Mapping the Globe: The Cartographic Gaze and Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1

Summary

Throughout much of the 1570s, Christopher Saxton must have had terrible muscle aches. Day after day, week after week, he marched through the English countryside and climbed the steepest hills; yet he was not seeking personal pleasure but was on a mission: Saxton was the first map-maker in a modern sense to be sent out by an English monarch to measure the extent of the kingdom. His project – a collection of detailed maps created with the help of the latest technology available – was intended to contribute to the aggrandizement, or cult, of Queen Elizabeth, and his maps were supposed to show the vast spatial extent of her power. Thus, it was for political reasons that Saxton grew blisters on his feet – and, indeed, map-making turned out to be political, albeit with the result, at least in the long run, not quite hoped for by Elizabeth. We do not know how content she was with Saxton's maps when they were published in 1579; we do know, however, that neither Elizabeth nor her successor James I funded any of the great cartographic projects that were to follow. None of the major map-makers of late sixteenth-century England, such as William Camden, John Speed or John Norden, received royal funding as Saxton had. Obviously at some point in the late sixteenth century, map-making had gone wrong in the eyes of English monarchy. But where exactly?

An answer emerges when we take a closer look at some of these projects, following for a moment Richard Helgerson’s illuminating discussion of them. My first images show the frontispiece and one sheet of Saxton’s ground-breaking Atlas of England and Wales (Illustrations 1 and 2). As Helgerson forcefully reminds us, the fact that this project was funded by the government and designed as a survey of the queen’s property shows in the map itself. The monarchic claim to the country is clearly visible: each sheet is dominated by the royal arms, reminding readers, as they turn the pages and move from county to county, that each belongs to the queen.