Despite the common practice of reading Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in relation to the cultural politics of the first year of the Stuart monarchy, politically-oriented criticism has largely neglected the play's connection to the politics of one of King James's most ambitious undertakings: the new biblical translation first announced in January of 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference. While maintaining that the play cannot be reduced to a simple allegory of James's effort to link his new political authority to the "authorizing" power of scripture, this essay examines how the "topicality" of that effort might be registered in the play's complex pattern of biblical allusion. We argue, finally, that with its staged conflict between ethical ideal and social practice, Measure for Measure offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of deploying religious rhetoric in secular political contexts.

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The vernacular of deep mapping provides a valuable resource for comparing Edward Hitchcock’s geology textbooks — particularly Elementary Geology — with select geology-based poems by Emily Dickinson. Although Dickinson’s poems that reveal a clear understanding of nineteenth-century science (especially geological findings) have already been critically analyzed by scholars such as Richard Sewall, Hiroko Uno, and Robin Peel, Dickinson’s verse has not yet been assessed from the vantage point of the complex layerings of literary deep mapping. Moreover, Dickinson’s poetic explorations of distinct timelines and phenomena in both human and natural history can be aligned in many instances not only with the language of Hitchcock’s textbooks, but also with the drawings, maps, charts, and cultural contexts embedded in these volumes. The language, imagery, inquiries and conjectures in poems by Dickinson that are explicated in this essay all have clear (as well as more nuanced) ties to Hitchcock’s Geology. My study proposes that even with their different genres and diverse authorial intentions, both Hitchcock and Dickinson engage in similar rich and multivalent approaches to what is clearly an incipient version of modern deep mapping.

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