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
2 - ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
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
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. Moreover, even within this deceptively straightforward translation, there are clear moments where Tanfield departs from or adds 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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage , pp. 93 - 142Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019