SOURCE: Sanford, Rhonda Lemke. “A Room Not One's Own: Feminine Geography in Cymbeline.” In Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, edited by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, pp. 63-85. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Sanford links the Renaissance connection between women's bodies and geography—evident in the iconography of Elizabeth I—to the wager plot in Cymbeline. She compares Iachimo's cataloguing of Imogen's bedchamber and the mark on her breast (II.ii) to the work of a mapmaker and likens his improvisational report of what he observed (II.iv) to a tale told by a traveler returned from distant lands.

I

In the literature of travel and exploration, the language of desire is frequently used to advertise new discoveries enticingly. Columbus described the New World alluringly as “a land to be desired, and, seen, it is never...