John Speed

Life
?1552-1629; English cartographer whose maps of Ireland, printed in Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), remained in use until superseded by William Petty’s Hiberniae Delineatio in 1685. His Theatre and its continuation, The History of Great Britain (1611), are similar in plan to William Camden’s Britannia (1586); his map of Dublin (1610) is the earliest extant plan of that city; Speed’s ‘Plan of Dublin’ (1610) [after Pool and Cast] appears on the cover of the Dublin Historical Record, publ. by the Old Dublin Society. ODNB

His New Map of the Province of Ulster (1610), from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612), engraved in workshop of his Dutch collaborator Jodacus Hondius, remained authoritative up the new maps of William Petty’s Irish Atlas (1685).

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Notes
John Betts, The Story of the Irish Society [Centenary 1913] ([2nd edn.] 1921), contains four plate of ‘Irish Gentleman’, ‘Irish Gentlewoman’, ‘Wilde Irish Man’, and ‘Wilde Irish Woman’, as p.10 facing; taken from Speed’s Map of Ireland (1609), a copy of the original being in possession of the Society, Londonderry; the same as ‘Gentleman of Ireland’, ‘Gentlewoman of Ireland’, ‘Wilde Irish Man’ & ‘Wilde Irish Woman’ are printed in G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman (Dublin: Talbot 1937), facing p.220.

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