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England Goes Global: Drake's Circumnavigation Medal

On Christmas Eve 1968 Apollo 8 became the first manned spaceship to circle the moon, and the film footage that NASA sent back changed our perception of the world forever. For there, as the three astronauts rounded the dark side of the moon, was the earth itself, a great globe suspended in the vast darkness of space. It was the first time any human being had seen the whole planet at a single glance and the world has thought about itself differently ever since.

Nearly 400 years earlier, a very different journey had caused a comparable revolution if on a smaller, national scale. In 1580 Francis Drake became the first Englishman, and only the second man in history, to sail his ship round the globe. And in consequence, to the English, the whole world suddenly looked different: its limits were known, it could be mapped and plotted, it could be crossed by a single English ship. In 1580 Shakespeare was 16.

And it wasn't just world geography that was turned on its head. Shakespeare's generation, those coming of age in the 1580s and 1590s, had to rethink every aspect of existence. Reformation, exploration and scientific discovery were dislocating the assumptions by which their parents and grandparents had lived. In religion, politics, commerce, on every front, the rules were being rewritten. That's what Shakespeare's plays are about.

But can we now recover that sense of uncertainty and shock, when the original audience responded to scenes that for them referred to the hot topics of the day, but for us have lost that power to unsettle?

In this series, I'll be trying to do just that. I'll be choosing 20 objects, things that have survived from Shakespeare's world and which lead us into the preoccupations and pleasures of the people that first queued up to watch his plays. I want to look at the shifting, restless world in which Shakespeare and his public were so exhilaratingly, sometimes terrifyingly, caught up.

For my generation that watched the first moon landing, the words `one small step' still resonate powerfully. For the generation shaped by Drake's exploration of the known world, what Shakespeare wrote must frequently have sounded like the news but presented by a poet.

Oberon: 'We the globe can compass soon,

Swifter than the wandering moon.'

(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.96-7)

Puck: 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes.'

(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.1.175-6)

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his mischievous attendant Puck boast that they can circumnavigate the globe in just over half an hour. It took Francis Drake nearly three years and I'm holding in my hand now the world that he traversed. It's a silver medal about 7cm in diameter, so roughly the size of a car's tax disc and nearly as thin, it is paper thin. As you turn it in the light you can see on one side Europe, Africa and Asia and on the other, the Americas. Across the oceans tiny dots indicate the route that Drake followed. From Plymouth down to the tip of South America, up the coast where Lima and Panama are both marked, onto California, over the Pacific to the Spice Islands in Indonesia, then round the Cape of Good Hope and up the coast of West Africa and home.

Created about the time that Shakespeare began his theatrical career in London, this medal is a glamorous memento, a silver souvenir-map of Drake's thrilling voyage. It lets us grasp, literally, this new way of imagining the world in the 1580s and the 1590s and for the Elizabethan playgoer watching A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1590s for the first time, encompassing the globe, putting a girdle around the earth, was news, patriotic news that every person in the audience would have known about. Shakespeare's very English fairies are, in their whimsical way, restating the nation's pride in Drake's accomplishment, just like our silver medal.

Drake's dramatic round-the-world journey on the Golden Hind ended in the autumn of 1580:

'And the 26 of September we safely with joyful minds and thankful hearts to God arrived at Plimouth, the place of our setting forth after we had spent 2 yeares 10 moneths and some odd few days besides in seeing the wonders of the Lord in the deep, in discouering so many admirable things, in going through so many strange adventures, in escaping out of so many dangers, and ouercoming so many difficulties in this our encompassing of the neather globe, and passing round the world.'

This 'passing round the world' brought with it exotic goods and even more exotic tales that would go on to fire the public imagination. More importantly though, it was the 16th century equivalent of the 'space race' as England with far fewer resources first tried to match Spain's skill and technology in navigating, and then began to assault the huge wealth of the Spanish Empire. This circumnavigation medal celebrates England's first great success on both fronts, and the next two decades saw dozens of English adventurers set off to emulate Drake's example. For military reasons, the precise details of Drake's voyage were treated as a state secret for several years. And it was only after the English saw off the Spanish Armada in 1588 that a large map of Drake's circumnavigation went on triumphant public display at Elizabeth I's palace in Whitehall. There thousands of visitors, and Shakespeare must certainly have been among them, would have been able to see it.

Our silver medal was a reduced, portable version of the Whitehall wall map with exactly the same purpose, to be a patriotic statement of Drake's great feat. The medal, like the map, is a calculated piece of political propaganda. Peter Barber is responsible for the maps at the British Library, and has made a special study of maps of Elizabethan England:

'If you look, you'll see that at the top of North America, there is a little note saying that this was discovered by the English, which historically speaking is fairly outrageous, and further down you've got a marking of the Virginia colony which would have made any Spaniard see red. But what is particularly interesting of course is that the Virginia colony, which is marked there, was founded after Drake got back from his round the world cruise. So this map we now know was not made in 1580, it is made in 1589 which is, in other words, a year after the Armada.'

This provocative teasing of the Spaniards goes on all over the medal. If you look just above California you can see in large letters the words 'Nova Albion' (New England or New Briton) striding across much of North America. Below, 'N. Hispania' (New Spain) looks as though it's just a small cattle ranch west of Texas.

Somewhere off the coast of Peru and Panama, Drake had raided Spanish shipping and had captured nearly ten tons of silver. To add insult to Spanish injury our medal is almost certainly made of that stolen silver. The silver also bought spices in the East Indies and so Drake came home to Plymouth with a cargo worth a fortune. His financial backers recovered their investment many times over, while the Queen took a share that almost doubled her annual income. Exploring like this was not just an adventure, it was also big business, and maps and globes allowed everybody, not just the investors, to share in the fun.

In The Comedy of Errors, written about 1592, Dromio, the quick-witted servant, outrageously compares a plump kitchen maid to a globe as he sets off on a raunchy geography lesson looking for treasure all over her:

Dromio: She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.

Antipholus: In what part of her body stands Ireland?

Dromio: Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs.

Antipholus: Where Scotland?

Dromio: I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of the hand ...

The wretched maid is the butt of one sexist, xenophobic joke after another:

Antipholus: Where America, the Indies?

Dromio: Oh, sir, upon her nose all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who sent whole armadoes of carracks to be ballast at her nose.

Antipholus: Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?

Dromio: O, sir, I did not look so low.

(The Comedy of Errors 3.2.120-47)

Eventually the kitchen maid, like the globe, is completely circumnavigated and like the maid, like Spanish silver, the world is there for the taking. The Drake silver medal is merely the top end of a huge market for maps that let the English of all classes see where their ships had been venturing. Shakespeare scholar and biographer, Jonathon Bate:

'It's not really until the period where Shakespeare's plays are being written, the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, that people get a real visual sense of the whole world, and in particular the roundness of the world. There is a lovely moment in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night where Malvolio is being forced to smile and the smile is causing lines to crease his face. And the character Maria says 'he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies.' She is referring there to a very famous map that was made in 1599 to accompany a book that gave an account of the voyages of the English navigators around the world and in that map there are lines of latitude and longitude, so it looks like a sort of creased face. But that map 'with the augmentation of the Indies' clearly was something that was a great novelty at the time.'

What's interesting to me about this medal and about maps and globes in Elizabethan England is that they are not navigational tools. They're evidence of a journey taken by somebody else, not a sat nav to let you find your way round the world, and most Elizabethans would have come across maps in books. Peter Barber again:

'The first place where he is likely to have found it would have been in the Bible. Particularly Protestant Bibles contained maps to prove the veracity of the scriptures. This is where you went to see where important things happened, and to prove that they actually happened there. As English sailors told the authorities repeatedly in the 16th century, maps were a fat lot of use when you were actually at sea because it was usually so misty you couldn't see anything anyway.'

So what we are looking at is really for armchair travelling?

'And again for the symbolic aspect. In 1570 the first book of maps was published and it is called The Theatre of the Lands of the World. So this idea of the world as a stage, which was picked up by Shakespeare, was around long beforehand.'

Shakespeare today is a great London tourist attraction and the theatre I'm standing in at the moment is getting ready for yet another busy season. But when Shakespeare and the equivalent of his marketing department sat down at the end of the 1590s to name their new theatre here on the south bank of the Thames, they must have wanted a name that would fire the public imagination and outdo all the existing theatres. Their competitors were called The Curtain, The Rose - one even with a startling lack of originality, simply The Theatre. Shakespeare's company by contrast chose a name that was topical, that, like that book of maps, was the theatre of the lands of the world, mapping all human experience. The name they chose was The Globe, a new way of thinking and showing the world.

Imagine you are a young Londoner in the mid 1590s, you've been on business at Whitehall where you've seen the great map of Drake's voyage and then you decide to go to that Shakespeare play you've heard about. It's A Midsummer Night's Dream and when you come to the scene between Oberon and Puck, just how much more resonant will those words be to you than to your jaded and globalised descendants some 400 years later?

Oberon: 'We the globe can compass soon,

Swifter than the wandering moon.'

(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.96-7)

Puck: 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes.'

(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.1.175-6)

Shakespeare quotations are taken from:

A Midsummer Night's Dream (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01260-5

The Comedy of Errors (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01667-2