Seeing and Overseeing the Stage as Map in Early Modern Drama
Résumé
In the public theatre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, cartographic fictions were not just a way of displaying the theatrum mundi, but more significantly they invited their spectators to engage in a power relation with it through a process of visual and imaginative appropriation of perspective. Focusing on a series of plays of travel and conquest from that period, this chapter considers instances in which maps of kingdoms or world maps overflow the boundaries of an onstage, hand-held prop or a running metaphor to become the stage itself, putting the spectators in the empowered, overseeing perspective of the cartographer surveying and drawing a stage map. The consistent use of that device in such heroic standards as Tamburlaine, Henry V, The Four Prentices of London, Old Fortunatus, and The Travels of the Four English Brothers is testimony to how much cartographic and perspective literacy was not just an elitist phenomenon targeting the audiences of court masques, but was identifiable by, and directed at, a larger public. This chapter further argues how competing cartographic options can provide alternative interpretations in the specific case of King Lear as both a map of nothingness and a map of enriched perspective.