5/30/2026 at 9:34:08 PM
The first thing that I did was zoomed out, surely Shakespeare wrote about something in the New World?No. It is amazing how small his world was. He was born and grew to adulthood, in the world where Spanish dominance kept England from attempting to explore the world. While Jamestown was settled before he died, he never wrote about it.
I've updated my understanding of how (un)aware people were in this era of the larger world. I have no idea why I would have ever expected otherwise.
by btilly
5/30/2026 at 11:06:49 PM
A lot of that is bias from the fact the whole map was vibed/hallucinated by an LLM instead of just sourced from (what I'm sure are many) concordances of Shakespeare's works.For example, "The Tempest" famously mentions the "Bermoothes" (Bermuda), but that's not included in this LLM's output for some reason. Any decent subject-index of Shakespeare would include it.
by quuxplusone
5/30/2026 at 9:42:20 PM
The map contains a bunch of references to America, the West Indies, Guiana, and Mexico. (Often with a connotation of "faraway exotic place" or "exciting new international development".)He may not have written about the British colonies but the New World was clearly at least somewhat present in his mind and his audience's minds.
by snarkconjecture
5/30/2026 at 10:47:13 PM
The most far-flung pins on the map are further away than Shakespeare or his audience likely had in mind."America" looks like it's at the centroid of the modern continental USA, but Shakespeare was surely thinking of somewhere in the Caribbean. "Asia" is shown somewhere in Mongolia/Kazakhstan, but the quotes suggest Turkey or the Middle East, and Shakespeare surely would have said "Cathay" or "India" if he meant to go that far. Likewise "Russia" is shown in Siberia, but everyone in Russia lives near the European borders thousands of km west.
That said, the references to Ethiopia, India, and the Indies are very clear and can only be where they are shown on the map.
(Don't take any of this as criticism! The map is very cool, it just shows the limits of what a fully automated approach can do. A human approach would be limited by the human's biases instead.)
by dmurray
5/31/2026 at 1:20:24 AM
> Likewise "Russia" is shown in Siberia, but everyone in Russia lives near the European borders thousands of km west.Yes, and "Love's Labour's Lost" specifically pairs/ contrasts "Russians" with "Muscovites": the "Russia" of St Petersburg is pretty far west of "Moscow."
by quuxplusone
