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
3 - ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
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
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 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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage , pp. 143 - 196Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019