Partial Views: Shakespeare and the Map of Ireland
Klein, Bernhard
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2/ Special Issue 3 (September, 1998)
Abstract
Contemporaries were divided over the visual power of maps: while some praised the privileged visibility afforded by cartography, apparent in the exciting possibility “to view the whole world at one view” (Thomas Blundeville 1589), others commented on the uselessness of what they saw as little more than vague geographical records, literally “superficial” images of a far more complex spatial reality. The aim of this paper is to explore the operation (and political functionalization) of this ambivalent visual code in one specific historical instance, the English construction of Irish space in Elizabethan and Jacobean times: in contemporary maps, Ireland could either be fully exposed and dragged into open view, or literally forced off the map and pushed into an indistinct and shadowy background. Such “partial views” of Ireland, I argue, are not only endemic in maps but also in contemporary plays, and in order to explore conceptual interrelations between the dramatic and cartographic representation of what many observers rationalized as Ireland’s intractable spatial otherness, the essay considers several early modern Irish maps alongside four plays by Shakespeare. The analysis of maps and plays reveals, I argue, both the continuing English interest in Irish space, as well as the gradual discursive accomodation of Irish cultural difference into a “British” framework.
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