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
- 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
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.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 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.
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.
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- Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage , pp. 11 - 46Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019