‘And thence as far as Archipelago’: Mapping Marlowe’s ‘British shore’ Willy Maley and Patrick Murray University of Glasgow [email protected] [email protected] The span of Christopher Marlowe’s geographical locations underscores what Michael Neill has called ‘the intoxicated exoticism of Marlovian cosmography’.1 According to Bill Sherman, ‘Marlowe was the earliest English playwright to attempt a systematic exploration of the dramatic potential of travel’. Sherman notes the extent to which Marlowe’s texts are tied to travel narratives and tales of empire: The conquerors, magicians, and merchants in his plays enjoy almost unrestricted movement across the globe, and […] offer[…] compelling fantasies to audiences whose own movement was extremely limited. They would also have served as a powerful vehicle for reflection on England’s place in the wider world and, more generally, on the ethics of travel. The fates of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas suggest that Marlowe’s visits to foreign locations were motivated more by edification than escapism. […] Marlowe’s plays were also among the first to confront the dramaturgical challenges of presenting global movement in the small and fixed space of the stage, using choruses to take audiences through enormous geographical leaps, and peppering his plays with cartographic details (some designed to place his characters with remarkable specificity, and others to show them transcending geographical boundaries altogether).2 As such, Marlowe’s promise to ‘confute […] blind geographers’ is part of his tabula rasa approach to conquest: 1 Michael Neill, ‘“Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49: 4 (1998), 361–74 (p. 365). 2 William Sherman, ‘Travel and Trade’ in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. by Arthur Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 109–20 (p. 114). 1 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. Here at Damascus will I make the point That shall begin the perpendicular. (4.4.73–80)3 Marjorie Garber’s comment on this passage reminds us of the cartographic power behind Marlowe’s rhetoric: ‘Appropriately, the text that he writes and later unwrites is a map, the metonymic sign of the world he seeks to conquer, and, according to his own figure, his pen is the conquering sword […] The ‘map’, present here only imaginatively, will become a visible stage property in his death scene at the end of Part 2, at a moment when, paradoxically, the unconquered territories are furthest from Tamburlaine’s grasp’.4 Stephen Greenblatt sees Tamburlaine’s efforts at confutation as vain: ‘Tamburlaine’s violence does not transform space from the abstract to the human, but rather further reduces the world to a map, the very emblem of abstraction […] At Tamburlaine’s death, the map still stretches out before him, and nothing bears his name save Marlowe’s play’.5 This is not strictly true, since Tamburlaine’s name appears in the title of several histories of the period, but the general point stands: mapping is an inexhaustible practice and complete cartographies are beyond mere mortals, even great ones.6 For Garrett Sullivan, ‘Tamburlaine’s assault on Damascus goes hand in hand with an act of measurement — his sword’s tracing of a circuit of the city. While this is a metaphorical measuring, it gestures toward a literal act of surveying. In the early modern period surveying preceded and enabled a siege such as Tamburlaine’s’.7 3 All references to Marlowe’s works are to Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 4 Marjorie Garber, ‘“Here’s Nothing Writ”: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays’, Theatre Journal 36: 3 (1984), 301–20 (p. 302). 5 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), p. 198. 6 See for example Samuel Clarke, The life of Tamerlane the Great with his wars against the great Duke of Moso, the King of China, Bajazet the Great Turk, the Sultan of Egypt, the King of Persia, and some others ... : wherein are rare examples of heathenish piety, prudence, magnanimity, mercy, liberality, humility, justice, temperance, and valour (London, 1653). 7 Garrett Sullivan, ‘Space, Measurement, and Stalking Tamburlaine’, Renaissance Drama 28 (1997), pp. 3–27 (p. 13). 2 Sullivan views Tamburlaine as a play ‘saturated with the language of measurement’, a drama that ‘repeatedly concerns itself with the traversing of geographical space, which is almost invariably associated with Tamburlaine’s conquest of it’.8 For Tina Takapoui, Tamburlaine ‘conceives of the world in terms of the confines of the visibility of the map’.9 Zenocrate ‘functions as a haloed idol rather than a real entity, some dark space on Tamburlaine’s map to conquer […] a detached inaccessible piece of land, forever detached and intact, fetishized as a territory of an empire’.10 Alongside this recognition of Marlowe’s mapping power play, scholars have been alert to the concatenation between religiosity and acts of world-describing in the playwright’s works. Lisa Hopkins links Marlowe’s geography more specifically with ‘questions of religious belief’.11 According to Hopkins, the undermining of preconceived religious ideas by geography in the Renaissance impressed itself deeply on Marlowe, engendering a profound engagement with both ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’ geographies. Hopkins specifically cites the discovery of America as ‘precipitat[ing] the great crisis of faith which ultimately produced the Reformation, since the failure of the Bible to mention the New World cast doubt on the supposed omniscience of the Scriptures’.12 For Hopkins: Knowledge of geography gives access to the contours of the next world as well as the present one – and as the present one expands, the imaginative space allotted to the next one visibly shrinks and withers.13 Much of Marlowe’s work is inflected by religious thought – The Jew of Malta, which portrays a bloody interaction between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is characteristic of an artistic engagement with contemporary theological discussions and disputes. Hopkins points to the ways in which the febrile nature of religious beliefs in the sixteenth century permeated conceptions of the world and its mapping. Such disputes, as we shall see, formed just one part of the broader shifting landscape of cartography, mapping and surveying during Marlowe’s lifetime. 8 Ibid, p. 17. 9 Tina Takapoui, ‘Kristevan Femininity and Negative Theology in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, I and II’, Early Modern Culture Online, 3.1 (2012) <http://journal.uia.no/index.php/EMCO/article/view/27> [accessed: 24 June 2014], 65–87 (67). 10 Ibid, 73. 11 Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 98. 12 Ibid, 98. 13 Ibid, Christopher Marlowe, 100. 3 ‘The fruitful plot of scholarism’: Marlowe’s geographic learning Christopher Marlowe was witness to a key moment in the development of geographical science in England. Situated at a point of epistemological transformation, Marlowe’s life coincided with a move away from the traditional and canonical and towards the novel and iconoclastic. The year of Marlowe’s matriculation at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, 1580, was according to Bruce McLeod a ‘ground-breaking year for ‘Imperial Britain’ […] a year that saw the creation of new geographies based on imperial designs’.14 New surveying and mapping practices imported from the continent, allied to emerging artistic techniques, led to a flourishing of maps, globes and atlases of both the local and the foreign as the realisation and representation of space underwent profound change.15 Marlowe’s plays evince an acute sensitivity to this ‘geographic revolution’. Scholars have identified the Kentish playwright as a dramatist working simultaneously in the death throes of an ‘old’ geography and in the birth of a new discipline, perceptive to the attendant intricacies, precepts and themes of both. John Gillies, for example, explicitly invokes the multiplicity of geographies found in Tamburlaine to locate Marlowe at a turning point in the evolution of geographical science, imagination and morality. For Gillies, Tamburlaine ‘manifests — with a power unsurpassed by any other Renaissance geographic or ‘poetic geographic’ text — the schizophrenia of the Renaissance geographic imagination caught […] between the amoralism of the New Geography, and the moralism of the old’.16 Garrett Sullivan, in a broader survey of the Marlovian canon, concurs with Gillies’ assessment. For Sullivan, Marlowe’s engagement with geographic discourse and its ideas was conducted within an ‘epochal moment in the histories of geography and cartography — that of the emergence of the ‘new geography’’: This moment is understood as marking the turning point from an imprecise and religious or mythopoetic geography to an accurate and scientific one — from, for example, the medieval map centred on the sacred site of Jerusalem to the famous cartographic projection associated with the atlas-maker Gerard Mercator, 14 Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2. 15 D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-Writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008), p. 6. 16 John Gillies, ‘Marlowe, The Timur Myth and the Motives of Geography’ in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998) p. 226. 4 which allows for the representation of space as homogeneous and uniformly divisible. Characterized by the proliferation of increasingly precise representations of the world (with [Abraham] Ortelius’s atlas being a prime example), the new geography was made possible by a number of historical phenomena, such as improved mapping technologies; the growing desire and need for accurate geographic information; and the ever-widening distribution of printed geographic materials, including maps and atlases.17 Sullivan situates Marlowe at a liminal point in the history of geography, revelling in the contemporary imbrication of imagination and experience, of ‘spheres, globes, astrolabes, maps and the like’, and the ‘mythopoetic geography’ of more established ideas of geographic representation (the profoundly religious T-O maps of medieval cartography which located Christ’s terrestrial birthplace at the centre of the cosmos). Where Gillies suggests that Marlowe encapsulates the ‘schizophrenia of the Renaissance geographic imagination’ and imbues his work with a tension between ‘old’ and ‘new’ moralities, Sullivan states much more categorically that ‘[i]t is of the new geography that Marlowe’s plays appear to be such a conspicuous product’.18For Marlowe, according to Stewart Mottram, ‘map reading is […] an underhand activity associated with the tyrant Tamburlaine and the damned Dr. Faustus […] Such plays are a comment on changing attitudes toward cartography in the later sixteenth century, for as props in the repertory of the overreacher and rebel, maps on stage can be seen to reflect cartography’s increasingly more radical status in late Elizabethan and early Stuart society’.19 The roots of Marlowe’s radicalised cartographies can be traced to his biographical background. Geographic diversity was present in Marlowe’s life from an early age. Canterbury, Marlowe’s birthplace, was one of the foremost sites of pilgrimage in the medieval period, drawing visitors from across the British Isles and the Continent — according to Jonathan Sumption, Canterbury retained an attraction for pilgrims rivalled only by Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago.20 As an essay by Richard F. Hardin demonstrates, even after the transformative effect of the Reformation on religious 17 Garrett Sullivan, ‘Geography and Identity in Marlowe’ in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 231–44 (p.232). 18 Ibid, p. 232. 19 Stewart Mottram, ‘Mapping the British Archipelago in the Renaissance’ in A Companion to British Literature: Volume II: Early Modern Literature 1450–1660, ed. by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher (Oxford and Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014), pp. 54–69 (pp. 62–3). 20 Jonathan Sumption, Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2003), p. 214. 5 pilgrimages in England, Marlowe’s home town maintained a degree of ethnic and religious heterogeneity.21 Marlowe would have been exposed to a wide range of ethnic identities from an early age. Furthermore, awareness of different cultures was supplemented by an education rich in geographic knowledge. By the late sixteenth century, influential pedagogical tracts propagated the notion of geographical science as part of the study of ‘cosmography’, a kaleidoscopic subject encompassing a vast and often contradictory field. This stemmed from continental educationalists such as Desiderius Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives and Leon Battista Alberti.22 For example, in Della Famiglia (1434), a tract described by Kenneth Charlton as Alberti’s ‘championing of the personal and social ideals of civic humanism’, the Italian polymath summarises the paradigmatic education of the humanist scholar, emphasising, among other disciplines, geography. Charlton surmises Alberti’s idealized pupil: [C]onversation, with his own age-group, with his tutors and with his elders, is of as much importance as his study of books. Arithmetic, geography, meteorology are to share time with the classics in preparation for the commercial life.23 In Marlowe’s intellectual formation the writings of key figures like Thomas Blundeville are instructive. According to Blundeville’s popular textbook His Exercises (1594): [Cosmography is] the description of the whole world, that is to say, of heauen and earth, and all that is contained therein. What speciall kindes of knowledge are comprehended vnder this Science. These foure, Astronomie, Astrologie, Geographie, and Chorographie.24 Marlowe was exposed to the subject of ‘cosmographie’ — and the multitude of endeavours subsumed under its designation — from childhood. His education, which included a scholarship at King’s School in his home town beginning at the age of fourteen and an intermittent student career at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, brought with it exposure to geographic texts, and also engagement with people and communities whose interest in geography was considerable. ‘[M]aps were part of both formal and informal education in early modern Europe’ notes Lesley Cormack, ‘From 21 Richard F. Hardin, ‘Marlowe Thinking Globally’ in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and Page, ed. by Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 22-32. 22 Jonathan M. Smith, ‘State Formation, Geography, and a Gentleman’s Education’, Geographical Review 86: 1 (1996), 91–100 (p. 94). 23 Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 32. 24 Thomas Blundeville, His Exercises (London: Printed by John Windet, 1594), p. 134. 6 the grammar schools on, both formal and informal educational systems had some interest in the study of the earth and the cosmos’.25 As a consequence, it is likely Marlowe would have had access to both geographical teaching and also substantial textbooks on the subject. John Gresshop, his headmaster at King’s School possessed one of the largest personal libraries in England, numbering more than 350 volumes.26 These included classical texts by Ovid and Plautus, as well as more recent work by Chaucer and Boccaccio, and also the work of Neoplatonist philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino. Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman have stressed the importance of Gresshop’s library for the education of the young Marlowe: If, like many teachers, Gresshop made the contents of his personal library available to his more promising pupils, Marlowe could have obtained early access to a fine representative range of texts in both the vernacular and the classical tongues, and found his knowledge increased and his imagination stimulated by as ample a private collection as that possessed by any university tutor of the day. 27 If, as Thomas and Tydeman claim, Marlowe found his ‘knowledge increased’ and his ‘imagination stimulated’ by Gresshop’s library, the geographical works therein can elucidate our understanding of how geography functions within Marlovian dramaturgy. Perhaps the most notable ‘cosmographical’ volume within Gresshop’s ‘ample’ collection, and the first geographical text the young Marlowe would likely have encountered, was Cosmographie (originally published in 1544), by the influential German cartographer, cosmographer and scholar Sebastian Münster. Münster’s role in the development of geography in Renaissance Europe is important — according to Benjamin Weiss, Münster ‘finally provides a clear link between the study of [Claudius Ptolemy’s] Geography in an astronomical context and the making of maps’.28 Cosmographie, a multiple-edition work that was constantly revised and augmented 25 Lesley B. Cormack, ‘Maps as Educational Tools in the Renaissance’ in The History of Cartography Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. by David Woodward (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 622–36 (p. 622). 26 For an inventory of Gresshop’s library see William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 112-22. 27 Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 5. 28 Benjamin Weiss, ‘The Geography in Print: 1475: 1530’ in Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ in the Renaissance ed. by Zur Shalev and Charles Burnett (London: Warburg Institute Colloquia 2011), pp. 91–120 (p. 110). 7 throughout the 1500s, was a text bristling with geographical information. ‘As each text became bigger, more crammed with data’, writes Elizabeth Eisensten in her description of Cosmographie’s encyclopaedism, and more profusely illustrated, each was also provided with more tables, charts, indexes which made it possible for readers to retrieve the growing body of information that was being stored in the work. Editors worked conscientiously to keep each edition updated and to provide more thorough coverage for regions that had received short shrift in earlier versions.29 Were Marlowe familiar with this storehouse of geographical knowledge from an early age, contemporaneous accounts of its reading suggest Cosmographie would have left a deep impression on the imagination of the emerging playwright. The preface to Richard Eden’s A briefe collection and compendious extract of the straunge and memorable things, gathered oute of the cosmographye of Sebastian Munster (1553), for example, gives an insight into the pleasure induced in the early modern reader by Münster’s writings: The worke of it selfe is not greate but the examples and varieties are mani so that in a short and smal time, the reader may wander through out the whole world, and fil his head with many strange and memorable things, he may note the straunge properties of diverse Beastes, Fowles, and Fishes, & the description of far countries, the wonderfull example of sundrye men, and straunge rytes and lawes of far distante nacions.30 Cited by Lesley Cormack as ‘one of the many cases of the close connections among the different branches of geography’, the Cosmographia would have presented to the young Marlowe an admixture of Ptolemaic and other cartographies alongside ‘basic cosmographical mapping technique.’31 In addition, the promise that the reader ‘may wander throughout the whole world’ in reading the book resonates with the capability of vicarious travel proffered by early modern cartographers and their maps. Such aspects of sixteenth-century geographical understanding figure heavily in Marlowe’s plays, especially in scenes which explore either explicitly or tangentially contemporary 29 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), I., p. 109. 30 Richard Eden, A briefe collection and compendious extract of the straunge and memorable things, gathered oute of the cosmographye of Sebastian Munster (London: Thomas Marshe, 1572), sig. A2r. 31 Lesley Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities 1580-1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 107, n. 55. 8 cosmographical science such as the map reading sequence of the second part of Tamburlaine. Münster’s text incorporated quasi-ethnographic illustrations of fantastical humans, including one-footed giants, double-headed children and wolf-men. Drawn from fourteenth-century travel narratives such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and cartographies like the Hereford Mappa Mundi, this extravagant facet of this mode of sixteenth-century geography, and its co-existence with more sober mathematical principles — summarised by Cormack as ‘providing fantastic descriptions and illustrations of people as well as […] more exacting maps and mathematical geography’32 — would have engendered in Marlowe an awareness primarily of the imaginative possibility of world describing. The fabulist elements of Münster’s presentation of cosmography reveal the opportunities of creative geographies alongside more restrained empirical science. Michael Neill’s recognition of the ‘intoxicated exoticism’ of Marlowe’s stage chimes with the Cosmographia of the headmaster’s library: just as Münster the cosmographer was renowned for presenting ‘the description of far countries, the wonderfull example of sundrye men, and straunge rytes and lawes of far distante nacions’ so the Marlovian stage was distinctive for its range of places and diversity of peoples. Cartography at Corpus Christi If Münster revealed to the young Marlowe the artistic potential of cosmography, what can we discern from his experience of geography in his later education? Marlowe attended Corpus Christi College from 1580 to 1587 taking a BA and later an MA, famously breaking his study to engage in ‘matters touching benefits of his country’, activities that possibly included spying.33 By 1580, interest in the rich terrain of cosmography — including chorography, geography and cartography — was on the increase among both teaching faculty and students. Cambridge itself was extensively mapped in the latter half of the sixteenth century: included in Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales (1579), the first book of its kind in English cartography, it was also the subject of several specific surveys, such as the highly detailed town map engraved by Richard Lyne (1574) which incorporates the 32 Ibid, p.129. 33 This facet of Marlowe’s life has been keenly debated. See Austin K. Gray, ‘Some Observations on Christopher Marlowe, Government Agent’, PMLA, 43: 3 (1928), 682–700, and Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services, 1570–1603 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 99–100. For a more sceptical account see J. A. Downie’s ‘Reviewing What We Think We Know About Christopher Marlowe, Again’, in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and Page, ed. by Sarah Scott and Michael Stapleton (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 33-46, esp. p. 45. 9 university.34 The map of the county in John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611-12), drawn from earlier surveys, has been labelled as ‘one of [Speed’s] finest’, attesting to the prominence of the shire in the early modern English cartographic consciousness.35 The background presence of cartographic activity — surveying, plotting and mapmaking — would have been reinforced by the everyday exertions of the curriculum. Marlowe’s degrees were in the arts, yet both academic qualifications required a level of geographical learning. According to Mark Curtis the English universities in the second half of the sixteenth century saw a ‘broadening and expansion of the arts course’.36 Such ‘expansion’ encompassed geographical science. Both teachers and students were the motivators of this disciplinary absorption, underlining the developing popularity of geography or ‘cosmography’ across the spectrum of the university. ‘[T]he good will of the tutors and the interest of the scholars’, Curtis writes: were all that were needed to introduce the study of modern as well as classical history, modern languages as well as Latin and Greek, geography, cosmography, and navigation as well as astronomy, the study of practical politics as well as moral philosophy, and the cultivation of manners, courtesy, and other social graces as well as piety.37 As this process indicates, university teachers and scholars began to regard cosmography and its ancillary disciplines as a central part of the curriculum, recognising its inherent benefits to a wide range of professions. ‘Geography’, as Cormack observes, ‘was […] encouraged and studied by serious students following the curriculum, whether they planned a career in the church, in academe, or elsewhere’.38 Regarding the geographical textbooks Marlowe would have encountered at university, David Riggs has shown that the playwright’s MA degree included study of cosmography and incorporated such influential works as Strabo’s seventeen-volume Geographica and Ptolemy’s Geographia (both translated into Latin in the fifteenth century), Münster’s 34 Lyne’s map has been singled out by P. D. A. Harvey as an ‘unusually clear example’ of Tudor cartography’s combination of bird’s-eye perspective and consistent scale. See Maps in Tudor England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 17. 35 Jeffery John Speed, Tudor Townscapes: The Town Plans from John Speed’s ‘Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine 1610’ (Buckingham: Map Collector Publications Ltd, 2000), p. 32. 36 Mark Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition: 1558–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 130. 37 Ibid, p. 130. 38 Cormack, p. 307. 10