Mapping English History in the “Universall World” When the
rebels of Henry IV Part I (1597) pore over a map of England,
dividing the land they expect to win, they may as well lick
their lips. “Come, here’s the map,” Glyndwr says, “Shall we
divide our right, / According to the threefold order ta’en?”
(3.1.67–68). Shakespeare’s audience surely squirmed as they
watched the emergent infant English nation separated with
surgical precision. If the play traces the deep divides between
lords and king, the map shows that those ruptures now appear in
the geographical spaces of England itself. It’s a device
Shakespeare repeats again in King Lear (1606), with just as much
impact for those concerned for England’s status as a collective
whole. Any spectator familiar with the history of Brutus or the
early Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc (1561) would know what comes
of such division: civil war and tragedy. The map simply makes
that anxiety of division and cultural rupture visual. But King
Lear and Henry IV Part I share another