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.

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 University Press 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 University and 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.