Drayton, Michael; Hole, William (eng.)
Oxford, Bucks and Berks. 1612. Hand-coloured, mounted.
Drayton was an Elizabethan poet and friend to Shakespeare. His life's work was Poly-Olbion, a collection of poems celebrating the beauty of the English countryside. The accompanying maps, attributed to William Hole, were designed to suit the nature of Elizabethan pastoral poetic allegory, rather than to show true geographic detail. As such, they personify the landscape with nymphs in the rivers, female tutelary figures for cities and similar representative illustrations. These are not strictly maps, as we would understand them, but rather a way for Elizabethan England to find not its way, but its identity. It shows a way to read the landscape as part of an idealised classical state of being - like associations of Elizabeth with Diana - and as such, forms a part of the growing concern with English national identity that typifies the Elizabethan era.