Reading the River in Shakespeare's Britain

by Bill Angus (Editor), Lisa Hopkins (Editor)

Overview

In Shakespeare’s Britain rivers were not only a crucial form of travel and important natural resources which sustained communities and provided employment but were also sites to which myths and memories accrued and which could be used to figure religious ideas of cleansing and the waters of life. Pageants were performed on them, legends grew up about their names and led to plays and poems being written about personified river gods and goddesses, and stories were told of historic battles which had been fought on their banks. These essays explore the cultural and literary geography of rivers in the early modern period and the ways in which they shaped the lives and identities of those who lived near them. By charting changes (both manmade and natural) to the way in which rivers ebb and flow the book also reminds us of the urgency of the climate crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399534499
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2026
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Bill Angus is a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, New Zealand. He has written extensively on early modern drama and material culture. His books with Edinburgh UniversityPress include Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson (2016), Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre (2018), Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019), co-edited with Lisa Hopkins, and his last monograph, A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture (2022). His latest edited collection Poison on the Early Modern English Stage, co-edited with Kibrina Davey and Lisa Hopkins, was published in 2023.

Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam Universityand co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, of Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama, and of Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. Her most recent publications are The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern English Stage (2022) and A Companion to the Cavendishes, with Tom Rutter (2020). She also works on detective fiction and her book Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction was published in 2023.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Theologies, Economies and Ecologies of the River, Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins
Part I: Conceptualising the River
1. Rivers of Milk, Honey, Tears, and Treasures: Mapping Salvation in Early Modern English Devotional Poetry, Brice Peterson
2. ‘Plenteous rivers’: Waterways as Resources, Threats and the Heart of the Community in Early Modern England, Daniel Gettings
3. Rivers and Contested Territories in the Works of Shakespeare, Rebecca Welshman
Part II: Writing the River
4. The Navigation of the Trent and William Sampson’s The Vow-Breaker (1636), Lisa Hopkins
5. Ship of Fools and Slow Boat to Hell: the Literary Voyages of the Gravesend Barge, Lindsay Ann Reid
6. Rivers, Monstrosity and National Identity in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, Melissa Caldwell
Part III: Rivers and Money
7. ‘Your Innes and Alehouses are Brookes and Rivers’: John Taylor and Free-flowing Rivers of Ale, Bill Angus
8. The Rose and the Riverside, Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley
9. ‘As Water mill, made rags and shreds to sweate’: Fluvial Bodies and Fluminous Geographies, Jemima Matthews
Part IV: Ecocritical Approaches
10. ‘Insatiable [Gourmandize] thus all things doth devour’: Reading the Threat of Human Greed along the Rivers of Early Modern England, Emily J. Naish
11. Powtes, Protest and (Eco)politics in the English Fens, Esther Water
12. Shakespeare’s Waterways: Premonitions of an Environmental Collapse, Sophie Chiari
Conclusions: Rivers of life and death, Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus

Notes on Contributors

Editorial Reviews

This is a breakthrough gathering of interdisciplinary essays rediscovering the dynamic turbulence between rivers physically altered by natural and human pressures and the period's political, industrial and demographic changes. Reading the River in Shakespeare's Britain is an inspiring model of how to shift the environment from the backdrop of human-centred affairs to the compelling forefront of revisionist cultural geography and eco-history.

Randall Martin