a Shakespeare-themed Tube map

October 03, 2007, 08:10

shufitz

z, that is wonderful!

A few quibbles. Gertrude is a dummy, and she has no business being on the "Strong & Difficult Women" line. (For that matter, neither does Desdemona.) And Polonius? I suppose he's appropriate on the "Fathers & Daughters" line, but the "Fools" line would be much more appropriate!

But these are minor objections. I loved the map. (Special favorites are the link-up between Othello and Desdemona, and the sight of a site shared by Beatrice and Benedict.)

October 03, 2007, 09:11

zmježd

And grisly pleasure in the cuisinal icon for Titus.

October 03, 2007, 09:43

Richard English

I wonder which city's map it's supposed to be (if any). It's certainly not London's.

I wonder what Harry Beck would have thought of it (although he must have been vastly pleased to see how his invention transformed cartography). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map

October 03, 2007, 10:37

zmježd

wonder which city's map it's supposed to be (if any). It's certainly not London's.

Is this more impenetrable British irony? It's not a city map. It's a map of characters from plays by Wm Shakespeare, an English author of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the category they fall into, and their relationships to one another.

October 03, 2007, 11:21

Richard English

And the reason for the river...?

October 03, 2007, 15:57

zmježd

And the reason for the river...?

1. Pure aesthetics.

2. To confuse the enemy (as the Danes say).

3. To make it look more like the London Tube map designed by Harry Beck.

I leave the choice of the "correct" answer as an exercise to the reader.

October 03, 2007, 16:05

<Asa Lovejoy>

quote:
Originally posted by shufitz:
I suppose he's appropriate on the "Fathers & Daughters" line, but the "Fools" line would be much more appropriate!

I disagree. Polonius was a fool in current parlance, not in Shakespearian parlance, since the fools in his plays are all mentally very sharp!

I do wonder about the placement of the privvies, and their inhabitants, though...

October 03, 2007, 18:38

zmježd

do wonder about the placement of the privvies, and their inhabitants, though...

Olivia, in Twelfth Night, plays a man, Cesario. So, you have a boy, the parts of women in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were played by boys, playing a young woman, pretending to be a young man. Hence the unisex toilet icon.

And then there's:

quote:
Hamlet: My excellent good friends! How dost thou Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do you both?

Rosencrantz: As indifferent as children of the earth.

Guildenstern: Happy in that we are not overhappy; on Fortune's cap we are not the very button.

Hamlet: Nor the soles of her shoe?

Rosencrantz: Neither, my lord.

Hamlet: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?

Guildenstern: Faith, her privates we.

Hamlet: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true! She is a strumpet. What's the news?

Rosencrantz: None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.

Hamlet: Then is doomsday near.

[Hamlet II.ii.]

October 08, 2007, 08:12

zmježd

I came across a site that has a pictorial history of the London Tube Map. Interesting to see how it went from a rather straightforward map to Beck's design, and how the latter has changed over the years up until today.

October 09, 2007, 01:57

Richard English

Unfortunately the link to the transformation maps isn't working for me.

It's good to see that Harry Beck's invention of the schematic map has been so widely adopted; I can't think of any major transport network that still uses geographically accurate maps nowadays - although the Paris Metro did until relatively recently.