Mapping Shakespeare’s World

A slenderly written, lavishly illustrated volume, Mapping Shakespeare’s World states its goals directly: “This book sets out to survey the settings of the Shakespeare plays, to ask how familiar the...

The impression one gets is that the meanings associated with "ecolinguistic" point to issues that range from fieldwork techniques to linguistic representations of the environment, grammatical structures and cultural features at large. In other words, this adjective draws a combination of trajectories that eventually seem to conflate into the view of language as a social phenomenon laid down by Firth (1957) and later developed by Hallyday and Sinclair.
Equally notable from a methodological standpoint is the novelty of Nash's contribution to the field of toponyny since a "comparative study of the toponymy of two island locations has never been carried out in Australia or elsewhere in the world" (5). It is however worth adding that, in this respect, the research would probably have benefited from a more detailed account of the toponymy of Dudley Peninsula, which is instead mainly relegated to two quite slim chapters.
The South Pacific has long been a vast and inviting area for those interested in the dynamics of how language behaves with population shifts from island to island, and it is clear that Nash is fascinated by the toponymic and linguistic heritage that he has been able to recover and record. No doubt, Nash's detailed excursion into the placenames of these two Australian insular environments is of great relevance for linguists interested in endangered languages. However, its major and enduring value is perhaps to be found in the meticulous fieldwork that has made this unique achievement possible, namely the record of hundreds of toponyms (1045 on Norfolk Island and 232 on Dudley Peninsula) that enshrine linguistic and cultural jewels for present and future generations of scholars interested in these fields of research. In addition, the very personal style, the human experiences reported, and the many beautiful photos taken by the author zoom into the people and the landscapes of these two insular settings and make this book enjoyable for a broader, non-scholarly audience as well.

Bibliography
Firth, John R. 1957. Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951 A slenderly written, lavishly illustrated volume, Mapping Shakespeare's World states its goals directly: "This book sets out to survey the settings of the Shakespeare plays, to ask how familiar they were, or what they might have meant to Shakespeare himself and his contemporaries. It also maps Shakespeare's visual world in a more general sense, looking at historical events, historical figures and cultural stereotypes associated with those places" (4). Evidently a project commissioned by the Bodleian Library, it is a showcase for more than 102 images-maps, engravings, and paintings, handsomely reproduced in full color. These works are credited mainly to the Bodleian, the British Museum, or the British Library Board. Some are familiar, such as the 1590 Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni by Cesare Vecellio, whose portrait of a Moor often is reproduced in discussions of Othello. Others were new to me, such as a seventeenth-century drawing of Angers, employed by author Peter Whitfield in conjunction with his remarks on the setting of Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John.
That I am unable to report anything more about the latter drawing-not the name of its creator nor its place in French art nor its provenance nor the accuracy of its depiction of Angers-is typical of the book's casual attitude. Many of the beautiful illustrations are not even discussed in the text. For example, a detail of what a caption calls "the large perspective view of Venice by Jacopo de' Barbari printed in 1500" is celebrated for its "precision and imagination," but the engraving appears to have been reproduced simply because Shakespeare set two plays in Venice (61). No connections are made between Shakespeare's dramas and this visual representation of the city from a century before The Merchant of Venice and Othello.
Mapping Shakespeare's World is likewise cavalier in its treatment of the plays; although quotations, using modern spelling and punctuation, are included, no edition of the plays appears in the bibliography. Citations are provided in endnotes but generally supply only the author, title and date of the work; missing are the names of publishers, the editions (in all but two cases), and, in a few instances, the city of publication. Another anomaly is the treatment of Samuel Johnson's observation that "a man who has not been in Italy [,] is always conscious of an inferiority[,] from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see" (53). In addition to silently changing the punctuation of the quoted sentence, Mapping Shakespeare's World cites the passage from the Life of Samuel Johnson with, not a page number, but rather the date (11 April 1776) on which Johnson make his remark to Boswell (189; Boswell 3:42). Now, one can perhaps excuse a handsomely constructed book that minimizes notes, quotes carelessly, and abbreviates citations in an attempt to make a straightforward appeal to a popular audience-after all, Johnson's own 1765 edition of Shakespeare calls notes "necessary evils" (58). The physical attractiveness of Mapping Shakespeare's World is indisputable, and anyone with a basic interest in literary history or the Bard can find entertainment browsing its pages. Yet Whitfield's promised "survey [of] the settings of Shakespeare's plays" ironically is likely to appeal only to scholars very familiar with all 37 plays in the standard canon, rather than to a general reader. Dividing his study into three sections, Whitfield groups the plays by their settings: Greece, Rome & the Mediterranean; European cities and courts (Italian and non-Italian); and finally British plays, ancient, medieval and modern. The cursory text means that little time is spent delving into the subtleties of the dramas; instead, Whitfield simply describes the Renaissance significance of a location and then explains what the location may have meant to Shakespeare. Sometimes this requires no more than noting, say, that Shakespeare moved the action of his source for The Taming of the Shrew from Ferrara to Padua, a famous university town, doubtless because his twin plots depict true and false learning. This is interesting and sufficient. In cases where the Renaissance connotations of a particular setting are complicated, however, the superficiality of Whitfield's treatment likely will leave the general reader bewildered. For example, the canard that Venetian women were sexually loose and that Venice was a febrile melting pot of races and cultures informs the setting of both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, The Moor of Venice. Mapping Shakespeare's World offers nothing new on these topics to scholars and insufficient context for novices. All readers, with the possible exception of experts in Renaissance art, will find the treatment of the illustrations throughout the book frustratingly vague and their specific application to Shakespeare's texts elusive.
Yet Whitfield's comprehensive approach does make connections between plays that might otherwise be overlooked: Do the savage Timon of Athens and the magical A Midsummer Night's Dream share more than their ancient Greek setting? Whitfield pointedly asks, although he unsatisfactorily offers no answer. Elsewhere, he notes astutely that the two plays set almost entirely in London, Richard III and Henry VIII, are distinguished from the other history plays by a shared claustrophobic atmosphere and terrifying palace intrigues. Mapping Shakespeare's World remarks that in adapting the novel Pandosto, Shakespeare reversed the settings of Bohemia and Sicily; in The Winter's Tale, therefore, the unjustly jealous Leontes hails from the Italian island conventionally associated with revenge-as does the similarly named Leonato, the patriarch of Much Ado about Nothing. Diverted into speculations about the meaning of Bohemia, Whitfield surprisingly does not go on to explore the fact that not only are The Winter's Tale and Much Ado about Nothing both set in Sicily, but also in both works a woman who is unjustly accused of unchastity apparently dies and comes back to life, forgiving her accuser. He has more to offer on the parallels between the two plays set in Ephesus; once we realize that in the late romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre Shakespeare is revisiting the setting of his early farce The Comedy of Errors, the fact "refocuses our attention on the Comedy of Errors [as another] … story of separation, rediscovery and healing" (25, 30).
Shakespeare sometimes uses a place name straightforwardly as evocative shorthand, by including it in a work's title, as in The Merchant of Venice, or by having characters announce the setting when they enter, like Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, who declaims, "I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;/If wealthily, than happily in Padua." (1.2.74-75) In the 1976 American Conservatory Theater production, an onstage audience of Punchinellos cheered the play's frequent references to Padua and booed every mention of Petruchio's hometown of Verona (also the setting of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet). In performance, oft repeated place names can have incantatory power.
An intriguing area for further study is how less obviously emphasized names of countries or cities function in the plays. Perusing the plays for place names, one quickly realizes how often Shakespeare informs us, explicitly, where the action is taking place. In the English history plays in particular, the references are precise, evoking for the audience well-known geography. Sometimes the reference is in passing, as when at the end of Act 1 of The Tragedy of King Richard the Second Bushy informs the King that his uncle John of Gaunt is dying at Ely House; the following scene is then understood to be taking place at Ely House. Often characters will set the scene by asking about their surroundings, in an apparently throwaway line that Shakespeare nevertheless can invest with significance. Act 2, Scene 3 of Richard the Second begins with Bolingbroke asking Northumberland, "How far is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?" and receiving the answer, "Believe me, noble lord,/I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire." (2.3.1-3) King Richard likewise opens Act 3, scene 2 by asking "Barkloughly castle call they this at hand?" (3.2.1) His speech does more than advise the audience of the narrowing distance between him and Bolingbroke's army; his echo of Bolingbroke's speech from two scenes earlier alerts the audience to the fatally intersecting paths of the two royal cousins.
It can be easy to ignore place names in dialogue; indeed, lines mentioning the setting are normally cut in filmed versions of the plays, and even in modern theaters, when the setting can be established visually. Yet, as Whitfield's book reminds us, Shakespeare did not locate his plays in generalized landscapes. Even fantastical comedies are grounded in the "still-vexed Bermudas" (The Tempest 1.2.230) or "the Forest of Arden" (As You Like It 2.4.13)-(Ardennes?)-while contemporary audiences were prompt to distinguish Venice from Verona, to make meaning of Athens or Ephesus, and to find themselves at home in Gloucester or Greenwich or Gad's Hill.  Pleasantly, this reference does not center around Anglo-American contexts. Instead, as editors Teri Ainiala and Jan-Ola € Ostman explain in Chapter 1, the book's overall introduction, this collection explores how names are used 'to accomplish a variety of culturally, socially and interactionally relevant tasks' within Scandinavia (1). For this reason alone, the work is to be highly commended. However, this is not the sole reason why the publication deserves praise. Without exaggeration, every chapter in this volume provides the reader with genuinely intriguing research questions. Still, as with every multi-authored work, the chapters vary greatly in their ability to address these questions satisfactorily. This variability is manifest in both segments of the conceptually bifurcated volume.
Part One explores the intersections among 'Tradition, Identity and Transmission'. The four chapters in this section address the two of the largest branches of onomastics. The first, anthroponomastics, is the focus of Chapter 3 by Emilia Aldrin (Halmstad University) and Chapter 4 by Guldbrand Alhaug (University of Tromsø) with Minna Saarelma (University of Helskini). Both contributions investigate parental naming in Scandinavian families by using a combination of interviews and statistics. In the Aldrin study, the empirical data come from a postal survey of 621 Swedish parents in G€ oteborg. By contrast, the Alhaug and Saarelma investigation relies on national statistics compiled by the Central Bureau of Population of Norway. This is not the only contrast evident between these two chapters.
The Aldrin contribution excels in the level of sophistication and insight of its qualitative analyses. However, the relative depth, detail, and transparency of the quantitative analyses are less satisfactory. For example, although the chapter provides the conceptual model used for mapping the parents' onomastic choices, the reader is left to guess which precise criteria have been used to differentiate between the conceptually overlapping categories for data coding and analysis. This lack of procedural transparency makes it relatively difficult to assess the statistical reliability of the findings. Interestingly, where the Aldrin piece falls short, the Alhaug and Saarelma contribution excels, and vice visa. While the co-authors' presentation and discussion of their empirical findings are logical, robust, and rich with fascinating details, the two pages reserved for reporting the qualitative analyses of the interview data are disappointingly meager in both substance and specificity. Despite the unevenness in their execution, Chapters 3 and 4 come to a similar conclusion: the Scandinavian parents examined consciously selected names to signal publicly their own cultural identity and that of their children.
The other chapters in Part One examine the use of a different type of name as a public identity signpost, placenames. The first toponomastic contribution is made in Chapter 2 by Aud-Kirsti Pedersen (The Arctic University of Norway). This extremely ambitious study examines the contrasting use of toponyms by majority and minority communities across three different temporal and geolinguistic contexts: (1) contemporary Norway, where Norwegian has eclipsed Sami and Kven; (2) 9th-century Orkney, where Scots replaced the Old Norse dialect, Norn; and (3) 11th-century Normandy, where Norman