Mapping King Lear

Summary

An older generation of critics frequently talked about the world of King Lear as a sort of framework within which the characters and events of the play exist. By drawing on early modern conventions of constructing and using maps, John Gillies's commentary in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference offers a new vocabulary for talking about this creation of a space within which the tragedy is worked out. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a great age of map-making, in part as they dealt with the discovery, exploration and colonization of the New World. Gillies argues that the Globe Theatre itself, in which King Lear had its early productions, was 'a kind of map: a quasi-cartographic product of the same type of cosmographic imagination which produced the world maps of Ortelius and Mercator'. Gillies justifies calling the Globe a map by applying J. B. Harley's definition of maps as 'graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world'. It is sometimes assumed that the movement toward new, more accurate modes of geographic representation in early modern map-making entailed a movement away from expressive representation, as in older maps, toward an objective, scientific kind of map; but Gillies argues persuasively that maps down even to the present remain full of expressive content, though precisely what is expressed may change in different maps with different social roles. What then is it that was mapped for an audience in 1607 or 2007 as they attended to King Lear?