Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama

M. Matei-Chesnoiu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137479686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137469410
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: RECOMPOSING SPACE WITHIN GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSITY

During the eight decades between 1550 and 1630, geographic space in early modern Europe, just as the theater in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England, was subject to considerable social, economic, and political reformulation. As a consequence, the way people came to think about spatiality changed dramatically. By redefining modes of understanding the global spatiality of places, geography underwent a veritable renaissance in the period of late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The pluralization and polarization of voices in the emerging science and in theatrical practice signified the advent of new conceptualizations of space and place, which helped people engage with the changing world around them. This study attempts to situate early modern distinctions in the newly rising geographic thinking in relation to ancient past ones and to drama, showing the pluralism of the emerging field and the multiple voices it represented. Renaissance geographic scholarship relied on the authoritative accents of the classical past, depending on their methods and accessing the broad universal views of ancient cosmography. In this way, geographers legitimized their works by reference to historic precursors. Considering the visually based mental structure derived from geography, cartography, and theater,¹ it makes sense to argue that early modern European geography and English drama of the period show similar characteristics. The exceptional development of these representational modes in the Renaissance connects with a minimalist and synthesizing way of dealing with a changing world. By recognizing the shifting nature of their universe, early modern geographers implicitly admitted the claim that this world needed new theoretical tools or approaches. English playwrights, on the other hand, exposed the dialogic capacity of their trade by using methods and knowledge derived from geography and cosmography. This symbiotic relationship between the dramatic and geographic modes of relating to space generated great potential and articulated associative techniques.

Ascribing cognitive significance to the culturally mediated spatial sensibilities, post-structuralists² and postmodernists have acknowledged the tension between literature, the production of culture, and the politics of place. The interdisciplinary “spatial turn” in literary and cultural studies has been pinpointed by theoreticians as different as Michel Foucault and his heterotopias,³ Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization process,⁴ and the production-of-space hypothesis by French Marxist philosopher and social critic Henri Lefebvre.⁵ In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues for a distinction between lieu and espace, the first being a particular, specific place that can be seen in opposition to mobile and indeterminate “space.”⁶ In Certeau’s account, lieux are characteristically constructed by the strategies of dominant groups who use techniques such as mapping, planning, and inscription to stabilize the meanings of particular locations, asserting thereby the primacy of place over time. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Certeau argues, the map “colonizes space.”⁷ Similarly influential for my study have been the postmodern cultural geography of Denis Cosgrove,⁸ who assesses the complex connections between seeing, imagining, and representing the world geographically; and Edward Soja with his notion of thirdspace.⁹ Franco Moretti’s work on maps provides an example of how geography can be used as a tool for explorations of place in the novel.¹⁰ Attuned to Doreen Massey’s work on the philosophy and politics of space, who writes in For Space about “the relational constructedness of things,”¹¹ Ina Habermann recognizes the need to study culture in terms of “topological structures, i.e. structures with a spatial index.”¹² Indeed, it is—I believe—viable to assess the interconnectedness of geographic parameters (rivers, seas, sea-cities, and islands), the real spaces they represent, and the constructed theatrical space, which is the place of the world. In drama, the material and symbolic aspects of space converge, showing the multidimensional quality of relations between identity and geography and how audiences might respond to imaginary projections of lived-in space.

The experience of lived space, as the dramatic experience, affects the way people feel and relate to their environment across time and reveals a horizon of possibilities. This embodied practice is performed at the point where the milieu and the body enter into a relationship with each other—in real life and on stage. Emotionally charged and synoptic views of marginal spaces emerge from early modern reconfigurations of classical geography, or in reverberations of Ovid’s exile poetry of the Pontus Euxinus in English geography and travel narratives. Historically divisive river-borders indicate internal dissension but also disrupt essentialist notions of bounded territoriality and imperial hegemony. Dramatic representations of cosmopolitan cities of the sea integrate the sea’s ancient meanings with modernizing global practices and commercial traffic. Theatrical islands are sites of containment and division, at once places of competition and conflict as well as elusive locations eliciting self-definition. In all these dramatic representations of geographic spatiality, however, the stage space¹³ is central to the enactment of locality in imaginative interaction. The stage is both the metonymic representation of physical space and a location of networked meanings that disrupt the commonly accepted culturally defined associations. In an innovative understanding of the anthropology of space, French cultural geographer Joël Bonnemaison applies concepts such as “reticulated space” (a network of spatial links that has no evident center or periphery), “islandness” (the spatial perceptions involved in relating land to sea, which come from living on an island), and “geosymbol” (the specific association made between a particular spatial location and a cultural belief symbol)¹⁴ in exploring cultural differences in spatial sensibility. These concepts emerging from cultural geography and the philosophy of space could be applied to theatrical representations of multidimensional geographic relations.

Philosophers have argued that the early modern period saw a paradigm shift in notions of place and space, in that Galilean and Copernican astronomy, and later Cartesian geometry, generated ideas of unbounded, undefined space against which local and specific topographical knowledges could be defined.¹⁵ Examples of such authoritative place-making abound in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain, in the development of cartography, geography, and chorography. In what concerns discussions of “representational spaces” and “mapmindedness” in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, John Gillies¹⁶ has charted the territory of early modern drama in relation to space and geography by revealing the connections between the semiology of the map and that of the theater. From what Gillies posits as the “imaginative or poetic dimension of Shakespeare’s geography”¹⁷ to the concept of “cartographic imagination”¹⁸ by D. K. Smith, the province of early modern dramatic engagements with space has been cogently outlined. In tracing the imaginative geography of romance, Cyrus Mulready observes that “In cartography, as well as in the theater, the allurement of romance served as a powerful enticement to territorial and colonial involvement.”¹⁹ Indeed, in drama, space can be compressed and expanded to comprise interrelated notions that at once demote common perceptions and promote overlapping circles of parallel universes and beliefs. It is a fact that plays produced in Elizabethan and Jacobean England reflect social and political issues of their time. Through spatiality, moreover, playwrights find a way to disrupt conventional notions of established order and elicit a movement toward more networked global spaces, away from rigid territoriality and ethnocentrism. Drama exposes the tension between the sense of rootedness in place and other pressures—such as migration, colonization, and trade—that disrupt and reorganize space.

Research in the field of early modern European cartography and geography has demonstrated the interpenetration of scientific and imaginative spatial modes of thinking as part of the Western European experience of place. Frank Lestringant has discussed early modern cartography as a site of contested imaginative engagement with territories and described the spatial experience as a “sudden rupture of scales that changed people’s ways of viewing the world, and consequently the world itself.”²⁰ Tom Conley has analyzed relations of space and writing in literature and cartography. In An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2011), Conley charts the paradox of the topographical shift in late Renaissance, in which space and subjectivity negotiated through cartography are rendered unstable through the “haptic eye” vision.²¹ Indeed, as geography is famously considered the eye of history, abstracted representation of geographic space is a multi-relational endeavor. Additionally, drama actuates the visual, aural, movement, and reduction triggers. Apart from inviting the audience to see and imagine things here and there, local and global, dramatic action creates its own space, the space of the stage, which is both here and there, then and now, a space of multifocal subjectivity. Examining critical responses to different aspects of early modern spatial practices, experiences, and uses, Sarah Dustagheer has shaped her analysis of the spatial turn in Shakespeare spatial studies into three categories: “City Spaces,” “Mapping Spaces,” and “Performance Spaces.”²² Focusing on the ambiguous function of maps as spatial signifiers in early modern England, moreover, Bernhard Klein sees the enabling capacity of cartographic images but also remarks on the difference of maps by Nowell, Saxton, and Speed, which “were all produced within a recognizably English frame of reference.”²³ There is a certain specificity in the spatial semiosis embodied in the parallel and interrelated function of map and stage in early modern England and this is my focus here.

Successful dramaturgy depends as much on the manipulation of bodies and things in space and place as it does on language. Until recently, “scene” and the spatial dimensions of drama generally was a neglected category in literary scholarship. Following Steven Mullaney’s groundbreaking work in The Place of the Stage, which started to map the theater’s role in shaping a rhetoric of space in early modern London, Douglas Bruster, Andrew Hiscock, Henry S. Turner, Jean Howard, and James Mardock have developed the spatial project in studies focusing on ways in which Jacobean playwrights provided new ways of comprehending a fast-evolving and expanding urban environment of unprecedented size and complexity.²⁴ In drama, following the suggestion made by Mardock, one might see the play-script as the lieu, subject always in its actual performance to the exigencies of space, as the text is appropriated and reshaped in a particular temporality for the actors’ own purposes.²⁵ Likewise, Bruce Smith correlates the physical structure of the 1599 Globe from the perspective of non-Euclidian geometrical space; he argues that “Shakespeare’s plays, in their original performance circumstances, provided audience/spectators with a complexly layered experience of space that far exceeded the laws of plane geometry.”²⁶ Smith identifies ten measures of global space: geographical, temporal, fictional, characterological, social, political, interpersonal, performative, receptive, and phenomenal. As I reason in the following pages, it is possible to see drama as existing in a tense and potentially subversive relationship to more self-evidently authoritative definitions of locale as postulated in early modern geography and cartography. Plays set in various environments stage a contest between dominant understandings of place and the attempts of different groups to undermine such meanings.

Geocriticism as a critical method that focuses on space, places, and geographical interaction in literature has been conceptualized by Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally, Jr. In Westphal’s view, “Geocriticism will work to map possible worlds, to create plural and paradoxical maps, because it embraces space in its mobile heterogeneity.”²⁷ The conceptual framework of geocritical practice, according to Westphal, is delineated by spatiotemporality, transgressivity, and referentiality, and “transgression imposes heterogeneity, along with polychrony (the combination of different temporalities) and polytopy (the composition of different spatialities).”²⁸ As I discuss throughout this book, the geocritical perspective could offer credible explanations to the much-debated fragmentation and dissipation of space in early modern drama, the anachronisms, polychronicity, and polytopicality of Shakespeare’s romances, for example, as well as the theatrical self-referentiality discernible in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In his engagement with spatiality in literature, Robert T. Tally observes the fundamental change that occurred in the Renaissance as to the way the world was imagined through the development of linear perspective, “which not only enabled more ‘accurate’ pictorial representations in the visual arts but also occasioned a wholesale re-imagining of space and of human spatial relations.”²⁹ Indeed, as my analyses will show, the geographic and spatial vision emerging from each Elizabethan or Jacobean play under discussion in relation to geographic features (rivers, seas, sea-cities, and islands) displays a geometric armature—as in cartography, geography, and cosmography—where space as seen by the eye is compacted into units of representation that can be comprehended by human thought. The fluid mappings of rivers, sea-cities, and islands—as intersecting forcefields of geographic knowledge—are staged in the diversified and cosmopolitan social spaces of the city, the battlefield, the brothel, the marketplace, or the theater.

This approach from the perspective of intertextuality, cultural geography, and geocriticism focuses on the spatial expression, representation, and negotiation of the experience of being in the world in early modern England and generally in Europe. I will look at how spatiality operates in sixteenth-century cartography, geography, cosmography, and travel printed texts published in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English to show the dialogic and synthetized understanding of an expanding world. I will examine the human connections to place and the abbreviated but destabilizing response offered by dramatic action to the visual and informational impact of geographic knowledge. The silence and secrecy inherent in early modern geopolitical representations of space is revealed in a corporeal manner through the medium of drama. In this way, theatrical action transposes the imaginative potential of mental maps into something rich and strange—a plausible engagement with reality. As Robert T. Tally rightfully outlines the utopian projection in the age of globalization as “a means of mapping the world,”³⁰ in my view, the theater in early modern England adapted to a form of literary exploration through which the authors confronted new modes of being in space. This aspect reveals the embeddedness of geographic knowledge in the material and discursive contexts in which it is produced. Like untying a Gordian knot, a pragmatic viewpoint is revealed in both early modern narratives of place and the allusions to geographic space in the period’s English drama. This applies to the spatial expression, representation, and negotiation of power relations in early modern English society, coagulated within the broader Continental borders. In addition, the dialogic nature of geographic narratives and drama depends on the inherent instability of populated spatiality. The hybridized practices of early modern geography and drama are concerned not only with the divulged purpose of showing what the world is, but also with suggesting what it might have been and even what it will become.

The analytical tool of geoparsing—invoked here to explore the spatial dimensions of early modern geographic narratives and their relation to drama—is derived from computer science. According to the Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science, “Geoparsing is the process of identifying geographic references in text and linking geospatial locations to these references so that the text can be accessed through spatial retrieval methods and suitable for spatial analysis.”³¹ Describing the advantages of integrating place-namebased and geospatial referencing in computer technology, Linda L. Hill defines georeferencing as “relating information to geographic location,” and geoparsing as “the process of identifying geographic references in text and assigning geospatial coordinates to these references.”³² Geoparsing software, therefore, allows automatic extraction of geographic context from textual data, computationally linking text and geographic location. By detecting geographic reference in the form of place names and associated spatial language, the software sets a digitized historical or literary text, for example, in its geographic context. Derived from a similar need of integrating spatiality within the human domain as in ancient and Renaissance geographic discourses, digital information retrieval and visualizations of geographic space connect real and imaginary places through geospatial technology. The abutment of theater studies and geoparsing may sound as an oxymoron to both early modern scholars and computer experts. My approach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Quotations and Translations
• 1. Introduction: Recomposing Space within Geographic Diversity
• 2. Reclaimed Ancient and Renaissance Geographic Commentaries
• 3. Ovid, Pontus Euxinus, and Geographic Imagination
• 4. Hydrography as Poetics: Rivers and Empires
• 5. Cities of the Sea: Constantinople—Mobility and Cosmopolitanism
• 6. Isolarii or Performative Island Routes
• 7. Conclusions: Staging Telemesic Space
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index