Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain

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.

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

About the Author :
Bill Angus is pursuing a rich and varied life in New Zealand. Previous publications include Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain (2024) and Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019) both co-edited with Lisa Hopkins and published by Edinburgh University Press. His latest book, Divorcing Jesus (2025) maps a moral and intellectual path from the ruins of Christianity towards the ideal of Atheism. Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam University and co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. Previous publications include Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain (2024) and Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019) both co-edited with Bill Angus and published by Edinburgh University Press.

Review :
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.