Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2 ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3 ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4 ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2 ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3 ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4 ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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. Moreover, 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’. 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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage , pp. 47 - 92Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019