Staging the Southern Continent 1565-1606

Globe, The, Jan, 2003 by Mercedes Maroto Camino

The classical idea of Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem ("all the world is a stage") pervades many maps produced during the early modern period. The theatricality of the world is of special interest in relation to the mythical Southern Continent. For as long as the Pacific remained uncharted, geographical discoveries and fantasy interacted in the construction or invention of this large area of the world.

The maps looked at in this paper are cultural, social and spatial representations that stand at the threshold between the moralized geography prevalent in the Middle Ages and the post-enlightenment representations with which we are now familiar. Thus, many early modern maps present a vision of the world that is both moral and geographical. Reality and fantasy merge in the histrionic representation of the world as a stage that influences the mapping of the Pacific at the time the journeys of Alvaro Mendana and Pedro Fernandez de Quiros took place between 1567 and 1606. Reinforced by a view of life as representation, and of the world as a stage where humans follow the designs of divine destiny, these maps, like the narratives that often accompanied them, create a universe where fiction and reality are representation both for the actors and for the viewers.

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Theatricality is deep in every cultural action. (Dening, 109)

The classical idea of the world as a stage, Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem, pervades many maps and narratives of exploration during the early modern period. This notion infuses many world maps, which offer a vision of a fragile universe, reminding viewers that human life is short and ephemeral. Much like Hamlet, the mirror these maps hold up to view reflects an image of life as being briefly performed upon a stage, as well as of human mortality.

These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world maps present a vision of the world that is both moral and geographical, as demonstrated in the way they display ostentatiously the baroque theme of vanitas. (1) These stock themes crossed the Christian divide between Reformers and Catholics to become one of the prevalent notions underlying exploration and mapmaking from the second half of the sixteenth century till well into the seventeenth.

The histrionic notion of the world as a stage is of special interest in relation to the early modern maps of the hypothetical Southern Continent. As long as the Pacific remained uncharted, geographical discoveries and fantasies interacted in the invention of this large area of the world. These maps stress the religious notions underlying Renaissance geography and the idea of a histrionic world that is divinely ordained. Among these, the heart-shaped world map of Jodocus Hondius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, published in 1589 (Fig. 1), offers some interesting insights. (2) This miniature map is the first known work of Hondius, who fled the religious struggles in the Netherlands to live in London in the 1580s before returning to Amsterdam in 1592 or 1593. Here the image of the whole universe, which is suspended by a cord held by the hand of God and thereby subject to God's divine power, has clearly been constructed by human action. This is seen by the map's incorporation of recent discoveries and its open acknowledgement of the recent circumnavigation of the world by Sir Francis Drake (1577-80). (3) The rounding of the southernmost tip of South America and the presence of the island baptized by Drake as Insula Regina Elizabetha attest to the achievements of the journey. Two concepts that seem to us to contradict each other, scientific progress and religious predetermination, are clearly combined in this map.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The ways cartographic representations highlight the meaninglessness of exploration and construct world geography as a theatre are neatly summed up in a map produced nearly at the same time as Hondius, and usually known as the "Fool's Cap" map c. 1590 (Fig. 2). (4) This map, which follows that of Abraham Ortelius in its geographical features, is derived from one made by Jean de Gourmont c. 1575, and is designed to emphasize the overlapping of exploration and vanity. (5) The characterization of the world as a fool offers a wide array of possible interpretations, for the fool was a cultural icon embodying multiple meanings.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

These meanings ranged from the relationship of madness with wisdom, inherited from the classical tradition, to, as Peter Whitfield sums up, the role of scapegoat:

   The Fool's origin and central role seems
   to have been in magic: he was a kind of
   scapegoat who drew down upon himself
   the forces of evil, unreason or ill-fortune,
   and by confronting them, averted the
   power from his community. He was
   licenced [sic] to break rules, speak
   painful truths, and mock at power and
   pretension, and the grotesque shape he
   bore was a kind of living punishment ...
   it is now the whole world which takes on
   the Fool's costume, thus forcing the
   viewer to confront the possibility that the
   whole created order is irrational, alien
   and threatening. (78)