Kingdom in his hand, he may at all times open the gates to a domestick Danger or a forreign Mischief’, while at the same time advising that the monarch’s demeanor should be ‘but like the beating of a healthy Pulse, with a steady and well-advised motion’ (138, 141). Not only are those advisors entrusted with the control of the gate keys and thus the kingdom’s borders, but the ruler must also couple wise advisors with a steady and controlled humor, represented here by the orderly beating of a calm pulse. And the conclusion of Cary’s narrative also features the king-as-ear trope yet again when she comments, ‘let [the favorite] enjoy his ear, but not ingross it’ (137). This advice implies that the ruler may have a favorite as both counselor and erotic companion so long as s/he does not monopolize the royal orifice. This final advice illustrates the interesting way in which Cary allows some bodily pleasure for those who govern and perhaps excuses one of the choices for which the historical Isabel was often excoriated: her adulterous alliance with Mortimer. Significantly, Cary does not harshly criticize Isabel for her adultery with Mortimer. The narrator explains Isabel’s affair as beginning when, ‘being debarr’d of that warmth that should have still preserv’d [her affections’] temper, she had cast her wandering eye upon the gallant Mortimer’ (89). This description, along with others that point to Edward’s cruelty, offers sympathetic justification for Isabel’s personal behavior.65 Cary’s political perspective of bodies and territory not only justifies Isabel’s political ambitions, but also potentially her personal ones. Cary’s version of Isabel, like her historical counterpart, accomplishes much: she successfully ‘colonizes’ England as a foreign power, saving the inhabitants and the land from the cruel mismanagement of the native rulers. In framing Isabel’s conquest in this way, Cary imparts a geographical legitimacy to the French queen, allowing her to be perceived as the ruler with the ability to keep spaces, bodies, and ultimately the state intact, orderly, and uncorrupted. Like the cartes à figures of James and his family standing watch over the maps of Scotland, Isabel through the geographic rhetoric Cary employs becomes that guarding figure. Indeed, the queen might also be seen as a kind of mapmaker, as evidenced by one of the ways 65 Isabel is criticized later, however, for her intemperate punishment of Spencer (pp. 128-129).

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she is described by her enemies. After Isabel has made her escape to France, Baldock, one of the king’s favorites, reassures his master by asking, ‘Alas, what can the Queen a wandering woman compass, that hath nor Arms, nor Means, nor Men, nor Money?’ (93). What Baldock, and by extension Edward, fail to realize is that it is Isabel’s very ability to ‘compass’, to enclose and appropriate areas both literal and figurative most advantageous to her, that marks her as a powerful force.66 Isabel is able to act as the geographical instrument of the same name in order to redraw the boundaries of her identity as a woman, so often linked to territory, to encompass her chosen land of England and its resources and thereby justify an invasion and a kind of colonization in her favor. The same language that characterized Cary’s earlier queen – that of a woman’s body as both a representative and resource of a kingdom – continues to be prominent in Edward II. However, Cary’s Isabel illustrates a more aggressive appropriation of the metaphorical associations between the female body and territory. Where Mariam formulates resistance by her figurative and literal absence from the land and space that Herod needs to legitimate his reign, Isabel actively engages with the terms of geography, conquest, and the body in order to subvert the very ideology that would potentially subjugate her – and England – to Edward’s rule. Cary has the ostensibly foreign woman emphasize her positive connections to England through careful control of the language of its domestic and agricultural benefits. In this way, Cary’s Isabel represents not just a resource of domesticated and fruitful land and household, as a wifely body was often characterized. Cary instead has Isabel create a kind of chorography of a peaceful and fruitful England, engaging in a powerful type of world-writing that legitimizes her ‘colonization’ of England. Through this endeavor, Cary redeems one of the more vilified historical figures, revealing the benefits of reorienting, figuratively and literally, how a writer and a queen can use ideologies of land and colonization. Elizabeth Cary returned from Ireland in 1625, arriving back at London in July of that year. Her life from then on would primarily be occupied with drama within her own family, especially after her public conversion to Catholicism.67 Her husband would be recalled from Ireland in 1629 following an underwhelming deputyship that ended with his corrupt trial 66 The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines the verb ‘to compass’ as ‘to go or come around, put around, encompass’, as well as ‘to attain or achieve, to accomplish’. 67 For more on this period of her life, and how Cary shaped her identity and her cause in letters, see Wray, ‘Memory, Materiality and Maternity in the Tanfield/Cary Archive’, pp. 230-234.

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proceedings against a prominent Irish family. But even without Henry Cary’s mismanagement of English rule in Ireland, there was a concurrent shift in who would be associated with and in control of English exploration, representation, and control of new territory. Starting in the sixteenth century and more so in the seventeenth century, a kind of ‘middling’ class were made more visible as wealth and political power became grounded in expanding commerce. As the geography and plays of the next chapter will further reveal, the female body’s symbolic presence in geography would continue; however, the expanding trade and colonial ventures of England and, more importantly, those ventures’ accompanying discourses, would alter the geographic discourse that connected women’s bodies to territory, as a land-based aristocracy ceded power to those whose wealth stemmed from mercantile ventures. Geographic products – and their meanings – were no longer seen as the sole purview of nobility with actual land or monarchs controlling a kingdom. Now more people could purchase and display maps simply for their own sake and not for the actual territory they depicted. Because of this change, women’s bodies in geographic products and literature would be increasingly disconnected from any royal or noble personae, as the middling and merchant classes appropriated the rhetorical power of maps. The increasingly pervasive rhetoric and reality of England’s plans of commercial conquest meant that women and their dramatic counterparts would be afforded new roles to enact on the London and world stages.

Works Cited Avery, Bruce. ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’. ELH Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer, 1990): 263-279. Baker, David J. ‘Off the Map’: Charting Uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland’. In Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, 76-92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Barber, Peter and Tom Harper. Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda, and Art. London: The British Library, 2010. Burgess, Irene. “‘The Wreck of Order” in Early Modern Women’s Drama’. Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January 2001): paragraphs 1-24. https://extra.shu. ac.uk/emls/06-3/burgwrec.htm. Callaghan, Dympna. ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry’. In Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, 163-177. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British, 1580-1650. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cary, Elizabeth. The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II [London: 1680]. ———. Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters. Edited by Heather Wolfe. Cambridge: Renaissance Texts from Manuscripts Publications, 2001. ———. The Tragedy of Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland Her Life by one of her daughters. Edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Cary, Elizabeth Tanf ield. The Mirror of the Worlde. Edited by Lesley Peterson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. Cavanagh, Sheila T. “‘The fatal destiny of that land”: Elizabethan Views of Ireland’. In Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, 116-131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Clarke, Danielle. “‘This domestic kingdome or Monarchy”: Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam and the Resistance to Patriarchal Government’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 10 (1998): 179-200. Corporaal, Marguérite. “‘Thy Speech eloquent, thy wit quick, thy expressions easy”: Rhetoric and Gender in Plays by Renaissance Women’. Renaissance Forum: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Literary and Historical Studies 6.2 (Winter 2003). Article no longer available at http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/. Ferguson, Margaret. Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. ‘The Spectre of Resistance: Tragedy of Mariam (1613)’. In Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, 233-250. New York: Routledge, 1991. Gernon, Luke. A Discourse of Ireland. In Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland. Edited by James P. Myers, Jr., 241-257. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983. Hadfield, Andrew. ‘Spenser, Drayton, and the Question of Britain’. The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 204 (Nov. 2000): 582-599. Hadfield, Andrew and Willy Maley. ‘Irish Representations and English Alternatives’. In Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, 1-23. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Haklyut, Richard. Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. Edited by Jack Beeching. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Press, 1972. Harris, Barbara. English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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Hodgson-Wright, S. 2014 May 29 ‘Cary [née Tanfield], Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639), writer and translator. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-4835. Jacobs, Kathryn. Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001. James VI and I. Political Writings: King James VI and I: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Edited by Johann P. Sommerville. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jonson, Ben. The Irish Masque at Court. In Masques of Difference: Four Court Masques by Ben Jonson. Edited by Kristen McDermott, 133-140. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Kelsey, Sean. 2014 ‘Cary, Henry, first Viscount Falkland (c. 1575–1633), lord deputy of Ireland’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-4837. Levy Peck, Linda. ‘The Mental World of the Jacobean Court: An Introduction’. The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Edited by Linda Levy Peck, 1-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lynam, Edward. ‘Woutneel’s Map of the British Isles, 1603’. In The Geographic Journal, Vol. 82, No. 6 (Dec. 1933): 536-538. Marlowe, Christopher. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin Press, 2003. Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://www.oed.com. Peterson, Lesley. ‘The Source and Date for Elizabeth Tanfield Cary’s Manuscript The Mirror of the Worlde’. Notes and Queries 51 (September 2004): 257-263. Raber, Karen. ‘Gender and Property: Elizabeth Cary and The History of Edward II’. Explorations in Renaissance Culture 26.2 (Winter 2000): 199-227. Rankin, Deanna. “‘A More Worthy Patronesse”: Elizabeth Cary and Ireland’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 203-221. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reeves, Margaret. ‘From Manuscript to Printed Text’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 125-144. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reinhard Lupton, Julia. ‘Mapping Mutability: Or, Spenser’s Irish Plot’. In Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, 93-115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rich, Barnabe. A New Description of Ireland. In Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland. Edited by James P. Myers, Jr., 126-145. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983.

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The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. Edited by Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, and G. Blakemore Evans. Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Schafer, Elizabeth. ‘Unsilencing Elizabeth Cary: Worldmaking in The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry’. In Worldmaking: literature, language, culture. Edited by Tom Clark, Emily Finlay, and Philippa Kelly, 41-54. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017. Schlueter, June. ‘Rereading the Side Panels in The View From London to the North’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010): 142-157. Scholz, Susanne. Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Shell, Alison. ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy of Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 53-67. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Shirley, Rodney. ‘A Royal Genealogical Map’. In The Map Book. Edited by Peter Barber, 142-143. New York: Walker and Company, 2005. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Starner-Wright, Janet and Susan M. Fitzmaurice, ‘Shaping a Drama out of History: Elizabeth Cary and the Story of Edward II’. Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 79-92. Straznicky, Marta. ‘Closet Drama’. In A Companion to Renaissance Drama. Edited by Arthur F. Kinney, 416-430. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Suzuki, Mihoko. “‘Fortune is a Stepmother”: Gender and Political Discourse in Elizabeth Cary’s History of Edward II’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 89-105. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Swan, Jesse G. ‘A Bibliographical Palimpsest: The Post-Publication History of the 1680 Octavo Pamphlet, The History of the Most Unfortunate Prince Edward II’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 107-124. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Trevisan, Sara. ‘Genealogy and Royal Representation: Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll for Elizabeth I (1558-60)’. Huntington Library Quarterly Vol. 81, No. 2 (Summer 2018): 257-275. Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Woolf, Daniel. The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wray, Ramona. ‘Memory, Materiality and Maternity in the Tanfield/Cary Archive’. In A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Edited by Patricia Phillippy, 221-240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

3.

‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’ Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce Abstract Heywood’s plays chronicle a shift in the understanding of geographic products and their rhetoric: no longer connected to real estate, these items become objects unto themselves, status symbols especially for the ‘middling’ classes. Likewise, instead of aristocratic brides who bring wealth and territory to a marriage, non-noble men can use their chaste wives as commodities whose sexual integrity denotes their husbands’ newly superior status. While Heywood’s early play The Four Prentices of London features aristocratic women wielding agency through their connection to territory, If You Know Not Me and the two-part The Fair Maid of the West demonstrate how a reductive connection to geographic objects decreased women’s potential for subversive agency while elevating the authority of middle-class Englishmen. Keywords: commodified women, The Four Prentices of London, geographic products, If You Know Not Me, early modern London, middling classes, The Fair Maid of the West.

While the first half of the seventeenth century saw a new visibility in political and economic prominence from the middling classes, that did not mean the nobility were completely removed from any overseas business ventures. At the same time as Henry Cary governed Ireland, he was also involved in the London and Bristol Company, otherwise known as the Newfoundland Company. Sir Richard Whitbourne, an energetic advocate for the English plantation of Newfoundland, persuaded Cary to join the venture and advised him in the establishment of an Irish colony on the island from 1622 onward. Cary even wrote brief guidelines for his colonists, specifying the location and character of the territory on which the people were to settle. In his directions, he calls for the colony to be between two bays, asserting that this place is ‘wheare neuer a natiue doth inhabite’, leaving the colonists – who should

Pilhuj, K., Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463722018/ch03

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speak ‘onlie the pure Englishe tounge’ and have ‘but one Religion’ – free to raise the very particular cattle he recommends, as well as engaging in other farming and husbandry tasks recognizable from so many of the colonial tracts discussed in the previous chapter. With this new plantation, Cary envisioned a ‘braue Conquest’ of the island, supported by England’s careful cultivation of the land in question.1 But Cary’s attempts to prof it from this plantation were ultimately unsuccessful, and the colony does not appear to have lasted beyond 1626. Increasingly troubling issues in Ireland (that would eventually lead to his recall to London) took up more of the Lord Deputy’s attention in the later half of the 1620s.2 Cary’s withdrawal from the scheme is emblematic of a shift in the status of those who predominantly represented an English presence overseas. Thomas Heywood’s plays, spanning the period from the 1590s to the 1630s, are of particular importance to this study of English identity, geography, and women’s bodies, because the dramas themselves help document changes in the ideology that governed the female body and its relation to elite status. In their depictions of the middling classes traveling overseas and the ways in which these characters charted new territories, Heywood’s plays also reveal how the women in these dramas lose their connections to land but gain new and potentially problematic links with maps and other geographic products themselves. Robert Brenner notes that in the first decade of 1600s, companies like the Merchant Adventurers were in the ascendant, ‘its leading members enjoy[ing] a disproportionate share of London’s highest political positions’.3 From that point on, the dominance of the merchant elite would only increase, as Brenner explains: By 1640, representatives of the Levant-East India Company had become preponderant within what might be loosely termed the City merchant establishment, which consisted of the top socioeconomic layers among London’s privileged company merchants, and had come to constitute the core of a recomposed City merchant political elite, which exercised its authority through the aldermanic court, the East India Company board of directors, and the customs farming syndicates. 4 1 Newfoundland Discovered, pp. 244-245. 2 For a fuller version of Cary’s involvement in the colony, see Newfoundland Discovered, esp. pp. 38-45. 3 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 3. 4 Ibid., p. 4.

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Brenner’s description reveals that power need not be augmented only by the acquisition of land through marriage. With territory a finite resource and new trading markets being created, families who were in the process of increasing their political and economic power were no longer required to seek brides in order to consolidate real estate holdings and to create legitimate family lines; but this new class could still place more emphasis on women’s roles as chaste representatives meant to bolster their merchant-husbands’ claims to authority at home and abroad.5 Heywood’s plays, straddling the years when merchant corporations like the Levant Company were primarily the domain of noblemen and the years following the introduction of the broader terms of admission in 1605, can be used to chart this ideological shift.6 Heywood’s early output like The Four Prentices of London reveals an author still drawing from the political rhetoric emphasizing legitimately inherited or conquered land, often represented in the body of an aristocratic female. However, plays later in Heywood’s career illustrate an emerging merchant elite that sought to enhance the prestige of their non-aristocratic rank, while also making Englishmen in general stand out among the many other nationalities that competed for trade in the Mediterranean especially. This desire to publicly secure additional social legitimacy, akin to that enjoyed by aristocratic families, stems from the performative nature of authority that early modern English men and women particularly in London, exposed to Queen Elizabeth’s dramatic progresses and the depictions of monarchs on the stage, would have understood. Moreover, merchants felt the need to counteract what Barbara Sebek calls the ‘social and sexual threats that transglobal commerce is perceived to entail’.7 Therefore, Heywood’s later characters are often newly wealthy figures who require a demonstrative method for establishing their moral superiority and authority at home and abroad. The evolving ideas behind the ‘new’ geography helped to guide these new paths to power: if a ruler could affirm his or her power by placing symbols of themselves on a symbolic representation of their territory, might 5 Brenner provides a few examples that demonstrate that merchants were still employing marriage as a means to strengthen business ties, revealing that City businessmen were also appropriating this aristocratic practice, albeit in an altered form. Brenner describes how City merchant James Cambell, governor of the French Company and the Company of Merchants of the Staple and alderman of London, was never part of the Levant Company. However, Cambell served on the East India Company board and perhaps consolidated that position by marrying his sisters to two great Levant-East India Company magnates, who were also separately linked by another sister’s marriage. Merchants and Revolution, pp. 89-90. 6 For more on the evolution of the Levant Company’s membership and how it exemplifies changes in other merchant groups, see Epstein, The English Levant Company, pp. 36, 41-59. 7 Sebek, “‘Strange Outlandish Wealth”’, p. 184.

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not a merchant also employ that authoritative geographic symbolism as it became more widely available? That is, since geographers were writing new worlds with their atlases and chorographies for audiences beyond their initial royal patrons, couldn’t the possessors and consumers of these new symbolic worlds also partake in the meaningful opportunities provided by these new products? A burgeoning market of an increasing variety of geographic goods meant for mass consumption helped lay the groundwork for men like Thomas Heywood to write a world where national identity derived not from monarchs and the land but from non-aristocratic men who could appropriate the symbols of that land. Richard Helgerson writes that, [i]n their passionate attention to maps of their own country, the English exposed themselves to the pervasive influence of an image no less compelling and considerably more durable than even that of the monarch, whose royal insignia were necessarily pushed aside on maps to make place for the land and its representation.8

Helgerson sees the representation of the land as becoming more important than any monarchical associations. In terms of individual representation, the map itself became an important symbol that the possessor could manipulate. Atlases and maps became objects unto themselves, owned for the status they might confer. In a similar but linked development, chaste wives who were not necessarily aristocratic were increasingly looked on as conferring a kind of moral legitimacy that could bolster their husbands’ political authority. As the symbolically potent connections among royal and noble women and territorially derived wealth began to dissipate, geography and associated literature also moved away from depicting these links. This change is also reflected in the shift in meanings associated with genealogical charts as well. Daniel Woolf details how, during the seventeenth century, the ‘gentry’s enthusiasm for official, Crown-recognized gentility abated in comparison with the desire for public acknowledgement of a status now produced as much by comportment, conspicuous expenditure, and civil interaction’.9 These three new markers of gentility make appearances in Heywood’s later plays, and I argue that maps, genealogies of worthies, and wives (and their behavior) fall under the categories of comportment and conspicuous expenditure. While Woolf marks 1660 as the date of completion for this shift 8 Helgerson, ‘The folly of maps and modernity’, p. 253. 9 Woolf, Social Circulation, p. 109.

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in how gentility is defined, clearly the process of change was underway in the preceding decades, especially as evidenced by plays like Heywood’s, where, as Woolf describes generally, ‘[g]entility was increasingly being defined according to economic status and its symbols, dress, demeanor and property, rather than by heredity’.10 This property, I contend, includes geographic products, its associated discourse, and chaste wives. And just as geographers could remap and re-imagine the world and consumers could buy many versions of the world, so too could dramatists remap the paths their characters took to power, drawing new boundaries and lines over familiar landscapes. The Heywood plays examined reveal how merchants and other members of the middling classes could appropriate and transform the ideas surrounding the aristocratic virgin bride and geography to bolster and proclaim their newly elevated civic and national status. Laura Caroline Stevenson has previously asserted that numerous plays of the late Elizabethan stage employed aristocratic symbols and language to construct a prestigious identity for ostensibly mercantile characters.11 Alongside this transformation, other new and often hybrid identities were developed, since in this expanding world of trade, where new men could make their fortunes through means other than inheritance and marriage, a bride’s symbolic importance was no longer necessarily associated with family lineage and property. Representations of virginity at the elite level became transformed: once also a physical marker that was supposed to ensure the inheritance of land and thus power to the rightful male heir, now the virgin body could be appropriated by any male of the rising middling class to bolster his claim to economic and political power. The proper virgin, with sexual access accorded solely to the groom, could theoretically be used as a tool in the construction of a new, masculine identity. Alongside this change of meaning in a woman’s body and marriage, new attitudes towards geographic products contributed to potential identities for the merchant classes, as the continuing proliferation of relatively inexpensive maps reveals. Rather than the large wall decorations adorning only noble houses like William Cecil’s Theobalds or the sole province of monarchs asserting their territorial authority, maps and atlases like Ortelius’ and others were printed and bound in relatively small portable volumes. More 10 Ibid., p. 111. 11 Stevenson, Praise and Paradox, pp. 187-190. Lisa H. Cooper also discusses Stevenson’s ideas at length in ‘Chivalry, Commerce, and Conquest: Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London’, Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, pp. 159-175. Cooper argues that Heywood’s early play, rather than simply appropriating aristocratic insignia, calls for a new English identity based on the elements of trade and chivalry.

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significant to this chapter is the genre of chorography, or works that describe the topography, buildings, history, and customs of local areas, from regions to shires to cities. William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse defines chorography as works that focus ‘rather in describyng the qualitie and figure, then the bignes, and quantitie of any thinge’.12 These maps and descriptions would appeal to individuals who lived in a certain locale; such people might be landowners, or they might wish to form and claim an attachment to their local area or city where no family inheritance afforded them actual possession. John M. Adrian details how writers from outside a local region and without any family connections could use chorography to establish connections to the land.13 As another example of how geography became increasingly available as a tool for non-nobility to assert status, consider again the set of playing cards from 1590 featuring images out of the 1579 Saxton atlas, which product also demonstrates portability. No longer solely an affirmation of Queen Elizabeth’s sovereignty over her kingdom, the map images on these cards could be carried and dealt out by anyone as a sign of knowledge and leisure ability. In addition to mentioning the playing cards, P.D.A. Harvey also asserts that by this time ‘[i]t was now no longer royal ministers alone who saw strategy and defence in terms of maps’.14 I would argue that ‘strategy’, here in Harvey’s conception linked to military defense, can also be understood as a strategy of identity formation, one that invoked connected ideas of virginity and wifely chastity. As an accompanying discourse to geography and cartographic products, virginity employed in new ways could be a strategy adopted by the middling sort to bolster their heightened status: the virgins they married, in addition to potentially securing ties to other businessmen, could also, in their role as chaste wives, establish and proclaim a specifically mercantile and eventually middle-class form of virtue and legitimacy. Heywood’s plays in particular provide evidence for the literary equivalent of this shift. The changing symbolic import of female bodies that complements the dissemination of maps as commodities for an increasingly powerful merchant elite meant that it could be more difficult, if not impossible for women to appropriate their bodies for their own ends. As we have seen in previous chapters, queens like Dido, Zenocrate, Mariam, and Isabel could 12 Cunningham, Cosmographical Glasse, p. sig. B4r. See also Gordon, ‘Performing London,’ pp. 69-88. 13 Adrian, ‘Tudor Centralization and Gentry Visions of Local Order’, pp. 307-334. 14 Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, p. 65.

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generate resistance as a result of their direct ideological connection to the land. These wives could usurp for their own ends the political significance of their bodies, disrupting their husbands’ monarchical authority through geographic rhetoric. Relying on their bodies’ connections to their husbands’ (or another male relation’s) territory, these queens follow Elizabeth’s example in bestowing, withholding, or otherwise subverting access to that body and its often political significance. Moreover, these women often wielded that connection to land in positive ways that affirmed their own agency. However, Heywood’s plays show a female virgin unconnected to actual land and whose symbolism becomes as ‘portable’ as maps themselves. Four of the plays in Heywood’s significant output chart this change in meaning, revealing how women, in particular dramatic characters, are increasingly used as the signifier of the virtues of the English people in general and of a husband in particular. Just as maps were increasingly understood as not simply standing in for land but as objects in their own right, available for purchase and multiple uses, a woman herself – in particular a virgin – became a singular resource connected not to actual land but geographic products themselves. The possession of maps and atlases could signify a man’s intelligence, purchasing power, and worldliness. Similarly, a woman and potential wife, whose bodily integrity would be just as charted and monitored as the borders on a map, could still reflect the personal integrity and honor of her husband; however, that wife was no longer necessarily aristocratic. With access to new avenues of wealth and consumer goods, a husband’s chaste wife would be another asset for this status-conscious man seeking to demonstrate a social presence commensurate with that of his economic position. Partha Chatterjee offers an explanation for the ideological use of women in a country whose political power was increasingly located within the mercantile classes, as she describes the role of women in the Indian movement toward independence from British rule. Though her ideas and Heywood’s plays are separated by some three hundred years, Chatterjee’s work and Heywood’s plays both contend with emerging national entities attempting to establish their sovereignty among mightier kingdoms. Chatterjee asserts that while nascent India competed with Great Britain on Western grounds of military technology and capitalism, the nationalists sought to defend against what they viewed as contamination from the West. By maintaining their spiritual and cultural superiority through the control of women’s sexuality and mobility, Indian men were able to join the West on common ground without sacrificing their heritage. Seventeenth-century Englishmen, by similarly relying on the policing of women’s bodily borders, could also

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imbue themselves and their newly acquired wealth and prestige with a kind of legitimacy and status that had before only been available to those with aristocratic lineages. While one of Heywood’s earliest plays, The Four Prentices of London, still draws from the political rhetoric that derives power from the acquisition of land through aristocratic marriage supported by conquest, his later plays ascribe to any virtuous English women the duty of representing their husbands’ as well as the nation’s moral superiority through their modest behavior as maids and chastity as wives. This female virtue is primarily signified by the integrity of property, in this case the female body, often with or through the affective space of the home itself, which is controlled and deployed as a status marker, much like maps themselves. Still potential signifiers of masculine power, these women are now akin to the commodities, like maps, that Englishmen bought, sold, and traded: desirable, plentiful, and ultimately interchangeable. Once these women’s bodies are secured by husbands, their primary function is to signify the security and integrity of family, home, and nation. Heywood’s lynchpin in demonstrating this change in the symbolic import of female bodies and their ties to the land is found in the figure most responsible for making that connection so salient and so successful. In his representation of Queen Elizabeth in the second part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, Heywood moves representational importance away from the integrity of the virgin body as it corresponds to actual land and aristocratic familial legitimacy. Rather, his play features Queen Elizabeth only to contrast how masculine power will now derive from the increasing prevalence of trade and thus require new ways of establishing a social identity. The wealth that his characters obtain through newly forming ventures like the Levant Company did not depend upon family heritage and subsequent marital alliances with other families of import. Instead, the new merchants’ increasing wealth relied on their ability to trade successfully in moveable goods, marketing and selling commodities to the citizens of England and beyond. To legitimize that new wealth, Heywood diminishes the role of the aristocratic virgin and the vast tracts of land to which she is linked (in this case, using the most exemplary virgin, Elizabeth) by transferring symbolic power to London buildings and homes whose integrity could be represented by any chaste wife. This shift culminates in Heywood’s character Bess Bridges, who functions in the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West as the new ‘map’ of masculine English power. By examining the progression of Heywood’s female characters and their involvement in imperial endeavors, this chapter will ultimately demonstrate how, through the continuing practice of ‘world-writing’, the female body

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became a purely symbolic location for English spiritual pre-eminence that allowed merchants and thus the nation to disseminate not just English goods, but also their superior identity across the globe. This economic and moral hegemony, while primarily imagined at this point in time, prefigured Britain’s later rise as an empire. Heywood’s plays disconnect his women’s bodies from the land so that they function only as products that represent the purity of England as a whole for their male counterparts. As such, these women lose the ability to disrupt masculine power since they are removed from their location in the genealogy of aristocratic families whose power relied upon particular pieces of land conveyed through female bodies. Heywood further reveals how cartographic representations of queens and territories, which could be used to assert female authority, become replaced by the character Bess Bridges and, by extension, other virgins, who, along with the new civic spaces that men map, construct, and survey, represent the impenetrability and thus superiority of the nation and her merchants. Heywood and his characters appropriate the geography as world-writing used by geographers and other playwrights, reconfiguring the meanings of maps and women to help create a world in which men of the mercantile and middling classes could establish their own metaphorical territories of power through objects like maps, localized spaces of the home or city, and heavily objectified women. Protected and enclosed in a similar way to the houses their husbands often plan and build, women could function metaphorically as maps that outline a husband’s honesty and integrity in economic ventures. Heywood provides his characters of the middling sort a means to augment this economic power with a mystique heretofore only open to members of the nobility. Eager to make their mark politically in England and overseas, these new businessmen needed some kind of status to consolidate their own and, in turn, English national power. And with his emphasis on virtue, Heywood proposes a genealogy of merit over bloodlines. His plays ultimately demonstrate how any English wife, in the physical and thus moral integrity of her body and home, rhetorically connected to cartographic products, supports her husband’s power. And this strategy becomes just as, if not more, effective as that originally wielded by aristocrats – and can also be used to combat the economic and colonial pretensions of foreign countries. These women are, like the newly available maps, objects unto themselves divorced from any (and in the case of Queen Elizabeth, specifically female) monarchical power, culminating in the ‘the girl worth gold’ of The Fair Maid of the West. That play’s Bess Bridges, whose name, significantly, is a diminutive of Elizabeth, herself becomes an object to be circulated, bought, and displayed like the gold and, I argue, the cartographic products to which she is compared.

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‘Bright Virgins’: Aristocratic Maidens in The Four Prentices But before promoting this new form of English identity, Heywood would initially rely on the earlier conventions. His first play, written in about 1593 while Elizabeth was still on the throne, is steeped in the conventional discourse that accompanied aristocratic female bodies in marriage. Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London, featuring the adventures abroad of the four sons of the Old Earl of Bullone, who have been forced to enter London trades, initially seems to privilege the merchant classes. Fenella Macfarlane argues that The Four Prentices of London serves primarily to define new middle-class values through the older terms of chivalric exploits. She writes that Heywood’s boisterous apprentice-knights emerge as embodying the aspirations of a developing class who, although yet to form its own distinct ideology and collective identity, is already on the move, representationally contesting accepted hierarchies and dominance, issuing a dramatic Challenge [sic] to the established sway of the nation’s traditional elite.15

The play’s emphasis on the four young men’s insistence that they will gladly carry the badges of their trade does reflect a change in the character of Heywood’s potential audiences. Just as the Levant Company was about to open its doors to any English citizen over the age of 26, so Heywood expands his subject matter to appeal to the increasingly wealthy and powerful grocers, goldsmiths, and other traders who would come to the theater.16 But although the four young earl’s sons turned prentices sometimes praise their respective trades, this play still offers ample evidence for its aristocratic characters’ continued reliance on the same geographically inflected language and marital practices in order to consolidate their wealth and power. That is, women’s bodies and their connection to the families and the corresponding property they represent still figure prominently in the ways that the old Earl and his sons reclaim their high-born birthright. While anticipating the ideological shift that would place more importance on trade and the female body as a moveable good rather than anchored to any particular land, the play still symbolically locates family property and prestige in the 15 Macfarlane, ‘To “Try What London Prentices Can Do”’, p. 137. 16 On 14 December 1605, James I renewed the charter of the Levant Company, with the added stipulation that any English merchant over the age of 26 could pay an entrance fee and join the Company. See Epstein, The English Levant Company, p. 36.

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royal or noble bride in order to bolster aristocratic status. Therefore, The Four Prentices’ political ideology continues to allow women the opportunity to gain access to power through the disruption of their symbolic function as passive conveyors of their families’ property and prestige. Kathleen McLuskie also contends that the four brothers are more aristocrats than apprentices; they remain in trades only until they are given the chance to return to their former noble state.17 Although Heywood introduces the men as they praise the worthiness of practicing a trade, their initial speeches are mainly a forum for expressing their desire for the noble pursuits of conquest. The eldest, Godfrey, states, ‘With much ado, do I containe my spirit / Within these bands, that have inclos’d me round. / Though now this case the noble Sunne doth shroud; / Time shall behold that Sunne breake through this clowd’.18 Here, Godfrey fully anticipates being able to reclaim his rightful place in the sky as sun, and thus his rightful place as the eldest son of a nobleman. His language anticipates Shakespeare’s Prince Hal who, in the 1598 Henry IV, Part One, proclaims in soliloquy that he will ‘imitate the sun, / Who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world, / That when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at’ (1.2.197-201).19 Like Hal, Godfrey forcefully insists that he will soon ‘breake’ through the clouds that obscure him, which signify his apprenticeship as a mercer. His younger brothers’ speeches also contain language that not only indicates unhappiness with their current state, but in describing their aspirations, employ words that have aristocratic connotations. While Guy, the next eldest, also has similarly positive words for his trade, he asserts, ‘[B]ut yet my spirits aime, / To have this hand catch at the Crowne of Fame’ (172). His vision of a crown within reach again points, like the sun, to imagery associated with royalty. Eustace, the next brother, declares in an even more telling statement, ‘I am a Grocer: Yet had rather see / A faire guilt sword hung in a velvet sheath, / Then the best Barbary sugar in the world’ (172). For Eustace, the ability to trade in an expensive luxury commodity like sugar is less sweet than imagining the phallic sword enclosed in ‘a velvet sheath’. His words hint at the acquisition of land by military might and at the correspondingly sexual conquest it could entail, should there 17 McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists, p. 59. Also quoted in Mcfarlane, ‘To “Try What London Prentices Can Do”’, p. 147. 18 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Vol. 2, p. 172. As this 1964 edition, based on the 1874 printing, contains no line numbers, all subsequent citations will refer to page numbers and will be in-text. 19 The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition.

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be a marriageable noblewoman of that territory. The words take on new meaning by the end of the play, when Eustace will see both a brother and a sister wed to royalty. That sister, Bella Franca, and the French princess are the only female characters; however, both women enjoy a signif icant role in the play, highlighted by their names that signify their connection to land.20 With her father gone on pilgrimage and her brothers joining the Crusades, Bella Franca calls attention to her male relatives’ apparent dereliction of duty: ‘Have you all left mee midst a world of strangers, / Here onely to my selfe: not to protect me from apparent wrong? / Since it is so, I’le folow you’ (175). Her question functions as more of an assertion, claiming that the world, though full of strangers, is now open to her; moreover, any blame for her unfeminine desire to travel can be laid at the feet of her male kin, to whom she presently offers no value as a bride to be deployed in a political alliance, since the family is without any accompanying territory. As the Old Earl’s lands have been wrongly taken, he and his sons must shift for themselves, leaving Bella Franca with little power as a putative virgin bride, ordinarily connected to and symbolic of family prestige. However, though that meaning has been stripped from Bella Franca, her name and her family’s insistence on their noble birth indicate that her potential for symbolism is not entirely lost. Indeed, once the brothers leave England and are shipwrecked on various shores, they accomplish their respective ascents to power rather rapidly, heaping more doubt on the idea that they are truly prentices and happy to be so. Godfrey, in a move fitting for the eldest son, returns to their homeland of ‘Bullen’ and reclaims the family’s estate and rescues the people from tyrannous earls. All the brothers establish themselves as monarchical leaders, albeit in somewhat less conventional ways: Charles decides that he will organize the bandits he finds: ‘I’le make these villaines worke in severall Trades, / And in these Forrests make a Common wealth, / When them to civill nurture I can bring, / They shall proclaime me of these Mountaines King’ (185). Although the theme of working in trades is again invoked here, it is not Charles who will be among the workers. Rather, in properly civilizing the bandits, he will be made their rightful King. Eustace similarly organizes the Irish he encounters into his own personal fighting force to accompany him on the Crusades. Guy, the second eldest and only brother who is not immediately established as some kind of hereditary ruler, finds himself in France as the love 20 Macfarlane dismisses the two women, arguing that ‘they appear mostly as prizes, spectators, or the objects of rescue’. ‘To “Try What London Prentices Can Do”’, p. 146.

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interest of the play’s only other female, the French princess, who is never given a name. Still, their initial meeting demonstrates her agency within the play, while also once again highlighting the brothers’ true nobility. The Presenter, who describes the brothers’ various shipwrecked fates, recounts the meeting, stating that, while walking, the French king and his daughter see a man ‘though basely clad, / Yet sparkes of honour kindled in his eyes. / Him at first sight the beauteous Lady loves; / And prayes her father to receive him home: / To which the King accords; and in his Court makes him a special Officer’ (177). This son of an earl has fire in his eyes that recalls his older brother’s earlier self-association with the sun, revealing an inherent nobility. However, the short description more importantly demonstrates how the French princess, while keenly aware of Guy’s inner value, proves her own importance in the political affairs of her father’s country, as she successfully implores the king to make the stranger an ‘Officer’ of the court. The French princess also actively woos Guy, following him just as Bella Franca travels in pursuit of her brothers. However, although these two women seek their destiny by traveling from Western Europe to Jerusalem, Heywood’s characters still attempt to assert that their primary importance lies in their roles as potential brides associated in the play with both conquest and quantifiable value. When Charles, failing to recognize Bella Franca as his sister, claims he will marry her and make her queen of the outlaws, his brother Eustace – also unrecognized by both and unaware of either as his siblings – strongly objects, stating, ‘Halfe of al’s mine, I claime it as my due: / In which bright Virgin, I except not you’ (194). Eustace refuses to give up the amount of spoil he is ‘due’, including the ‘bright Virgin’. His language in describing Bella Franca conflates her with both the spoils he has won and the land that he has gained, as part of the ‘halfe’ of the rewards of the territory that he, Charles, and the outlaws have won. Describing Bella Franca as a ‘bright Virgin’ associates her (and, more importantly, her virginity) with the gold and jewels that presumably make up part of their newly obtained property. He and his brother further underscore the relationship between Bella Franca and territorial conquest by continually using the verb ‘claim’. Their new ally, Tancred, a prince of Italy allied with the brothers, also says, ‘You claime her as your right’ (195). The men speak of Bella Franca as they would new-found land, with each wishing to mark her as their territory. In this escalating argument over Bella Franca, Eustace declares, ‘Halfe of her’s mine; I will not bate an haire’, and ‘But I’le have all, my Title is encreast’ (194). Eustace again speaks of Bella Franca in quantifiable terms, claiming that at least half of her is rightly his. He also refers to his ‘Title’, a term that calls attention to his increasingly ascendant social status, but also to a title

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or deed of a property – in this case, his own still-unrecognized sister, who at this point merely seems to Charles and Eustace a valuable virgin. The acquisition of property through conquest is another important theme that runs throughout The Four Prentices, a means to wealth hardly indicative of or available to the apprentices in Heywood’s audience. Thus, the emphasis on conquest – indeed, the subtitle of the play is ‘With the Conquest of Jerusalem’ – joins with the continual association of its female characters with land and property to make the play one whose core values still primarily subscribe to those of the aristocracy (although incestual undertones render part of these values as problematic). Similar to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, who secures his bid to be a legitimate ruler by using the rhetoric of courtship and conquest interchangeably, so the four erstwhile prentices, as well as other males in the play, equate marriage and women with the conquest of territory. And although the women have the potential, through these metaphors, to be relegated to passive lands/bodies awaiting conquest (recalling Ortelius’ and Plancius’ often reclining continental figures), the women’s active pursuit and sometimes rejection of men in the play assign them an agency more akin to the threatening figure of Elizabeth as Europa from the anonymous Dutch engraving (Fig. 6). Though likened to territory or, in the case of the map, explicitly made into land, Queen Elizabeth, Bella Franca, and the French princess maintain an ability to act: the continental figure by wielding a sword, the women of Heywood’s play by crossing borders in their travels. Indeed, Heywood subtly invokes Queen Elizabeth and her kingdom as virgin territory: when Robert, Duke of Normandy, boasts the list of countries that have come to win back Jerusalem, his brief chorography not only places England first but makes the island’s isolation and purity one of its chief strengths. His soldiers, he informs the Soldan, come From England, the best brood of martial spirits, Whose wals the Ocean washeth white as snow, For which you strangers call it Albion: From France, a Nation both renown’d and fear’d, From Scotland, Wales, even to the Irish Coast, Beyond the pillars great Alcides rear’d. (243)

While the list ostensibly reveals the special degree of unity among the soldiers, Robert still takes care to catalog the kingdoms separately, reserving the first and longest description for England. Set apart from the other nations not only because it is the ‘best brood’ for soldiers, Robert’s image of England

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divides the island geographically and morally; the ocean that separates the kingdom from the rest of Europe also washes the walls ‘white as snow’, implying England’s pure and impregnable nature that an audience under the rule of Queen Elizabeth would have understood well. In contrast to the ‘faire Jerusalem’, which must be won back from her pagan conquerors, England stands uniquely unsullied. The kingdom’s status as virgin territory is again emphasized at the end of the play when Robert tells the assembled cast that, once their pilgrims’ duties are finished, they all should ‘Repayre we to our Countries, that once done, / For Syon and Jerusalem are wonne’ (254). Once the conquest of the city has been accomplished and its Christianity re-established, the men return, some with brides, to their new territories in France, Sicily, and in Robert’s case, England. Robert’s new kingdom of England, acquired upon his father’s death, ultimately stands in as his virgin, its purity maintained by the ocean. Thus, throughout the play, the rhetoric of courtship becomes interwoven and indeed interchangeable with the language of conquest, appearing in connection with winning the Holy Land and securing a bride. But similarly to Marlowe’s Dido and Cary’s Isabel, Bella Franca and the French princess establish authoritative identities by appropriating the same language that the men use to render their bodies as objects or territory and instead claim their own agency. Bella Franca, in particular, recognizes and uses the value that her suitors ascribe to her. Frustrated by their fighting over her, she exclaims, ‘He that best loves me, pierce me with his sword, / Lest I become your generall overthrow’ (210). Knowing she is the occasion of the strife between men, she exhorts one of them to kill her, threatening the men with a penetration of her own devising and one that would clearly make her useless to their plans of conquest and family lineage. Moreover, her exhortation for one of the men to ‘pierce’ her with ‘his sword’ resonates as a potentially sexual invitation, in particular since Bella Franca reserves that right to the one that ‘best loves’ her. Both interpretations demonstrate the active role that Bella Franca plays as she decides how and to what ends she will figure in the knights’ plans. She further emphasizes her ability to determine her own worth by promising This night shall end my beauty, and to morrow Looke to behold my Christall eyes scratcht out, My visage martyr’d, and my hair torne off; He that best loves it, ransome it with peace; I will preserve it, if your fury cease. (210)

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Bella Franca, in order to stop the men’s bickering over her, will make herself damaged goods. Her word choice echoes that of her suitors who described her as property; her eyes become ‘Christall’ that she will remove, and her hair is again mentioned, this time as being ‘torne off’, referencing the men’s earlier claims to not ‘bate an haire’ of her. Finally, she offers herself as a part of bargain for peace, if only one of the men will ‘ransom’ her beauty. Her threats prove effective, as the men do not wish to lose a valuable virgin bride. Her shrewd bargaining, couched in the very same terms that earlier objectified her, demonstrates that her body and its connection to property, especially that of territory, can also be wielded against those who would attempt to own her. Once the men agree to her terms, Bella Franca informs them, ‘You have redeem’d my beauty, your last jarre / Had made perfection with my face at warre’ (211). Bella Franca turns the commodification of feminine beauty against these men by threatening its removal from the marriage marketplace. But even once her suitors ‘redeem’ that beauty by acceding to her wishes, Bella Franca does not immediately concede to marriage. Rather, her negotiations in this scene allow her to defer the question of marriage until the play’s conclusion when she, anticipating Rosalind at the end of As You Like It, reveals herself to her brothers and chooses her own husband. Despite Robert’s promise that ‘Were that faire Virgin here, I would renowne / Her glorious beauty with the English Crowne’, Bella Franca instead insists, Nay I’le make good the words that I have said: Father, I give a daughter to your hand; Brothers, behold, here doeth your sister stand: Tancred behold the Lady you once ceas’d, Onely I leave Prince Robert here displeas’d. (250-251)

Bella Franca turns down Robert’s offer of marriage and a crown, naming the man she chooses even as she reveals herself and the bold travels that brought her to Jerusalem to her family. No one objects to her pronouncements; Robert immediately acquiesces to Bella Franca’s choice of Tancred, again presumably satisfied with the waiting maiden isle to which he will soon return. Bella Franca crosses borders in more ways than one: her journey has seen her appropriate the typically masculine language of women’s objectification to her advantage. In contrast to Bella Franca’s strategy, the French princess’ agency is first notable for the way in which it departs from the language of female objectification: instead of describing herself as resources that she yet controls, the French princess describes her active desire for Guy. The French princess

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bemoans her situation, lamenting, ‘[B]ut my poore heart / Is bard and kept from loves satiety: / Like Tantalus, such is my poor repast, / I see the Apples that I cannot taste: / I’le stay my time, and hope yet, ere I die, / My heart shall feast as richly as my eye’ (205). Her love for Guy is represented in the language of sensual desire; she yearns to taste fruit just out of her reach. The lament objectifies Guy as food to be consumed, which will satisfy her alone. In this soliloquy, she assumes the masculine role of the denied Petrarchan lover who as yet can only look but not touch. However, though she figures herself as powerless, the French princess gives voice to her active desire and determined will to enjoy her male beloved. Once the French princess has exchanged her page’s disguise for her true identity at the play’s conclusion, Guy describes their relationship in a way that still accords her the upper hand. As Guy tells it, he was unworthy to be her husband; only now he can ‘of a great Kings daughter make a Queene: / This is the beauteous Virgin, the French Lady, / To whom my fortune still remaines in debt’ (253). While Guy speaks a conventional claim of humility, he also asserts that he ‘still’ owes the French princess for his good fortune, a configuration that, along with her royal lineage, places her status above his and will thus afford her a continuation of the power she has demonstrated through active pursuit of her desires. In this play, upper-class family lineage and power are thus preserved and indeed augmented, as the new ‘Earle of Bullen’ is now married and, more significantly, partially indebted to a French princess.21 Bella Franca weds her beauty and virginity to a wealthy and illustrious ruler, while Eustace is made king of Sicily, and Charles is now king of Cyprus. The idea of prospering in trades is long since forgotten, preserved only in the quaint rendering of the symbols of their abandoned professions upon their shields. Heywood’s play does hint at the emergence of a growing merchant and artisan class, but that importance is subsumed by the play’s emphasis on landed wealth and its preservation and accumulation through conquest, with additional security attained by marriage among noble families that are represented by virgin brides, themselves continually linked to territory. But in barely ten years, Heywood would produce a play that very dramatically shifted symbolic importance from virgins of aristocratic lineage to men who did not need to secure wealth by wedding royal or noble women but who still required virtuous wives. Thomas Gresham, the protagonist of the second part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, usurps the position of 21 Elder brother Godfrey has chosen to take up a crown of thorns as a holy man, so Guy immediately inherits as the next brother.

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the royal or noblewoman in politics and power, replacing her – represented in this play by no less a personage than the Virgin Queen herself – with maps and other geographic products themselves. Specifically, Gresham’s Royal Exchange and the products and women associated with that location become the secure place and objects that represents these merchants’ and thus the nation’s power.

Charting Trade and Identity in If You Know Not Me Critics of Thomas Heywood’s second part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie (c. 1605) have long acknowledged the play’s interest in praising certain aspects of England’s increased trade and mercantilism. David Hawkes writes that the play legitimizes merchants by insisting on a strict connection between signs and referents; in this play’s case, the connection between money and its value. Hawkes argues that Heywood’s play promulgates the ‘idea that signs are naturally and inherently connected with their referents’ and that this idea ‘is compatible with aristocratic notions of birth and breeding’ but not quite so in ‘a money-based market economy’.22 Hawkes argues that the play thus emphasizes how Gresham and merchants like him appropriate an aristocratic ethos of signs and meaning. His ideas echo the large amount of critical work about Heywood’s play in particular and nascent capitalism in general that examines the ways in which early modern writers justified the new statuses arising from certain modes of commerce through some appropriation of earlier aristocratic ideologies of identity. This examination of the play demonstrates how, in the second If You Know Not Me, the shift in focus from Elizabeth as Protestant savior in the first play to Sir Thomas Gresham as an economic one reflects a growing interest in representing merchants as legitimate figures of social and political power over and above any aristocrat. In this play, unlike The Four Prentices and works examined in earlier chapters, the protagonist obtains wealth, fame, and political connections not through marriage and land, but by participating in and facilitating the growing trade of the city. Jean E. Howard describes this London as a ‘place where both status and gender relations were constantly being renegotiated’.23 Howard argues that these negotiations reveal new methods for establishing prestige. She explains that 22 Hawkes, ‘Thomas Gresham’s Law’, p. 31. 23 Howard, Theater of a City, p. 27. Howard’s book examines the ‘discursive changes and struggles necessary to make cognitive and ideological sense of life in the city’ (14). To do so,

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[r]ank remained crucial to male identity, but in the urban context it was challenged by a new emphasis on what I call performative masculinity, that is, the ability to master codes of fashionability and to comport oneself with distinction in the city’s emerging arenas for mannerly display.24

This mastering of new codes to affirm certain ranks is also noted by H.R. French, where the ‘value’ of this search for a middle sort is located ‘in illustrating the possibility of contingent and multiple social self-definitions according to context – of the presence of co-existing, competing descriptions of the same hierarchy’.25 The arguments of Howard and French help to underscore that idea that early modern texts concerned with trade and merchants would not depict a linear shift from one mode of identity to another, but rather show the continued importance of defining rank visually through appropriations of familiar discourses to create new forms of identity for those involved in trade. In Hawkes’ and my own argument, Heywood’s characters deploy rhetoric, both visual and verbal, that does gesture to an aristocratic ideology of power: specifically in my examination, the reliance on the symbolic import of chaste wives, their bodies’ connections to geography, and family lineage. Out of these established ideas, Heywood’s play creates a new kind of ‘family’ of city merchants with a new kind of property. The successful businessman – in this case, Thomas Gresham – is imagined as the benevolent father whose ‘property’ includes not just his material wealth but figurative ownership of virtuous descriptions of London locations in which he conducts his prosperous trade. In addition to elements of an aristocratic ethos of virgin brides and property, geography and its gendered discourse found in texts of exploration were a part of the newer ‘code of fashionability’ that Heywood employs to shape Gresham’s and other merchants’ identities. In terms of geographic products like the atlas, maps, chorographies, globes, and playing cards, these relatively portable and affordable items could be bought by more people, and anyone who could purchase a map or atlas could ‘own’ pieces of the world if not the entire known world itself. Richard Helgerson notes at this time the ‘exponentially growing production of atlases of all sorts and sizes [that] went hand in hand with the booming production of sheet maps, wall maps, globes, and estate surveys. In these years, mapmaking she uses drama because of ‘the record these plays afford of the messy struggle to come to terms with issues that continued to provoke repeated attempts at narrative solution’ (22). 24 Howard, Theater of a City, p. 27. 25 French, ‘The Search for the “Middle Sort”’, p. 291.

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became a very big business’.26 Heywood’s merchant characters manipulate both these geographic and aristocratic discourses: no longer is the family an aristocratic or even a literal one, but one that sanctions merchants’ power through metaphorical yet dramatic demonstrations of ownership over purely symbolic representations of female bodies and territory; specifically in this case, cartographic products including geographically and commercially inflected descriptions of London and its female inhabitants. Ultimately, Heywood creates a new ideology from multiple sites of meaning in order to cement Gresham’s and other merchants’ status as powerful and legitimate figures in England’s actual and mental geography of bodies and spaces. In Heywood’s play, then, the figure of the chaste wife – no longer aristocratic – and the increasingly figurative space she could represent thus become incorporated into an emerging ‘middling class’ discourse to legitimize its members’ increasing economic and political prominence. While the chastity of non-aristocratic wives had always been regarded as an important reflection of the husband and his family, I suggest that these women and their bodies, especially in Heywood’s plays, began at this time to play a different and larger role in conferring a certain virtuous status to rising merchant families. The language of Thomas Gresham and the other merchants who populate If You Know Not Me reveals a continued preoccupation with female sexuality, but this vocabulary now overlaps with terms that equate this sexuality with geographically related consumer goods, a connection that affords men like Gresham access to the symbolic power of territory as well as of female bodies. This sexual and cartographic discourse also refers back to critic Theodora Jankowski’s work mentioned in the introduction, in particular her idea of the ‘fetishization’ of a woman’s initial virginity and overall sexuality, as Heywood describes female bodies in language that relates these women to individual buildings and moveable goods.27 In the play’s new world of power gained by finance and trade, chastity is still an important concept; however, a maidenhead becomes another commodity that can be ‘purchased’ and used by any man with wealth to bestow. Sexual intercourse is thus described in financial terms, with the woman’s body, as a commodity, likened to a map itself as a consumer product, as opposed to the actual territory. The men in If You Know Not Me thus fetishize women as cartographic products, which they alone can own, enjoy, and display as part of their strategy for economic and political legitimacy. Since 26 Helgerson, ‘The folly of maps and modernity’, p. 242. 27 Jankowski, Pure Resistance, p. 80.

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Heywood’s play converts aristocratic power and land ownership into maps and mercantile authority, the merchants can also dismiss a literal aristocratic bride in favor of any chaste woman who can be deployed as another owned and controlled object, which, in the case of the play, are often cartographic ones. These women are more heavily objectified than any allegorical female figure from atlas frontispieces. Dehumanized into maps and other geographic commodities, they have no connection to actual land and lineage (as Dido, Zenocrate, Mariam, Isabel, and the women of The Four Prentices do). Because the power of Heywood’s merchants derives from their business, the chastity of women also takes on meanings related to the commercial context, further objectifying them. Instead of an implied magical inheritance of the aristocratic blood of the noble bride’s family, this new chastity, particularly in Heywood’s play, is a fetish in a very tangible sense: this chastity (and the women who may possess it) becomes an object that any man can acquire. Like cheaper and more widely obtainable luxury goods, a special status-conferring virtue is no longer the sole province of the aristocracy but is, like so much else, available in a wider market. Susan Cahn claims that ‘the transformation of chastity into a commodity allowed wealthy men to buy both chaste wives and unchaste mistresses’.28 Thus, Heywood opens his play with scenes that delineate the sexual nature of commerce and the business characteristics of sexuality. When Thomas Gresham questions his nephew John about a dispute the latter has with a Mistress Blunt, John replies, ‘But do you know her, Uncle? are you inward with her course of life? Shes a common midwife for trade-falne virginity: there are more maidenheads charged and discharged in her house in a yeare, then peeces at the Artillery yard’.29 The brief description of Mistress Blunt as a bawd is a mix of metaphors including childbirth, purchase, and battle. John’s dismissal of the woman has her assisting at a kind of perverted birth of a market of tarnished women that she then fires, presumably at clients. He puns on the words ‘charged’ and ‘discharged’, likening the maidenheads to artillery fire but also pointing towards the financial transactions taking place for them. The passage acts as an introduction to the way that Heywood’s characters will regard virginity and the women who may possess it: they do not carry a precious commodity that may be fought for or parlayed into a bargaining tool, as Bella Franca’s character demonstrates. These virgins are continually born and reborn, disposable, and ready to be ‘charged and discharged’. 28 Cahn, Industry of Devotion, p. 143. Also noted in Jankowski, Pure Resistance, p. 80. 29 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Volume 1, p. 254. All subsequent citations are in-text.

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The fact that any woman and her body can be a part of this market is underscored by the speech given by the tradesman Tawny-coat, who stops at Hobson’s shop to settle a debt. Shortly after the above speech on Mistress Blunt, Tawny-coat informs the audience that London fashions are all the rage even in the country: Then your maske, silke-lace, washt gloves, carnation girdles, and buskpoint sutable, as common as coales from Newcastle: you shall not have a kitchen-maid scrape trenchers without her washt gloves; a darie-wench will not ride to market, to sell her butter-milke, without her maske and her buske. (259)

Significantly, all the consumers in this speech are women. In Tawny-coat’s assessment, any woman with money to spend insists upon owning the f inery associated with the upper classes. The women that Tawny-coat describes here, including those as low-born as scullery and dairy maids, adorn themselves with silk and lace, masks and busks, eager to make themselves pretty even as they complete their chores. Tawny-coat, like John before him, employs words that blur the line between commerce and the women’s sexuality, since the women dress in commodities meant to enhance their attractiveness while they in turn undertake their labor and trade; moreover, these are products are now found as easily as another commercial item, Newcastle coal. Ultimately, since these physical markers of upper-class beauty are widely available, they serve as another reminder of how interchangeable women could now be in Heywood’s conception of the formation of new (masculine) social identity. Heywood’s play continues to emphasize the presence of as well as a preference for this new trade in moveable goods (which includes commodified sexuality) by representing territorial acquisition as a problematic method for obtaining wealth. When attempting to mediate the quarrel between Thomas Ramsie and Thomas Gresham, the merchant Hobson reminds the characters and informs the audience, ‘You know the cause, that this contention / Is onely that he [Gresham] bought a peece of land, / This had given earnest for: all Adams earth, / And Adams earth is free for Adams sons, / And tis a shame men should contend for it’ (267). Real estate here only causes disputes between otherwise honest men; furthermore, Hobson imagines a resolution where the parties involved in this dispute, as well as the world in general, agree that land is a communal property. But Heywood does not propose a utopia of common ownership where the map would show no borders. Rather, he proposes a new kind of geography,

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one tied closely to trading and the city where this business takes place. In a scene reminiscent of Dido’s tour of the pictures of her rejected suitors, the character Dr. Nowell takes the newly reconciled Gresham and Ramsie, along with Hobson and Ramsie’s wife, to view ‘A gallery wherein I keepe the pictures / Of many charitable citizens, / That having fully satisfied your bodies, / You may by them learne to refresh your soules’ (276). Instead of Dido’s gallery, which reveals her power through the extent to which she defeated male suitors and rival rulers with her vow of chastity, Dr. Nowell’s pictures will instruct his ‘middle-sort’ guests on how to leave their mark upon the city. His advice is not to seize power or land but rather to reveal the extent of their geographical influence by using their wealth. As an example, he speaks highly of Sir John Philpot: ‘This man at one time, at his owne charge, / Levied ten thousand souldiers, guarded the realme / From the incursions of our enemies’ (276). Dr. Nowell’s praise of Philpot does not merely state that the man was able to protect the country’s borders; rather, he makes plain that the man’s wealth contributed to the preservation of the kingdom, no doubt earning him the gratitude of the monarch. In this description, it is a citizen, not a monarch like Elizabeth, who is connected to the land and the preservation of its integrity. Nowell’s description of generous merchants and lord mayors continues, concluding with the ways that these men inscribed themselves on the physical geography of the city and left a legacy more potent than heirs: Behold their charity in every street, Churches for prayer, almes-houses for the poore, Conduits which bring us water; all which good We doe see, and are reliev’d withal, And yet we live like beasts, spend time and dye, Leaving no good to be remember’d by. (277)

Nowell concludes by relating the potential impact his listeners could have on the shape of the city if they but heed and follow the examples set before them: Even in the mid-day walkes you shall not walke the street, But widows orisons, lazars prayers, orphans thankes, Will fly into your eares, and with a joyfull blush Make you thanke God that you have done for them; When, otherwise, they’le fill your ears with curses, Crying, we feed on woe, you are our nurses.

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O, is’t not better that young couples say, You rais’d us up, then, you were our decay? And mothers tongues teach their first born to sing Of your good deeds, then by your bad to wring? (279)

Nowell’s lengthy speeches on the correct behavior for this new merchant class resembles the earlier speeches by John and Tawny-coat in that Nowell combines images from various discourses; here, he gives his audience a chorographic description of London and some of its inhabitants while also relating the potential good works of Gresham and his contemporaries to child-rearing and the establishment of a kind of family or lineage. While previous citizens have made indelible marks on the city’s topography with conduits, churches, and almshouses, Nowell describes the potential outcomes of the men’s future actions towards the city by employing that same geographical description, but combined with words that make all of London into a family. The men have the opportunity to hear praise as they traverse a well-ordered city where young couples have been ‘rais’d’ correctly; if they should not fulfill their civic and paternal duty by rendering aid, they may encounter mothers teaching their children how to speak ill of the men who would be their foster fathers. The idea that these men will act as the patriarchs for the wider city appears again when Lady Ramsie describes how the merchant Hobson and his friend Gunter sit ‘In Christs Church, morn by morn, to watch poor couples / That come there to be married, and to be / Their common fathers, and give them in the Church, / And some few angels for a dower to boot’ (320). The lineage of the aristocracy that provides for good names and better dowries are no longer needed in this new economy where merchants may act as the fathers who grant their blessings and some money to even the poorest couples. This unique inscription of the city by the merchants’ passage through London mimics the processions of Queen Elizabeth and other monarchs, in particular just before their coronations. By traveling through London, with stops along the way to hear speeches, view tableaux, and bestow money, the new monarch asserted authority over the city by visually aligning her- or himself with important locations. Rhonda Lemke Sanford, drawing on Steven Mullaney’s work, asserts, ‘[T]he city is a theater of memory whose terrain is waiting to be “inscribed”.’30 However, Lemke Sanford notes that Mullaney only examines those places touched by royal pageantry. Lemke Sanford’s project, which considers the work of decidedly non-aristocratic inscribers of the city 30 Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory, p. 105.

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like Isabella Whitney and Ben Jonson, more closely supports my assertion here that members of the middling sort could appropriate another upper-class discourse to remap the city for their own purposes. Lemke Sanford also points to Georg Braun’s and Frans Hogenberg’s 1572 map of London, which places figures that are clearly of the merchant class in the foreground (Fig. 17). As noted in Helgerson above, the figures and symbols of monarchs were being pushed to the sides of maps. In the case of the Braun and Hogenberg map of London, the monarch has been pushed literally and figuratively off the page, replaced by the figures of prosperous merchants. The female figures that stand next to the men can be seen as their wives. These women are clearly not meant to stand in for any landmass; they neither hold or feature any objects or clothes that would call to mind any continents, as do the figures in earlier maps. Instead, one of the men gestures towards the women, displaying them as Braun and Hogenberg show London behind them. Rhetorically and visually, then, London – and its female inhabitants – was increasingly becoming a city mapped and claimed by businessmen. In the case of Heywood’s play, these new men establish authority through prominent displays of charity and grand building projects marking the city throughout, achieving an ownership of the city similar to the royal processions discussed earlier.

Fig. 17: London map from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572). © The British Library Board (Maps.C29.e.1).

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But Gresham’s and Nowell’s descriptions do not only appropriate the conventions of processions in order to assert their place within and thus power over city landmarks. The description of the Royal Exchange in particular, with its physical features serving as a mirror for its inhabitants’ positive qualities, draws from country house discourse. As another artistic method of asserting the values and beliefs of the aristocracy, country house discourse emphasized the head of the household’s care and munificence towards his people and his property, with both expressing their grateful deference. Kari Boyd McBride writes that the discourse drew on idealized feudal, social and economic relationships, represented most conspicuously through the theory and practice of hospitality, invoking a utopia of medieval nostalgia that stood as a rebuke to all that was new while, paradoxically, accommodating the very change it excoriated.31

The invocation of this nostalgia was partly a response to the shift during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a system of manorialism to ‘a society dominated both economically and politically by the middle class’.32 During this change in the nature of power, this discourse, asserts Boyd McBride, functioned as a kind of ‘script’ for the ‘performance of legitimacy’.33 Country house discourse can also be thought of in conjunction with the perhaps more egalitarian genre of chorography, which described local pieces of land as well but did not depend on one noble dedicatee and manor house and could be appropriated by the middling sort. That Gresham and his associates follow some of the ‘lines’ from the country house script indicates not only their ability to do so but also demonstrates how wealthy businessmen continued to solidify their recently achieved status by adapting modes employed by the aristocracy. More specifically, these men would take the place of the lords at the head and center of estates, while their wives would continue to uphold the chaste silence of the manors’ originally noble ladies in order – like the imagined land of the discourse – to bolster their families’ good reputations. Although the Exchange differs greatly from the territory acquired through dynastic marriages enacted by Herod or Tamburlaine, Gresham’s building, and, more importantly, the business that takes place within it, ensure and 31 Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse, p. 2. 32 Ibid., p. 1. 33 Ibid., p. 3.

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proclaim his elevated standing over an even wider territory. Heywood places two Lords on the stage strictly for the purpose of declaiming the new Burse’s place in the world. The Second Lord asserts to his companion: I might say, all the world has not his fellow. I have been in Turkies great Constantinople; The merchants there meet in a goodly temple, But have no common Burse: in Rome, but Romes’ Built after the manner of Frankford and Embden: There, where the greatest marts and meeting places Of merchants are, have streets and pent-houses, And, as I might compare them to themselves, Like Lumber Street before this Burse was built. (295)

The Lord in his speech measures Gresham’s new building against other similar places around the known world and finds these other establishments lacking. In addition to asserting the unique and superior quality of the structure, the Lord’s reference to specific cities points to the idea that London and thus England may surpass these cities in other respects as well. The powerful Ottoman Empire’s capital does not even have a place specifically set aside for its merchants, indicating a lesser regard for trade. Rome simply imitates the German meeting places, signifying the Italians’ lack of originality. In addition, the second Lord, a few lines later, declares of Venice’s Rialto, ‘Tis but a bable, if compared to this’, equating the Italian exchange with gaudy and presumably useless show (295). The nearest comparison is with ‘the great Burse in Antwerp, yet not comparable / Either in height or wideness, the fair cellarage, / Or goodly shops above. Oh, my Lord Mayor’, cries the second Lord, ‘This Gresham hath much graced your city, London: / His fame will long outlive him’ (296). The city that the Lord believes comes closest to the new Exchange is, significantly, Antwerp, one of the earliest and most prosperous centers of trade on the continent. Yet, since the new building in London surpasses its counterpart in the Netherlands in its size and design, Heywood asserts that English trade will soon overtake that of the Dutch. The new Exchange that Gresham builds, as he and various characters testify, is soundly constructed to allow sunlight in but to keep the elements out; it is esthetically pleasing, a source of income, and a credit to its builder and ultimately the nation. In many ways, then, the qualities ascribed to the building recall the characteristics sought for in a nobleman’s wife. Although the comparison may not be readily apparent, Heywood’s repeated association of maidenheads with commerce joins with his character Gresham’s

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extended descriptions of the specific functions of the Burse’s boundaries to create a space that replaces the aristocratic wife. For within the strictly controlled space of the Burse, Gresham can enhance wealth and prestige and be assured of the quality of the legacy he leaves behind. I quote the majority of Gresham’s speech: It shall be in the pleasure of my life To come and meet our merchants at their houre, And see them, in the greatest storme that is, Walke dry, and in a worke I rais’d for them, Or fetch a turne within my upper walke, Within which square I have orderd shops shall be Of neat, but necessariest trades in London: And in the richest sort being garnisht out, Twill do me good to see shops, with faire wives Sit to attend the profit of their husbands; Young maids brought up, young men as prentises. Some shall prove masters, and speake in Greshams praise, In Greshams worke we did our fortunes raise. For I dare say, both country and the Court For wares shall be beholding to this worke. (288-289)

Gresham relates how his building provides protection from any storm, with space devoted to walking covered from the elements. The atmosphere of the Burse, he concludes, will help foster an environment where honorable couples and individuals will flourish. Heywood bases Gresham’s appraisal of the Burse and its positive effects on the country house discourse that equates the attributes of the land with the character of its people, specifically the aristocratic or royal male. But in Heywood’s conception, the figures that will be the exemplars of the nation as a whole will not come from the aristocracy. Rather, the merchants and their families who occupy Gresham’s superbly designed Burse will profess English greatness. The importance of the Exchange and the space of London in formulating identity is underscored when considering John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London, a chorographic and chronographic description of the city’s neighborhoods, inhabitants, and general character. Heywood’s play denotes more than a passing familiarity with Stow’s work, for Dr. Nowell’s list of city worthies echoes that of Stow’s. Both play and survey also call attention to Ludgate, where the charitable Mayor Foster and his wife Agnes have had their deeds literally inscribed upon London itself, with verses commemorating their good

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works.34 Although Heywood could just as easily have read the actual epitaph upon the gate, the inclusion of so many of the other important citizens that Stow also features in his survey suggests that Heywood actively uses what Edward T. Bonahue, Jr. refers to as Stow’s ‘map[ping] out for London and its citizens a narratological and historical space that could, and would, be utilized by subsequent writers’.35 Similarly, Rachel Ramsey asserts that Stow’s survey establishes ‘a discourse about building, focusing on who should build what where and for what purposes’, ultimately providing monarchs with a tool for controlling London’s expansion.36 In effect, Bonahue and Ramsey demonstrate how Stow’s Survey is an example of world-writing, in this case, a writing of what Stow would like his city to look like. In doing so, he provides others with an example of how to ‘map’ certain qualities onto the urban space. As an example of this mapping, the survey will often describe the physical characteristics of a building and then connect them with its more intangible qualities, as Stow does here when he writes of a charity house: ‘So it is of late, to wit in the yeare of Christ 1593 on the North side thereof, and at the West end of Hogsstreete, beautifyed by certaine Almes houses, there strongly builded of Bricke and timber & covered with slate for the poore, by the Marchant Taylors of London […]’.37 Stow points out the particular materials used in the building, the beauty and strength of which contribute to the appearance and quality of the neighborhood and the support of its poorer inhabitants. The picture of a caring city with proper concern for its poor may be as inaccurate as some early modern maps, but the Survey is an example of the ideologically driven nature of early modern geographic products: these writers often describe what they wish or want to be so, not necessarily what was ‘there’. Through the example of Stow’s survey, dramatists like Heywood could see London – and any other space – as open to a kind of ‘remapping’. The play If You Know Not Me would then constitute the ordering of the space of London to help signify the supremacy of English masculine identity. Heywood supplements this assertion of English superiority by a sustained description of the chaste nature of those who occupy Gresham’s building. Just as a virgin bride and chaste wife theoretically ensured the legitimacy and

34 The lines referred to begin, ‘Devout soules that passe this way […]’. Stow, Survey of London, p. 16. The corresponding lines in Heywood’s play can be found on page 278. 35 Bonahue, Jr., ‘Citizen History’, p. 63. Bonahue’s article also emphasizes the changing nature of English society, especially in London: ‘[I]n London, more than anywhere else in England, the traditional markers of social class were under assault and in flux’ (65). 36 Ramsey, ‘The Language of Urbanization’, p. 251. 37 Stow, Survey of London, p. 48.

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quality of her children, this new Exchange will house only those merchants of the best character: Here, like a parish for good citizens And their faire wives to dwell in, Ile have shops, Where every day they shall become themselves In neat attire; that when our courtiers Shall come in trains to trace old Greshams Burse, They shall have such a girdle of chaste eyes, And such a globe of beauty round about, Ladies shall blush to turn their vizards off, And courtiers sweare they ly’d when they did scoffe. (291)

Gresham’s building is so pure as to become a neighborhood organized around a kind of church for its likewise holy salesmen, who, of course, will bring their fair wives. The building’s open yet chaste nature will allow for courtiers to venture in, their notoriously decadent ways tamed by the nature of those within the building.38 Specifically, ‘chaste eyes’ will provide a ‘girdle’ for these visitors, an item of clothing that both points to the commercial function of the building and, with its placement near the waist, suggests sexual continence. Furthermore, the ladies will refuse to remove their masks, utilizing another item of saleable clothing to create a

38 Gresham’s earlier description of the building’s construction takes care to detail the precise nature of the building’s open-air elements: This space, that hides not heaven from us, Shall be so still; my reason is, There’s summers heat as well as winters cold; And I allow, and here’s my reason for’t, Tis better to be bleakt by winters breath, Than to be stifled up with summers heat. In cold weather, walk dry, and thick together, And every honest man warm one another: In summer, then, when too much heat offends, Take air, a Gods name, merchants or my friends. (291) That Gresham takes such care to explain why the building must have these openings implies that there is just as much anxiety about open structures as there is about ‘open’ women. His careful explanation as to why the building remains open to the elements justifies the decision by positing a building that is almost like a body in allowing healthy circulation, in this case of air. Moreover, the precise nature of the openings will allow the right kind of merchant to enter, encouraging a kind of beneficial homosocial community for the men, as ‘every honest man warm one another’.

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physical barrier to wantonness.39 These chaste women can now safely be put on display much like their goods; the description of the ‘globe of beauty roundabout’ indicates their status as a commodity (a globe itself) as well as the international nature of the items within the Exchange. With its focus on the building’s interior, Heywood’s description also recalls the building plans that were used at this time both to construct and to advertise new buildings. As early as 1538, the Lord Mayor of London wrote to Thomas Cromwell describing ‘a platte, that was drawn howte for to make a goodly Burse in Lombert Strette for Marchaunts to repayer unto’.40 Gresham’s Exchange would be planned to scale in the 1560s, while an engraving of the completed building would also be disseminated.41 Thus, in these historical cases, plans and maps were being used outside the scope of asserting royal authority and to describe more localized areas and buildings. The play furthers the remove from any royal or noble sphere when Heywood dramatically highlights the elimination of an aristocratic wife, presumably for one who more resembles the qualities of the Exchange, through his characterization of Queen Elizabeth in the play’s second half. While the historical Elizabeth was still engaged in gaining political leverage through matrimonial and political discussions with France when she opened the Exchange in 1571, Heywood depicts an Elizabeth who, along with her virginity, becomes yet another commodity that can be bought, sold, and ultimately replaced. With Gresham and men like him becoming the new parental figures for London and its people, the queen’s role is continually sidelined and even maligned. In Heywood’s view, the woman who so famously took advantage of her marriage potential on a grand scale is reduced to just another commodity in the Exchange. At the beginning of its construction, Gresham publicly announces, ‘Here’s a brick, here’s a faire sovereign. / Thus I begin; be it hereafter told, / I laid the first stone with a piece of gold’ (290). While on the surface pointing once again to the money that constitutes Gresham’s power, the use of the word ‘sovereign’ to describe the currency 39 By making the chaste quality of the merchants’ wives reflect the general nature of the Exchange and the city beyond, Heywood again follows Stow’s example. The latter opens his section entitled ‘Under the Honor of Citizens, and worthinesse of men in the same’ with the observation that ‘[t] he matrons of this citie are the very modest Sabine Ladies of Italy’ (78). The comparison not only calls to mind the women’s honor even after being abducted, but also their role in preventing war between the Sabines and the Romans and ultimately preserving Rome. Heywood’s London matrons can also be seen as contributing to civic stability; however, his use of the word ‘modest’ to describe the women, as well as the fact that this is a lone sentence about women in a section primarily dedicated to the men, ultimately points to a more passive role by these women. 40 Harvey, Maps in Tudor England, p. 97. 41 Ibid., p. 101.

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puns on the word’s additional meaning of ‘ruler’. The image is not just one of coins facilitating the English economy but of Elizabeth herself making up only one part of her nation’s new prominence. John Watkins agrees, noting that Heywood ‘persists in investing historical agency in non-aristocratic men’. 42 In this play, the oft-mentioned but rarely seen Elizabeth represents the shift in power from the aristocracy to those of the ‘middling sort’, a transformation more readily apparent during Heywood’s career in the early decades of the 1600s than during the time depicted in the play. 43 Even when Heywood seems to praise Elizabeth, his laudatory comments in fact function to reduce Elizabeth to the status of any other woman in the new economy. This diminution of Elizabeth is made prominent by a juxtaposition of two scenes. In the first, two Lords describe Elizabeth’s presence at a meeting of ambassadors. The first Lord affirms, ‘[S]he is a rare linguist. / Where other princes use interpreters, / She, propria voce, […] / She of herselfe answeres them without interpreter, / Both Spanish, Latine, French, and Greek, / Dutch, and Italian’ (298). Although the audience never sees Elizabeth display her linguistic talents, the scene positions the queen as more of an intermediary than a ruler; as interpreter, she is a facilitator of discourse and presumably trade between foreign representatives and the English. The description takes on a darker tone when it is followed shortly by a scene that features John Gresham, the nephew to Thomas now a factor in France, visiting a brothel. The ‘Curtezan’ informs John and the audience that I have tried ere now The sweaty Spaniard and the carowsing Dane, The foggy Dutchman, and the fiery French, The briske Italian, and indeed what not; 42 Watkins, Representing Elizabeth, p. 48. Watkins suggests that the incoherence of the two parts of If You Know Not Me ‘signals the extent of Heywood’s skepticism about privileging the monarch as the agent of national destiny’ (48). The first part focuses on the trials of Princess Elizabeth as a Protestant under Catholic rule who, along with her religion, eventually succeeds in ‘saving’ the kingdom. The second part is almost wholly concerned with Gresham’s trials. He also notes that of the two visual depictions of historical successions in the play, that of the portraits of kings and Nowell’s citizens, only the latter group remains (51). 43 My reading contrasts with that of Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, who assert that Elizabeth, in the Tilbury scene at least, is ‘an exemplary embodiment of national prosperity’ (59). See England’s Elizabeth, p. 59. For another perspective on the play’s use of history, see Mehl, ‘The Late Queen on the Public Stage’, pp. 153-171. Mehl argues that the play is more a nostalgic look at the time period featured than at Elizabeth herself. According to Mehl, Heywood promotes Elizabeth’s reign as a time of renewed charity when citizens more than the queen contribute to posterity (170-171).

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And yet of all and all, the Englishman Shall goe for me. (307)

Her appraisal of the many nationalities that she has ‘sampled’ mimics the international meeting that the queen has been hosting only a few scenes earlier. The Curtezan’s list of her many sexual congresses is a perversion of the congress that Elizabeth has with the ambassadors; the queen as a ‘rare linguist’ becomes sexual in connotation, echoing the early modern conception that a woman who would be loose with her tongue would also be immoral sexually. In the latter scene, John Gresham supplies the economic metaphor, telling the Curtezan, ‘[T]hou hast a commodity that I must needs take up’ (307). The line recalls the play’s earlier emphasis on women’s sexuality as a commodity, reducing Elizabeth’s political use of her virginity on the international marriage market to the level of prostitution. The relationship also recalls the vexed meaning of the word ‘queen/quean’, which could signify both a ruler and a prostitute. Heywood’s comparison belittles one of her effective political strategies, placing Elizabeth’s much vaunted virginity on the same level as a Curtezan who would sell her commodity to any traveler. While thus marginalizing Elizabeth, Heywood continues to praise Gresham by suggesting that it is he, and men like him, who will constitute the new locus of power in England’s emerging imperial trading presence. The nameless second Lord again appears to praise Gresham, although he does initially have kind words for Elizabeth, since she ‘will come in person, and here christen it: / It cannot have a better godmother’ (296). However, her role as godmother is immediately undermined by the Lord’s declaration: ‘This Gresham is a royall citizen’ (296). Although his royal status could be said to derive from Elizabeth, she is described here only as the godmother; it is Gresham alone who is both royal and a citizen, the two words combining aristocratic and populist characteristics. Gresham himself further undercuts the importance of the nobility and, by extension, the queen, when he dismisses the news that his ships have sunk, in particular those carrying the pictures of England’s kings that were to grace the Exchange. Instead of evincing any distress, Gresham simply says, ‘I car’d not to have lost their waights in gold’ (299). His casual attitude indicates the vast nature of his income and that royal images are unnecessary for his Exchange. The ever-present and voluble second Lord concurs when he says that Gresham is ‘As royall in his vertues as his buildings’ (301). The connection between man and location is explicit. The buildings and their structural soundness, not an aristocratic bride or any noble person, serve as indicators of Gresham’s noble nature. In addition, the continued use of the word ‘royal’ to describe

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Gresham also implies that he possesses the economic and political resources of monarchs. Gresham demonstrates a command of both types of resources in a dramatic fashion when he purchases and drinks an expensive pearl. He dissolves the jewel in wine and then offers this toast: ‘Here fifteene hundred pound at one clap goes. / Instead of sugar Gresham drinks this pearle / Unto his Queene and mistresse: pledge it, lords. / Who ever saw a merchant bravelier fraught, / In dearer slippers, or a richer draught?’ (301). Gresham makes sure to disclose the pearl’s exact value as he toasts his queen, and he also makes sure to describe himself as a prominent merchant, clad in the gifts he has just received from a Barbary king. Although the gifts are poor recompense for the trading deal the king has revoked, Gresham’s jovial donning of the slippers and dagger and his pearl cocktail again demonstrate that money is no object for him. But the pearl has deeper significance as a symbol of virginity and, here, as a signifier in particular for Elizabeth’s virginity and sexuality as well. Valerie Traub writes of a particular pearl that appears prominently in the Armada portrait of the queen (Fig. 18). Drawing the viewer’s attention to the bottom of Elizabeth’s stomacher, just below a virgin knot, Traub argues that the drop pearl in the Armada portrait ‘emblematizes the erotic self-assertion of the most powerful woman in the realm, figuratively announcing Elizabeth’s sovereign right to her own pleasures’. 44 Traub’s argument both builds on and contrasts with readings by Peter Stallybrass and Louis Montrose, who see Elizabeth’s virginity in the portrait as showing a causal relationship with the defeat of the Armada.45 Traub, however, also asks the viewer ‘to see in the drop pearl a metonymy of female pleasure’ as well as virginal impermeability.46 The portrait’s assertion of virginity and erotic pleasure, argues Traub, is both powerful and unashamed since the painting’s ultimate message is one of Elizabeth’s and thus England’s power. She concludes, ‘The pearl is answerable to a politics of the monarchical body which finds its mirror image in the Queen’s hand resting confidently atop the globe’. 47 Thus, Elizabeth controls her own body, bodies within her realm and, through her navy, the world. This extended description of Traub’s argument is meant to emphasize just how much political and personal significance can be invested in Elizabeth’s 44 Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 130. 45 Stallybrass writes that ‘the conjunction of imperial virgin and cartographic image […] constitute together the terrain of Elizabethan nationalism’. Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’, p. 129. Also cited in Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 128. 46 Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, p.129. 47 Ibid., p. 132.

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Fig. 18: The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I by George Gower, c. 1588. From the Woburn Abbey Collection.

sexuality and imprinted upon the pearl.48 Once the potency of this symbol for Elizabeth is established, Gresham’s dissolution of the pearl becomes not only a toast but a dramatic indication of the transfer of power and its representation. John Watkins also suggests that Heywood’s queen distinguishes herself from her historical counterpart by ‘her alacrity in discrediting the Crown’s pretensions to sanctity and in granting political agency to her subjects’. 49 Heywood’s Elizabeth and her pearl stand in for the broad changes in the acquisition of status and power that early modern English society, especially in London, underwent at this time. While noblemen secured land and lineage and thus increased authority through the conduit of a bride’s virgin body, Gresham is able to purchase and consume Elizabeth’s virginity as a sign 48 Howard in Theater of a City also asserts that the play privileges Gresham over Elizabeth as he challenges her in magnificent show (55). Her treatment of the scene, however, examines the pearl as a symbol of the exotic other that Gresham controls by ingesting. Where I see the Royal Exchange as a new feminized territory to be appropriated by merchants, Howard views the Royal Exchange as a place that connects Gresham to civic benefaction but more importantly to ‘its future as a center for long-distance overseas trade and commercial empire’ (60). 49 Watkins, Representing Elizabeth, p. 38.

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of his and other merchants’ power. Although the significance of the pearl still rests on the assumption that a virgin body represented some tangible form of property, the virgin queen and her power have been reduced to a mere commodity before being literally dissolved and consumed, denoting that men like Gresham need not acquire virgin territory to increase or establish their power; rather, virginity is just another purchase they can make to demonstrate the power that they already have. When the audience finally sees Elizabeth interacting with her merchantsubjects, she does so like any other trader. She secures Hobson’s agreement to a loan, assuring him, ‘[A]s I am true maid, / Ile see myself the money back repaid’ (318). Although Elizabeth can use her virgin status as collateral for the loan, indicating that she still maintains some control through her body, the earlier scenes that establish any courtesan’s sexuality as a commodity lower the queen, who trades in the same readily available good, to their level. The role of actual women’s bodies in securing power in England and overseas diminishes in importance as men like Hobson, Gresham, and his nephew can ‘purchase’ women and their symbolic import outright, just as they buy and build on highly localized spaces within the city. Rather than the large swaths of territory associated with women in earlier plays, these women are objects within a smaller space connected to and controlled by the men of London.

A Girl Worth Gold: The Fair Maid of the West If the queen herself, along with any other noblewoman who might have access to power through her important position as the embodiment of territory and lineage, have been in Heywood’s play reduced to conducting the business of courtesans, what happens to the women who occupy the status in between the aristocratic women and the prostitutes? Although Gresham’s building can fulfill the same metaphorical duties of a wife, who would merchants like Gresham actually marry and what role might they play in the representation of English imperialism? An answer is found in Heywood’s other popular two-part play The Fair Maid of the West, the first part produced around 1600 and the second some 25 years later. Both were printed together in 1631 and feature Bess Bridges, the play’s ‘fair maid’ who leaves her native England to command her own ship through the Mediterranean and encounters adventure in Barbary, Italy, and on the high seas. But rather than a journey of a woman of initiative and power, Bess’ voyage to distant lands – indeed, Bess herself – offers another means for men

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of the middling sort to appropriate world-writing that imparted English male superiority. And a specifically moral superiority would justify their increasingly imperial designs. Instead of signifying real estate, Heywood’s Bess Bridges is a kind of geographic product, displayed so the English could write a world where they assert their status of moral and cultural superiority. Ultimately, the events of the play point to Bess’ status as a temporarily public emblem of virtue who returns home when her duties are accomplished; once she has been circulated in strictly virtuous display, she returns home to grace that physical space alone. The shift of the play’s focus from Bess’ virtue to her beloved Spencer’s physical feats emphasizes the historical shift that pushed women further into a more private, domestic sphere. Queen Elizabeth, whose public role has already been diminished in If You Know Not Me, is further erased in The Fair Maid, becoming subsumed in the persona of Bess, whose name is a literal diminution of her namesake’s. Bess’ silence and acquiescence in the public arena at the play’s conclusion allows for the more politically and publicly significant joining of the men Spencer and Joffer. Any problems that might arise from the continued vocal and visible presence of Bess’ strong character are solved as Heywood has her step aside to represent property in the form of at least a status-conferring object like a map, and, at most, the protected space of the English family and home. In this capacity, Bess takes the place of aristocratic women, imparting legitimacy and spiritual superiority to men like Spencer, who continue expanding their own, as well as England’s, political clout with moral certainty. But in taking the symbolic role of the aristocratic wife, Bess and wives like her have no recourse to any concrete connection to territory or lineage, just as the maps and atlases increasingly owned by commoners did not stand in for any actual land holdings. Rather, Bess becomes an object, a map only, and maps at this time began serving a new function, what Lloyd Brown calls ‘pretty things with bright colors and gold leaf to please the eye and decorate the home’.50 Brown refers here to the second type of two kinds of maps made in the seventeenth century – those for sailors and government officials who would demand accuracy and those that served as mere decorative home items to confer status. R.A. Skelton quotes Robert Burton remarking in The Anatomy of Melancholy how those who could afford them collected maps ‘to beautify their Halls, Parlors, Chambers, Galeries, Studies or Libraries with’.51 But this collecting of maps was not done just for contemplation of beauty, 50 Brown, The Story of Maps, p. 171. Also quoted in Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, p. 158. 51 Quoted in Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps, p. 26.

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as Peter Barber and Tom Harper explain: printed maps, and in particular large wall maps, ‘appealed to the wealthy European mercantile class as a reflection of their social status and worldly knowledge’.52 Moreover, ‘[m]ap tapestries can be regarded as the north European equivalent of frescoes’, decorating the houses of the wealthy as luxury status items.53 Ultimately, the consumers of these maps did not use them as actual guides or planning tools connected to actual land; rather, they were useful as decorative objects unto themselves. In placing these ‘pretty things’ – wives and maps – within the house, men like Gresham and Spencer find cartographic authority not in representations of actual land like their royal forbearers, but rather within the literal and metaphorical homes that they construct and the families that reside therein. Heywood’s later plays provide a study in detail of the ideological shift that made the family and the home one of the most effective representations of the English empire that would arise in the following centuries. As noted earlier, Bess Bridges’ role in English nationalism can also be articulated through theories on Indian nationalism that arose in response to the British imperialism of later centuries. Partha Chatterjee writes that as long as Indians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took ‘care to retain the spiritual distinctiveness of [their] culture, [they] could make all the compromises and adjustments necessary to adapt [themselves] to the requirements of a modern, material world without losing [their] true identity’ (155).54 If men are to pursue traditionally masculine ventures such as business and military endeavors, then they could not be encumbered by having to also secure spiritual superiority. Placing that responsibility with women not only safeguarded Indian spirituality, but also confined women securely in the home, constituted as a distinct sphere protected from external (Western) influence. The nationalist movement thus deemed women to be the bearers of Indian spirituality, and the women would fulfill this role by remaining virtuous and untouched by Western ways. Although her essay focuses on India, Chatterjee’s ideas have wider applicability since they pertain to shaping national identity through gender roles. As a nation or kingdom’s global presence grows, the presence of any women in the public arena must necessarily be (or remain) muted so that their modesty may convey the culture’s superior morality. Chatterjee summarizes nationalism and women’s place within it in these terms: ‘The new patriarchy, 52 Barber and Harper, Magnificent Maps, p. 122. 53 Ibid., p. 56. 54 Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman’s Question’, p. 155.

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advocated by nationalism, confer[s] upon women the honor of a new social responsibility […] with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood’.55 Their new social responsibility entails protecting and, in their behavior, proclaiming the spiritual separateness that raises their national culture above all others. It is this social responsibility that Heywood imparts to Bess in the form of asserting her chastity through the rhetoric of geography, often articulated by the male characters around her. For Bess in The Fair Maid, as with the Queen Elizabeth found in the second part of If You Know Not Me, it is primarily the men who participate in world-writing, often on the bodies of those women. These women cannot draw on any connection to actual land through the language of geography; as self-contained objects, they, like maps, stand only for themselves or for whatever discourse is inscribed upon them. From a singular woman standing in for an entire territory on a map, now all women are reduced to simply the map itself. In the case of Heywood, he delineates Bess as an object, in particular a charted object and sometimes a room ultimately used and protected only by her beloved and eventual husband, even and especially in the face of increasing international trade by the English. Jean E. Howard writes that, in Tudor-Stuart England, ‘a discourse of national identity was emerging, […] defined in part by a bounded geographical essence and in part by racial and cultural differences from other such imagined communities’.56 As they increasingly interact with those characterized as ‘others’, the English recognize and celebrate those qualities that separate the other from themselves. One of the ways Heywood differentiates Bess and England is by that protected object or room status. Georgianna Ziegler writes that ‘the woman’s room signifies her “self,” and the man’s forced or stealthy entry of this room constitutes a rape of her private space’.57 Thus, Bess’ body in the play often figures as either a map of virtue or, at most, a room within a house where such maps would be displayed by men using them as status symbols. The audience f irst encounters Bess at her tavern; her position as a barmaid in a place traditionally associated with vice and license serves to highlight her virtue while also metaphorically connecting in special ways Bess’ integrity with the small space she occupies. To underscore the virtuous remarkableness of Bess, the gentleman Mr. Carrol, upon hearing her occupation, exclaims, ‘Honest, and live there? / What in a public tavern,

55 Ibid., p. 162. 56 Howard, ‘An English Lass Amid the Moors’, p. 101. 57 Ziegler, ‘My Lady’s Chamber’, p. 73. Also quoted in Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory, p. 64.

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where’s such confluence / Of lusty and brave gallants?’ (Part 1, I.i.24-26).58 However, his companion assures him that ‘Her very beauty hath upheld that house, / And gained her master much’ (Part 1, I.i.32-33). Moreover, the Captain claims that ‘the Castle needs no bush, / Her beauty draws to them more gallant customers / Then all the signs i’th’town else’ (Part 1, I.i.20-22). In his description, the Captain establishes Bess as an integral part of the physical and commercial nature of the tavern’s structure; she thereby recalls the role of the nameless merchants’ wives in Gresham’s Royal Exchange, who bring a virtuous presence to the husbands’ stalls.59 Additionally, Bess’ time at the Castle and, subsequently, the Windmill, the tavern she later owns, involves keeping the drawers and customers well-mannered. At the Windmill, she asks the boasting Roughman, ‘Can we not live in compass of the law, / But must be swaggered out on’t?’ (Part 1, II.i.93-94). Significantly, Bess speaks to Roughman in potentially geographic terms, rendering law as an area that can be occupied. Her use of the term ‘compass’ describes her own and others’ behavior as drawn and bounded – that is, constructed by others and, initially, monitored by her.60 She tells her customers at the Windmill, ‘[I]f you come like other free and civil gentlemen, / You’re welcome; otherwise, my doors are barr’d you’ (Part 1, II.i.100-102). And initially, Bess’ use of this geographic and spatial language indicates some agency, especially as Bess does the work of guarding her own sexuality, claiming after Spencer’s departure that she will ‘recollect’ herself and ‘what he left in charge: – Virtue and Chastity’ (Part 1, I.iii.85-86). But Spencer will, however, as he phrases it, ‘put her to the test and utmost trial, / Before I trust her farther’, a promise that is worded so as to undercut Bess’ agency in asserting and guarding her own borders (Part 1, I.iii.16-17). Spencer here describes his beloved as a product that he will ‘test’, objectifying Bess in a way similar to Carrol when he bawdily asks Spencer if ‘she keeps a rundlet for your taste, / Which none but you must pierce’ (Part 1, I.ii.118-119). Although Spencer kills Carrol for the perceived insult, their conceptions of Bess are nearly identical. Indeed, 58 All lines from The Fair Maid are in cited in-text and from the 1967 Regents Renaissance Drama Series, edited by Turner, Jr. 59 The Mayor of Foy will later note of Bess that though ‘she liv[es] in an house of such resort, / She is no more distasted’ (Part 1, III.ii.3-4). Her virtuous behavior is again contrasted with the space she occupies; in addition, her good reputation is related in a word – distasted – that recalls the sampling of wares. 60 Simon Shepherd examines the role of women in taverns, arguing that they are locations of disorder. He asserts that tavern behavior ‘is a containable sin, is morally fenced in and doesn’t destroy property’. Shepherd views the tavern as a symbolic space of release and containment; I claim that Bess’ well-mannered tavern’s symbolic significance lies in its correlation to Bess’ initial control of her own body. Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women, p. 97.

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Carrol’s question is prophetic, for Bess will ultimately be ‘pierced’ by her eventual husband Spencer alone. In addition to linking her to property and consumable goods, Bess is further objectified in a manner that recalls the availability of mass-produced printed works, to include maps. Spencer calls her the ‘precedent of all true love, / And shall be register’d to after times, / That never shall pattern her’ (Part 1, IV.v.73). Although he claims that she will not be patterned, Spencer’s statement implies a kind of official approval of Bess’ behavior, with the possibility that he will allow her to be ‘copied’ as a plan for future virtue. Here, Bess can be again likened to an object, in this case an engraver’s plate used to produce copies of prints such as maps. But again, this language allows Bess some authority at first, as she recognizes her own role as a model for other women to emulate. When she hears report of Spencer’s death, Bess vows ‘to be a pattern to all maids hereafter / Of constancy in love’ (Part 1, III.iv.59). As well as inspiring other maids, Bess also manages to convert the men around her to better behavior, inspiring her fellow Englishmen to revive their innate male virtues. The formerly ill-mannered Roughman states, ‘She hath waken’d me, / And kindled that dead fire of courage in me / Which all this while hath slept’ (Part 1, III.ii.132-134). Before his encounter with Bess, Roughman predicted his sexual conquest in terms that related Bess to a place ripe for conquest: he will ‘make this Windmill my grand seat, my mansion, my palace, and my Constantinople’ (Part 1, II.i.16-17). But instead of appropriating Bess’ body and property, the fair maid becomes for him an object lesson in adhering to a better and more ‘manly spirit’ (Part 1, II.iii.5). Although seemingly powerful at first, Bess will eventually lose much of her authority to determine her symbolic import. She will divest herself of property, bestowing her wealth to various charities, and her character will serve an important function in valorizing English men, especially those in trade, as she inhabits that economy as a commodity herself. Her later venture overseas, away from the trade of the tavern, is thus still connected to commerce, especially since her trip ultimately ‘advertises’ the virtue of the English to all the foreigners she encounters. But her ‘advertisements’ do not focus on her own potentially powerful character, as Dido and Isabel did in the rhetorical work establishing their right to rule. Rather, Bess admonishes the Spaniards she frees from captivity to ‘pray for Bess Bridges, and speak well o’ th’ English’ (Part 1, IV.iv.59). After another victory over the Spanish, she tells the liberated sailors to ‘pray for English Bess’ (Part 1, IV.iv.120). A Spaniard responds, ‘I know not whom you mean; but be’t your queen, / Famous Elizabeth, I shall report / She and her subjects are merciful’ (Part 1, IV.iv.121-123). His promise furthers the connection between Bess and English

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national character, but also diminishes the queen’s symbolic importance by conflating her identity with that of her subject. This eliding of Bess’ identity with that of her queen continues in Morocco. The King of Fez also associates her with Queen Elizabeth when he catalogs the English queen’s accomplishments after Bess reveals her name: There’s virtue in that name. The virgin queen, so famous through the world, The mighty empress of the maiden isle, Whose predecessors have o’errun great France, Whose powerful hand doth still support the Dutch, And keeps the potent King of Spain in awe. Is not she titled so? (Part 1, V.i.88-93)

Heywood’s association of Elizabeth and Bess reinforces England’s political might; however, the pairing of the two women, one a commoner, one a queen, continues the leveling of royal authority that Heywood began in If You Know Not Me. That play’s comparison of a courtesan to Elizabeth illustrated the reduction of virginity to an object with no special significance; here Heywood’s comparison again effaces Elizabeth’s power but with an aim to promoting English virtue. The virgin queen has the same if not less symbolic power than any maiden who would (be utilized to) portray her own and thus her nation’s spiritual might. And because of these many comparisons of Bess to her homeland and queen, a violation of Bess’ body (or, at this point, that of any other English woman) bespeaks a violation, or invasion, of England itself. Like Elizabeth before her, any penetration of Bess can be seen as a corresponding penetration of English borders. But in Heywood’s play, the physical work of protecting English borders is left to men like Spencer and Goodlack, who become more militaristic in the play’s second half. Bess, on the other hand, only briefly controls the borders of an actual physical location, her tavern in Foy, before receding further from any active participation in proclaiming England’s superiority. By the conclusion, with her impending marriage to Spencer, she will presumably reside in a house he provides, maintaining her own integrity as a sign of his honor and as an assurance that his property will be legitimately inherited. But before she disappears into domesticity, Heywood emphasizes her importance in commercial terms: Mullisheg, the King of Fez, furthers this connection of Bess with commodities when he declares, ‘That English earth may well be term’d a heaven, / That breeds such divine beauties’ (Part 1, V.i.43-44). In addition to once again relating Bess to the territory of England as a whole,

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the king uses in his statement the verb ‘to breed’, a term often associated with the production of animals to sell at market.61 Additionally, Mullisheg reduces Bess’ agency by negating her role in the engendering of the ‘divine beauty’ that aids her bargaining; it is the English soil that produces Bess and her virtues for overseas display and trade, not, as perhaps the case for Elizabeth, Dido, Mariam, and Isabel, the woman who cultivates those qualities. Later in the same act, Bess actively aids the cause of trade overseas when her intervention convinces Mullisheg to release merchants held in captivity. But her actions ultimately contribute to Spencer and England’s status alone. Bess offers to pay ransom in exchange for a merchant and his crew’s freedom. Mullisheg negotiates her offer to just one kiss, a price that she immediately ‘pay[s]’ (Part 1, V.ii.79). Mullisheg’s continued insistence on Bess’ physical favor as part of a trade raises the specter of the courtesan from the second part of If You Know Not Me, implying that Bess, like the nameless prostitute of the former play, ‘hast a commodity that [a man] must needs take up’ (If You Know Not Me, Part II, 307). Jean E. Howard notes this problematic desire that Bess elicits, writing that this scene puts the fair maid ‘in the compromising position of encouraging [Mullisheg’s] desire. She is both in danger and the source of danger’.62 However, this compromising position is, in fact, another means to put Bess’ and thus England’s virtue to the test, just as Spencer earlier tried his beloved’s constancy. As Sarah Gristwood succinctly queries Queen Elizabeth’s position as both potential bride and virgin queen, ‘For, after all, if no-one assaults it, where is the virtue in virginity?’63 With each arguably passive resistance to foreign overtures, often deflected by men’s actions, the play confirms Bess’ role as a status-conferring object for Spencer and England, again taking the place of the powerful queen and opening up the possibility that any virtuous English woman could ornament her husband’s status and that of the kingdom’s. Thus, Heywood uses extended scenes in the King of Fez’s court as an exotic location for proving the superiority of Bess and England, highlighting their virtue against a place that is decidedly decadent and open. In contrast to Bess’ rendering as a reproducible object of or firm foundation for exemplary behavior, Heywood introduces Mullisheg in geographic terms to stress the king and his territory as unsound. At his introduction to the play, he recounts his recent victory: ‘Upon the slaughter’d bodies of our foes / We 61 See breed, v.: 3. absol. Of animal species: To produce brood or young; to have offspring; to propagate their species. 9. a. To take charge of or promote the engendering of (animals); to ‘raise’ (cattle). Oxford English Dictionary Online. 62 Howard, ‘An English Lass Amid the Moors’, p. 114. 63 Gristwood, Elizabeth and Leicester, p. 131.

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mount our high tribunal’ (Part 1, IV.iii.10-11). In contrast to the ‘Virtue and Chastity’ that Spencer before his departure admonishes Bess to remember and guard, Mullisheg presents a gruesome image of corpses that indicates his martial prowess and supports his ruling status yet also seems unstable in its figurative foundation of slaughtered bodies as opposed to virtuous ones. And Mullisheg also employs female bodies to display his questionable power. The king exhorts his bashaw to Find us concubines, The fairest Christian damsels you can hire, Or buy for gold: the loveliest of the Moors We can command, and negroes every where. Italians, French, and Dutch, choice Turkish girls, Must fill our Alkedavy, the great palace Where Mullisheg now deigns to keep his court. (Part 1, IV.iii.28-34)

Mullisheg again affirms his own power in terms of a physical structure, describing the contents of his palace. He orders that women of various nationalities be brought in, not only for his pleasure, but as a sign of his authority’s extensive reach. The space of his court is not one room or geographic product to confer virtuous status (as in the case of Spencer’s Bess) but is a paradoxically open harem with multiple women, none of whom are a wife. Mullisheg is associated with the stereotypical associations of the space of the harem: filled with licentious concubines on display yet also clearly forbidden to any other men. With this example, Bess’ original space of the prosperous tavern, where properly behaved men can participate in beneficial trade, seems even more a location of honorable English masculine identity. This superiority through forms of virtuous trade becomes especially prominent in the second part of the play, when Bess’ place in Mullisheg’s bed is literally traded for the legitimate presence of his wife, Tota. The bed-trick episode, in substituting one woman for another, also serves to emphasize Bess’ continued objectification; she is the more valuable English ‘product’ for whom a more appropriate product (for Mullisheg) must be substituted. Goodlack and Roughman have been forced by Mullisheg and Tota, respectively, to procure Bess and Spencer as bedfellows to satisfy his lust and her desire for revenge. The bed-trick that the two men perform functions as a transaction that will produce beneficial results for all involved. Their plan, described once again in the terms of trade, further underscores Bess’ role as a commodity and her increasing passivity. Goodlack asks Roughman if they could not ‘propose / A stratagem to gull this lustful Moor, / To supply

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him, and then to satiate her?’ (Part 2, I.i.451-453). Their solution seeks to ‘supply’ these customers with products that will ‘satisfy’ them. In addition, Mullisheg’s and Tota’s use of the two English crewmen as procurers or factors of Bess’ and Spencer’s bodies marks the couple as potential participants in sexual commerce, but it is a possibility that the English regard as more threatening to Bess. So, her virginity and England’s accompanying moral superiority must be secured by English (male) cleverness. Goodlack and the rest of the English crew perform a bed-trick in order to preserve Bess’ virtue from the lustful Mullisheg more than to keep Spencer from Queen Tota’s advances. In this scene, Bess’ crew manage to preserve her virginity, to save Spencer’s life, and to outwit the king and officers of Fez while at the same time reforming them. Finding himself so cleverly deceived, Mullisheg praises those who only a few scenes earlier he had ordered killed: ‘These English are in all things honourable, / Nor can we tax their ways in any thing, / Unless we blame their virtues’, the king proclaims (Part 2, III.iii.151-153). Again, financial language, as opposed to that of martial conquest, creeps into the descriptions of the English. While the audience first sees Mullisheg eagerly imposing extra customs on Christian traders, here the admirable qualities of the English cause him to refrain from placing any extra ‘fees’ on the English, a figurative gesture that indicates the king’s new willingness to trade with England, both in goods and the kingdom’s superior virtues. These final scenes in Fez also mark the acceleration of Bess’ removal from the play’s main action, reducing her from a relatively active participant in commerce (as represented by her tavern, sea voyage, and early intervention at Fez’s court) to a passive object in the care of Spencer and his men. Goodlack and Roughman devise and carry out the bed trick, Spencer then leaves to redeem his oath of honor to Joffer, and a distressed Bess does not immediately pursue him. This sequence reveals how, in the second play, Heywood shifts his focus from Bess toward the more manly qualities of valor and skill in fighting. Though Bess previously held sway over all the men in the tavern, her tearful pleas have no effect on Spencer who must return to honor his vow to Joffer and to face certain death: ‘My honour, faith, and country, are engaged, / The reputation of a Christian pawn’d […]’ (Part 2, III.ii.101-102). When Bess still attempts to argue, Spencer asks, ‘Shall Fez report, / Unto our country’s shame, and to the scandal / Of our religion, that a barbarous Moor / Can exceed us in nobleness?’ (Part 2, III.ii.132-135). The role of ambassador has shifted; now Spencer actively takes up the task of representing Englishmen’s duty and honor, as the play’s unfolding events bring about more opportunity to display these manly virtues. In the final act, Spencer and Goodlack attain renown in Italy by earning valor while

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fighting for Mantua and Ferrara, and the last scene includes the description of the sea battle that results in Joffer’s capture. Jean E. Howard writes that English virtue is not the only end that the play accomplishes. Through their adoration of and service to Bess, the men in the play ‘form a homosocial community […], but one in which, ironically, women will have almost no place’.64 Spencer and Joffer’s (re) union is emblematic of this community, with Spencer safely superior since he imparts Christian values to his counterpart. As Spencer assumes a more prominent role among the traveling English, Bess’ authority markedly declines, evidenced in the terms that the men employ to describe her. Spencer instructs his crew to ‘be chary of this jewel’ when he and Bess must part in order to escape (Part 2, II.iv.49). With his use of the word ‘jewel’, Spencer reveals another connection between Heywood’s two fictional Elizabeths, the queen and Bess. Just as Gresham is able to obtain and consume a pearl that serves as a metonym for Elizabeth’s sexuality and authority, so Bess is also reduced to an ornamental object that can be kept by Spencer: a ‘pretty thing’ like the maps described earlier by Lloyd Brown. Once his jewel (and its integrity) have been seen and admired throughout Europe and North Africa, Spencer the husband can return the jewel to its box, emphasizing with this objectification his ultimate control over even such a renowned traveler as Bess, who truly serves to show his masculine virtue to advantage. Bess and, earlier, her royal counterpart are thus transformed into protected ornaments whose brilliance is only revealed by and used for Spencer and Gresham. This language that equates Bess with an ornamental object has its corollary in the many advice books on domestic government or, put another way, monitoring the borders of the household. Robert Dodd and John Cleaver write in the 1612 edition of A Godlie Form of Household Government that a modest and chaste woman that loveth her husband, must also love her house, as remembering that the husband that loveth his wife, cannot so well like the sight of any tapestrie, as to see his wife in his house. For the woman that gaddeth from house to house to prate confoundeth her selfe, her husband and her familie: Titus 2.65

In both the play and this treatise, wives have been rhetorically reduced to the decorative elements kept safe within the house, even in contrast to the 64 Howard, ‘An English Lass Amid the Moors’, p. 104. 65 Cleaver and Dodd, A Godlie Form of Householde Government, pp. 227-228. First published in 1598, with subsequent editions in 1600, 1603, 1612, 1621, and 1630.

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women who work in their husbands’ stalls in Gresham’s exchange and Bess herself, who had earlier been represented as at least an important ‘structural’ component of the businesses in which she worked and eventually owned. In Spencer’s conception, following Dodd and Cleaver, Bess now occupies an ornamental role meant to complement the status of her husband and family. No longer even a room or a building in the new symbolism of English nationalism, Bess and other wives are maps, atlases, wall maps or tapestries that served no practical or cartographic function beyond representing the male homeowner’s intelligence and worldliness. The objectification of Bess continues prominently in the play’s Italian scenes at the finale. Just as any visitor might see their host’s wealth and taste reflected in his jewels or tapestries, so the Duke of Florence views Bess as an object on display when he first encounters her. After rescuing her from rape, Florence claims, ‘I read a nobleness in thy forehead’ (Part 2, IV.i.71). The verb to read places Bess as the object of the Duke’s gaze, which can interpret the meaning found therein. His and others’ subsequent descriptions of Bess continue to feature language that connects Bess with products like the atlases available for wider consumption. The Duke solidifies this connection when he dismisses his merchant friend’s description of her accomplishments on the seas and in Fez, claiming, ‘But to behold the creature, were a project / Worthy a theatre of Emperors, / Nay, gods themselves, to be spectators’ (Part 2, IV.i.117-119). Again Bess is placed as an object on display – in this case, a stage – the words ‘theatre’ and ‘spectators’ echo the titles of multiple atlases and geographic texts like John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611) and John Norden’s Speculum Britaniae (first part, 1593). Florence also refers to Bess as ‘the mirror of your sex and nation’, echoing the title of the Ortelius atlas, The Mirror of the World (Part 2, V.iv.191). This act of gazing upon Bess, indeed surveying her like the reader of a map or atlas, is worthy of rulers and gods to undertake, but this surveying power will eventually be controlled not by a monarch but by the decidedly non-aristocratic Spencer alone. The concept of Bess as a geographic representation of superior beauty and virtue, particular to England, continues when the Duke exhibits her to the Dukes of Mantua and Ferrara. Mantua, upon seeing Bess, exclaims, ‘Methinks I spy one beauty in this place, / Worth all the sights that I have seen before. / I think, survey the spacious world abroad, / You scarce can find her equal’ (Part 2, IV.vi.29-32).66 Mantua’s compliment again places Bess 66 To these objectifying compliments, I would add the Duke of Florence’s disturbing invitation to his guests to ‘[t]aste her’, which furthers the notion of Bess as a consumable good. Ferrara

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in the role of an object to be surveyed and evaluated as to its worth. The favorable comparison that Mantua makes between Bess and other sights seen in the world, coupled with his use of the verb ‘survey’, reaffirms the Duke of Florence’s earlier equation of Bess with a map to be read. In these descriptions, Bess becomes like the large maps that were more readily available for those with new wealth to display in their homes; however, the fact that she travels makes her more akin to the portable atlases like Ortelius’ that were produced in great numbers in the latter half of the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth. John Gillies explains that ‘Ortelius represents his atlas as a theatron in print: the printed equivalent of a renaissance map room, which the reader figuratively enters when turning the pages’.67 In her surveyed and exemplary qualities, Bess functions as a cartographic commodity that can travel abroad as readable symbol of English virtue in general. However, with his ultimate possession of Bess through marriage, it is Spencer alone who will benefit from Bess’ representative quality since he will be the only one to truly own and ‘enter’ her. And Heywood describes Spencer’s final reunion with Bess using the same terms of mapping and commerce. When the Duke of Florence describes Bess to Spencer, the latter compliments the as-yet-unnamed mistress: ‘How rich were he / Could call himself Lord of such a jewel’ (Part 2, V.i.44-45). The compliment conflates the roles of wife and possession, with Spencer using the appellation Lord – often ascribed to a husband – to name the putative owner of the jewel/Bess. Spencer also continues the other male characters’ practice of surveying Bess; although the Duke has made him swear not to touch his mistress, Spencer, when sent to look in on Bess, says, ‘Sure ‘tis some rare piece. / […] Would Bess were here to wager beauties with her, / […] Ha, thus far off she seems to promise well. / I’ll take a nearer and more free survey’ (Part 2, V.ii.14, 17, 19-20). Still open to ‘survey’ by men, Bess is also once again rendered in financial terms (‘rare piece’, ‘wager’), this time doubly so, since Spencer, unaware the woman he is about to survey is Bess, compares his wife to herself. Once Spencer has correctly ‘read’ Bess as both chaste and his wife, Heywood speedily rejoins the couple. Interestingly, it is Bess who ultimately facilitates this reunion, briefly appropriating the cartographic language that others use to describe her. After eliciting the Duke’s promise that she can punish the man who supposedly stole her (actual) jewel, Bess declares, ‘[E]re I judge the felon, / [I will] Survey him first’ (Part 2, V.iv.100-101). adds to the conception of Bess as an ornament when he chides Florence, ‘You have only showed us a rich jewel, sir, / And put it in a casket’ (Part 2, IV.vi.35, 68-69). 67 Gillies, Introduction to Playing the Globe, p. 23.

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Using her ability to survey, Bess circles Spencer, ‘reading’ and describing his features chorographically, all the while repeating to her husband his rash vows not to touch her. However, this brief moment of Bess’ agency, where she assumes the heretofore male gaze of the cartographer, is immediately undercut by Bess herself when she offers herself up to Spencer: ‘Th’art mine by gift. I give myself to thee’ (Part 2, V.iv.119). The sentence briefly ascribes to Spencer the role of object, but Bess immediately in the next sentence substitutes herself as the gift. Although she is briefly subject and object in ‘gifting’ herself, the remainder of the play’s action leaves no question that Bess is now both subject to and object of Spencer. Bess’ retreat into the home to maintain her own virtue and thus her husband’s new status is complete by play’s end: ‘No longer a warrior, queen, entrepreneur or sea captain’, writes Howard, ‘Bess is about to be ushered from the public eye into the private home, the space allotted to woman in the emerging nation state’.68 But before her seclusion, Spencer is happy to utilize her as a sign of his own status; he exults in the fact that other men read Bess as virtuous; he says in soliloquy, ‘How the Duke prais’d her vertu, chastity, / And constancy […] / Adds to my joys’ (Part 2, V.ii.33-35). In this configuration, she becomes a product to add to Spencer’s happiness; Bess is his atlas or jewel, to be returned to the home or a casket after being exhibited as a status symbol. The changing nature, or perhaps even decline, of the aristocracy’s importance in the seventeenth century, coinciding with diminishing relevance of territorial acquisition, had demonstrable effects on the conceptions of wifely roles. No longer could aristocratic women have access to political power through their connection to land and their place in their family’s lineage. As power built on politically advantageous marriages waned, argues Lawrence Stone, unions contracted in the ‘hope of financial and territorial advantage’ also lessened.69 Although ‘[w]ealth’, writes Stone, ‘was the most important single consideration in very many early-seventeenth-century marriages […]’, in particular among the upper classes, that wealth, we have seen, derived less and less from aristocratic lineages.70 Both parts of The Fair Maid of the West, following The Foure Prentices and the second part of If You Know Not Me, chart the literary version of that development in territorial and marital ideology. Women were increasingly called upon to signify the virtue of the English character, which, in turn, helped to provide the spiritual support 68 Howard, ‘An English Lass Amid the Moors’, p. 116. 69 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 613. 70 Ibid., p. 61.

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for England’s expanding powers in the world arena. Fenella Macfarlane expands Stone’s conception of the shift in power by including the role of overseas expansion: Merchant chivalry’s masculinist coding of agency and prowess in the public realm (i.e. overseas adventure) can thus be seen in correlation with the culture’s constitution of patriarchal authority within the domestic space. For, as is now widely recognized, the period sees both the growth of ‘private life’ and the increasing construction of the household as a unit of social order in which more men are encouraged to establish their authority.71

This space of ‘private life’ and English women are, this chapter demonstrates, increasingly surveyed, charted, and controlled by merchant-adventurers of the middling sort. Women in the seventeenth century changed from symbols of territory to potential commodities of domestic virtue that accorded men moral superiority, especially in international politics. In the case of Heywood’s female characters, in particular Bess, the commodity besides jewels that they are most often likened to is the map or atlas, as they are often owned, surveyed, and displayed by men. Just as wealth opened up new political possibilities for merchant-adventurers, so the new products of cartography also became available as markers of status. Maps and brides, and the symbolic prestige they represented, could be purchased and deployed in new ways. For men like Gresham and Spencer, making the bodies of women a kind of virtuous geographic product that they owned alongside local spaces of the city meant that they could chart a new path to new status and authority. While Bess at times briefly controls her body and her business, this new world-writing available to the middling sort insists that fair maids be fair copies in locked rooms.

Works Cited Adrian, John M. ‘Tudor Centralization and Gentry Visions of Local Order’. English Literary Renaissance Vol. 36, Issue 3 (Fall 2006): 307-334. Barber, Peter and Tom Harper. Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda, and Art. London: The British Library, 2010.

71 Macfarlane, ‘To “Try What London Prentices Can Do”’, p. 163, fn. 40.

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Bonahue, Jr., Edward T. ‘Citizen History: Stow’s Survey of London’. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 38, 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 1998): 61-85. Boyd McBride, Kari Boyd. Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2001. Brown, Lloyd A. The Story of Maps. London: Cresset Press, 1951. Cahn, Susan. Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England, 1500-1660. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Chatterjee, Partha. ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman’s Question’. In Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology. Edited by Gregory Castle, 151-166. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Cleaver, Robert and John Dodd. A Godlie Form of Householde Government. [London: [Pr?]int[ed?] for Thomas Man, 1612]. Cooper, Lisa H. ‘Chivalry, Commerce, and Conquest: Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London’. In Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Curtis Perry, 159-175. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2001. Cunningham, William. The Cosmographical Glasse, conteinyng the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Navigation. [London: Ioan. Daij, 1559]. Dobson, Michael and Nicola J. Watson. England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Epstein, Mortimer. The English Levant Company: Its Foundation and its History to 1640. 1908; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. French, H.R. ‘The Search for the ‘Middle Sort of People’ in England, 1600-1800’. The Historical Journal 43, 1 (2000): 277-293. Gillies, John. Introduction to Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, 19-45. Edited by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. London: Associated University Press, 1998. ———. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gordon, Andrew. ‘Performing London: the map and the city in ceremony’. In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 69-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gristwood, Sarah. Elizabeth and Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics. New York: Viking, 2007. Harvey, P.D.A. Maps in Tudor England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hawkes, David. ‘Thomas Gresham’s Law, Jane Shore’s Mercy: Value and Class in the Plays of Thomas Heywood’. ELH: English Literary History 77 (2010): 25-44.

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Helgerson, Richard. ‘The folly of maps and modernity’. In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 241-262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Heywood, Thomas. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Volume 1. Edited by John Pearson. 1874; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, Inc, 1964. ———. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Vol. 2. Edited by John Pearson. 1874; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. ———. The Fair Maid of the West, Or, A Girle Worth Gold, Parts One and Two. Edited by Robert K. Turner, Jr. Regents Renaissance Drama Series. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. Howard, Jean E. ‘An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and National Identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West’. In Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, 101-117. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Jankowski, Theodora. Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Lemke Sanford, Rhonda. Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Macfarlane, Fenella. ‘To “Try What London Prentices Can Do”: Merchant Chivalry as Representational Strategy in Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews 13 (2001): 136-164. McLuskie, Kathleen E. Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Mehl, Dieter. ‘The Late Queen on the Public Stage: Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Parts I and II’. In Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present. Edited by Christa Jansohn, 153-171. Munster: LIT, 2004. Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610-1630. Edited by Gillian T. Cell. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1982. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Ramsey, Rachel. ‘The Language of Urbanization in John Stow’s Survey of London’, Philological Quarterly 85 (Summer-Fall 2006): 247-270. The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. Edited by Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, and G. Blakemore Evans. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Sebek, Barbara. “‘Strange Outlandish Wealth”: Transglobal Commerce in The Merchant’s Mappe of Commerce and The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II’. In Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Edited

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by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 176-202. Madison, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998. Shepherd, Simon. Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in SeventeenthCentury Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Skelton, R.A. Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries. London and New York: Staples Press, 1952. Stallybrass, Peter. ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’. In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 123-142. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Stevenson, Laura Caroline. Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Stow, John. Survey of London. Edited by William J. Thoms. London: Whittaker and Co., 1842. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Watkins, John. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Woolf, Daniel. The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ziegler, Georgianna. ‘My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’. Textual Practice 4 (1) Spring (1990): 73-90.

4. ‘The Fort of her Chastity’ Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue Abstract Cavendish’s plays respond to the commodification of women’s bodies as geographic objects by assigning to women the roles of both cartographer and territory. In Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo, the women appropriate the authority of those who survey and create maps of the land; in this case, the territory in question is again women’s bodies, but Cavendish demonstrates how women, through assertion of bodily sovereignty similar to that of Elizabeth as Virgin Queen, can gain agency. Cavendish’s strategy is inspired by the mapmakers of the Low Countries, where she spent time in exile. As the Dutch lost actual territory, they exerted rhetorical control of the world through their surveys and depictions of land and people around the globe. Keywords: Loves Adventures, bodily sovereignty, Bell in Campo, Dutch cartography, Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance.

Although the conclusion of the second part of The Fair Maid saw Bess Bridges ushered into the home during its performances in the 1630s, the next decade would see numerous women not only leaving their houses to participate in politics, but also actively defending their households from encroaching Parliamentary and Royalist forces. During the English Civil Wars, N.H. Keeble notes that ‘the incidence of female petitioners of parliament during the years 1642-1653 and in 1659 is a clear and specific example of the Civil War enabling women to forgo their customary womanly silence for an “Amazonian” or “masculine” spirit; the activities of prophetesses is another’.1 Keeble’s assessment assumes that women before this time were customarily silent, and the character trajectories of Heywood’s Elizabeth and Bess seem to bear this assertion out. Of course, although much critical work has 1 Keeble, The Restoration, pp. 195-196.

Pilhuj, K., Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463722018/ch04

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demonstrated the presence of very vocal fictional and historical women in the early modern period, there is no doubt that, in the upheaval of the Civil Wars and the uncertainty of the Interregnum, actual English women’s more vocal presence and visible work outside of the household exerted a marked influence on other women. Margaret Cavendish benefitted not just from those women’s example but also that of real and fictional women using geographical rhetoric. As a woman writing and publishing during the Interregnum and Restoration, Cavendish not only can claim the female petitioners and prophetesses as forebears, but she also within her work reveals the imprint of geographic texts. As an example, in The World’s Olio (1655), she asserts that ‘Restraint is but a Whetstone to Appetite; For most Travellers confirm, that those Countreys that have most Restraint, have least Chastity’. Cavendish denies a need for restraints on behavior, since such restrictions traditionally result, she claims in a kind of chorographic description, in a country’s further licentiousness. Cavendish further explains the lack of need for such rules, since any person can be left to live according to their own judgment, so long as ‘the bright Star of Knowledge light them, and the Needle of Understanding direct them’.2 The language of geography appears here in the act of a woman writer asserting both individual choice in general and her own in particular as she creates a text. And much of Cavendish’s works in their topics, settings, and characters, often reclaim power and authority for women through the discourses associated with geography, in particular the act of mapmaking. The practice and rhetoric of surveying and charting which we saw detached from royal authority and appropriated by the merchant-adventurers in Heywood’s plays is redirected by the imaginative woman who referred to herself as ‘Margaret the First’ into the hands and words of her female protagonists. Cavendish often referred to geography and maps when expressing her ideas on everything from marriage to bodily humours, from the individual thought process to government. Perhaps most tellingly, Cavendish writes in Allegory 4 of The World’s Olio, ‘The World is the Ground, whereon the Mind draws and designs, with the Pencils of Appetite, the actions of Life, mixing the Colours of several Objects together with the Oil of Thoughts’ (96). For Cavendish and her dramatic characters, the world, on the page as well as its real counterpart, was the canvas upon which they designed a distinctly female agency through the discourses of mapping, travel, and chastity. While the metaphor employed above could be said to refer to painting, 2 Cavendish, The World’s Olio, p. 74. All subsequent citations from The World’s Olio are in the text.

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the same tools and actions were also used in cartography. And Cavendish endows herself and her dramatic women characters with broad locations of action as well as the tools to chart those territories and the women’s own active identities. Although this kind of travel and surveying was available to Heywood’s Bess Bridges, her freedom of movement and gaze was eventually curtailed and only led to the fair maid securing a husband while establishing his, as well as England’s, superior reputation abroad. The play ends with Bess’ chastity and wifely status safely intact, but literally put aside for the more visible and politically and economically advantageous alliance of two men, Bashaw Joffer and Spencer. Cavendish’s plays, in contrast, continuously praise female protagonists who travel abroad to gain fame in their own right. But in order to counteract the accusations of moral transgression that would have accompanied her border-crossing heroines, Cavendish rewrites the ideology of the pure maid and chaste wife in order to reclaim these titles as categories that primarily benefit the women themselves, as opposed to bolstering the reputations of their husbands and families. Moreover, Cavendish’s strategy for asserting the right for women to travel and gain agency for themselves without any approbation draws its rhetoric from the burgeoning Dutch and English map trade of the 1650s and 1660s, which she implicitly links back to the representational strategies of Queen Elizabeth in maps and marriage. In addition, by establishing a virtuous yet mobile identity for her heroines, Cavendish subverts the repressive effects of the objectification that writers like Heywood impose upon the female body in order to assert the authority and status of the rising middle class. With Heywood’s fetishization of female chastity for the benefit of merchant husbands as a starting point, this chapter moves to demonstrate how Margaret Cavendish’s plays establish an authoritative female identity by renegotiating the geographic discourse used by the authors previously examined in this study. Cavendish presents female characters who are able to wield considerable agency in their lives by using and reshaping the geographic strategies employed by earlier authors. She makes her women both maps and mapmakers, highlighting their ability write a world where the women are both subject and object, the mapped territory of virtue and the creator of that map. Unlike the powerful ‘world-writers’ of the first two chapters, Cavendish’s women are not royal; rather, they are potentially any and every woman. Cavendish creates in her characters a hybrid identity inspired not only by Queen Elizabeth, but also by the influential proliferation of the cartographic products of the Dutch Republic in which she and her husband spent their exile. The Dutch, partly by virtue of the prevalence of their geographic

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products the world over, established a presence throughout Europe and beyond without resorting to actual territorial conquest. These Dutch objects – maps, atlases, curiosity cabinets, and globes – through their very omnipresence became one of the means by which the Dutch asserted a kind of authority that stressed collection of knowledge above items, with those geographic items demonstrating knowledge and thus power. These traveling and traded objects ultimately bolstered Dutch subjectivity and thus sovereignty without much, if any, military accompaniment. Similarly, Cavendish’s characters establish their presence and authority by resorting to geographic rhetoric first and foremost. The women assume the roles of both surveyor and that which is surveyed: by mapping themselves and their surroundings (and, sometimes, themselves onto those surroundings), these women become active, traveling subject-objects. In her plays Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo, both first published in Playes (1662), the main characters are able to travel, to lead armies, and to choose husbands, paradoxically establishing the integrity of their bodies even while those bodies cross borders, enter other nations, and take up arms. Ultimately, Cavendish’s women rewrite the relationship between subject and object, so often used, as in Heywood’s plays, to emphasize a wife’s subordination to her husband. Cavendish reconfigures this relationship in order to present the woman and her body as both subject and object. Cavendish has her characters take full advantage of this multivalent position by placing themselves in varying relationships to both maps and bodies as objects, since, as Karen Newman writes, ‘Women’s relation to commodities is multiple, even extravagant: at once goods, sellers of goods, and consumers of goods’.3 By using the language of surveying, mapping, and design that was disseminated in the many new treatises and atlases during this period, Cavendish creates characters in contrast to Heywood’s Bess, the passively mapped geographic product; her women are both mapmaker and map, allowing these protagonists to chart not only their own bodies and identities, but their destinies as well.

‘The Brain of a Man is the Globe of the Earth’: Mapmaking and Self-fashioning in England and the Netherlands during the 1650s and 1660s Margaret Cavendish’s work was very much influenced by what she calls the ‘Pencils of Appetite’ and ‘the Actions of Life’ (Olio, 96). In Cavendish’s case, 3 Newman, Fashioning Femininity, p. 133.

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her particular appetite was for books, bolstered no doubt by her residence in the country that served as a dynamic center for all things geographic. Cavendish and her husband, William, arrived in Antwerp in 1648 to live as Royalist exiles near the end of the Civil Wars and for the duration of what they did not realize would only be the Interregnum. Examining the nature of the cartographic culture in which the Cavendishes would have found themselves will help to illustrate Margaret Cavendish’s use of this culture’s geographic perspective in her own work. As noted in the previous chapter, maps themselves were becoming increasingly available to a wider public, no longer solely used by and for monarchs and powerful nobility as expressions of royal and aristocratic territory and thus status. Instead, maps, atlases, and globes became objects unto themselves, used by members of the rising middle class to highlight their own status rather than to depict any actual piece of real estate. For example, when Shakespeare’s Lear produces a map of his kingdom on stage in Act One, scene one, in order to divide his kingdom among his daughters, the characters as well as the audience would have understood that map to stand in for the actual land he assigned to each daughter as well as his own power to effect such a division. In the later decades of the seventeenth century, however, the inexpensive and more widely available cartographic products were accessible to those whose wealth, and thus status, were tied not to land but to commerce. Thus, the maps they hung on their walls, the globes they placed in their studies, and the atlases they set upon their desks were not symbolic of any actual territory. Instead, these objects marked the cosmopolitan nature of the owner, as well as his or her ability to purchase luxury objects and curiosities. And no country was a more prolific producer of these objects of symbolic capital than the Netherlands in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Benjamin Schmidt summarizes the abundance of cartographic products available from Dutch cities in the latter half of the seventeenth century: A veritable flood of geographic goods – of literary works, such as travelogues, learned geographies, natural histories, and books of “wonders”; of cartographic resources, including decorated maps, multivolumed atlases, and luxurious globes; of visual artifacts, comprising tropical painting, inexpensive prints, and coveted curiosa, (the latter often sold with the cabinets that housed them) – streamed off the presses and out of the ateliers of the Netherlands, suppliers in the province of Holland manufacturing most assiduously. 4 4

Schmidt, ‘Inventing Exoticism’, p. 348.

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As well as being the primary suppliers of geographic products enumerated above, the Netherlands were also the main purveyors to people in Europe at large of the new geographic ideology that did not equate maps with real property. These products were not used by monarchs planning battle or pictorially displaying their control over a certain territory, but by people wishing to view parts of the world and to display to their guests their knowledge and curiosity in the form of geography. The colonial situation of the Dutch at this time period underscores the solely symbolic nature of this discourse. Schmidt details how Dutch dominance around the globe depended less on land than on commerce among those lands. He explains that ‘[r]ather than land-based, imperial ambitions, the Republic cultivated more profit-minded, commercial strategies […]’. The Dutch, Schmidt asserts, ‘plied a trade in the image of the world, which took the form of geography’.5 Dutch mapmakers, then, were decreasingly part of a republic that could claim any actual territorial hegemony. In addition to the loss of the New York and Brazil colonies in the 1650s and 1660s, the once powerful Dutch East India Company lost considerable market share in southeast Asia, finally declaring bankruptcy in 1664. Schmidt succinctly states: ‘The Republic, in other words, chose to market a world which it had a contracting stake in governing’.6 And market the world they did, above and beyond what Heywood may have seen in the first decades of the 1600s. In addition to the products mentioned above, Schmidt also describes the range of items and prices available: there were wall maps, mosaic floor maps, globes large and pocket-size, city maps, topical news maps, and topographical panoramas. Schmidt notes that ‘[a]lso from the Netherlands came a stupendous outpouring of cartographic texts, which placed the Republic in the enviable position of mapmaker to Europe’.7 He describes the large atlases from the workshops of Blaeu, Janssonius, and de Wit, as well as sea atlases from Colom, Donker, and van Keulen. These cartographers and printers also produced inexpensive minor atlases and plain sheet maps. Even the man appointed by Charles II to be his cosmographer, John Ogilby in England, would order prints from Amsterdam in the 1660s and claim authorship for himself.8 Cavendish and her husband were thus at the epicenter of a profusion of maps and other geographic products. Writing on Margaret Cavendish’s experience as a Royalist exile, Emma L. E. Rees claims that ‘her texts are inseparable from the very particular 5 6 7 8

Ibid., p. 356. Ibid., p. 349; emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 352. Ibid., p. 355.

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times in which they were written’.9 The influence of these products, both written and pictured, can be seen in the early writings of Cavendish. In addition to the comparisons detailed in this chapter’s opening, Cavendish would also use other geographic metaphors in The World’s Olio; in Allegory 16, she claims, ‘Man and the World do resemble much; The Heart is like the Torrid Zone, and the flame blazes there as the Sun which sends forth Raies through the Eyes’ (99-100). She continues this image in Allegory 24, when she relates human moods and bodily humours to various locations: Melancholy is the North Pole, Envy the South, Choler is the Torrid Zone, and Ambition is the Zodiack; Joy is the Ecliptick Line, where the Sun of Mirth runs; Justice is the Equinoctial; Prudence and Temperance are the Artick and Antartick Circles; Patience and Fortitude are the Tropicks. (101)10

More generally in her work, Cavendish would imagine her own countries and entire worlds, declaring in The Blazing World that ‘every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects […] and all this within the compass of the head or scull’.11 In her writings and in her very methodology, carefully delineating certain regions and characteristics, even of fictional places and people, Cavendish employs an approach that mirrors that of cartographers. She emulates the Dutch in particular, highlighting that she and her husband William, like the Republic, also possessed no real territory during their exile. Cavendish also applies cartographic terms to explain human temperament, charting the terms of human behavior and characteristics onto geographic locations. In the creation of her own fantastic worlds in later works like The Blazing World, Cavendish also incorporates ideas from medieval mappae mundi makers, who fashioned world pictures that served as spiritual allegory and encyclopedia, as well as writers like John Mandeville, who included fantastical details in the account of his trip to Jerusalem. Cavendish also often follows the more recent practices of Dutch publishers; finding she cannot conquer the real world, as the Dutch did, she embarks upon ‘worldwriting’ that would correspond to the Dutch preoccupation with charting 9 Rees, Margaret Cavendish, p. 25. Rees examines the effects of what she calls a ‘double exile’, since Cavendish was geographically exiled as well as relegated to the margins as a result of her sex. 10 Cavendish did not limit herself to earthly geography; she often ventures into the broader realm of cosmography, noting in Allegory 6 of The Worlds Olio that ‘The Thoughts are like Stars in the Firmament, where some are fix’d, others like wandring Planets; others again are only like Meteors’ (97). 11 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, p. 185.

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and then marketing an image of the world as substitute for actual conquest. Even contemporaries were aware of the inverse relationship between the decline of the Dutch global presence and increasing role in representing the world. The English writer John Evelyn, a friend of the Cavendish family, summarized the interest in cartography and other arts, noting that ‘the Dutch were such enthusiastic investors in art because the shortage of land in their country made its price unaffordable’.12 Following their return to England, Margaret Cavendish and her husband, already imbued with the distinct culture of Dutch mapmaking, would then have been immersed in a cartographic culture that was beginning to overtake that of the Dutch while still basing itself on earlier works of English cartography. In addition to the continuing reprints of Saxton’s atlas of England and Wales, John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain went through a number of editions between 1611 and 1676. In her home in the Dutch Republic and later back in England, Cavendish would have access to myriad versions of the world and universe to inspire her own forays into world-writing. Helen M. Wallis writes that customers of one English cartography shop could find globes depicted ‘according to the Copernican Hypothesis’ as well as those ‘according to the Ptolomaick Systeme’, indicating that English geographical tastes included classical as well as contemporary models, allowing English men and women varied models for conceptualizing their world.13 Wallis also notes that despite the use of Elizabethan and Jacobean geographies, England under Charles II was able to foster its own artistic and scientific output: The Restoration ushered in a period of intellectual and economic progress reminiscent of the Elizabethan age. The arts and sciences benefited from the establishment of stable government and from rapid expansion of economic activity. A prosperous landed gentry was now buying books, prints, and pictures.14 12 Worsley, Cavalier, p. 176. 13 Wallis, ‘Geographie is Better’, p. 4. The shop referred to is that of Joseph Moxon, an English printer who returned to England from the Netherlands with his father in 1646. From his shop, he translated and printed the Dutch W.J. Blaeu’s book on globes as A Tutor to Astronomie and Geographie, or an Easie and Speedy Way to understand the use of both Globes (1654). In 1659, Moxon published a new handbook with a similar title and subject, but designed for an English, not Dutch, readership; the book went through five editions between 1659 and 1698. Moxon’s work demonstrates how the English were venturing into mapmaking independent of the Dutch trade; another example is the publishing of an English book of Sea-Plats in 1657. See also esp. 9-10. 14 Wallis, p. 3.

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Wallis demonstrates that the trend, begun in the first half of the seventeenth century, of non-aristocrats purchasing and using maps for their own purposes, was a well-established part of English life by the Restoration. While she specifically speaks above of a landed gentry, there were other English people seeking geographic products to further knowledge. Samuel Pepys writes in his diary on 8 September 1663, that he went to Joseph Moxon’s shop to buy globes in order to teach his wife geography.15 For one shilling, Wallis notes, men like Pepys could buy a map of France; as a comparison, this same sum would buy dinner at the King’s Head tavern in London.16 Thus, when Cavendish came home, it was to a country that was building from its own and Dutch geographic foundations, with which its inhabitants were intimately familiar. And when she did come home to England, she did not retreat to and remain in the actual home. Cavendish’s writings, appropriating and reshaping the discourses and genres around her, demonstrate her eagerness to engage in public debate centered on contemporary issues. Mihoko Suzuki’s analysis of Cavendish’s texts across genres emphasizes the recognition of what she calls ‘the embeddedness of her writing in popular culture and her engagement in the political controversies of her day’.17 And Suzuki’s comparisons of the forms of Cavendish’s political expressions with those of women’s petitions to Parliament, the seventeenth-century ‘pamphlet wars’, and the satirical representations of ‘Parliaments of Women’ reveal that Cavendish’s work was very much influenced by the active women of the Civil Wars’ years. From this foundation of Dutch and English geographic texts and the public petitions and writings of earlier women, Cavendish creates her characters’ subjectivity by combining those elements with a kind of Royalist emulation of monarchical identity similar to that proposed by Catherine Gallagher. She writes of Cavendish’s use of Elizabeth in particular, arguing that of the two roles open to early modern women, subject and monarch, only the latter afforded any example of female autonomy. More specifically, Gallagher argues that ‘Toryism and feminism converge because the ideology of absolute monarchy provides, in particular historical situations, a transition to an ideology of the absolute self’.18 For Cavendish in particular, the Interregnum 15 Ibid., p. 6. 16 Ibid., p. 20. Samuel Pepys’ meticulously recorded book inventory reveals the mix of maps available to English buyers; Pepys’ library included recent works by Jospeh Moxon and John Ogilby (appointed Charles II’s cosmographer in 1671 and no longer plagiarizing Dutch maps), as well as those of Saxton and Speed (Wallis, p. 39). 17 Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, pp. 184. For analysis of Cavendish in particular, see pp. 182-202. 18 Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute’, p. 135.

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demonstrated that a man like Charles II could be a ruler in name only, with a deferred claim to a land that as yet held no real throne for him. During this time and the ensuing Restoration, for Cavendish, Gallagher asserts, ‘[t]he monarch becomes a figure for the self-enclosed, autonomous nature of any person’ (136). Within her works, in particular The Blazing World, Cavendish creates worlds populated with territories and subjects over which she can rule, just as the Dutch, through their knowledgeable maps, asserted their control over a world of their own writing. In her plays Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo, Cavendish creates characters who shape and view their bodies and their activities cartographically, and these women continually establish and demarcate the boundaries and topography of both their agency and identity. That is, the bodies of the female characters and the spaces they inhabit are maps, even as, paradoxically, these women are the mappers of those same bodies and spaces. Thus, Cavendish and her characters are able to reorient the subject-object relationship exemplified in Heywood’s plays: while the men mapped and displayed the women as geographic objects in his later plays, Cavendish’s work demonstrates how these women reclaim for themselves the perceived ability of Elizabeth to be both the charted boundary and the one who sets that border. Her control of two objects – her impenetrable island kingdom and her inviolate virgin body – provided her with powerful symbols of her subjectivity and authority, derived from a unique duality as both subject (queen) and object (land). Cavendish’s non-royal heroines – both virgins and loyal wives – become worlds unto themselves as well the ones who write upon those worlds and the larger ones they inhabit as powerful women.

Virgin Mapmakers and Virgin Territory in Loves Adventures Both parts of Loves Adventures take place in a world that, like England, still found virgin brides to be a highly prized commodity. As demonstrated in Heywood’s plays, this virginity could ensure not just legitimate inheritance of titles and estates but could also symbolize any husband’s household in general, as well as reflecting his reputation for probity. Cavendish’s play highlights this preoccupation with virginity in its opening scene, when the Lord Singularity explains to his father why he can never marry. The young man claims, ‘I would sooner yield up my life to death, than venture my honour to a womans management’ (24).19 His father assures him, ‘[Y]ou must trust to 19 Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver. All quotations from the plays are from this edition and will be in the text.

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chance, for marriage is a Lottery, if you get a prize, you may live quietly and happily’ (22). But his son adamantly refuses to trust any woman, declaring his disbelief that ‘any man that hath a Noble Soul, dares marry since all his honour lyes or lives in the light heels of his wife’ (23). Though the father’s argument reveals his son’s anxieties about chastity to be extreme, Lord Singularity’s apprehension demonstrates the reasoning behind this discourse: he explains to his father that ‘you may indanger the honour of your Line and Posterity with Cuckoldry and Bastardy’, revealing the economic and status-driven reasons for securing a wife’s chastity (22). Significantly, Lord Singularity’s explanation of the dangers of marriage places the putative husband in the subject-position, claiming that the incorrect choice of bride will cause ‘you’, in other words, the groom as future father, to endanger his own posterity. Although the wife’s actions are the ones that produce ‘Cuckoldry and Bastardy’, Lord Singularity’s language emphasizes the husband’s agency, even when in peril. The potentially wronged groom remains the subject of the sentence and his own downfall, since his choice of bride is viewed as the only one taking place. The bride, in contrast, appears first as a prize according to Singularity’s father and then as a pair of ‘light heels’ in his son’s estimation. Thus, although Singularity refers to ‘a woman’s management’, the two men’s conversation predominantly casts the wife as a dangerous object, rather than a person actively making decisions about her marriage. However, the identity of Cavendish’s female characters need not and does not end here. The editors of Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture ask, ‘What new configurations will emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?’20 Building on this question, I would ask what other objects can women employ in order to position themselves as subjects? This question is partially answered by John Gillies’ conception of maps as ‘process rather than product; in terms of a semiological (or signifying) activity rather than an inert artifact’.21 For Gillies, maps are akin to poems in that they must be interpreted. Moreover, he writes about the idea of geography as not just showing a ‘depicted world object’, but that the discipline can be seen as a ‘world-creating act of graphic depiction’.22 That is, even as viewers and readers of geographic texts learned about the world, they also learned how to describe that world and thus any kind of world or part of one that they wished to produce. Geographer Veronica della Dora similarly speaks of the ‘social and performative aspects’ of maps and atlases especially, remarking how 20 De Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, Introduction, p. 2. 21 Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, p. 54. 22 Ibid., p. 56.

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‘from mere documents, maps have been revisited as dynamic non-human actors that take life from their interactions with humans’.23 These performative aspects can include the creation of the map itself, which is ultimately part of an even larger and continual process that includes a mapmaker interpreting the world or a part of it and translating that interpretation into a material object whose meaning remains in process for each viewer who encounters it. For Cavendish, her female characters are always in that continual process of meaning-making – or world-writing – as they take a geographic approach to repeatedly map and project their own identities. Again, paradoxically, the women objectify themselves, their ideas, and their actions as maps in order to formulate their own subjectivity. Lady Wagtail and her entourage initially establish the geographic rhetoric of Loves Adventures, revealing its potential for female objectification as they survey the newly wealthy and silent Lady Bashful. The group debates her mood, with Sir Roger Exception concluding, ‘No she is angry, because we are strangers unknown unto her; and she takes it for a rudeness that we are come to visit her’ (29). Exception views himself and the group as visiting strangers who attempt to document her moods. The description assigns the talkative group’s erstwhile hostess the role of passive object, with the noun ‘strangers’ and the verb ‘to visit’ suggesting foreigners traveling to and exploring a new land. Lady Bashful’s characterization is therefore initially a conventional one that presents her as a submissive female, and she compounds her guests’ geographic discourse by calling them ‘a Legion’, thereby likening them to an invading army over which she has no control (38).24 Likewise, Lady Orphant, disguised as the young man Affectionata and wishing to praise Lord Singularity, imagines herself as a territorial object to the Lord Singularity as governor, ultimately placing herself in a conventionally subordinate position to her commander: 23 Della Dora, ‘Performative Atlases’, p. 241. 24 Cavendish at times in the play also acknowledges the more conventional role that the languages of sexuality and conquest play both in the context of the individual male’s desire and the nation’s imperial aspirations; the contrast of this tradition with the strategies of Affectionata and Bashful highlight the subversive nature of the ways that these women use sexual and geographic language. One early scene has two merchants discussing the military and amorous successes of Lady Orphant’s putative groom Lord Singularity and his army, establishing a connection between the nation’s economic and military interests and success in sexual conquest, akin to Ralegh’s penetration of Guiana. The merchants’ talk of Caesar, the example of Rome, and its best soldiers elide into talk of the soldiers as ‘not less courtly to the feminine sex, than these of this age’, again linking imperial conquest to the sexual (32). Lord Singularity later recalls this link between martial and sexual conquest when he offers to send the disguised Lady Orphant, whom he assumes is male, to the courtesans, ‘where you will learn to sport with Ladies, as well as fight with Turks’ (91).

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[Y]ou are the Governour of my soul, that commands the Fort of my passion, and the Castle of my imaginations, which are the heart, and the head […] you are the archetectour of my mind, the foundation of my thoughts, and the gates of my memorie, for your will is the form, your happiness the level, and your actions the treasurie. (55)

Although Lord Singularity is briefly compared to a plot of land in Affectionata’s naming of him as a foundation, her beloved is mainly equated to those males who occupy and control the land, namely governors and architects. With these examples, Cavendish partly establishes her characters’ identities upon the traditional discourse of the female as land awaiting occupation and fertilization. The descriptive terms they employ or others apply to them initially reflect the more familiar role of women in geographical and individual subject-object relationships: that of the object to be explored and described by the male gaze before being cultivated by men. However, these early examples of the ladies using a more traditional geographic language underscore the radical nature of their later appropriation of the traditionally male roles of surveyor and mapmaker. Cavendish soon disrupts the conventional geographic discourse throughout the play, subverting its usual ideological effects by having Ladies Orphant and Bashful assume the role of cartographers of their virgin territory. And in those roles, I argue that these women are seventeenth-century cartographers as defined by Richard Helgerson, a conception that made monarchs tangential to the process of map-making. These (at first) men appropriate the sole right to chart and represent that territory as mapmakers, relegating the sovereign to just another object; as Helgerson puts it, rulers like Elizabeth or even James become ‘a merely ornamental adjunct to that country’ left to decorate the margins of the maps with heraldic imagery.25 While initially a sovereign like Elizabeth would be the patron for as well as the subject of an atlas, now the cartographer becomes the more prominent figure. Helgerson posits that ‘[n]ot only does the emergence of the land parallel the emergence of the individual authorial self, the one enforces and perhaps depends upon the other’.26 In other words, he explains, ‘the self gives the dumb and inanimate land voice and life, in exchange for which the land grants the self an impersonal and historically transcendent authority’.27 According to Helgerson, cartographers had a major role in 25 Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks’, p. 332. 26 Ibid., p. 340. 27 Ibid., p. 341.

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creating the very discourse they were supposedly only representing, while in actuality conferring authority onto the representations from which they then drew their authorial – and authoritative – identity. 28 Thus, subject and object – in this case, mapmaker and map – delineate and promote each other. The mapmaker uses the recognized authority of geography as a means to establish and advance himself through his creation, while the continued use of the genre retains its presence and power in public estimation. As both creators and controllers of their geographically described bodily property, Bashful and Orphant gain authority from their ability to map, label, and disseminate that territory. Although the mapping that the women initially undertake in the above examples is traditional in nature, their very ability to express themselves in a discourse of their choosing indicates their agency. Moreover, Cavendish’s protagonists eventually reconfigure that conventional discourse to establish an active subjectivity derived from the cartographic language that they choose. Well before the above speech, Lady Orphant begins to place Lord Singularity in an objectified position. After she demands to see his portrait, Lady Orphant surveys and describes him in chorographic fashion, asserting that she alone can ‘perceive his noble Soul to appear in his lovely, and lively Countenance; do but observe it well’, she orders her friend, ‘and you will see as much as I’ (30-31). This appropriation of the dominant male role of explorer and judge so early in the play allows Orphant’s/Affectionata’s later assertions that Lord Singularity is an architect to be regarded with some skepticism, since here she has already established herself as a kind of cartographer. Lady Orphant further upends traditional gender roles when she embarks on an adventure, disguised as the young man Affectionata, to discover and claim the professed bachelor. Although her transgressive and duplicitous behavior would seem to be an ill-chosen strategy for a woman pursuing the already paranoid Lord, Lady Orphant employs her mapping discourse to make her journey and its objective more acceptable. When Foster Trusty speculates that her journey will impact her reputation negatively, Lady Orphant asks, ‘Are holy Pilgrimes Vagabonds, or is it immodest for the bodies of devout soules to travel to the sacred Tombe to offer penetentiall tears’ (33). Her assertion that she is a pilgrim, and thus devout, recalls the figures of religious travelers that often graced the margins of medieval mappae mundi. Just as those maps and their travelers portray more transcendent and spiritual journeys, so Lady Orphant in her description gives her adventure a more acceptable purpose. Her potential reference to a much older form of geography also reveals the 28 Ibid., p. 357.

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non-linear nature of geography. Just as the cartographer’s shop features both Copernican and Ptolemaic world systems, the meanings and importance of the mappa mundi have not become obsolete, and Orphant can call upon that tradition as a geographic means of reaffirming her chastity. Not only the traveling Orphant but Bashful is also determined both to protect as well as to proclaim her virginity as the most important commodity both women ostensibly have. As sole owners, the two women invest much rhetoric in establishing their virginity as a way to chart their bodies as ‘mapmakers’ of themselves. Lady Bashful’s friend Reformer informs her that, because of her many visitors, ‘opinion travels without a Passe-port’, but Bashful emphasizes her good name, claiming, ‘I deserve no other’ (41). Although such an emphasis on female chastity is also a patriarchal concern and potentially repressive, Ladies Orphant and Bashful highlight their objectified nature in order to then define themselves in the ways they wish using cartographic and chorographic discourse. They are able to chart, and, in a sense, to publish their own identities by remapping the very object – their bodies – that could potentially cause them to be regarded as property. As surveyors and thus controllers of that territory and its borders, the two characters can aff irm their integrity and thus authority as subjects as well as their impenetrability as objectified property. Cavendish describes the Ladies Orphant and Bashful as the principal cartographers of their geographically described bodies, placing them in a position similar to that which Helgerson argues belongs to earlier male mapmakers. By asserting their role as mapmakers in the emerging geographic discourse that separated the sovereign from the land, these authors relied on the established authority of the genre of the map while at the same time reshaping that discourse to fashion their own subjectivities and agency. Significantly, the women are able to establish their own boundaries, choosing whether to allow access, either literal or metaphorical. After she has seen the silent Sir Serious Dumb, Lady Bashful proclaims to Reformer, ‘Oh that his eyes had that piercing faculty, for then perchance he might have seen; I am not so simple as my behaviour made me appear’ (38). Though she places herself again in the more conventional role of the object to be gazed upon, it is she who insists on this desire to be surveyed and thus known by Serious Dumb. Joyce Devlin Mosher notes how ‘Cavendish and her dramatic heroines alternatively invite and reject the gaze of the other, of desire, and of the crowd’.29 The adjective ‘piercing’ 29 Devlin Mosher, ‘Female Spectacle as Liberation’, paragraph 12. Devlin Mosher comments specifically on Lady Victoria’s and the army’s public accolades in Bell in Campo, although the invitation to be gazed upon is arguably more explicit here. Similarly, Rebecca D’Monté argues

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may suggest sexual penetration, intensifying the potential transgression of her bold statement by expressing explicit sexual as well as marital desire. In similar fashion, Lady Orphant as the page Affectionata declares to Lord Singularity that his praise ‘struck my ears, broke open my heart, and let desire run forth, which restless grew until I travelled hither’ (48). Although the praise of the Lord penetrates her heart in a sexual fashion, it is Affectionata’s desire that projects itself into the outer world, compelling her to travel in search of Lord Singularity. She is both passively penetrated and invaded territory, but also the active, traveling explorer. Lady Bashful’s courtship seems to follow a less radical path than Affectionata’s – Bashful remains within the home while Sir Serious follows her from room to room – but she asserts her authority over borders and herself by threatening to lock her unconventionally silent suitor out of doors, which, as the head of her household, she can presumably accomplish. In her courtship, Bashful is the vocal partner who, although playing the traditional role of the scornful female, nonetheless does so by declaring control over the boundaries of her house and thus body through her right to block entrances. In a further role reversal, Dumb affirms his integrity by fulfilling the traditionally female roles of silence and obedience. Thus, Bashful, although pursued, establishes a measure of control over Dumb’s pursuit and lays the groundwork for her more extreme appropriation of the male role in courtship later in the play. The ability of Orphant and Bashful to geographically inscribe not just themselves but other characters increases their authority and power. For example, once in the employ of her beloved, Affectionata/Orphant discusses the nature of the individual and asserts her opinion on profound philosophical matters. She tells Lord Singularity: [A]s for the souls of all mankind, they are like Common-wealths, where the several vertues, and the good graces are the Citizens therein, and the natural subjects thereof; but vices and follies, as thievish Borderers, and Neighbour-enemies, which make inrodes, factions, mutinies, intrudes and usurps Authority, and if the follies be more than the good graces, and the vices too strong for the vertues, the Monarchy of a good life falls to ruine, also it is indangered by Civil-wars amongst the passions. (56) that ‘[w]hilst commenting on the dangers implicit in the power of “looking” – surveillance, control, suspicion – [Cavendish] also explores the ambiguous qualities of performance to enhance both her role as a woman writer and that of her female characters’. I would add that the heroines in Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo also use gazing’s associations with control when they assert their subjectivity through geographic rhetoric that places importance on the creator or spectator’s gaze. D’Monté, “‘Making a Spectacle”’, p. 110.

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Cavendish here has a woman speaking (though Lord Singularity is unaware of this fact) on topics normally considered outside the scope of female expertise – the nature of the soul, the ordering of governments. The passage demonstrates that women like Affectionata/Orphant could appropriate the gendered discourse of geography, assuming the role of the male writer and surveyor as they chart various ideas beyond their own bodies. These women who actively gaze at and chart both men and land could also use the authority of a surveyor and writer to alter the perception of any topics discussed, mapping out new ideas. Here, although Affectionata uses the term ‘mankind’, she then describes the individual as a ‘soul’, which could be considered genderless. The use of this word raises the possibility that the ‘Citizens’ and ‘Borderers’ will also be considered (by the audience or reader at least) as correspondingly neutral in gender when they refer to the topography of the soul. This language aids in the construction of an individual who is likened to a political territory but without resorting to the language of body parts and penetration. The soul and its citizens are not related to a supine virgin, nor is the potential invasion likened to male penetration. In fact, this consideration of the nature of the soul makes that entity self-contained; though she speaks of ‘intrudes’ of vices, Affectionata in her description does not refer to any external factor.30 She uses her surveying power to map out new territory for virtue within a person, allowing men and women access to spaces of nobler behavior and, through the very act of proposing this ‘map’, philosophical musings in general. The geographic agency that these two characters establish becomes especially apparent when the women conclude their own marriages. Lady Bashful enacts a dramatic negotiation when she disarms Sir Serious Dumb’s rival for her love, Sir Humphry Bold. Stepping on his sword, she declares it to be ‘my victorious spoils’ and tells Humphry, ‘Let the sword alone, for it is my prize; and by Heaven, if you touch it, I will run you thorough with this sword in my hand’ (72). This odd courtship has Lady Bashful assuming the 30 This description reveals how Cavendish could modify her metaphors over time; some seven years earlier in The World’s Olio, she related how a governor and his authority is modeled on that of a father: ‘For a governor in a Common-wealth, is like a private family; as for example, a man that first begins to keep a house, and makes laws, and sets rules’ (47). Cavendish could also alter her allegories within the same work; in the last part of the Olio, she writes that ‘The Mind is like a Commonwealth, and the Thoughts as Citizens therein; or the Thoughts are like Household-servants, who are busily imployed about the Minds Affairs, who is the Master’ (95). However, both of these political allegories still employ gendered language (father, Master), whereas Affectionata’s allegory appears to revise these gendered descriptions of the mind and territory into a more universal application.

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role of both negotiator and a female warrior who can figuratively castrate and potentially penetrate the men around her. Bashful also makes the encounter into an exchange she controls, handing Sir Serious the sword he has willingly surrendered to Bashful while promising her ‘chaste and honest life’ to him (73). In effect, it is Lady Bashful who conquers and claims, and then she chooses her husband and negotiates her marriage in military terms by giving Sir Serious access to her spoils – the phallic sword and her virgin body. As Bashful asserts, protects, and opens her own borders to the suitor of her choice, Affectionata/Orphant controls her betrothal to Singularity in the play’s final scenes by also employing geographic language, primarily the discourse of travel and discovery. In soliloquy, she first maintains that she would be happy to continue ‘acting a masculine part upon the Worlds great Stage’, again relating her identity to the geography she traverses, both within the world of the play and upon the imaginative space of the stage in performance (101). However, Lord Singularity’s insistence that his page marry forces Affectionata to relinquish her male disguise. Yet, despite being in a potentially vulnerable position, Affectionata still maintains the upper hand in negotiating her fate. She tells the assembled audience, ‘But since I am discovered, I will otherwise conceal my self, and live as an Anchoret from the view of the World’ (103). She describes herself as the female body or territory that has been revealed or ‘discovered’ by men, thus softening the impact of her transgression with conventionally passive language but claiming control in her assertion that she will withdraw from public view. Specifically, she plans to locate her identity within a spiritual calling that nonetheless remains rooted to an earthly place; Affectionata would take the role of an ‘Anchoret’, a holy woman tied to a particular church or other location, often one that she would separate from the rest of the world with self-imposed physical as well as spiritual boundaries. Affectionata demonstrates through this choice that, if she cannot traverse the world stage, she would still be in control of her borders. Ultimately, however, Lord Singularity begs her for any kind of companionship, and she then proceeds to negotiate her future with the now utterly pliable Lord. The play’s f inal song underscores the subjectivity and hence agency found in the decisive plans that Affectionata/Orphant had devised for herself as an anchoret, illustrating how even in a marriage she will continue to exert a similar authority based on her identity as mapper of her body and thus her fate. The musicians perform a song that applies as much to Affectionata as to a personified Love, with changes in gender and promises of marital bliss:

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O Love, some says thou art a Boy! But now turn’d Girl, thy Masters joy. Now cease all thy fierce alarms, In circles of your loving arms. Who can express the joys to night, ‘Twil charm your senses with delight. Nay, all those pleasures you’l controul, With joyning your each soul to soul. Thus in Loves raptures live, till you Melting, dissolve into a dew; And then your aery journey take, So both one constellation make. (106)31

Cavendish here describes how Love/Affectionata’s arms will encompass the body of her new husband, an image that makes Affectionata the individual who shapes and controls the borders of this match. Although the song asks Love/Affectionata to cease fierce alarms and bring to an end her martial exploits and the authority they confer, in the next few lines, the lyrics assert that it will be Love/Affectionata who controls the activities that will take place within the marriage bed. Moreover, although the song describes how the two newlyweds will melt into one person, reminiscent of the Biblical idea of marriages as one flesh, the song’s final image – that of Lord Singularity and Affectionata becoming one constellation – indicates that Affectionata, already established as a cartographer and a kind of map throughout the play, will also be the creator and major component of a more transcendent cosmological chart. Although the pronoun ‘you’ could refer to both husband and wife, the ambiguity of number in the word at least raises the possibility of the interpretation above. Loves Adventures concludes with the ostensibly happy marriages of both female protagonists. However, Lady Bashful’s and Lady Orphant’s authority could still potentially be ended by the ideology of the femme covert hinted at in the song’s final lines, which theoretically subsumes the wife’s identity into that of their husbands’. But another set of two plays written by Cavendish, the two parts of Bell in Campo, provides an example of how even married women and widows could still predicate authority on the assertion of the 31 Although the dialog indicates that the first Song of this final act was written by ‘my Lord Marquiss of New-Castle’, the second song quoted above is clearly a separate piece; the musicians call it an ‘Eppilanian’ [epithalamion] without any reference to William, whom they only identify as the author of the first song (105-106).

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right to map and control their bodies – and thus their identities – by not only inscribing those bodies with cartographic rhetoric of their own making, but also impressing their identities upon the land itself. With this strategy, the female protagonists of Bell in Campo further complicate the connections between the characters’ bodies and maps in order to assert their subjectivity and agency through these multiple positionings of subject and object.

The ‘Heroickesses’ of Bell in Campo Early in Bell in Campo, Cavendish has one of the men relate turmoil at home to the chaos of the battlefield in order to tell what he believes to be a clever joke to his fellows. The ‘3rd Gentleman’ proclaims that he would rather go to war since an Army is a quiet solitary place, and yields a man a peaceable life compared to that at home: for what with the faction and mutiny among his Servants, and the noise the women make, for their tongues like as an Alarum beat up qua[r]ters in every Corner of the House, that a man can take no rest; besides every day he hath a set Battel with his wife, and from the Army of her angry thoughts, she sends forth such vollies of words with her Gunpowder anger, and the fire of her fury, as breaks all the ranks and files of content, and puts happiness to an utter rout. (112-113)

The Gentleman’s description of a home life constantly in uproar ostensibly places the woman in the position of soldiers or a powerful army, but he does so only to ridicule her as a figure whose only weapons are words and anger that will upset her husband’s happiness and no more. However, Cavendish will literalize this metaphor as she depicts the military successes of Lady Victoria and her ‘noble Heroickesses’. She also highlights the more serious effects of war upon women and the household through the story of Madam Jantil, but even here Cavendish demonstrates how a widow could become an authoritative mapmaker. In making the Gentleman’s joking relation of women to war an eventual reality within the play, Cavendish reveals the ways in which women might, even outside the world of the play, use geographic language in a theater of war in order to chart their identities and map their agency within marriage and widowhood. Even before she ventures onto a literal battlefield, Cavendish’s protagonist Lady Victoria makes important connections between conventionally masculine military pursuits and how women have always been involved in

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and affected by war. First, Lady Victoria displays her superior rhetoric and ability to negotiate early modern ideals of womanhood when she recasts the figure of Penelope. Victoria transforms the usually stationary figure of Odysseus’ wife by rhetorically establishing very different boundaries within the traditional story: [T]he lovingest and best wife in all story that is recorded to be, the most perfectest and constantest wife in her Husbands absence was Penelope, Ulysses wife, yet she did not Barricado her Ears from Loves soft Alarums; but parled and received Amorous Glances shot from loving eyes of either party; and though the Siege of her chastity held out, yet her Husbands wealth and Estate was impoverished, and great Riots committed both in his Family and Kingdome, and her Suters had absolute power therof; thus though she kept the Fort of her Chastity, she lost the Kingdom, which was her Husbands Estate and Government, which was a dishonour both to her and her Husband. (110)32

While the character of Penelope is quite often deployed as an exemplar of wifely devotion, Lady Victoria rewrites her story into an eroticized siege that ultimately results in the successful penetration, if not of Penelope herself, then of the husband’s household, potentially figured as an index to the wife’s virtue. Moreover, Victoria’s retelling of story in The Odyssey focuses on the extended and difficult trials Penelope faced while her husband was making his way home from war. The 3rd Gentleman’s joke about warring with women at home now becomes a much more serious consideration as to how even the inner rooms of a household could be invaded in some fashion by martial concerns. In geographic terms, by reimagining Penelope’s story, Lady Victoria redraws the bounds of chastity to include not only Penelope’s body, but also the physical location that she occupies. Specifically, Lady Victoria retells the classical tale in order to convince her husband to let her travel with him, an objective that this story of Penelope’s seeming failure helps to accomplish.33 More generally, this appropriation of classical figures by a woman in order to evince a new identity is based upon a revision of a story 32 Suzuki also examines the speech on Penelope in her chapter “‘Royalist” Women and the Revolution’ in Subordinate Subjects, arguing that Cavendish uses Penelope’s example to highlight how women’s behavior straddles traditional notions of private and public (and therefore political) space (190). 33 Cavendish seems to have conceived of this view of Penelope early in her writing career. In The World’s Olio, she states, ‘It is true, she was Chast, but she gave her self leave to be Courted, which is a degree to Unchastity, and a means whereby her Husbands Estate was wasted’ (133).

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meant to urge women to spousal obedience. However, despite criticizing Odysseus’ wife, Victoria tells the story by placing Penelope in the role of a ruler or general undertaking or withstanding a siege. This conception demonstrates a specific example of the joining of a monarchical subjectivity with that of a mapped object, in this case, the home and the wife’s body. And since Victoria is the one speaking the story and mapping boundaries onto a cipher of her own wifely obedience, she is both subject and object. The idea that the home is a highly symbolic space that can be remapped as part of a strategy for obtaining individual wishes is one taken up by other women within in the play. When Madam Russell’s husband tries to compel her to join him on the battlefield, she refuses to follow Lady Victoria’s path even as she takes up the latter’s rhetorical practices. Madam Russell re-imagines her home as the better battlefield, claiming: ‘I will be a Generalissimo my self at home, and distribute my Colours to be carried in the Hats of those that will fight in my quarrel, to keep or gain the Victory of my favour and love’ (115). Similar to the soldier who jests that his home is the site of a more taxing kind of war, Russell conceives of her home as a public tournament field where men will fight for her favor. Although Russell is threatening her husband with adultery, her speech nonetheless reveals how Cavendish’s characters use martially inflected descriptions of space in order to obtain very different ends. Cavendish next turns from Madam Russell’s colorful flouting of the typical expectations of a wife to a more sustained depiction of the ways in which women can assert their agency within more compatible marriages. The play’s two main characters, Lady Victoria and Lady Jantil, proclaim their bodily integrity through actual and rhetorical reconfigurations of the space around them, and in the process, they demonstrate a new means of articulating women’s identity through their use of a broader sense of geography, detached from its original link to actual real estate and yet taking advantage of that detachment to connect to new ideas of sovereignty based on a monarchical or ruling persona. Paradoxically, these women also partially derive this new subjectivity from the act of objectifying their own bodies and desires in order to map them, becoming, as noted earlier, both active subject (surveyor/mapmaker) and passive object (the map itself). Cavendish’s Lady Jantil at first seems to fulfill the stereotypical role of devoted wife, even after the death of her husband, Seigneur Valeroso. She remains committed to his memory, establishing her life and home around a schedule of grieving at her husband’s tomb. But Jantil’s actions are not just slavish devotion to a dead husband; through her, Cavendish reveals a means of identity for the widow that is both traditional and subversive. Jantil exhibits particularly geographic strategies for asserting her independence

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from conventional gender expectations. When Madam Jantil is given the account of Seignor Valeroso’s death on the battlefield, she refers to him as ‘my Husband that is the subject and ground of that honourable relation’ (129). And as Jantil considers Valeroso to be the foundation of the messenger’s story, so she will build herself a new life upon that same ‘ground’, constructing a building that includes space for her to live as well as a tomb complete with a marble image of her husband (131). By enclosing herself within this space that she has constructed, Madam Jantil also very clearly delineates her continued chastity and fidelity to her dead husband. Though she seems to separate herself from the world, Jantil is still very much a part of society, as other characters like her maids and erstwhile suitors comment on her actions (132). The tomb and house she creates remain visible signs upon the land of her devotion to her husband, but more importantly, they signify her ability to use wealth and property as she sees fit, erecting a building ostensibly devoted to her husband’s noble memory, but also serving as an indication of her independent wealth and power.34 Yet Jantil is also concerned with preserving her husband’s legacy, since she specifically orders the tomb to be made of marble since ‘metals being usefull therein are often taken away by necessity’ (133). Her choice of materials demonstrates that Jantil is well aware of the effects of war, indicating a worldly knowledge that exceeds that of her country’s leaders, who will later erect a presumably more vulnerable bronze statue of Lady Victoria. In addition to securing her husband’s memory for posterity, Jantil’s actions also point to her continued participation in the world around her. She commissions a life of her husband to be written, enacting the role of patron to a writer and delineating the subject of her choosing. Finally, she distributes her property, claiming that she will be ‘like an Executrix to my self executing my own will’ (134). Jantil occupies two roles here: that of testator and executrix, with the second enabling her to establish a presence even after death (either her own or her husband’s), since an executor assumes charge of the will’s directives after its writer’s death. Her will, then, also takes on a double meaning, referring to both the document and the ability to carry out the desires enumerated by Jantil. In opposition to the prevailing assumption that property should theoretically descend to the 34 See also Julie Sanders’ argument which views the closet as a public space. She claims that the ostensibly ‘private’ and supposedly solely domestic space of the closet is in many of Cavendish’s writings important to her ‘public self-construction’. Although Sanders primarily examines The Convent of Pleasure, the purportedly private space of Valeroso’s tomb is also used by Jantil as a means of public self-assertion. Sanders, “‘The Closet Opened”’, p. 131.

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closest male relative, Jantil first provides for her husband’s officers, those who will maintain and pray at her elaborate tomb, and her loyal female servant, only mentioning in the end that ‘the rest of my Estate’ goes to the ‘next of [my husband’s] name’ (164). Although she may speak of leaving the world to devote herself to Valeroso’s memory, Jantil and her actions – in this case, her reshaping of early modern inheritance practices – reveal a woman who uses her status as a widow in order to claim her own property and to dictate its use and character to her own liking, which includes buildings and public markers on the land.35 With these buildings, Cavendish has Jantil express her widowed identity with a reshaping of the land, indicating that Cavendish was interested in depicting a very public and geographic female independence. Jantil gives highly detailed instructions as to how the tomb and its decorations are to be laid out, even describing the poses of the marble figures she means to include (132). Moreover, Jantil designs her new building to suit her own specific needs; since she plans to live alone there in remembrance of her husband, she directs her Steward on how to organize some ten or twenty Acres, which I would have incompassed about with a Wall of Brick of reasonable height, on the inside of the Wall at one end, I would have built a little house divided into three Rooms, as a Gallery, a Bed-chamber, and a Closet, on the outside of the Wall a House for some necessary Servants […] from this house which shall be my living Tomb, to the Tomb of my dead Husband, I would have a Cloyster built, through which I may walk freely to my Husbands Tomb, from the injuries of the weather, and this Cloyster I would have all the sides thereof hung with my Husbands Pictures. (132-133) 35 Jantil also takes into account the funds needed to preserve her most loyal maid, Nell Careless, as an independent woman (134). The maid’s name seems to stem not from any neglect of duty, but rather that she does not care for the position of a conventional wife. Indeed, Nell is adamantly subversive: she tells the bewildered Doll Pacify, maid to Madam Passionate, that she would not marry even if she or the prospective groom were young, fair, or rich, since time, especially that ill-spent, removes those qualities. She continues to scorn the qualities sought after by suitors, declaring, ‘Faith there is not one in an Age that takes a wife meerly for virtue, nor valews a wife any thing the more for being so; for poor Virtue sits mourning unregarded and despised’ (138). The play concludes with Nell gratefully accepting her inheritance from Madam Jantil. In this scene, Cavendish has anticipated what Virginia Woolf deems necessary for a woman’s independence in A Room of One’s Own: the funds to secure shelter and sustenance. Woolf apparently did not take this scene into account when she wrote negatively of Cavendish. However, these plays also indicate any space from battlefield to tomb can be rhetorically reconstructed to women’s advantage.

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Jantil’s extensive description of her new home, of which the above excerpt is only a brief part, reveals that she intends to have her desires dictate the architecture for her property. The specific practical purposes Jantil assigns to the various parts of her building are reminiscent of Gresham’s minute listing of the various parts of his Exchange. However, the Royal Exchange, although built partly to signify Gresham’s power, more importantly serves as a space for England as a whole to pursue and evince its role as a commercial force. Jantil’s use of her land, however, functions most prominently as a mark of her own desires and her ability to fulfill them. As its sole designer and original occupant, the symbolic significance of the building devolves only to her chosen identity as a chaste but still publicly active widow, an idea reinforced by her description of the tomb as a ‘living’ one. Jantil ultimately grounds her authority on what could be a vulnerable and dubious position for a woman. Instead of the sexually suspect ‘merry widow’ who might foolishly pursue younger men or the grieving widow who thinks only of her dead husband, Jantil instead uses her widowhood as a means for establishing her authority over her own body and its attendant inheritance. Since the reason for her building, her refusal to be courted, and her continued independence in all other facets of life together point to the socially acceptable reverence for her dead husband, Jantil avoids any opprobrium that might be attached to a single woman. Pamela S. Hammons in her examination of Cavendish’s poems argues that ‘how a woman represents herself in relation to property is a flexible fiction that she can mobilize to fashion a socially acceptable self-image as a proper woman’.36 Through discourses coded as socially appropriate in early modern England, a woman could become an authoritative owner of property. With her distinct method of grieving, Jantil does so while also recalling the idea of ‘world-writing’ – that is, reshaping the physical landscape and the (often female) bodies associated with it as a means of asserting authority and identity. Once she has mapped out, in a very physical sense, her life and how she moves through space in terms of her desire to express grief, Jantil underscores that assertive identity by appearing as an author in a more conventional sense, as she assumes the role of poet and eulogist of her deceased husband.37 Just as Marlowe’s Dido demonstrated her authority by blazoning her beloved, 36 Hammons, ‘The Gendered Imagination of Property’, p. 418. 37 Shannon Miller concurs with the idea of Jantil as a self-defined poet; her chapter examines the ways that Cavendish’s poetry within Bell in Campo gestures to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, ultimately making Jantil stand in for Cavendish as an author. See Miller, “‘Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe”’, esp. 19-21.

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Jantil’s identity as chief (and sole) mourner of Valeroso allows her to assume the role of author as she now objectifies her husband in poetic speeches ostensibly dedicated to his memory: I saw his Face pale as a Lilly white, His wounds fresh bleeding blood like rubies bright; His eyes were looking steadfastly on me, Smiling as joying in my Company; He mov’d his lips as willing was to speak; He shak’d his hand as if he bid farewell, That brought the message which his tongue would tell; He’s dead, he’s dead, a sunder break my heart, Let’s meet in Death, though Wars our lives did part. (127)

In a reversal of Petrarchan conventions not unlike Dido’s poetic dismemberment of Aeneas, Jantil here represents her husband as a very powerless and conventionally female body. Valeroso’s body is made even more feminine by the fact that Jantil describes his body as open and bleeding, characteristics at this time more likely to be associated with the porous female form disseminated in notions of the grotesque body.38 In addition, Valeroso is also likened to the silent Petrarchan figure of the female beloved. Though ‘He mov’d his lips as willing was to speak’, Cavendish gives Valeroso no voice after death; the audience is given only Jantil’s poetic description of her husband in parts (face, lips, hand, tongue) that his widow now has the authority to depict and interpret. In a sense, she surveys his body, deriving authority from her subject even as she creates that subject herself. Such a strategy echoes the one described by Helgerson above, where mapmakers derive authority from a genre (geography) that they in fact are helping to create and transform. Moreover, Cavendish provides a more detailed and vivid description of Madam Jantil’s still active identity than of her heroic husband. In the last speech that Margaret Cavendish writes for Jantil, the widow describes herself, yet she does so as an active builder as well as creator of verses: Weep, cold Earth, through your pores weep, Or in your bowels my salt tears fast keep; Inurn my sighs which from my grief is sent, 38 Cavendish again follows a literary precedent; her description of Valeroso’s body is similar to the bleeding and ultimately feminine depiction of the crucif ied Christ found in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).

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With my hard groans build up a Monument; My tongue like as a pen shall write his name; My words as letters to divulge his fame; My life like to an Arch over his Ashes bend, And my desires to his grave descend. (134)

Jantil imagines that her sighs and groans will furnish a monument for her dead husband even as her tongue and its words become written expressions of her devotion. In these lines, Jantil’s own body and its output will constitute two lasting memorials for her husband, one in stone and the other in print. Although these memorials are ostensibly for Valeroso’s memory alone, the poem very clearly establishes Jantil as the agent in these traditionally male creative endeavors. Her repeated use of the word ‘my’ (eight times) highlights the very proprietary role that Jantil assumes in her writing as well as her literal and figurative acts of construction. She has built, surveyed, and written a world where she is the mapmaker of herself, her husband, and her will, all of which she re-connects to actual territory by inscribing not just the page but the land itself with her identity. Cavendish never explicitly connects the plot featuring Madam Jantil with the arguably main story line featuring Lady Victoria; nevertheless, she does relate the two women through a very similar use of rhetoric evocative of bodily integrity and martially inflected geography. Although Jantil decides not to join Lady Victoria and her heroickesses, the widow faces her own battle in the form of a potential onslaught of suitors, as well as the necessity to cope with her newly single status. As one Lord observes, she ‘bears out the Siege of Sorrow most Couragiously, and on my Conscience I believe will beat grief from the fort of her heart, and become victorious over her misfortunes’ (141). By figuring Jantil’s widowhood and subsequent encloistering as a battle, the Lord highlights the difficult position in which Jantil and any other widows find themselves as well as pointing out the public nature of their status in displays of grief. And his language simultaneously connects Jantil’s figurative war with Victoria’s more literal one. The Lord’s speech links the supposedly masculine world of public war with the ostensibly private and domestic sphere of women, revealing a fluidity of space and ideology. The two women are connected not just by the plot but by their repeated references to their own and, in the case of Victoria, other women’s impregnability, both literally and figuratively. In addition, the episodic and seemingly unassociated scenes featuring the two women, which may appear to detract from the unity of the play, instead link these women as rhetorically mapping and maintaining their bodies’ borders as a means to establishing a socially

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sanctioned agency whereupon they leave their own marks upon the land. Although Lady Victoria and Madam Jantil use their role as surveyors and mapmakers to achieve agency in very different circumstances, the results are similar in their transformative and empowering nature: while Madam Jantil turns the potentially stifling role of loyal widow into a foundation for establishing herself as a creative agent through architecture and poetry, Lady Victoria calls upon those same strategies in order to make her and the heroickesses’ military actions – in particular that of crossing and penetrating borders – socially appropriate and, in doing so, she provides another example of women’s potential routes to identity fashioning. The actions in the contrasting and seemingly unconnected plots of Jantil and Victoria nonetheless reveal a unified strategy of female identity formation purposefully employed by Cavendish. Alexandra G. Bennett argues that Cavendish’s plays demonstrate the ways in which the potentially fragmentary nature of drama itself allowed the duchess to intertwine the legendary fantasy of her imagination with contemporary reality, providing a series of snapshots of seventeenth-century life and the possibilities of agency therein.39

In some of those snapshots, we can again see the influence of the Cavendish’s time spent in the Low Countries. The collage of Cavendish’s seemingly disparate scenes in each play takes its form from the style of atlases and other cartographic products produced by the Dutch in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Benjamin Schmidt describes the deliberate ‘mix-andmatch quality’ in the texts that served ‘not so much to distinguish the cultures and landscapes of the world as to conflate them. Distinctions, like borders, were studiously erased’. The world as depicted by the Dutch cartographers was ‘unusually fluid and supple, with no obvious center and with minimal orientation’; treatises often ran into the thousands of pages and exemplified what Schmidt calls the ‘geographic bleeding from text to text, region to region, race to race’.40 Schmidt offers as an example of this geography the work of Olfert Dapper, publishing between 1663 to 1718, and focuses in particular on his two-volume Dapperus exoticus curiosus. The text features many distant places which all seem to be able to claim possession of the biggest or richest wonders, as well as both a China and an America populated by ‘Indians’. 41 39 Bennett, ‘Fantastic Realism’, p. 180. 40 Schmidt, ‘Inventing Exoticism’, pp. 357-358. 41 Ibid., p. 368, fn 23.

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While the information Dapper supplies is incorrect, his text promotes a world in which all regions are full of exotic wonders at which to marvel. Cavendish’s plays may seem similarly fantastical, but her construction of the play is no haphazard collection of scenes and lessons. Rather, her method resembles that of Dutch cartographers in order to expand upon bodily integrity and female agency throughout seemingly distinct and separate scenarios that could thus be transferred into everyday life. In Cavendish’s plays, this conflation or blurring of place and time, as in setting the plays in multiple locations within fictional places like the ‘Kingdom of Faction’, means that the lessons regarding women as figurative mappers of their own identity and agency could ‘bleed’ not just from text to text or region to region, as Schmidt asserts of the effects of Dutch conflation. The people and places in Cavendish’s plays grapple with certain overarching issues in the world, like those in politics, marriage, and women’s place in them, in a way that could reveal to readers in general how the ideas and strategies might apply to them. This type of mapping, then, can send broadly applicable messages to the world. A striking example of a text that also exhibits multiple ‘real world’ meanings from the ‘mix-and-match’ geography of the Low Countries is found in a painting by Johannes Vermeer, entitled Officer and Laughing Girl, produced in about 1657 (Fig. 19). Upon the wall of the room in which the two figures sit is a copy of a very specific map: Willem Blaeu’s 1621 map of Holland and West Friesland, made by Floris van Berkenrode and his sons. The map was initially commissioned by the government to help take care of flooding but here seems to function as an ornamental and perhaps informative decoration in the home. In addition to practical information, the map also contained historical information printed in its margins, as well as allegorical figures meant to represent Dutch economic and cultural achievements. 42 Richard Helgerson notes that such maps also provided for the Dutch nation ‘a vivid sense of itself’, especially during the struggle for independence from the Habsburg empire. 43 And now that scientific, historical, and geographic text features in a painting of a domestic scene that could then be hung in almost any space and context. Considering just the map within the painting, the very structure and content of Cavendish’s plays themselves imitate the geographic sensibility that spawned Dapper, Blaeu, and Vermeer, one that was replete with bold claims and encyclopedic information that might seem at odds, and one whose uses covered such disparate elements as defense, decoration, and 42 Barber, ‘Profitable and Useful’, pp. 160-161. 43 Helgerson, ‘The folly of maps and modernity’, p. 254.

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Fig. 19:  Johannes Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, c. 1657. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York.

nationalism. It was also a discourse that blurred the lines between public and private, outside territory and the space of the home. The entirety of Vermeer’s painting captures that blend well: matters of state (the map) and war (the officer) are present within the home. But the laughing girl is just as if not more important than these ostensibly worldly matters: she is at the very least the focus of the scene and its most dynamic figure, facing the viewer and with light from the significantly open window pouring onto her laughing face. As the central and most visible figure, she can also be taken as the element that connects and controls the various elements of the picture, as she may have hung the map and brought the officer into the room.

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As the central figure of Bell in Campo, Lady Victoria’s rhetoric supplies another example of the ways in which female subjects could use this mapping of space, both body and world, in order to establish and make acceptable their agency, even in its most strident formulations. Specifically, the generaless draws on the trope of the objectified female form which might represent the land. However, rather than describing this body as one awaiting penetration and conquest, Victoria takes care to delineate and emphasize the integrity of that body, which is here not just herself but is composed of the entire female army. When the women agree to follow Lady Victoria, she tells her soldiers, ‘I am glad to hear you speak all as with one voice and Tongue, which shows your minds are joined together, as in one piece, without seam or rent’ (118). Lady Victoria describes the army as a body, singular in purpose as well as number, whose integrity she will later insist upon in the guidelines that she devises for her army. But in asserting they are all one piece, without seam or rent, she also configures them as a kind of tapestry, another object often inscribed with geographic scenes. This unity continues when she states that, for decisions, the ‘whole Army shall give their votes’ (125). The army is then regarded by Lady Victoria as one body when she speaks of ‘put[ting] ourselves into a Warlike body’ and ‘the face of this Female Army’ (126, 128). Moreover, the women and Victoria conclude that even the Council’s decisions will ultimately be decided by the Generaless because ‘wheresoever a division is there can be no final conclusion’ (125). Lady Victoria’s rhetoric, as well as her expectations for her army, represent the women as a unified whole by appropriating language associated with the regulation of a chaste female body; the soldiers constitute a physical body or even work of art, gendered female by the sex of its inhabitants as well as Lady Victoria’s use of feminine forms like ‘generaless’ and ‘heroickesses’. The emphasis on controlling each of their own and thus the entire army’s body and its borders reclaims the traditionally masculine policing of female chastity and places its symbolic import into the hands of the women themselves. After establishing the women as a whole and impermeable body, Lady Victoria outlines requirements that specify the integrity of each individual woman in physical terms. Armor must be worn at all times, states Lady Victoria; the women ‘shall Sleep, Eat, and Rest, and march with them on their Bodies’ (121). The wearing of armor not only provides physical protection, but also contributes to the consolidation of these female soldiers and their goal: the women publicly display their uniform impermeability to the opposing forces. This emphasis on integrity also encompasses their daily rations, for Lady Victoria will also regulate their food, since

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strong Drinks, and nourishing Meats send many vapours to the Brain, which Vapours are like several Keys, which lock up the Senses so fast, as neither loud noises, bright lights, nor strong sents can enter either at the Eyes, Ears, or Nostrils, insomuch as many times their Enemies send Death to break them asunder. (122)

Again, the importance of keeping the women’s physical selves as closed off from corrupting outside influence is underscored, but this time the activity is specif ically related to their success on the battlef ield. The noises, lights, and smells of their (male) enemies during battle will be barred from penetrating the women’s senses and thus stave off death and defeat. The image of the enemies’ sights and smells entering the women’s bodies through various orifices (eyes, ears, nostrils) intimates a sexual conquest that could bewilder the senses. In addition, by using the nourishing vapors as ‘keys’ to secure those senses, the women of Cavendish’s play are able to lock away their interior selves within their bodies as a kind of enclosed space. Instead of an object that is continually under threat of penetration, these heroickesses will take an active role in the security of their own objectif ied bodies, again blurring the lines between subject and object. Once the integrity of the female army is conveyed through Lady Victoria’s speeches, the women can dramatically consolidate their subjectivity from a position that relies upon their own objectification of their chastity. The women of the army occupy a field and, while confirming the borders of their bodies, also impose their own control and order upon the land that they occupy. In the case of this first field of meeting, the female army inscribes the open space with martial constructions that heighten the sense of the female army’s agency and impermeability. Lady Victoria refutes the idea that they are just for breeding and increasing the commonwealth; rather, they will ‘make these Fields as Schools of Martial Arts and Sciences’ (120). Not only do the women reject their conventional roles as mothers, but they will become teachers in the traditionally masculine arts of war, making the open fields into bounded space with a specific function. Such a function recalls the ‘ceremonies of possession’ involving proper cultivation of the land, used in Ireland and detailed in Chapter Two. But instead of colonists using the territory for farming to claim ownership, the territory in Cavendish’s play is being appropriated and thus possessed by the women’s educational use for ‘schools’ of war. The heroickesses continue to physically reconfigure the landscape to aid in their martial endeavor. Lady Victoria declares that the army will sleep upon the ground, since ‘the open Fields, and casting

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up trenches makes Souldiers more hardy, laborious and carefull, as being more watchfull’ (123). Although she calls the field ‘open’, Lady Victoria also demarcates the land by having the women cast up trenches. The generaless believes that such activities will make the women ‘more watchfull’, indicating that she and her army are still concerned with demarcating the spaces they occupy as well as themselves, since the very bodies of these women become more bounded as well. Their physical forms, dressed in protective armor at all times, are thus again linked to the boundaries that the female army imposes upon the land. Moreover, the continued references to their plans as a ‘design’ that they keep secret (126, 128) echoes Cavendish’s use of the word, quoted earlier, in The World’s Olio where ‘The World is the Ground, whereon the Mind draws and designs’ (96). Lady Victoria and the women impose their designs, both literal and figurative, upon the land and themselves. Taken together, these examples connect designs, and the act of designing, with the world at large, indicating that the women’s actions impart a visual mark of ownership and control on public space and their bodies within that space. Considering early modern English ideology about women in the public eye – the negative views of which affected Cavendish’s endeavors and herself – the heroickesses are appropriately concerned with their own public adventures’ appearance. We saw in Chapter Three how a kind of anxiety over chastity accompanied women who might travel abroad; the men of Heywood’s plays, especially in The Fair Maid, solved both this problem and the question of establishing the moral superiority of Englishmen abroad by having men map that spiritual pre-eminence onto carefully displayed and securely hidden female bodies. But in Cavendish’s play, it is the heroickesses who take care to establish and then maintain their own territorial and physical integrity for ‘proper’ public display. Lady Victoria is still aware of the danger that ‘men are apt to corrupt the noble minds of women’ in the ‘Body of our Army’ (125). An ideology that potentially loaded the figure of the woman abroad with negative connotations meant that Cavendish’s traveling women – from Affectionata to Lady Victoria – would still have to devise a counter-discourse in order to make their voyages not only socially acceptable but even laudable. By erecting borders both upon the land and around their bodies, Lady Victoria and the female army appropriate a rhetoric of objectified chastity based on the language of geography, or world-writing. Their bodies become the world onto which the women can write; this subjectivity in turn helps bolster their agency in the form of their ability to then describe and ultimately alter the world around them. This persona of authoritative mapmaker

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affords Lady Victoria, her army, and Cavendish herself the ability to write a world in which they as women can occupy the space of general, ruler, and writer – and be celebrated. This new way of reading and writing the landscape and the female body is exemplified by the ultimate success of the heroickesses’ army: Cavendish describes them as the ‘keys’ that have unlocked passage into the Kingdom of Faction, again relating them to the same object that appeared in the earlier description of the army (147, 152). This time, the women are the successful agents in the war, and Cavendish compares the women, and not any invading vapors, to a phallic key, and one that allows passage into enemy territory. Rather than figured as passive territory like Ralegh’s Guiana or Stradanus’ America or any of the other numerous female figures found in maps discussed in the introduction and Chapter One, these women have become the instrument of penetration and thus the conquerors. The female army can safely assume this more masculine and active position by paradoxically asserting the feminine quality of chastity through the mapping and claiming the boundaries of their own bodies. Thus, the women use the geographic objectification of their own bodies in order to project a powerful sense of self. The use of the term ‘key’ also suggests cartography, since maps would often require a legend or key so that the viewer could interpret the symbols of individual maps; the word then points to the women as at least part of a map, more importantly that piece which helps to unlock its meaning. 44 In unique ways the heroickesses combine the ostensibly conflicting roles of subject and object, map and mapmaker. This remapping of their very selves allows the women and Lady Victoria especially to rewrite other often patriarchal conventions or roles prescribed by early modern English society. Lady Victoria, again in her instructions to her followers, informs them that they will share stories and songs of heroic women, since ‘the remembrance of the actions of gallant persons inflames the Spirit to the like, and begets courage to a like action, and the reason of singing of heroical actions only of women, is that we are women our selves’ (124). By referring to the past military actions of women, Lady Victoria not only clears the way for the women to act as authors, but also establishes a kind of lineage for these women that subverts the traditional 44 In addition, a key was also used to describe a strategic location from the 15th century onwards. Key: n, 4b. A place or position with strategic advantages which give control over or access to a territory, sea, etc. Also figurative. For a key on a map, see 5d. A list or diagram explaining the figures in a photograph or picture, the features of a map, or the symbols, abbreviations, colours, etc., used in a book, chart, or other work. Oxford English Dictionary Online.

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family genealogies that emphasize first-born biological male children that are considered to be so crucial in legitimizing, passing on, and strengthening familial and thus political power. With Lady Victoria’s conception of a line of heroines, the emphasis shifts to an inheritance of merit that can be traced through the heroickesses’ common history, ultimately ‘begetting’ or giving birth to the noble actions of the present generation of warlike women. Just as the female army redraw the borders of themselves and their topography, so they also sketch a subversive genealogy. Perhaps most dramatically, Lady Victoria delivers another rousing speech to her army that excludes men not only from this new concept of genealogy, but also from the very acts of conception and birth, as Lady Victoria rhetorically transforms the garnering of fame into a highly feminized activity that women alone can instigate and participate in. Lady Victoria reminds her army that they must partake in heroic deeds as well as listen to stories of past valor, for honourable Fame is not got only by contemplating thoughts which lie lasily in the Womb of the Mind, and prove Abortive, if not brought forth in living deeds; but worthy Heroickesses, at this time Fortune desires to be the Midwife, and if the Gods and Goddesses did not intend to favour our proceedings with a safe deliverance, they would not have offered us so fair and fit an opportunity to be the Mothers of glorious Actions, and everlasting Fame, which if you be so unnatural to strangle in the Birth by fearfull Cowardize, may you be blasted with Infamy. (143)

The language that Lady Victoria uses to inspire her troops is heavily inflected with the ideas of pregnancy and childbirth. From Lady Victoria’s perspective, fame is conceived within the womb of the mind, but only by combining them with actual deeds will Fortune as a midwife bring about their glorious Actions’ and Fame’s safe delivery, with divine approval added. The women are therefore made the primary agents of their good reputations; even if their reputations become sullied, the speech makes clear that the women maintain control, as they would be the ones strangling their infant fame. By conflating the army’s martial acts with the very female-centered act of childbirth, Lady Victoria transforms fame from battle into a distinctly feminine activity, while simultaneously illustrating actual childbirth as a dangerous and potentially life-threatening endeavor that could also bring a woman fame should motherhood be recognized as such. Similar to the lineage of female-only valor, childbirth as described here takes place without males, drawing focus and fame to women alone. And this lineage of womanly valor harkens back to the genealogy that Cary’s Mariam created

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with her ancestor Sara, as well as the family trees found on maps emphasizing Elizabeth’s special place in royal genealogy and geography. The success of Lady Victoria and her army brings about fame and a kind of royalty: the generaless assumes a status next to that of the king. She perhaps occupies a place even above that of the monarch, as she is able in the last scenes of the play to pass a number of decrees without the assent of a king or parliament. Just as she carefully mapped out her army’s study and field of battle, Lady Victoria circumspectly lays out her new laws, beginning with a woman’s status within her home. Wives, widows, and maids who joined the female army are given prominence in matters of household finance, counsel, and even seating arrangements. That Lady Victoria uses the force of law in a public setting to dictate female preeminence within and without the home further underscores the right, firmly established on the battlefield, of women to travel abroad, even if just down the street. Her tenth rule states that women ‘shall go to Playes, Masks, Balls, Churchings, Christenings, Preachings, whensoever they will, and as fine and bravely attired as they will’; within this one precept out of the eleven she proclaims, Lady Victoria asserts women’s control of their own bodies, both in clothing and movement (167). 45 Furthermore, the public expression of these household rules that actually extend beyond the home reveals the boundary between house and street, public and private, politics and family to be one that Lady Victoria can redraw. With her laws, the generaless finalizes the work begun in her initial retelling of Penelope’s story: she has redrawn the borders of the female self and the home, illustrating the integrity of the former and the porousness of the latter so that she and other females can create a socially acceptable yet still politically subversive identity of mobile chastity.

‘Upon My Own Foundation’: Mapped as Monarch Lady Victoria is commemorated in the final scene of the play when she is informed that a bronze statue of her likeness in battle will grace the public square. The symbolic monument mentioned at Bell in Campo’s close returns attention to the beginning of Cavendish’s collection of plays. The frontispiece shows an enrobed Margaret, flanked by the figures of Athena and Apollo, standing atop a pedestal within a classical Greek architectural frame (Fig. 20). The illustration, as Jodi Mikalachki and other scholars have 45 One can also imagine those plays providing additional examples of world-writing as Cavendish’s plays do, adding to a continuing cycle of female identity formation.

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noted, recalls the iconography employed by Ortelius, Queen Elizabeth, Drayton, and other earlier creators and promoters of cartography. The flanking allegorical features, classical staging, and centralized female figure linked to the territory depicted within are all common features of early modern mapmakers and their sponsors. Cavendish’s placement of her own image in the centralized position connects her with the earlier figures whose bodies stood in for the land represented within the atlas; however, rather than occupying a potentially objectified position alone, Cavendish’s figure is also linked, like Elizabeth on the Saxton atlas, to the creation of the content within the volume whose cover she graces. She appears as a monumental work of art; yet, Cavendish through that objectification is also linked to the geographic imaginings within the volume that she alone has written. Thus, Cavendish is both objectified as art in the front matter and affirmed as author to the plays within; she, like Affectionata, Lady Bashful, Lady Victoria, and her other dramatic creations, occupies the position of both subject and object. Cavendish also draws on frontispieces to other texts more contemporary to her for the striking composition and symbolism of her cover. Another geographic product of increasing popularity in England at this time was the handbook or guide to surveying. The skills of the surveyor were at this time becoming recognized as a separate trade apart from the mapmaker or printer. As an example, Aaron Rathborne’s The Surveyor in Foure Books, published in London in 1616, ‘presents the pattern for most survey books of the rest of the seventeenth century’. 46 Its numerous editions indicate that this text too, like Speed and Drayton, continued to be an influence in geographic discourse well after its initial publication. More importantly, books like these also demonstrate the increasingly democratized nature of geography, and surveying in particular. Not only were cartographic products like those detailed in Chapter Three and the opening of this chapter available to the general public, but so were the skills necessary to create such products. The capacity of any person to learn or teach these world-writing skills is parallel to the ability of the characters in Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo to survey their own bodies in order to reshape their destinies; just as any Englishman or woman could learn and put into practice mapping skills, so do the characters of Cavendish’s plays appropriate and deploy geographic rhetoric to articulate their identities and thus agency. The image on the frontispiece especially points to this geographically conceived and 46 In particular in terms of ‘privileging of universal geometry’, which theoretically would be accessible to those who bought the book. Edwards, Writing, Geometry and Space, p. 26.

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Fig. 20:  Margaret Cavendish, Frontispiece to Playes (1662) and Playes, Never Before Printed (1668). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1862, 1011.236).

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self-determined subjectivity (Fig. 21). While still following the conventions of other frontispieces to atlases with its classical architecture and allegorical figures, The Surveyor’s illustration leaves out the central figure of the author, sponsor, or subject, looking beyond the columns to a small scene of surveying. The stage, normally occupied, is left empty, with only a Latin inscription.47 The image implies that the surveyor, with the skills personified by the female figures of Geometria and Arithmetica, will decide who or what to place upon their particular stage. With the authorial position open to any who would possess the book, the gender of the flanking figures, symbolizing tools to measure land rather than land itself, seems to indicate that even a woman could endeavor to be the individual who could chart territory and possibly herself. Ultimately, this visual gesture towards the skill and authority of the surveyor combines with reference to Queen Elizabeth on Saxton’s atlas in particular to underscore the authoritative geographic nature of the personae that Cavendish wishes to construct for herself and her characters. As an extension of Gallagher’s argument discussed above, my analysis of Cavendish’s plays demonstrates that, in addition to creating a political subject for herself in the persona of Margaret the First, Cavendish also imagines powerful subjects in the autonomous individuals represented by her female protagonists. Their subjectivity derives from the rhetorical configuration that these women articulate in geographic terms: their bodies are also the territory which they control, the ‘land’ that is subjected to their authority as it confers upon them the authoritative role of mapmaker and monarch.

The Space of London and the Paths of Authorship Cavendish’s characters map out territories in imaginary lands like ‘the Kingdome of Faction’ and ‘the Kingdome of Reformation’, or faraway places like the Venetian states; moreover, the lack of any record of public performance might be said to mitigate Cavendish’s world-writing effects on individual women in the real world, despite the publication of her plays. But one woman who could be said to have been affected by Cavendish’s writing is the playwright 47 The phase Inertia strenua, or ‘masterly inactivity’, is a reference to Horace and used here by Rathborne, along with the small image of a man incorrectly using a surveying tool, to criticize those who are overconfident in their surveying skills, according to Mark Netzloff in John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue, p. xiv. But despite Rathborne’s apparent disdain for the amateur surveyor, the book was still widely available for many years and thus accessible to anyone.

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Fig. 21: Aaron Rathborne, The Surveyor in Foure Books (Printed by W. Stansby for W. Burre, 1616). © The Trustees of the British Museum (1875, 0814.741).

Aphra Behn. Though Behn does not mention Cavendish as an antecedent, the younger writer could not have failed to encounter the Duchess of Newcastle in some form in Restoration London, whether by writing or reputation. Later critics have noted how Cavendish and Behn focus on related topics in their works. Miriam Wallraven discusses how both women use travel narrative

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as a form of empowerment, especially when conceiving of fictional spaces. But Behn rarely confined herself to the fictional spaces of the imagination or even locales abroad. London features in her plays quite often, in particular in one of her more successful works, The Lucky Chance, first performed in 1687. The play evokes the spaces of the city throughout; Janet Todd writes that ‘it breathed the localised physical London she knew’. 48 The play even gestures to the wider world and the connections that London has with those places as well, revealing the continued prominence that thoughts of the Low Countries and Ireland held in Londoners’ minds. When a servant insists that the character of Belmour has been hanged in Holland for killing ‘one of their kings’, the rake Gayman replies drily, ‘Holland’s a Commonwealth, and is not rul’d by Kings’. Unmoved by this information, the servant immediately replies, ‘Not by one, Sir, but by a great many’. 49 Although the Republic is a close neighbor and recent opponent, servants like Ralph have made up their own minds about the Low Countries. Similarly, the suitor Bearjest claims he has been to Ireland, which he considers ‘the End of the World – and sure a man can go no farther’ (207). His conception of Ireland as the end of the world connects that place with conventional ideas of wildness asserted by colonial writers covered in Chapter Two. But it is the spaces of London, from domestic households and streets, to inns and fields, that Behn’s play is most concerned with; in particular, it is control of these spaces that allow her women to assert control in their lives. Specifically, the women in this play are able to gain authority in the marriages to which they have already been bound, enacting power even within the potentially confining space of an early modern marriage. Although their husbands and other men of the play speak of and treat these women as mere objects, Lady Fulbank and the other women simply ignore their characterizations and act as powerful mappers and controllers of space, similar to how Orphant, Jantil, Victoria, and Cavendish’s other characters do in their plays. The women of The Lucky Chance, however, embrace the licentious nature of their city locale as part of their own make-up too. No maps of virtues, these women, especially Lady Fulbank, instead chart their personal sexual desires in order to be with the men of their own choosing. That this city is a wanton place is confirmed by Sir Feeble: having married the much younger Leticia, he insists, ‘[T]hou wo’t not make me free o’th’City a second time, wo’t thou entice the Rogues with the Twire and the wanton Leer […] well, she shall never go to Church more, that she shall not’ (208). 48 Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, (e-book) loc. 8020. 49 Behn, The Lucky Chance, p. 197. No line numbers. Subsequent citations are in-text.

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Sir Feeble puns on being made ‘free of the city’; instead of an Alderman’s privileges, the phrase indicates that he expects his wife to be free with herself when out in London, even on the way to Church. But Leticia and Lady Fulbank are not free with their favors in the sense that their husbands imagine; despite charting their own ‘course’, a word used by Sir Feeble’s daughter Diana when she also chooses her own husband, the women are remarkably loyal to their original beloveds, Belmour and Gayman, respectively (260). Sir Feeble and Sir Cautious, old, greedy, and controlling, are depicted as the immoral characters, along with their arrogance, judicial corruption, and general lying, especially in the course of obtaining their brides. In fact, Sir Cautious is excessively callous with regard to his wife, Lady Fulbank. He is the one who instigates the ‘lucky chance’ of the title: when he has lost three hundred pounds gambling against Gayman, it takes only the briefest of suggestions by the latter for Sir Cautious to wager a night with his wife in order to save his reputation and his money. Gayman wins, of course, and he and Lady Fulbank use Sir Cautious’ shame at the deal to negotiate their continued relationship, with Gayman becoming a kind of heir to Cautious’ wealth and wife. But even as they come to this arrangement, Lady Fulbank also assists Leticia and her Belmour, whom Feeble had separated with lies, in a scene that demonstrates the power of Lady Fulbank’s control over space and thus other people. When the couple flee Sir Feeble’s house, they come directly to Lady Fulbank. Leticia insists, ‘Madam, your Virtue, Charity and Friendship to me, has made me trespass on you for my Life’s security, and beg you will protect me, and my Husband (274). The Lady assures them they ‘shall not fail of my Protection now’, before ordering them both into her Bed-chamber before the angry Sir Feeble arrives (274). When the old man confesses and repents all he did to keep Leticia and Belmour apart, Lady Fulbank pronounces absolution and invites the couple to ‘come forth’ to explain their parts and set in motion the comedy’s conclusion (275). Leticia’s immediate repair to Lady Fulbank for help indicates that she is aware of the latter woman’s power in both a domestic sphere and even an international one, for Lady Fulbank indicates she knows of Belmour’s predicament with his pardon and Dutch exile, stating he ‘ever had [her] Wishes’ before she extends the couple her protection (274). And before this final scene, Behn has already demonstrated Lady Fulbank’s adriot command of London space in setting up her initial rendezvous with Gayman. She already knows his claim of having been away to visit an uncle in Northamptonshire is a lie, and she lets him know it as well: Lady Fulbank here demonstrates her command of space beyond London, as she is aware of what others do or don’t do outside of the city. Within the bounds of London, she constructs an elaborate journey through

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the city space for Gayman, dressing her servant as a devil who instructs the hopeful rake to go at evening to ‘the Corner of the silent Wall, /In Fields of Lincoln’s-Inn’ to meet the spirit who will take him to an unknown paramour (215). Of course, the paramour is Lady Fulbank, and she contrives it so Gayman will not even know it is her or her bedroom; he does not realize where he has been and whom with until the end of the play. The plot of Lady Fulbank, her husband, and Gayman, joining with the Leticia/Belmour story at the end, demonstrates how Lady Fulbank’s knowledge and control of the city’s external and domestic spaces affords her control over not only her own life and desires but that of the other characters as well.50 Behn in her play provides a ‘real-world’ example of women controlling their marriages and destinies.51 All the women, even the fairly silent maidservant to Lady Fulbank, achieve the husband or companion they desire. But, of course, the fanciful plot, with its false ghosts and mysterious devils, the neat pairings and speedy resolutions, can make the setting and its characters seem as imaginative as Cavendish’s work and subjectivity as a kind of monarch-writer. Similarly, Jodi Mikalachki discusses Cavendish’s fanciful use of Queen Elizabeth and cartographic convention in The Blazing World. She argues that [a]lthough Cavendish drew on earlier feminine icons of the nation to imagine and enhance the power of her female sovereign, that female sovereignty and its iconography had lost their political agency by the time she wrote her f iction. Their symbolic power had not altogether expired, but even Margaret Cavendish could only imagine them in the setting of another world.52 50 Leticia’s plot uses London space to help her reunite successfully with Belmour. When Sir Feeble catches her about to escape the house with her jewels to meet Belmour, she and her maid quickly reassure him by referring to the initial story fabricated by Belmour to get the old man out of the house. Phillis claims she was in fear of the supposed riot, and she and Leticia were leaving with valuables to seek safety. Here they take advantage of the idea of London as a potentially volatile space, and Sir Feeble accepts the reason unquestioningly (3.6). In terms of domestic space, Leticia immediately plays into Sir Feeble’s belief that Belmour is a vengeful ghost suddenly appearing in her bedchamber, transforming the room into a performance space where she laments her ‘betrayal’ and confirms Sir Feeble’s fears to her advantage (5.2). 51 Julia H. Fawcett also examines Behn’s use of space for women characters, asserting that her play shows Londoners how to reconcile ideas of personal space with a rapidly growing city. She considers the ways in which bodies move through the performative staging of the play, creating new boundaries for the city and bodies. She details how Lady Fullbank especially ‘remaps’ the space of her bedroom and thus her body. Fawcett, ‘Unmapping London’, pp. 155-171. 52 Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea, p. 67.

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Mikalachki’s argument leaves the reader with the assertion that, although creatively effective, Cavendish’s use of earlier cartographic conventions is merely the use of a residual ideology that no longer exerted any political force. Mikalachki notes that Cavendish’s work is only an attempt at the identities formulated in earlier English works of geography like Christopher Saxton’s atlas or John Stow’s London chorography; she ultimately concludes that the worlds Cavendish created were more a sign of the limited possibilities for female political agency at that time. But the use of these new conceptions of space by Aphra Behn in ‘real’ spaces like London belie this assertion and at least raise the possibility that these women of agency are not entirely fanciful. And Cavendish’s ‘imaginary’ spaces and fanciful plots could be argued to have a real effect in the history of women’s writing: Behn herself in the preface to her play asks for ‘the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me, […] to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in, to take those Measures that both the Ancient and Modern Writers have set me […]’ (187). While Behn does not specify any of these writers, Cavendish would certainly qualify as one who had blazed a path before, especially considering Behn’s reference to a ‘Masculine Part’ within her, which can connect with Cavendish’s idea of individuals’ differently gendered spirits that reside within people and can travel and mingle in her Blazing World. With their role in creating a path of writerly authority through representations of space, Cavendish’s works can be seen as just as powerful in their expression of agency as earlier geographic texts if the imperialism, control, unity, and indeed the world depicted in those ‘scientific’ works is recognized as just as subjective and fluid as many straightforwardly fictional texts. For example: throughout her reign, Elizabeth wrestled with various political and religious factions within England and rarely achieved the kind of order over which the serene figure on the frontispiece presumably rules. And Stow’s praise of Londoners’ bounty attempts to gloss over the problems that dogged the city and its elders. The worlds written in these and other atlases, chorographies, and myriad geographic products often could be as nearly fantastical as Cavendish’s imagined kingdoms and worlds. Therefore, she and her protagonists can claim a rhetorical power and fashion an authoritative identity similar to that which figures like Elizabeth, Stow, Speed, and others could draw from their geographic texts. Sara Mendelson notes that ‘[e]ven as a child, Cavendish had been attracted to what we now term “Renaissance self-fashioning” in her dress and behavior’.53 That distinctive assertion of identity would continue to be carried out in her writing. In the 1662 General Prologue to her plays, Cavendish writes: 53 Mendelson, ‘Playing Games’, p. 201.

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All my Playes Plots, my own poor brain did make: From Plutarchs story I ne’er took a Plot, Nor from romances, nor from Don Quixot, As others have, for to assist their wit, But I upon my own Foundation writ. (265-266)

Although Cavendish, as she asserts in her prologue, conceives of very unique settings and characters that had few discernible predecessors in art, she does reveal some of the types of texts that helped shape her plays and stories. The repetition of the word ‘plot’, while ostensibly referring to the story or play’s sequence of events, also points to a plot of ground, especially when the terms are joined at the end of the above quotation by the word ‘foundation’, which also indicates a physical space that Cavendish creates and occupies. Earlier in her prefatory poem, Cavendish asserts that ‘Greek, Latin Poets, I could never read, / Nor their historians, but our English Speed’ (265). The description of plots and foundations, the reference to John Speed and, by implication, his cartographic and chorographic work Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, reveals the influence that the study of geography had on her dramatic output. Ultimately, her work reveals not just the pervasiveness of geographic modes of thinking in science, art, and literature, but also provides an example of how female characters and their authors continued to rework and subvert the potentially objectifying and thus repressive discourses surrounding the female body, from genealogy to geography, family to monarchy. In making the conscious choice to use the science and art of geography, Cavendish, whether knowingly or not, continues reworking and redrawing a map of female subjectivity whose contours can be retraced back through Heywood, Cary, Marlowe, and, ultimately, Queen Elizabeth. In referring to the virgin queen in both the frontispiece image and the cartographic self-fashioning of the virgins within her plays, Margaret Cavendish has, in her quest for a distinct female subjectivity, traveled back to the place where early modern English geography ostensibly began.

Works Cited Barber, Peter. ‘Profitable and Useful, Allegorical and Ornamental’. In The Map Book, edited by Peter Barber, 160-161. New York: Walker and Company, 2005. Behn, Aphra. The Lucky Chance; or, An Alderman’s Bargain. In The Works of Aphra Behn, edited by Montague Summers. 1915; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Bennett, Alexandra G. ‘Fantastic Realism: Margaret Cavendish and the Possibilities of Drama’. In Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret

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Cavendish, edited by Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz, 179-194. London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Edited by Kate Lilley. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays. Edited by Anne Shaver. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 1999. ———. The World’s Olio. [London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye at the Bell in St. Pauls Churchyard, 1655]. De Grazia, Margreta, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Introduction to Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Edited by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, 1-13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Della Dora, Veronica. ‘Performative Atlases: Memory, Materiality, and (Co-) Authorship’. cartographica 44.4 (Winter 2009): 240-255. Devlin Mosher, Joyce. ‘Female Spectacle as Liberation in Margaret Cavendish’s Plays’. Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May 2005): 7.1-28. https://extra.shu. ac.uk/emls/11-1/moshcave.htm. D’Monté, Rebecca. “‘Making a Spectacle”: Margaret Cavendish and the Staging of the Self’. In A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Edited by Stephen Lucas, 109-126. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003. Edwards, Jess. Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-century England and America: Circles in the sand. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Fawcett, Julia H. ‘Unmapping London: Urbanization and the Performance of Personal Space in Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 50, 2, (2017): 155-171. Gallagher, Catherine. ‘Embracing the Absolute: Margaret Cavendish and the Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’. In Early Women Writers, 1600-1720. Edited by Anita Pacheco, 133-146. New York: Longman, 1998. Gernon, Luke. A Discourse of Ireland. In Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland. Edited by James P. Myers, Jr., 241-257. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hammons, Pamela S. ‘The Gendered Imagination of Property in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Women’s Verse’. CLIO 34, 4 (2005 Summer): 395-418. Helgerson, Richard. ‘The folly of maps and modernity’. In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 241-262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. ‘The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England’. In Representing the English Renaissance. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 327-361. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.

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Keeble, N.H. The Restoration: England in the 1660s. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Mendelson, Sara. ‘Playing Games with Gender and Genre: the Dramatic SelfFashioning of Margaret Cavendish’. In Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish. Edited by Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz, 195-212. London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Mikalachki, Jodi. The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Miller, Shannon. “‘Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe”: Affiliation and Memorialization in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes and Plays, Never before Printed’. In Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections. Edited by Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice 7-27. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2006. Netzloff, Mark. Introduction: Surveying and Social Dialogue in John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1618): A Critical Edition, xiii-xx. Edited by Mark Netzloff. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Rees, Emma L.E. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Sanders, Julie. “‘The Closet Opened”: A Reconstruction of “Private” Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish’. In A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Edited by Stephen Clucas, 127-140. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2003. Schmidt, Benjamin. ‘Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700’. In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 347-369. New York: Routledge, 2002. Suzuki, Mihoko. Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2003. Todd, Janet. Aphra Behn: A Secret Life. Bloomsbury Reader, 2017. E-book. Wallis, Helen M. ‘Geographie is Better than Divinitie: Maps, Globes, and Geography in the Days of Samuel Pepys’. In The Compleat Plattmaker: Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited by Norman J.W. Thrower, 1-44. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. Worsley, Lucy. Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion, and Great Houses. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.

Conclusion Women as World-Writers Abstract In addition to reviewing the trajectory of geography, territory, women’s bodies, and early modern women’s identities over the course of the time and texts examined in the book, the conclusion also offers a brief examination of the influence of these writers’ geographic rhetoric on the flourishing of English women playwrights at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the next. Mary Pix’s Queen Catharine and Mary Davys’ The Northern Heiress demonstrate further use of the ideas of women as surveyors and thus controllers of themselves and the spaces they occupy. Moreover, royal connections continue, as Queen Anne becomes associated with England in ways similar to that of Elizabeth. Keywords: early modern women’s writing legacy, Mary Pix, Queen Catharine, Mary Davys, The Northern Heiress, Queen Anne.

The assertions in the previous chapter hold that women like Cavendish, Behn, and their characters could write a world as effectively and vividly as any geographer. And both women authors continued to write while they could, despite any social and financial difficulties. The past fifty years has seen renewed and sustained critical and popular interest in the works and lives of these women writers, with academic texts, classes, and conferences examining their output, and fictional texts that reimagine their lives. But it is an inescapable fact that, in their time, these two writers were considered strange, even dangerous anomalies. Of Cavendish, Samuel Pepys writes that she was a ‘conceited ridiculous woman’.1 Behn became, according to Janet Todd, ‘a byword for lewdness’ who faced sharp criticism throughout her career.2 And while Behn has been lauded by more recent writers like Virginia 1 Diary 9:123. Also quoted in Narain, ‘Notorious Celebrity’, p. 70. 2 Todd, Aphra Behn, loc 9762.

Pilhuj, K., Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463722018/con

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Woolf as an important foremother in the history of women’s writing, these later accolades did not help an often impecunious Behn in her lifetime, as she was often short of money, and most likely died in straitened circumstances.3 This reality brings to mind the suffering undergone by many of the women examined in this book, including characters, historical figures, and writers. Indeed, for all the geographic ingenuity they demonstrate, characters like Dido, Zenocrate, and Mariam arguably achieve their fullest power in death. The Isabel of Cary’s History of Edward II wins political and martial victories in her story, but even a passing knowledge of the queen’s history calls to mind her eventual sequestration and later notorious reputation. Cary herself would endure effects of a husband angered at what he saw as her inept interventions at court and ill-timed religious conversion; even some of her writing would initially be attributed to him. We next saw how Heywood’s plays chronicled new ways that women’s bodies could be objectified and transformed into status symbols. And finally, although writers like Cavendish and Behn devised new ways for women to become world-writers themselves, we saw earlier how such endeavors impacted them personally. But women’s loss of agency, or gaining agency at the cost of life, is not the full story, as I hope this book has shown. These writers and their characters reveal ways that early modern women can take advantage of discourses and social systems which explicitly seek to use them as passive objects. In the face of seemingly immutable constructions that made women’s bodies into passive territory to be surveyed and possessed, Dido, Zenocrate, Mariam, Isabel, and their creators seized that language and imagery and, as the central point in a geographic rhetoric of land and lineage, demonstrate just how disruptive they could be to a conventionally masculine mode of identity and authority. The appropriation of this geographic discourse in the pursuit of agency for women characters not only reveals the potential instability of this seemingly simple and supposedly immutable mode of gendered identity formation but, perhaps more signif icantly, the tacit acknowledgment that the passive objects at the center of the mapping discourse are anything but: all of the writers saw dynamic dramatic potential on the part of their women characters to not just rebelliously remap their identities and connections to men. These writers also saw the simple fact that women in general could be and do, just like any male counterpart. Even Heywood’s plays, while charting ways in which women could be reduced into additional geographic objects, still feature women like Bella Franca, Bess Bridges, and Queen Elizabeth who travel, fight, and rule; indeed, the male 3

Ibid., loc 9667.

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characters’ insistence on objectifying these women also reveals just how active – and threatening – these women are. And while Cavendish and Behn may have dealt with personal misfortune and approbation, their plays and other writings were still written, published, and performed. Significantly, Cavendish, Behn, and their geographically inflected writing and characters can be seen as descendants of the earlier plays in this book; they may have seen and read the maps of identity constructed by their literary forebears, and they have charted new ones that still have a kind of family connection to those that came before. Of course, one geographic ancestor many of these writers and plays undoubtedly had, as examined at multiple points in this book, was Queen Elizabeth. And while the Tudor monarch saw herself as an anomaly among women, many people, including the writers covered here, viewed her as a powerful and geographically minded foremother to be copied, questioned, and transformed. We have seen how her actual and figurative personae of queen, mother, country, geographer appear in many forms throughout this lineage of geographical and literary texts and characters, but her legacy had significant real-world effects as well. While the time period of the texts covered in the previous chapters end in about the 1680s, Elizabeth’s strategies, including some of the ideas of world-writing and women’s agency within geographic discourse, were passed down to and used by England’s next queen regnant at the opening of the eighteenth century. Descriptions of Anne often focus on her childbearing difficulties: Katherine Eggert refers to the Stuart monarch as an example of what the author sees as the post-Restoration focus on the body of any queen being seen as merely a ‘babymaking apparatus’, calling her ‘poor, overweight Queen Anne’ and noting her nineteen pregnancies. 4 But Anne did preside over a remarkable reshaping of England by overseeing the Act of Union in 1707. This joining of Scotland and England, as well as other contentious issues in Anne’s reign, meant that she too had to craft an authoritative ruling persona. She often described herself as mother to her people from the very start of her reign, choosing as part of her coronation text the passage in Isaiah: ‘Kings shall be thy nursing Fathers, and Queens thy nursing Mothers’.5 As mother to her country, she made the choice of successor that she believed would continue her protection of Church and Kingdom. Rather than a victim of favorites, another conventional description of the last Stuart queen, Anne was often a master at diplomatic deception; she often promised the Jacobites that she would support the Pretender ‘at the proper 4 Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, p. 203. 5 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 402.

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time’ despite her preference for the Hanoverian succession.6 Nonetheless, Anne refused to allow the Electress Sophia, as Hanoverian heir to the throne, to reside in England, recognizing her as a potential catalyst for unrest while also becoming a drain on the English treasury. Although the end of her reign would be punctuated by fears of a civil war between Whigs and Tories and those questioning the Hanoverian succession, Anne’s rule ultimately provided for a relatively peaceful transition to the elector of Hanover, George I. The Jacobite rebellions were swiftly put down by the new ruler, and Anne’s tenure as monarch would be a prelude to the relative stability of the eighteenth century, when the British empire envisioned by so many of Elizabeth I’s contemporaries became a reality. Anne seems to have mirrored her queenly predecessor, both deliberately and coincidentally in the course of her life and reign: the tumultuous family relationships, the practice of always maneuvering among factions (in Anne’s case, the Jacobites and the Hanoverians as well as her own Whigs and Tories), attempts at moderation, strategic reticence on the matter of an heir, and the decision to represent themselves as mother to their subjects.7 Significantly, Anne also relied on geographic discourse that linked her to her kingdom. In 1709, a new atlas was published, called Britannia fortior: or the new state of Great Britain &​Ireland: under our sovereign Queen Anne. The edition celebrated the Act of Union, combining geographical and historical information about not just England and Wales, but now Scotland as well, a textual affirmation of the union. An earlier geographic treatise, describing only England and Wales, had been published in 1691, with William III on the frontispiece next to an allegorical figure of Britannia. His wife Mary, Anne’s sister, is absent in most versions of the text, leaving no doubt as to whom the kingdom is connected and thus who controls the nation.8 But the 1709 edition’s frontispiece features Anne alone, in a composition reminiscent of so many geographical texts. The illustration features the persona of Britannia, with figures representing Church and Crown on either side (Fig. 22). In this case, Queen Anne fulfills the role of Crown, holding the orb and scepter as she stands protectively over the seated Britannia. The drawing of the queen and the Church figure occupy the same ground and are the same height, indicating in their depictions an equal share of power over the female figure who sits between them. The placement of the figures echoes 6 Ibid., p. 402. 7 For more information on Anne’s ruling persona, see Bucholz, “‘Nothing but Ceremony”,’ pp. 288-323. 8 See Major, Madam Britannia, pp. 26-27.

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Fig. 22:  Frontispiece from Britannia fortior (London, 1709). © University of Aberdeen.

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that of the frontispieces of earlier atlases, in particular that of Saxton’s atlas of England and Wales. Although the enthroned queen’s position is now taken up by Britannia, Anne still occupies the important place normally reserved for the allegorical figures of geometry or mathematics. That the queen has moved into a standing position often occupied in the past by male figures also argues for a greater potency ascribed to her. On equal footing (literally) with the Church she was known for championing, Anne’s figure in this depiction dramatically conveys her role in the shaping of the union of Scotland and England through visual rhetoric associated with cartographic products. Rather than being the map or the territory described, Anne is like those figures of geography who hold the tools of surveying on the frontispiece, as seen previously in Rathborne’s The Surveyor. As that illustration argued for the greater prominence of the mapmaker himself (or even herself), so the composition of the fortior frontispiece claims greater creative and controlling prominence for Anne. And as queen, Anne did help write a new world, shaping new borders and potential for her kingdom. While Queen Anne shows some of the ‘real-world’ applications of the legacy of geographic discourse inherited from Elizabeth and others, I do not wish to give the impression that literary uses of this kind of identity mapping ceased after Behn and Cavendish. More women writers in general flourished after the passing of both Cavendish and Behn by the end of the 1680s, and we can still find examples of these later women using the two Restoration writers’ ideas of women as territory, but also more importantly as creators and surveyors of their identities and lives. Mary Pix’s 1698 play Queen Catharine or, The Ruines of Love uses Cavendish’s ideas of female-created and controlled spaces as seen in Bell in Campo and The Convent of Pleasure. Pix’s tragedy even takes the bold step of remapping history, claiming new causes for the vicissitudes and progression of the English civil wars in the fifteenth century. Pix focuses on Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, and extends her life to place her, literally and figuratively, in the middle of the war between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. She has a future Edward IV as a bitter rejected suitor of Catharine, jealous of the queen’s marriage to the lowly Owen Tudor, and angry that his younger brother the Duke of Clarence has fallen in love with Catharine’s ward Isabella. Interestingly, Edward places blame on the very space that Catharine occupies: ‘The court of Catharine’s the cursed cause; / There, Oh! there, the ignoble youth is ruined’.9 Here and throughout the play, the space that Catharine occupies 9 Pix, Queen Catharine, p. 2. Citations are by page number, as there are no line numbers, and are in-text.

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is referred to as a kind of special separateness, a place for the most part removed from the wars and yet still exerting influence over them, as seen by Edward’s lament. And despite the war and the seemingly romantic focus, we see more of just Catharine and Isabella inside their female-centric castle and household. Dawn M. Goode remarks on this focus as well, arguing that ‘Catharine and Isabella lived in a world of their own making’ prior to and, I would contend, some time during the events of the play.10 While Goode examines how ‘female-only spaces’ are destabilized within the play, she still acknowledges the importance held by ‘female-space’ in the narrative.11 The play’s characters note the unique space that Catharine’s household occupies, with the queen herself stating to Owen Tudor that ‘we meet indeed ’midst / Wars and Tumults; Camps on either side; / Frightfull scenes for Love’ (19). And yet, despite their placement between the warring factions, Catharine is able to give their love at least one night of peace, with the caveat that ‘there is / Nothing ours’ (20). Of course, she is partly right – the castle is later invaded by Edward and his brother Gloucester, bent on avenging Edward’s rejection and thwarting Clarence’s relationship. Significantly, the castle does not fall to a conventional siege, but rather the brothers’ use of secret tunnels beneath that Owen and the queen use for their rendezvous. Catharine entrusts Isabella with the key, and she in turn entrusts that key in preparation of their elopement to a servant of Clarence, who is actually employed by the scheming Gloucester. Catharine places the fault for the castle’s tragic breech not on Isabella’s naivete or even Edward’s cunning, but on providence: ‘Love was her only crime, yet she proved / Fates cruel Instrument of my undoing, why / This was, why so ordained is beyond mortal inquiry’ (52). None but the heavens, Pix seems to argue, could allow for the disruption of the space that Catharine controls, a space that, for the present falls prey to tragedy, but the relationships that these two women have within that space help to create England’s future. For while Pix reconfigures part of the history of the fifteenth century, she does so in order to give greater prominence to her women characters, making them directly responsible for major historical events during the war and after. Although Isabella mismanages the space beneath the castle and is eventually killed, it is not before she and Clarence affirm their love as she expires. A distraught Clarence is prevented from falling on his sword by Warwick, who exhorts him to ‘Think of revenge, / Live to accomplish that, / In that I will assist ye’ (48). The scene places within the female-space of the 10 Goode, ‘Dueling Discourses’, p. 44. 11 Ibid., pp. 47, 55.

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castle the reason for Clarence and Warwick’s historical betrayal of Edward, specifically Edward and Gloucester’s murderous invasion of the space that results in Isabella’s death. Thus, Isabella lives on in her ability – or at least that of her memory – to have kingdom-wide effects. Pix ascribes an even more substantial effect on England’s ‘future’ to Queen Catharine by having her faithful servant Lord Dacres remind her and the audience of the lineage she and Owen Tudor have created. He ushers in her two youngest sons and says of them, ‘’[T]is the Queen alone can save you; whilst / She lives France is potent, and must be fear’d / If violence is offer’d’ (51). The play leaves the audience in this final scene with a reminder that this Catharine, by virtue of her French lineage, is powerful enough to protect her sons who Dacres prophetically declares to be destined for greatness: Now by the Soul of my great master, by Royal Henry, I read in these small lines Majestick glory! Methinks I am inspir’d to say, from these branches, Shall come a noble stock of Princes, which must Bless, And Wed, and intermixing, heal the distracted Land, Behold the Queen and Tudor’s Blooming grace, Nature her self can scarce make such another face. (51)

In his survey of the two young boys’ features, Dacres sees both the past, in the form of Catharine and Owen’s faces, and the future, not just for the boys but for England. The wedding, intermixing, and healing reference Catharine’s grandson Henry Tudor, who will end the wars, marry Elizabeth of York to unite the two factions, and establish the Tudor dynasty. The silent boys become the objects in this play: a book in which Dacres can read both Catharine’s past and England’s future, an important genealogy for the spectators of Pix’s time. Although the space of Catharine’s love has been reduced to the ‘ruines’ of the title, from these ruins springs a future that the queen will actively protect: we last see her, Dacres, and her sons removing to a new space, ‘a Monastery which seems as built for retiring Princes, so / Quiet, and so neatly form’d, near the Metropolis it / Stands, there you may live in peace’ (51). They retreat to a cloistered and separate space much like the castle once was, but significantly still near the ‘metropolis’, presumably London, so that she is not fully removed from the greater political world that her sons must one day rejoin to fulfill their destinies. Of course, Pix’s play still ends with the issue that opened this conclusion: women’s agency becoming fulfilled only in death or retirement from the world so that their sons or other men may gain power. A more comedic and

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livelier example of the continuation of this women’s geographic literary legacy – and one that arguably owes more to Behn’s city comedies – can be found in Mary Davys’ 1716 play The Northern Heiress or, The Humours of York. The very title and setting call for a geographically minded analysis, as Davys explicitly sets her play in York and not London. While such a choice reflects the fact that Davys lived in the northern city for many years and may have also been meant to appeal to Londoners’ sense of superiority, the choice is nevertheless a notable one and helps make place and who controls it a central feature. Davys uses the ‘humours of York’ to comedic effect, yes, but she also presents the northern city as a place with unique customs quite apart from those of London – including the authority of its women to control their bodies and the spaces they occupy. In Davys’ York, the audience meets the heiress of the title, Isabella, her friend Louisa, and the latter’s brother Gamont, who Isabella would prefer as a husband. Mainly through the stratagems of Isabella and some of the other women, most of the characters are happily paired off. The other notable female character in the play is Lady Greasy, a widow who owns a boarding house and a candle-making business. A Falstaffian character, Lady Greasy is often shown eating, drinking, and holding forth on her opinions about the action of the play. Indeed, much of the play follows women like Lady Greasy and Isabella, who never shy from voicing their ideas and pursuing their desires. The York through which these women move is presented by Davys in a comedic but not altogether negative fashion. In fact, York is set in opposition to London and its customs and often appears in a much more positive light. Lady Greasy tells the story of a young man whose father set him up in the family business; as soon as the father passes away, the son ‘throws by his Business, rambles up to London, binds himself Prentice to a Fop, which they say is a great Trade there’.12 Greasy speaks disparagingly of London, a distant location ‘up’ there which has questionable business. Lady Greasy and other women of York highlight the more congenial and unique practices of York, particularly the one that (supposedly) calls for guests to pay the hostess for the food and drink. Lady Cordivant explains, [T]his has been a Custom Time out of Mind. Our ancient and loyal City of York, has always been famous for keeping up an hearty and neighbourly Way among our selves, which keeps us all friends; for eating, as well as lying together, makes Folks love. (27) 12 Davys, The Northern Heiress, p. 19. All subsequent citations are in-text. Page numbers are used as there are no scene divisions or lines.

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Lady Cordivant and Lady Greasy speak confidently of the different customs and practices of York, relating these chorographic details with an authority previously seen in atlases or other geographic works like Stow’s Survey of London. Greasy’s description of the faddish and financial dangers of London implies that York does not have such temptations. And Cordivant speaks highly of the conviviality and amity produced by the importance placed on social gatherings and financially providing for them. Her description also gives historical weight to the practice done since ‘Time out of Mind’ in the ‘ancient’ city; the histories of locations, we have seen, are also often included in chorographies. While these women and their local practices could be mocked for their self-importance, and Isabella expresses exasperation at their conversation, Davys still provides for continued defense of York practices. Lady Ample tells a questioning visitor, ‘[I]f you find Fault with our Proceedings, you must no more be admitted into our Society. I do assure you, this Humour prevails all the Town over’ (29). Ample not only defends the customs, but she also threatens the male questioner with banishment from their company should he not accede to York customs, demonstrating a woman’s control of space based on acceptance of her location’s practices. And the women are very firmly in control of much of the play’s action as well, in particular the multiple marriage arrangements. Isabella secures her own choice in marriage while assisting her friend Louisa; she declares confidently that she ‘will be conducted into the Land of Matrimony by my dear Louisa’ (35), construing marriage as a journey they will take together. The men of play are very much left out of these impending marital travels, as the women of York meet together for strategic as well as social reasons to arrange the multiple pairs of the play’s end. Even the women’s social meetings have a potential political bent, as Davys sees fit to inform her readers in the cast list that the Ladies Greasy, Cordivant, and Swish have been or are married to former Lord Mayors, a fact not relevant to the plot but perhaps increases and adds a geographical inflection to their authority. These husbands are never seen and are only briefly referred to beyond the cast of characters, but they do help to establish some of the women’s authority as derived from connection to a particular place; in this case, their husbands’ governance of York. The play reveals multiple layers of female authority in York; even the northern heiress herself, despite planning her own and many marriages, defers to her aunt Lady Ample when she tells her, ‘Madam, I desire you will please to pardon me, for disposing of myself without your Consent’ (68). Isabella looks to her aunt to forgive her for choosing Gamont, indicating Ample to be the one in charge of the family, despite the recognized existence of an uncle. But he is geographically distant,

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living in the culturally different London, and the York of this play is a place where women control themselves and who has (marital) access to them. The Northern Heiress was performed and published a mere two years after the death of Queen Anne and yet, somewhat surprisingly, the play was dedicated to ‘Her Royal Highness the Young Princess Anne’ (A2). But this is clearly not the Stuart queen or even the current ruler: Davys bypassed any dedication to the George I or even his two adult children to focus on someone she wished, perhaps, to establish as a kind of female heiress to the Stuart queen: that of her namesake, George I’s seven-year-old granddaughter.13 With perhaps little patronage to be expected from a child’s household, Davys could be seen as attempting world-writing on the dynastic stage, skipping men in the Hanoverian lineage to highlight Anne’s potential. The dedication then, instead of procuring any notice from the royal household, instead uses a real heiress to frame the story of an imaginative one, creating a female space that reaches from the page and into the real world, however ephemerally. More tangibly, Pix and Davys represent a period when more women were creating an actual space for themselves in England as writers: in the years after Cavendish and Behn, we see the plays of Pix and Davys but also Delarivier Manley, Catherine Trotter, and Susanna Centlivre.14 The plays of Pix and Davys examined here give a promising glimpse into the ways these women and their contemporaries could be seen as carrying forward the lineage of women as world-writers. Finally, while many more women than before wrote publicly in these final decades of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, and writers like Pix and Davys continued the literary geographic legacy shaped by the authors examined in this book, examples of women writing the world were not limited to the imaginative locations of literature and the English stage at this time. There were mapmakers in the more conventional sense working in the flourishing geographic business of the Low Countries, which featured women working, running, and even owning map ateliers. Will C. van den Hoonaard details how many women took the occupation of colorists in these map studios: he states that they were important parts of the process of this world-writing, although their names may be unknown. More prominent are the women who owned map ateliers, often widows who carried on the business after their husbands’ deaths. Van den Hoonaard 13 Kilburn, Matthew. ‘Anne, princess royal (1709-1759)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 14 Intriguingly, Davys created a literal (and literary) space for herself when she opened and ran a coffee house in Cambridge from about 1718 until her death in about 1732. She also continued to write and sold subscriptions for her work. McBurney, ‘Mrs. Mary Davys’, pp. 349-350.

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describes how, throughout the time covered in this book, the families or ‘houses’ of mapmakers in the Low Countries both competed and intermarried, with the houses of Hondius, Ortelius, and Blaeu being the largest. And within these houses, we begin to have names for the women among them: Abraham Ortelius, he of the first atlas, had two sisters, Anna and Elizabeth, who were commissioned to color editions of that atlas in the last decades of the sixteenth century.15 In the next century, van den Hoonaard finds that there were at least 27 named women map publishers in the Low Countries.16 A striking example of these women’s success and tenacity in world-writing can be found in Anna Beeck, who worked in the last decades of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Deserted by her husband in 1693, she continued to publish and color maps in The Hague, eventually securing a divorce and earning the approval and support of the courts and her neighbors. She would eventually provide the latest reports of battles in the War for Spanish Succession through her maps, perhaps claiming the title of journalist as well as cartographer.17 From an English queen appropriating masculine geographic rhetoric to establish her legitimacy, to women in the Low Countries taking over their families’ map-making businesses to produce images of the world and the events therein, this book traces a path from Elizabeth, through writers and their characters who took geographic discourse as a tool for writing the world and themselves, responding to and helping to shape new ideologies of women’s identities. Through this book, with its genealogy of geography and, in particular, the fictional and real women who make up that family tree, I have demonstrated that geographic products, their language, and images are not simply static representations of space. Rather, they helped map out new ways for writers and their characters to create conceptions of themselves and the world. Ultimately, early modern dramatists adapted geography to create locations where women could make a mark. From this geographic lineage, my examination will, I hope, motivate further journeys into other less charted territories in world-writing.

15 Van den Hoonaard, Map Worlds, p. 39. 16 Ibid., p. 42. 17 Ibid., p. 43.

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Sanders, Julie. “‘The Closet Opened”: A Reconstruction of “Private” Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish’. In A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Edited by Stephen Clucas, 127-140. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2003. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Schafer, Elizabeth. ‘Unsilencing Elizabeth Cary: Worldmaking in The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry’. In Worldmaking: literature, language, culture. Edited by Tom Clark, Emily Finlay, and Philippa Kelly, 41-54. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017. Schlueter, June. ‘Rereading the Side Panels in The View From London to the North’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010): 142-157. Schmidt, Benjamin. ‘Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700’. In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 347-369. New York: Routledge, 2002. Scholz, Susanne. Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Sebek, Barbara. “‘Strange Outlandish Wealth”: Transglobal Commerce in The Merchant’s Mappe of Commerce and The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II’. In Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Edited by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 176-202. Madison, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Shell, Alison. ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy of Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 53-67. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Shepherd, Simon. Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in SeventeenthCentury Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Shirley, Rodney. Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons: The Art of the Decorative Cartographic Titlepage. Houten, The Netherlands: HES & DE GRAAF Publishers BV, 2009. ———. ‘A Royal Genealogical Map’. In The Map Book. Edited by Peter Barber, 142-143. New York: Walker and Company, 2005. Short, John Rennie. The World Through Maps: A History of Cartography. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2003. Skelton, R.A. Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries. London and New York: Staples Press, 1952. ———. Saxton’s Survey of England and Wales: With a Facsimiles of Saxton’s WallMaps of 1583. Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1974.

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Smith, D.K. The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh, and Marvell. Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2008. Stallybrass, Peter. ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’. In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 123-142. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Starner-Wright, Janet and Susan M. Fitzmaurice, ‘Shaping a Drama out of History: Elizabeth Cary and the Story of Edward II’. Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 79-92. Stevenson, Laura Caroline. Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Straznicky, Marta. ‘Closet Drama’. In A Companion to Renaissance Drama. Edited by Arthur F. Kinney, 416-430. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Sullivan, Jr., Garrett. ‘Geography and Identity in Marlowe’. In The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Edited by Patrick Cheney, 231-244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Suzuki, Mihoko. “‘Fortune is a Stepmother”: Gender and Political Discourse in Elizabeth Cary’s History of Edward II’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 89-105. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2003. Swan, Jesse G. ‘A Bibliographical Palimpsest: The Post-Publication History of the 1680 Octavo Pamphlet, The History of the Most Unfortunate Prince Edward II’. In The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Edited by Heather Wolfe, 107-124. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Todd, Janet. Aphra Behn: A Secret Life. Bloomsbury Reader, 2017. E-book. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Trevisan, Sara. ‘Genealogy and Royal Representation: Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll for Elizabeth I (1558-60)’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 81, 2 (Summer 2018): 257-275. Turner, Henry S. ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520-1688’. In The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 1. Edited by David Woodward, 412-426. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Van den Hoonaard, Will C. Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014.

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Vickers, Nancy J. ‘Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme’. In Writing and Sexual Difference. Edited by Elizabeth Abel, 95-108. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Wallis, Helen M. ‘Geographie is Better than Divinitie: Maps, Globes, and Geography in the Days of Samuel Pepys’. In The Compleat Plattmaker: Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited by Norman J.W. Thrower, 1-44. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. Wallraven, Miriam. ‘“Authoress of a whole world”: The Empowerment and Narrative Authority of 17th- and 18th-Century Women Writers in Real and Fictional Travelogues’, Inbetween 14 (2004): 135-149. Watkins, John. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wiggins, Martin. ‘When Did Marlowe Write Dido, Queen of Carthage?’ The Review of English Studies, 59, 24 (1 September 2008): 521-541. Wilson, Charles. Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt in the Netherlands. London: Macmillan, 1970. Woolf, Daniel. The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Worsley, Lucy. Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion, and Great Houses. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Wray, Ramona. ‘Memory, Materiality and Maternity in the Tanfield/Cary Archive’. In A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Edited by Patricia Phillippy, 221-240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Zamora, Margarita. ‘Abreast of Columbus: Gender and Discovery’. Cultural Critique, 17 (Winter, 1990-1991): 127-149. Ziegler, Georgianna. ‘My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’. Textual Practice 4 (1) Spring (1990): 73-90.

Index Abbate, Corinne S. 81 fn42, 89, 261 Adrian, John M. 148, 192, 261 Affectionata 208-210, 212-215, 233 affective space 60-61, 115, 118, 150 Albano, Caterina 30 fn32, 43, 61, 89, 261 ancient Rome 22, 34, 63-64, 107-108, 111-115, 118, 133, 173 fn39, 208 fn24 and Mariam 24, 112-115, 119-121, 123, 130 Anna of Denmark (Queen of Scotland and England) 103-106 Anne, Hanoverian princess 255 Anne Stuart, Queen of England 247-250, 255 Avery, Bruce 44, 49 fn5, 89, 99, 138, 261 Barber, Peter 105, 180, 105, 138, 141, 180, 192, 225 fn42, 241, 261, 267, 269 Bartels, Emily 59 fn16, 90, 261 Behn, Aphra 236-237, 240-241, 245-247, 250, 253, 255, 259 The Lucky Chance 237-239 Bennett, Alexandra G. 224, 241, 261 Bess (Bridges) 150-151, 178-179, 181-192, 197, 199-200, 246 Blaeu, Joan Atlas Blaviana 51 Blazon 61-63, 221 Bonahue, Edward T. 171, 193, 261 Boyd McBride, Kari 168, 193, 262 Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum 8, 53, 167 Brenner, Robert 144-145, 262 Britannia fortior 8, 248-250 Brotton, Jerry 35, 43, 262 Brown, Lloyd 179, 188, 193, 262 Bucholz, Robert O. 248 fn7, 257, 262 Burgess, Irene 116 fn46, 138, 262 Burnett, Mark Thornton 68, 232 Butler, Judith 31-32, 43, 262 Cahn, Susan 163, 193, 262 Canny, Nicholas 107-108, 109 fn37, 139, 262 Caro-Barnes, Jennifer M. 64 fn23, 90, 262 cartes à figures 101, 106, 136 Catherine de Medici 17-18, 20 Catharine of Valois (character) 250-252 Cary, Elizabeth 24 and Ireland 108-110, 137-138 works The Mirror of the Worlde 93-94, 109-110, 139, 259 The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II 94, 124-137, 139, 259 The Tragedy of Mariam 94-95, 110-124, 139, 259 Case, John, Spherae Civitatis 8, 49-50

Cavendish, Margaret 8, 14, 26, 34, 42-43, 198-210, 232-234, 239-241, 245-247 works Bell in Campo 200, 216-232 The Blazing World 203, 206 Loves Adventures 200, 206-216 The World’s Olio 198, 200, 203, 213 fn30, 217, 217 fn33, 229 Chatterjee, Partha 149-150, 180-181, 193, 263 chorography 14-15, 38, 48, 98 fn10, 137, 146, 148, 156, 161, 166, 168, 170, 191, 198, 210-211, 240-241, 254 Clarke, Danielle 107, 139, 263 Cleaver, John and Robert Dodd, A Godlie Form of Household Government 188-189, 193, 259 closet drama 123-124 Conley, Tom 14 fn3, 18 fn9, 20 fn14, 43, 261, 263 Cooper, Lisa H. 147 fn11, 193, 263 Crawford, Patricia 37, 44, 79, 90, 263, 267 Cunningham, William, Cosmographical Glasse 77-79, 80, 90, 148, 193, 259 Davys, Mary, The Northern Heiress 253-255, 257, 259 de Belleforest, Francois, La Cosmographie universelle 17 de Bouguereau, Maurice, Le Theatre Francoys 8, 18-20 de Certeau, Michel 27, 43, 263 Dee, John 11, 42, 89 fn49, 259 della Dora, Veronica 207-208, 242, 263 de Nicolay, Nicolas 18 de Somogyi, Nick 61, 90, 263 Devlin Mosher, Joyce 211, 242, 263 Dido 21-23, 49-51, 54-64, 71, 77, 84, 87, 89, 93-95, 115, 133, 148, 157, 163, 165, 183, 185, 221-222, 246 Dobson, Michael 174 fn43, 193, 263 Dodd, Robert and John Cleaver, A Godlie Form of Household Government 188-189, 193, 259 D’Monte, Rebecca 211-212 fn29, 242, 263 Drayton, Michael, Poly-olbion 8, 96-97 Edward II 126-129, 133-135 Edwards, Jess 27, 43, 263 Eggert, Katherine 22-23, 44, 247, 257, 264 Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England 8, 11-13, 44, 90, 151-152, 246, 259 character in If You Know Not Me 150, 160, 165, 173-179, 181 courtship strategies 87-89, 94 and Dido, Queen of Carthage 51, 56-58, 64 example for others 14-15, 22-23, 84, 87, 94, 135, 149, 166, 247, 250, 256 and genealogy 39-40, 66-67, 66 fn26, 103

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and imperialism 11-12 influence on Margaret Cavendish 199, 205-206, 232-235, 239-241 and Isabel 125-127, 132-133 and London 145, 166-167 and maps 7, 12-13, 15-18, 21, 23, 26, 28-31, 35, 49, 65, 67, 103, 148, 156, 209, 232-233 as territory or land 28-30, 135, 156, 165 in The Fair Maid of the West 178-179, 183-185, 188 in The Four Prentices 156-157 and virginity 28-30, 176-178 as world-writer 14-15, 65-66, 89, 247 English civil wars 197-198, 201 Epstein, Mortimer 145 fn6, 152 fn16, 193, 264

Helgerson, Richard 27 fn24, 44, 146, 161, 167, 194, 209-211, 222, 225, 242, 265 Henri IV (of France) 7, 18-20, Herod 24, 94, 99, 107, 111-123, 130-131, 137, 168 Heywood, Thomas works The Fair Maid of the West, Part One 150-151, 178-186 The Fair Maid of the West, Part Two 150-151, 186-191 The Four Prentices 145, 150, 152-160 If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, Part Two 150, 160-178 Howard, Jean E. 33, 44, 48, 90, 160-161, 177 fn48, 181, 185, 188, 191, 194, 265

Fawcett, Julia H. 239 fn51, 242, 264 Ferguson, Margaret 103 fn23, 112 fn44, 139, 264 Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 125, 141, 270 French, H.R. 161, 193, 264

Ireland 15, 24, 41 fn60, 66, 93-110, 116, 119, 125, 131, 137-140, 143-144, 228, 237 Isabel 24, 95, 124-127, 134-136, 148, 157, 163, 183, 185, 246 connection to land 129-137 and genealogy 132-133 and Zenocrate 132-133

Gallagher, Catherine 205-206, 235, 242, 264 Genealogy 12, 34-40, 85, 89 fn49, 94-95, 103-106, 132-133, 151, 231-232, 241, 252, 256 and Mariam 110-112, 122-123, 232 and Zenocrate 78-79, 82-83 gentry (see also ‘middling classes’) 146, 204-205 geography as world-writing 14-15, 20, 34, 40, 42-43, 49, 54, 55, 80, 84-86, 93, 150-151, 171, 181, 204, 229, 232 fn45, 233 early modern English study of 47-49 in early modern France 17-20 in the early modern Low Countries 199200, 224-226 “new” geography 26-27 products 14-15, 146-148, 161-163, 179-180, 188, 200-205, 207-208, 230 Gernon, Luke 98-99, 109, 131, 139, 242, 259 Gibbs, Joanna 59 fn16, 68, 90, 264 Gillies, John 26-27, 32-33, 44, 53, 90, 179 fn50, 190, 193, 207, 242, 264 Greene, Robert Alphonsus, King of Aragon 84-85, 90, 259 Selimus 84-86, 92, 260 Gregg, Edward 247 fn5, 257, 265 Gristwood, Sarah 185. 193, 265 Goode, Dawn M. 251, 257, 264 Gresham, Thomas (character) 25, 159, 161-178, 180, 182, 188-189, 192, 221 Hadfield, Andrew 98-99, 113, 139, 265 Hammons, Pamela S. 221, 242, 265 Hakluyt, Richard 86 fn46, 95, 139, 260 Harper, Tom 105, 138, 180, 192, 261 Harvey, P.D.A. 15 fn4, 17 fn8, 44, 49, 90, 173 fn40, 148, 193, 265 Hawkes, David 160-161, 193, 265

James I and VI 15, 24, 94, 102-108, 113, 124, 127, 136, 140, 152 fn16, 209, 260 Jankowski, Theodora 30-31, 35-37, 40, 44, 56, 58, 90, 162, 163 fn28, 194, 266 Jonson, Ben 167 The Irish Masque 102, 105, 108, 140, 260 Jowitt, Claire 86 fn46, 91, 266 Kagan, Richard L. 17, 20 fn16, 44, 266 Keeble, N.H. 197, 243, 266 Knapp, Jeffrey 32, 44, 266 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 41 Lady Bashful 208-215, 233 Lady Jantil 216, 218-224, 237 Lady Orphant, see also ‘Affectionata’ 208-215, 237 Lady Victoria 211 fn29, 216-219, 223-233, 237 Lefebvre, Henri 27, 44, 266 Lemke Sanford, Rhonda 14 fn3, 27, 36, 44, 48, 80 fn41, 91, 166-167, 181 fn57, 194, 266 Levy Peck, Linda 105-106, 140, 266 London 12, 33-34, 108, 137-138, 144-145, 150, 160-162, 164-167, 169-171, 173, 177-178, 205, 236, 237-240, 252-255 Macfarlane, Fenella 152, 154 fn20, 192, 194, 267 Major, Emma 248 fn8, 257, 267 Maley, Willy 98, 265 mappae mundi (see also ‘medieval maps’ and ‘T-O maps’) 26-27, 48, 63, 75, 203, 210-211 Mariam 24, 95, 98 fn10, 107, 125-127, 130, 137, 148, 163, 185, 246 and ancient Rome 112-115, 119-121, 123 and genealogy 111-112, 122-123, 133, 231-232 as resource 117-119

Index

and Tamburlaine 118 as world-writer 115-116, 122 Marlowe, Christopher 14, 23-24, 34, 41, 47-49, 51, 85-87, 89, 91, 93-95, 120, 124, 133, 140, 241, 260 works Tamburlaine, part one 64-75 Tamburlaine, part two 75-84 date and authorship 50-51 fn7 The Tragedy of Dido, Queene of Carthage 21-22, 49-64 McClintock, Anne 28 fn30, 31 fn33, 44, 79, 91, 267 McLuskie, Kathleen 153, 194, 267 medieval maps (see also ‘mappae mundi’ and ‘T-O map’) 26, 48, 71, 86 Mehl, Dieter 174 fn43, 194, 267 Mendelson, Sara 37, 44, 240, 243, 267 merchants (see also ‘middling classes’) 37, 41, 138, 144-148, 150-152, 159-163, 166-167, 169-170, 172, 173 fn39, 176, 177 fn48, 178, 182, 185, 189, 192, 198-199, 208 fn24 middling classes 25, 37, 41, 138, 143-144, 147-148, 151, 160-162, 167-168, 174, 178-179, 192 and genealogy 149-151, 161, 163 Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley, The Changeling 36, 45, 260 Mikalachki, Jodi 232-233, 239-240, 243, 267 Miller, Shannon 221 fn37, 243, 267 Montrose, Louis 54, 91, 176, 267 Munson Deats, Sara 65 fn25, 77, 91, 267 Munster, Sebastian, Cosmographia 17 Newman, Karen 28, 45, 200, 243, 268 Norden, John, Speculum Britaniae 189 Oliver, H.J. 50-51 fn7, 91, 268 Ortelius, Abraham Epitome du theatre du monde 93-94, 108-110, 125 frontispiece figures 51-53, 67 Theatrum orbis terrarium 7, 17-18, 23, 33, 51-53, 67, 147, 156, 189-190, 233, 256 Petrarchan love poetry (see also blazon) 5657, 60-62, 118-119, 159, 222 Philip II (of Spain) 12, 20 Pix, Mary, Queen Catharine 250-252, 255, 260 Plancius, Petrus, ‘Orbis terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus’ 7, 53-54, 67, 156 Postel, Guillame, des merveilles du monde 17 Proser, Matthew N. 64, 91, 268 Ralegh, Walter, The Discovery of […] Guiana 28, 95-96, 98-100, 117, 131, 208 fn24, 230 Ramsey, Rachel 171, 194, 268 Rathborne, Aaron, The Surveyor in Foure Books 8, 233, 235-236, 250

275 Rees, Emma L.E. 202-203, 243, 268 Rich, Barnabe, A New Description of Ireland 101, 109, 140 Riggs, David 34, 45, 47-48, 91, 268 Rowley, William and Thomas Middleton, The Changeling 36 Royal Exchange 160, 168-173, 175, 182, 221 Rubin, Gayle 35-37, 45, 68, 91, 268 Salome 107, 110-112, 115-116 Sanders, Julie 219 fn34, 243, 269 Sawday, Jonathan 61, 91, 269 Saxton, Christopher, An Atlas of England and Wales 7, 15-18, 20, 28, 39, 49, 65, 89, 148, 204, 205 fn16, 233, 235, 240, 250 Schafer, Elizabeth 124, 141, 269 Schlueter, June 106-107, 141, 269 Schmidt, Benjamin 17, 20 fn16, 44, 201-202, 224-225, 243, 266, 269 Scholz, Suzanne 28, 41, 45, 96 fn2, 98 fn10, 122, 141, 269 Sebek, Barbara 145, 194, 269 Seed, Patricia 98-99, 101, 129, 141, 269 Shakespeare, William Cymbeline 36 fn46, 80 Henry IV, Part One 153 King Lear 201 Richard II 128-130 sonnets 68-69, 101, 221 fn37 Shepherd, Simon 182 fn60, 195, 269 Shirley, Rodney 51 fn8, 53, 91, 103 fn24, 141, 269 Short, John Rennie 15, 18 fn13, 45, 269 Skelton, R.A. 17 fn7, 45, 179, 195, 269 Smith, D.K. 34-35, 45, 270 Smith, Thomas, De republica Anglorum 107 Speed, John 108, 113, 205 fn16, 233, 240-241 map of James I 105-107 map proofs 7, 12-13, 15 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain 8, 15, 100-102, 113, 189, 204 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene 32, 98 fn10, 99, 141, 260 A View of the Present State of Ireland 99, 99 fn13 Stallybrass, Peter 176, 176 fn45, 195, 207 fn20, 242, 263, 270 Starner-Wright, Janet 125, 141, 270 Stevenson, Laura Caroline 147, 195, 270 Stone, Lawrence 41, 45, 191-192, 195, 270 Stow, John, Survey of London 170-171, 173 fn39, 195, 240, 254, 260 Stradanus, Johanes 7, 54-55, 230 Straznicky, Marta 123-124, 141, 270 surveying 49, 77, 79, 80, 151, 161, 171, 189-192, 198-200, 208-211, 213, 218, 222-224, 233, 235, 246, 250 Sullivan, Jr., Garrett 60-61, 91, 270 Suzuki, Mihoko 22, 45, 130-131, 141, 205, 217 fn32, 243, 270

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Tamburlaine 23-25, 34, 48, 51, 59, 64-66, 68-87, 89 Thevet, Andre 17 Todd, Janet 237, 243, 245, 257, 270 T-O maps 48, 66, 71, 84-85 Traub, Valerie 176-177, 195, 270 Trevisan, Sara 39-40, 45, 123, 141, 270 van den Hoonaard 255-257, 270 van der Straet, Jan see ‘Stradanus, Johanes’ Vermeer, Johannes, Officer and Laughing Girl 8, 225-226 Vickers, Nancy J. 61 fn18, 92, 271 Vitkus, Daniel 84, 85 fn45, 92, 260 Wallis, Helen M. 204-205, 243, 271 Watkins, John 174, 177, 195, 271 Wallraven, Miriam 236-237, 271 Watson, Nicola J. 174 fn43, 193, 263 Wiggins, Martin 50-51 fn7, 92, 271 women as cartographers 26, 56, 255-256, 191, 203, 209-211, 215, 225, 256 and virginity 36, 41-42, 53, 69-70, 74 fn32, 96, 99-101, 105, 112, 119, 147-151, 154-156, 158-163, 171, 178, 187, 206, 209, 211, 214, 241 as map figures 12-13, 23, 51-55, 57, 64, 67, 77, 101, 163, 232-234, 241, 248-250

role in marriage 23, 35-37, 40-41, 79, 96, 100-101, 145, 145 fn5, 147, 159, 191-192, 225, 237 as territory 25, 30-31, 35, 40-42, 51-54, 57, 62-65, 67-68, 71, 79, 96-101, 118, 122, 137, 149, 153-156, 158-159, 162, 181, 184, 199, 209-211, 212, 214, 223, 233, 235, 246 as world-writers 40, 55, 61, 64, 115, 133, 137, 199, 204, 208, 221, 229, 246-247, 255-256 Woolf, Daniel 37-39, 45, 123, 141, 146-147, 195, 271 world-writing 20, 34, 42-43, 49, 54, 61, 64, 70-71, 75, 80, 83-86, 93, 150-151, 171, 179, 181, 192, 232 fn45, 233, 235 Worsley, Lucy 204 fn12, 243, 271 Woutneel, Hans 8, 103-105, 107 Wray, Ramona 137 fn67, 141, 271 York (city) 253-255 Zamora, Margarita 54, 92, 271 Zenocrate 23-24, 48-49, 65-87, 89, 94-95, 118, 163, 246 and genealogy 59, 67, 79-83, 86-87, 132 and Isabel 132-133 as territory 68-69, 71, 75-78, 80 as world-writer 71-74, 78, 81, 87, 148 Ziegler, Georgianna 181, 195, 271