The geography of tragedy: mapping allusions to places in a set of Shakespearean plays

Abstract Allusions to places were collected from the dialogue of twenty-two early modern English tragedies and projected onto maps to detect patterns in the plays‘ geographies as a set, by authorial grouping, and by individual play. The sample was composed of eleven Shakespeare tragedies and eleven randomly selected non-Shakespeare tragedies. In the full sample set the greatest concentration of place names was in the eastern Mediterranean. Places in Italy were especially well represented, and numerous individual places within Rome were cited. London was not mentioned. There was only one mention of a place in the Americas. About the same number of place name mentions appeared in the Shakespeare set compared to the reference set but the Shakespeare tragedies referred to fewer different places overall. There was a wide variation between individual plays in the number of place name mentions and the number of different places mentioned. The maps are accessible through the Time Layered Cultural Map platform where they can be explored by region, by play and in various user-defined combinations. It is possible also to download the underlying datasets from the platform for use in other applications, and to add new datasets to the platform and layer those over the existing sets to answer different questions.