The roles of the river in early modern times

Rivers were connected to so many aspects of early modern life in Britain, providing a means of travel, commerce, employment, natural resources, and more; they also helped to form identity and culture, including folk myths and religious ideas of cleansing and the waters of life.

Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain, edited by Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins, which will be published on August 31, showcases new research on rivers, from their cultural representation in Shakespeare’s time to how environmental collapse begins. Among other topics, it includes writers who range from Shakespeare to Izaak Walton, devotional writing, and poems and plays about the Fens, the Trent, and the Thames.

The excerpt below, drawn from the book’s introduction by Angus and Hopkins, touches on rivers in Shakespeare’s plays, the Thames, which London audiences crossed to see plays at the Globe, and more. [For simplicity, information on the authors and sources is noted below the excerpt, in lieu of footnotes.]

In the early modern era, the Thames provided a convenient setting for the regal pageantry of Queen Elizabeth I. In the popular drama of the time a very different river provided a similar spectacular backdrop for the self-dramatisation of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burned on the water’ while its ‘oars were silver, / Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made / The water which they beat to follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes’ (A&C, 2.2.235–9).

Besides providing an ever-moving stage for royal spectaculars, London’s other formal occasions often ‘acknowledged the river’s central role in metropolitan life’, Ward noting that during the annual Lord Mayor shows the Thames served as ‘a ceremonial thoroughfare in . . . London, as its streets were far too narrow for the purpose’. Maria Shmygol too observes its historically crucial role in elaborate civic festivities. It served as ‘both a means of passage and a watery stage during occasional royal processions and annual Lord Mayor’s Day celebrations’, which might include ‘a vibrant flotilla of vessels accompanied by trumpets, drums, and the thundering gunfire of the galley-foist, as well as symbolic and allegorical devices’. She describes two of these spectacles, the first occurring in June 1610 for Prince Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales and the second in February 1613 celebrating the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the latter ended badly, as Shmygol tells: ‘The conquest of the “castle” never took place, and quotes a report suggesting that combat was ultimately terminated because

divers [were] hurt in the former fight, (as one lost both his eyes, another both his handes, another one hande, with divers other maymed and hurt) so that to avoyde further harme, yt was thought best to let yt alone.

The perilous nature of this riverine performance is confirmed by one involved, who notes that in such ‘jesting business I ran more danger than if it had been a sea service in good earnest’.

Besides contributing to these commercial, cultural and ideological functions of the life of a society, rivers could of course also pose mortal dangers to both individuals and their communities. Lykke Syse notes coroners’ records from the sixteenth century showing that of all accidental deaths 53 per cent were by drowning. Flooding was also an ever-present danger and Oestigaard notes that in the seventeenth century these might be regarded as ‘God’s chosen instruments for cleansing the corrupt earth’ (even more implausibly it was also claimed locally that ‘the area beside Dagenham near the Thames was the site of the original Deluge’). There were other ways too in which the river might be a destabilising presence. Lykke Syse shows how the river was not only very obviously ‘physically unstable’ but it furthermore ‘eluded social control’ and to an extent therefore contemporary moral norms; the example given is the phenomenon that on the river ‘everyone felt free to swear, and a term for swearing was actually “water-language”, comparable to “gutter language”’.

Rivers were particularly important for early modern London’s poets and playwrights. Duckert points out that on the various occasions that Shakespeare and other playwrights required characters to ‘enter wet’, it was probably the Thames that supplied the water, and he also notes that the ‘Water Poet’ John Taylor was one who ‘staged river pageants of sea battles’, and describes how Richard Brome, in order to ‘bring flouds o’ gaine to th’watermen’, imagined a dramatic aquarium unreachable by the sedan-driving fad in 1632: ‘a new Theatre or Playhouse / Upon the Thames on Barges or flat boats’. Even if no actual theatres were on boats, many were close enough to the Thames which Duckert argues is both ‘local’ and simultaneously ‘tied to the global hydrosphere’. Even when spectators at the Globe or the Rose had disembarked from the boats in which they had probably reached the south bank of the Thames and entered the theatres, they could probably still smell and hear the social and commercial activities surrounding the river. The river not only brought the theatres their customers but also energised and informed the plays they put on. Just as the river conveyed its passengers and conducted its commerce, the theatres welcomed the world of the river.

Shakespeare in particular seems to go out of his way to mention rivers in his plays. The Thames is an important presence in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Julius Caesar, Cassius tells Brutus about how Caesar once got into difficulties in the Tiber. And Antony and Cleopatra works in several mentions of the Nile which contribute nothing to the plot but plenty to the atmosphere and to the characterisation of Cleopatra herself where she is Antony’s ‘serpent of old Nile’ (1.5.30). In Cymbeline, the Roman envoy Lucius is sent on his way with an escort who are instructed by the king, ‘Leave not the worthy Lucius, good my lords, / Till he have cross’d the Severn’. Geoffrey of Monmouth had identified the Severn as dividing England from Wales, and this idea retained sentimental even if not political currency in the early modern period. Leah Marcus therefore suggests that this reference to it is designed to present the Wales of the play as a completely separate country from the one which Cymbeline rules (either from his historic capital of Maldon or, Shakespeare may have thought, from the hillfort known as Cymbeline’s Castle near Aylesbury). This heightens the sense that the place to which Belarius has fled with Guiderius and Arviragus is a remote and lawless one, but it also introduces an important river to sit alongside the play’s reference to Milford Haven whose Welsh name, Aberdaugleddau, meaning ‘mouth of the two Cleddau(s)’, comes from the names of two rivers, the Eastern  Cleddau and the Western Cleddau. Shakespeare, it seems, likes to discuss rivers, and his plays express something of the range of symbolic values and practical uses they had in his society.

Note: This excerpt refers to the following authors and their works: Lowell Duckert, For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes (2017); Karen V. Lykke Syse and Terje Oestigaard, editors of Perceptions of Water in Britain from Early Modern Times to the Present (2010), including Lykke Syse’s “Ideas of Leisure, Pleasure and the River in Early Modern England” and Oestigaard’s “The Topography of Holy Water in England after the Reformation”; Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (1988); Maria Shmygol, “Jacobean Mock Sea-Fights on the River Thames: Nautical Theatricality in Performance and Print,” from the London Journal (2022); and Joseph Ward, “The Taming of the Thames,” from Huntington Library Quarterly (2008). For The Merry Wives of Windsor, it also cites Jemima Matthews, “Inside Out and Outside In: The River Thames in William Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,'” Shakespeare (2019).