Conclusions: Staging Telemesic Space

Abstract

The interdisciplinary dynamic of geocriticism accounts for a model of interpenetration among disciplines, so the association of early modern geographic and cartographic visualizations and theatrical space yields unexpected dimensions. As a Heraclitean river, drama is never the same twice. Theatrical space is disparate rather than encompassed; it is drifting rather than stable, traversed rather than settled. Since instability is a distinctive attribute of a unity formerly taken for granted, dramatic representations of the major components of relief display the language of multiplicity within a self-reflexive, metatheatrical continuum. In outlining the materiality of spatial signifying practices and the ways in which the Jacobean theater interacts with the context of early modern society, Russell West points out the theater’s self-reflexivity: “To examine the self-reflexivity of art is, in final analysis, to situate the work of art in a place.”1 This place, however, is as much Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England as it is ancient Britain and Gaul, Ottoman Constantinople and ancient Byzantium, or the multi-dimensional and politically ambivalent Maltese archipelago and other Mediterranean islands. Indeed, in the perpetual oscillation between center and periphery, here and there, then and now, the theater’s polyvocality and polychronicity maintains a metonymic relation with the geographic spaces it represents and constitutes itself as the site of radical possibility, the space of resistance.