Shakespeare's wavering geography: Religious topographia in Cymbeline

Abstract

As forms of vivid description, or enargia, the figures of topographia, topothesia, and chorographia feature prominently in Elizabethan rhetoric manuals. This article considers Cymbeline's wavering geography as a confluence of these tropes. It reads the multiple rhetorical constructs of Shakespearean topographia in Cymbeline as instances of dislocation between the strictures imposed by a national identity project and the ever-present longing for a traditional religious past. In this respect, Cymbeline, whose Christian intimations are still the subject of contention, may also be said to dramatise and interrogate the precarious settlements (cultural, religious, and geographical) brought about by the Henrician reformation.