Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain
Edited by Bill Angus, Lisa Hopkins
Explores how perceptions of rivers shaped identity and culture in Shakespeare’s Britain
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
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.
