With William Shakespeare’s theatre called the Globe, what did he know about maps? More than a century after Shakespeare’s death, Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary defined a map as, “A geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the longitude and latitude.” For Shakespeare, a map was a basic pattern, but it was also something closer to Johnson’s definition. Precisely calculating longitude was still more than a hundred years in the future, in the era of Samuel Johnson, but making maps had reached a new level of accuracy. In his plays, Shakespeare gives evidence that he had seen these new maps.

Thirty years ago, in his invaluable Maps in Tudor England, P. D. A. Harvey recounted that “the sixteenth century saw a cartographic revolution in England.” That revolution in mapping derived not only from the ability to print maps in books, but also to draw maps to scale based on techniques used in surveying. These new methods of mapping became important both for military defense and for civil administration.

National defense became a priority with threat of Spanish invasion. Moreover, as Jonathan Bate spelled out in Soul of the Age (2009), one of those administrative uses of maps was for ministers of the crown to keep track of Catholic families. Families such as the Somervilles and Ardens, relatives of Shakespeare.

Less ominous, in the late 1500s, a surveyor from Yorkshire, Christopher Saxton, produced a series of accurate maps of the counties of England. By 1600, his maps were being reproduced in books, on tapestries, and on playing cards.

Based on this new sophistication in making maps, in Shakespeare’s day, a map could mean a correct pattern or, in today’s terminology, a blueprint. Three examples can suffice: In Henry VI, Part 2, Act III, Scene 1, King Henry VI says to his uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, “in thy face I see/The map of honour, truth, and loyalty.” Also, in Richard II, Act V, Scene 1, the Queen calls Richard II, “thou map of honour.” In Titus Andronicus, Act III, Scene 2, Titus calls Lavinia “thou map of woe.”

From the metaphorical to the actual, Shakespeare mentioned maps that were geographical depictions. In Henry IV, Part1, Mortimer, Glendower, and Hotspur discuss dividing the kingdom into three parts, and they consult a map and mark the new boundaries along the rivers Trent and Severn. In Henry V, Act IV, Scene 7, Fluellen refers to maps of the world and compares the maps of Macedon and Monmouth, noting their respective rivers and salmon.

Probably the best-known example, though, is in the opening scene of King Lear, when Lear calls for a map and indicates where he will divide his kingdom among his three daughters. The portion that he gives to his daughter Goneril he describes as, “Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,/With shadowy forests and with champains rich’d,/With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads.” Turning to Regan, he grants “To thee and thine hereditary ever/Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom,/No less in space, validity, and pleasure/Than that conferr’d on Goneril.” Awaiting Cordelia is “a third more opulent.”

From histories and tragedies, Shakespeare mentions even more detailed maps in two comedies. In Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2, Maria says of Malvolio, “he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies.” In The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 1, Salanio assures Salarino that had he a business venture, he would be “Peering in maps for ports and piers and roads.”

Where mention of a map might be expected is in The Tempest. However, the shipwrecked party never wonders how to locate on a map the island where they have come ashore. Given that The Tempest is on the order of a fairy tale, a nice touch for a director would be to have hanging on Prospero’s wall an enlargement of the map engraved by Ambrosius Holbein and published in 1518 in Thomas More’s island fantasy, Utopia.

With Shakespeare’s interest in history, especially British history, the new maps, drawn to scale and commercially printed, came at the right time for him. In the latter 1500s in Flanders, a German named Gerard Mercator published maps of the British Isles and of other parts of the world. In 1570 he published the first book of maps to be called an atlas. Contemporaries hailed Mercator’s maps for their accuracy, and they admired that he developed a way mathematically to project a sphere onto two dimensions. Despite its necessary distortions, the Mercator Projection remains useful to this day.

Also in the Low Countries around those years was another pioneering cartographer, Abraham Ortelius. He published an atlas as well, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. With Shakespeare (through Jaques) saying in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage,” it is tempting to picture the Bard turning the pages of a book whose title in English would be The Theatre of the World.

Exactly which maps Shakespeare pored over can probably never be known. In any case, it is fair to imagine Shakespeare studying new maps of the world, or at least parts of the world that he fancied. Most especially, he studied maps, whether by Mercator or Ortelius, Saxton or somebody else, of England’s cities and shires. If nothing else, those scale maps with their “ports and piers and roads” showed him how to find his way from Stratford to London and back again.

Since Shakespeare was no university student, his study of maps, like his study of history, was self-directed. In 1999, John Guy, writing in The Oxford History of Britain, put it very well: “His orbit centred on Stratford and London, not Oxford and Cambridge.” Guy added, “His was the everyday world of life, death, money, passion, stage business, and the alehouse—such matters became the stuff of peerless drama and poetry.”

Within that everyday world, Shakespeare’s mention of maps tells us something about what he thought his audience knew about maps. Whether groundlings or gallery, they would have understood his references. What becomes tantalizing is whether they caught his mistake in The Winter’s Tale, where he gave a coastline to landlocked Bohemia.

It could be they did but didn’t care. Apparently more important and more interesting to them and to Shakespeare were new maps showing all the lines of the Indies. In 1600 the queen granted a charter creating the East India Company, and in that Age of Exploration, Shakespeare and his audience knew that England’s fortunes lay overseas.