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.