The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England

In the third act of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624), the virtuous White Knight uncovers the Machiavellian endeavors of his opponent, the insidious Black Knight. The Black Knight's lackey arrives to give him the bad news:

BLACK KNIGHT'S PAWN:	Sir, your plot's discovered.
BLACK KNIGHT:	Which of the twenty thousand and nine hundred
	Four score and five, canst tell?
BLACK KNIGHT'S PAWN:	Bless us, so many?
	How do poor countrymen have but one plot
	To keep a cow on, yet in law for that?
	You cannot know 'em all sure by their names, sir.
BLACK KNIGHT:	Yes, their number trebled. Thou hast seen
	A globe stands on the table in my closet?
BLACK KNIGHT'S PAWN:	A thing, sir, full of countries and hard words?
BLACK KNIGHT:	True, with lines drawn some tropical, some oblique.
BLACK KNIGHT'S PAWN:	I can scarce read, I was brought up in blindness.
BLACK KNIGHT:	Just such a thing, if e'er my skull be opened,
	Will my brains look like.
BLACK KNIGHT'S PAWN:	Like a globe of countries.
BLACK KNIGHT:	Ay, and some master-politician
	That has sharp state-eyes will go near to pick out
	The plots, and every climate where they fastened;
	'T will puzzle 'em too.
BLACK KNIGHT'S PAWN:	I'm of your mind for that, sir.
BLACK KNIGHT:	They'll find 'em to fall thick upon some countries;
	They'd need to use spectacles. But I turn to you now,
	What plot is that discovered?1

On the verge of their downfall, the Black Knight and his Pawn thus engage in seemingly trivial banter revolving around the word "plot." In addition to the pervasive meaning of "plot" as a devious scheme, the illiterate Pawn conceptualizes "plot" as a patch of land sufficient for a cow, while the educated Knight indulges in cartographic fantasies about the autopsy of his own brain; "plot" assumes bovine as well as geographic and political import. "Plot," as the Pawn complains, does indeed become a "hard word"—it signifies the physical realities of the earth, and yet, given its multiple meanings, it is difficult to understand. For the audience, as for the politicians the Knight envisions inspecting his skull, "pick[ing] out the plots" in this passage becomes in itself a "puzzle," as the word assumes a different significance at every turn.

Middleton's overdetermined exploitation of "plot" points to the word's deep resonance in early modern English culture. At the turn of the seventeenth century, "plot" pervaded popular discourse in new and interconnected ways: the explosion of surveying manuals (guidebooks for charting the land) corresponded with the development of the idea of narrative plot (literal and figurative charts of a story line). The Oxford English Dictionary cites Middleton's writings to illustrate three different etymologies for "plot": A Game at Chess, Women Beware Women, and The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased are used, respectively, to define "plot" as a piece of ground, as a literary sketch, and even as the idea of representation more generally. As seen in the exchange between the Black Knight and his Pawn, Middleton also uses "plot" in the sense of a subversive scheme. The recurrent punning on "plot," found in the writings of Middleton and many of his contemporaries, exemplifies Patricia Parker's argument in Shakespeare from the Margins that "the terms of this wordplay make possible glimpses into the relation between the plays and their contemporary culture, in a period when English was not yet standardized into a fixed orthography, obscuring on the printed page the homophonic networks possible before such boundaries were solidified." ² Indeed, in playing with "plot"—a word which increasingly implied structures imposed upon both land and text—late Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists self-consciously call attention to this very process of solidifying lexical, geographic...