How did we build our maps?
Our “overview” map of London (which shows the city and playhouse maps all together) and each of our playhouse district maps have been constructed around London in the year 1616–our “anchor” date. This date falls at an overlapping point between the lifespans of these different playhouses and, conveniently, has some theatre-historical significance: it saw the very first Folio publication (a large and costly print size of a sheet of paper folded just once) of early modern plays in Ben Jonson’s Works–an important step in the cultural significance of English drama; it’s the date of a well-known view of London [link in media]; and it is the year Shakespeare died.
We have used a range of contemporary sources–legal documents, petitions, surveys, arrest warrants, business transactions, maps, and other material from the early modern record–as well as academic scholarship to build out what each district looked like that year. The maps themselves are based on the 1682 Morgan Map (named after its cartographer William Morgan, d.1690) and a variety of other historical cartographic and textual sources.
Our historical maps have been geo-referenced (that is, linked to contemporary, spatially accurate maps) using methods pioneered by predecessor projects Locating London’s Past and Layers of London, both developed by the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the University of London, and its partners. The IHR and its partners continue to be involved today, providing georeferenced historical map images and other support for our project. Our mapping continues to use “GIS” (or Geographic Information Systems) to ensure the maps correspond to the shape and coordinates of the city today. We are in the process of building up a picture of the urban landscape within each of our playhouse districts, to use as the background setting for exploring the relationships and connections within the theatrical world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
