19/01/2025
‘This dear, dear land.’ John of Gaunt’s death-bed elegy for ‘this sceptred isle’ in Richard II (1597) is one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare. Still quoted 400 years later – as patriotism or critique in wartime propaganda, television dramas, parliamentary speeches and anti-littering adverts – ‘this England’ is a classic political setpiece.
But Gaunt’s mournful celebration of ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea’, ‘This blessèd plot’, ‘Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege / Of wat’ry Neptune’ is also part of another tradition: the lost art of chorography.
Although nature and travel writing remain established forms, chorography has been largely, undeservedly forgotten in the literary landscape. Yet this protean form, deriving from the Greek choros (‘place’) and graphia (‘writing’), combining geography and topography, social and cultural history, antiquarianism and mythology, panegyric and lament, is a vital chapter in intellectual history. It was not just Shakespeare’s dramas that were profoundly influenced by chorography, but much of the literary culture of early modern England, including the work of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton and Thomas Hobbes. The story of chorography, though, begins in the ancient world.
Ptolemy’s Geography (c.149 AD) began by stating that ‘Geography is a representation in picture of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein,’ whereas ‘chorography, selecting certain places from the whole, treats more fully of the particulars […] even dealing with the smallest localities, such as harbours, farms, villages, river courses and such like’, ‘as if one were to paint only the eye or the ear by itself.’ Ptolemy thus frames chorography as an art of place.
