Virtual Grub Street: Malvolio’s Crow's Feet and “the new Mappe”.

In this series:

Malvolio’s Crow's Feet and “the new Mappe”
Henry Neville’s Twelfth Night in Context.
What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01?

Percy Allen may be among the first to adopt as a method exhaustively checking the records of the Royal Court of Queen Elizabeth for sources for the plays of Shakespeare. The method was somewhat revolutionary. In recent times it might be called a dominant method of Oxfordian research. Of recent decades quantities of references have been forwarded as proof of every kind if theory. As now, so too then: Allen’s results went the gamut from quite possible to merest conjecture to surely he should have seen how ridiculous.

The one persistent strength of his work also predicts the strength of his successors. In the process he exhumes every kind of small historical detail helping it to find its way into the scholarly record toward whatever purpose it might eventually be put. Allen may be right or wrong about his theories but we are richer in data for his efforts.

While Allen wrote his ‘Historic Origins of “Twelfth Night”’[1] before he openly declared his confidence that Edward de Vere had written the works that go under the name of “Shakespeare,” it is clear that he was coming to that conclusion. Asserting that his research showed the play began as a masque played at Court around 1581 went a long way toward excluding the Stratford man from its authorship. Prominently mentioning the Earl of Oxford, who was reputed as an exceptional Court playwright, as a model for Count Orsino kept him close at hand.

That it is unlikely that Oxford was a model to any degree for the Count hardly matters any more.[2] The method remains strong. Allen himself also advanced the Duke of Alenҫon (then having risen to be Duke of Anjou) as the main model. The models were chosen from the Court circa 1581 he suggested. The play had been an Interlude[3] along the lines of Lyly’s Sapho and Phao of the same year. Once the theory is fleshed out it is surprisingly strong.

If the character Olivia is modelled in part upon Queen Elizabeth — and, again, there is a strong argument for it — Orsino is likely modeled on Alenҫon. But Olivia/Elizabeth does not marry Orsino/ Alenҫon in the end. If the playwright first wrote the play in order to encourage the marriage he has gone about his task in a most ironic fashion.

The plot of the play, of course, comes from a story from Shakespeare’s beloved Italian short story writer Mateo Bandello. The originals for Viola and Orsino marry in it. They marry in the play. Olivia marries Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian. Viola and Sebastian are, at most, based upon a minor French courier and a special envoy from Alenҫon with whom the Queen flirted shamelessly. This was hardly a way to encourage the French marriage. At most, it was a way to entertain an audience with models of persons and situations they personally knew in order to flesh out Bandello’s characters and make his plot even more entertaining.

If we look for scholarly estimates of the date of the play we find that no one seems to be sure. The best guess of traditional Stratfordians according to Kevin Gilvary’s Dating Shakespeare’s Plays[4] is 1602. Oxfordians seem more divided between 1581 (without mention of Allen) and 1593.

It is here that we must look into one of those small details that Allen unearthed (albeit not from Court records), whether or to what degree his theories are valid or not. Models for characters can be frustratingly subjective. Rarely are they as generally agreed upon as Polonius being the Baron Burghley in Hamlet. Rarely is the evidence as compelling. Rarely can they be used, then, to establish the date a play was written or performed.

When Maria says of Malvolio, however

He does smile his face into more lynes, then is in the new Mappe, with the augmentation of the Indies (III.ii.78-9)

rather less subjective matters are at hand. We learn beyond doubt that the playwright has an easy familiarity with maps. They being mysterious and expensive in those days, few did.

More still, there is the promise that identifying this “new Mappe“ will go a long way toward establishing a date of composition. Such a small detail can be a powerful tool.

Traditionalists favor Edward Wright’s “A Chart of the World on Mercator’s Projection”[5], we are informed by Marion Peel in Dating Shakespeare’s Plays. “The map has radiating rhumb lines, suggesting the wrinkles around Malvolio’s eyes.” The rhumb lines referred to, it bears pointing out, are the lines of longitude and latitude. ‘[T]he conclusion,’ says the 19^th century scholar C. H. Coote, ‘is irresistible that this map had every claim to be regarded as the "new map," in that it was published in 1599, within two years of the performance of Twelfth Night in 1601.'

According to the 18^th century scholar George Steevens Maria’s simile is “A clear allusion to a Map engraved for Linschoten's Voyages, an English translation of which was published in 1598.”[6] This map has even more lines as it leaves in place all of the construction lines employed to transfer it from a spherical perspective.

Steevens’ candidate is not a complete map of the globe. Its lines, however, greatly outnumber those in the Mercator. (The lines in both form rectilinear grids.) As any decent scholar knows, words such as “undeniable” or “irresistible,” etc., are set up like Cherubim at the gates of Eden to intimidate the curious. They are a sign that a conclusion is anything but irresistible.

Percy Allen’s candidate is not mentioned by any of these parties. The traditionalists, of course, could not consider it possible because it would suggest far too early a date for the play. But why, according to Dating Shakespeare’s Plays, and a review of the literature, the Oxfordians would seem to have chosen for their prime candidate the Molyneux’s 1592 Mercator globe from which the 1598 map would later be transposed can only be guessed. The only answer would seem to be that they haven’t read Percy Allen’s essay.

Now there can be no denying that all maps of the time could have been called “new”. They also all had lines. But Percy’s candidate, Ortellius’s “Americae Sive Novi Orbis Nova Descriptio” in the atlas Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum (1579), has certain advantages over the other candidates. Foremost, it is entitled “Novi Orbis Nova Descriptio,” “The New World Map”! No need to post Cherubim in order to keep its newness from inspection. Furthermore, it advertises that its descriptions are expanded (additamentum). No small part of the additions, it expands and clarifies its previous description of the Indies. Another solid translation of the Latin titles could be a “new Mappe, with augmentation”.

Also to the point, Ortellius’ map has a lot of lines… but comparatively few of them are rectilinear. They represent in an exaggerated fashion the meandering of rivers and flow of sea currents. It’s fair to say that the rivers in particular look a lot like deep crow’s feet at the corners of so many eyes.

[1] Allen, Percy. Shakespeare and Chapman as Topical Dramatists (1929). 14-49.

[2] Oxford’s love of the virtuous character advanced in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and the original character in Bandello’s short story more than account for any resemblance.

[3] He says a “masque favoring the Aleҫon marriage”.

[4] Peel, Marion. “Twelfth Night, or what you will.” Dating Shakespeare’s Plays: A Critical Review of the Evidence. Kevin Gilvary, ed.

[5] New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare Twelfe night (1901). 209. “Coote proves that the maker of this 'new map' was Emmerie Mollineux, 'possibly with the assistance of Hakluyt.'”

[6] Ibid., 208.