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Was William Shakespeare an Eighteenth‐Century Geographer? Constructing Histories of Geographical Knowledge
Author(s) -
Mayhew Robert J
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
transactions of the institute of british geographers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.196
H-Index - 107
eISSN - 1475-5661
pISSN - 0020-2754
DOI - 10.1111/j.0020-2754.1998.00021.x
Subject(s) - geographer , textuality , historiography , humanism , historical geography , history , human geography , context (archaeology) , sociology , epistemology , literature , social science , geography , philosophy , archaeology , art , cartography , theology
A Wittgensteinian view of language and meaning is employed in a modified approach to the historiography of geography which steers between socio‐economic approaches and the scepticism engendered by post‐structuralist theories of language, so enabling connections between geography and humanism to be explored. The contextual history which flows from this method is exemplified by an analysis of eighteenth‐century editions of Shakespeare and the approaches they adopted to discussing Shakespeare's knowledge of geography and the natural world. The early eighteenth century edited Shakespeare in the light of subsequent knowledge of nature, thus removing him from historical context and rendering him as an eighteenth century geographer. By contrast, later editions, starting with Samuel Johnson's (1765), attempted to recover the geographical knowledge Shakespeare could have possessed in the Tudor period. The two editorial projects are related back to the religious, natural philosophical and historical beliefs of the editors. Individual intellects, the history of textuality and the shifting affiliations of geography in the division of knowledge need to be addressed more closely in future work on the history of geography.