The plot thickens: Surveying manuals, drama, and the materiality of narrative form in early modern England

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 69, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 617-648

  Brückner, Martin ^a   Poole, Kristen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250313484     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2002.0021     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. J. W. Harper, New Mermaids Series (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1966), 3.1.124-43.
2. Rosemary Kegl, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.
3. See E. G. R. Taylor, "The Surveyor," The Economic History Review 17 (1947): 123, 125-27.
4. For a comprehensive study of mathematical treatises and the rediscovery of geometry in sixteenth-century England, see Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954).
5. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1642 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 36-38, 164-66, 307-10;
6. Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603-1658 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 12-15, 109.
7. See A. W. Richeson, English Land Measuring to 1800: Instruments, and Practices (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966);
8. and J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon-Christie's, 1987).
9. Garrett A. Sullivan discusses the way in which developments in surveying technology affected the relationship between lord and tenants in The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 31-56.
10. The transition of estate maps from rarity to commodity is noted by Peter Eden, "Three Elizabethan Estate Surveyors: Peter Kempe, Thomas Clerke, and Thomas Langdon," in English Map-Making, 1500-1600, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: The British Library, 1983).
11. See also Maurice Beresford, History on the Ground (London: Lutterworth, 1957);
12. and David H. Fletcher, The Emergence of Estate Maps: Christ Church, Oxford, 1600 to 1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
13. These studies show that the circulation of estate maps thus coincides with the general widespread dissemination of maps and globes in northern Europe, as discussed by Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983),
14. and Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983).
15. Richard Benese's This Boke Sheweth the Measurynge of all Maner of Land (1537?, 1550?);
16. and the revised version The Boke of Measuryng the Lande. Newly Corrected and Compiled (1563, 1565).
17. Leonard Digges's A Book Named Tectonicon, Briefly Shewing the Exact Measuring, and Spedie Reckoning of all Maner Land, though originally published in 1556, achieved prominence when his son Thomas republished it in the 1590s.
18. A cursory publication history shows that, for example, Valentine Leigh's Science of Surveying was published twice in 1577, and reissued in 1578, 1588, 1592, and 1596.
19. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 108, 107.
20. Sullivan, 40.
21. Ra[du]lph Agas, A Preparative to Platting of Landes and Tenements for Surveigh (1596), 13-14.
22. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chap. 1.
23. Surviving copies of Hopton's book indicate that readers did indeed follow his orders in measuring their land. A copy of Speculum Topographicum at the Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 13783 copy 2) contains extensive inscriptions, consisting of numerical entires and marginalia that demonstrate hands-on, practical usage of the book. (For example, where Hopton writes, "Having prepared a faire sheet of paper, as you be taught before, about the middest thereof make a point" [139], the reader adds, "fasten it to an imoueable table to protract by needle," the clear voice of experience.)
24. Agas, 9.
25. Hopton, 147;
26. Agas, 13.
27. Edward Worsop, A Discovery of Sundrie Errours and Faults Daily Committed by Land-meaters (1582).
28. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, Kent English Reprints, The Renaissance, ed. Hilton Landry (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State Univ. Press, 1988), 312. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. Illustrations from the text are from the original edition, STC 20519.
29. Although Puttenham's instruments here are various components of poetic verse, the vocabulary is identical to that of surveying manuals; the invocation of "staffe," for example, taps into the rhetoric of texts promoting new surveying technologies, such as John Blagrave's Baculum Familliare ... A Booke of the Making and Use of a Staffe, Newly Invented by the Author, called the Familiar Staffe (1590),
30. and Thomas Hood's The Use of Two Mathematicall Instruments, the Crosse Staffe, and the Iacobs Staffe (1596). Puttenham's insistence upon poetry as craft parallels claims that surveying is art.
31. and Bennet.
32. For the extraliterary impact of geometry on language and bookmaking, see Roy Harris, Signs of Writing (London: Routledge, 1995);
33. and Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1990).
34. Blundeville, A Briefe Description of Universal Maps and Cards and of Their Uses (1589), 278;
35. v.
36. Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1630), in Thomas Dekker, Mermaid Series, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1859), 227.
37. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 70.
38. Middleton, The Puritan (1607), in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. F. Brooker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 3.3.109-12. Hereafter cited parentheticallly by act, scene, and line number. In recent years scholars have attributed this play to Middleton, and it will be included in the forthcoming edition of Middleton's plays edited by Gary Taylor.
39. Gillies, 72.
40. The quotation from Ortelius can also be found in Gillies, 72.
41. Andrew Gurr includes a facsimile from the plat, or plot, of 2 Seven Deadly Sins in The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 36.
42. Middleton, A Trick to Catch the Old One, in Middleton, Five Plays, ed. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 2.1.314, 321, 1.1.115.
43. For A Trick, Women Beware Women, and The Spanish Tragedy, which we discuss below, we have checked the spelling of plot against sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies of the play.
44. Cited in W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 4.
45. Middleton, Women Beware Women (1626), in Five Plays, 5.2.30, 32, 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
46. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne (London: A & C Black, 1989), 4.3.5-7. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
47. The Spanish Tragedy, 115n, 112n.
48. Greg, 1.
49. David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 100, 89, our emphases.
50. Similarly, Gurr, while reproducing a facsimile of The Platt, refers to "the plot of the second part of The Seven Deadly Sins" (34-36).
51. Elizabeth Dipple, Plot (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1970), 2.
52. See also Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984);
53. Thomas G. Pavel, The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985);
54. and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).
55. Dipple, 8.
56. Brooks, 24.
57. Agas, 2.
58. Lorna Hutson, "Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England," Representations 41 (1993): 86. In this essay, Hutson traces another genealogy of "plot," from its use in historical narratives to prose fiction.
59. Bradley, 83-84.
60. Palladis Tamia (1598), cited in Bradley, 2;
61. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 5.3.122.
62. Brooks, xii.