'The end of all': how a forgotten map helped us forget Newington Butts

'The end of all': how a forgotten map helped us forget Newington Butts

In 1796, Edmond Malone was embroiled in a bitter dispute with George Chalmers over the authenticity of the Samuel Ireland papers, and used several famous maps for evidence. He did this not because of what any of these maps included but because of what was missing on all of them: Shakespeare’s Globe. One map not cited by Malone was “London and Westminster in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Anno Dom. 1563” by John Wallis (1789), and which I show was far from obscure. Malone had to omit this famous map for the rather embarrassing fact that it depicts “Shakspere’s Play-house” dominating the Bankside landscape a year before the playwright was even born. Since Wallis’s map was not used as an exemplar by Malone, then, it has largely been forgotten, but I argue in this chapter that this map does provide an insight into this crucial juncture in early theatre history. Wallis’s map took the basic imprint set down in the Copperplate Map and refashioned it for the popular taste at a time when antiquarian interest in the life and times of Shakespeare was on the rise. As the edges of these maps fused with the idea of the extent of Elizabethan London, it became natural to view the playhouse on the perimeter of the map as central to the cultural character of the city. In the antiquarian world view, the map allowed them to see the end of all of the City of London, from which perspective the Newington Butts playhouse located further to the south—out of sight, out of mind—was for all intents and purposes lost in a vacuum.

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