SOURCE: Oruch, Jack B. “Spenser, Camden, and the Poetic Marriages of Rivers.” Studies in Philology 69, no. 4 (July 1967): 606-24.

In 1590 the poet William Vallans published his Tale of Two Swannes partly, he said, to “animate, or encourage those worthy Poets, who haue written Epithalamion Thamesis, to publish the same: I haue seen it in Latine verse (in my iudgment) wel done, but the Author I know not for what reason doth suppresse it: That which is written in English, though long since it was promised, yet is it not perfourmed.”¹ The “worthy Poets” whom Vallans hoped to arouse must have been Edmund Spenser and William Camden.² Spenser had promised to write an Epithalamion Thamesis in his correspondence with Harvey of 1580, but he never published such a poem; Camden had included a few fragments of a Latin poem called De Connubio Tamae et Isis in the early editions of his Britannia, but he did not identify the author.

Although the Latin fragments in the Britannia bore their own title, it is easy to see how Vallans could call them by the name of Spenser's proposed river-marriage poem: in subject and genre De Connubio is obviously related to the hypothetical Epithalamion Thamesis. This relationship extends also to the marriage pageant of the Thames and the Medway in the Faerie Queene (IV. xi. 11-53) and the river-marriage myths in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and the Mutabilitie Cantos. All of these river myths constitute an interesting but neglected sub-genre in Elizabethan poetry, a sub-genre which found several imitators in the following two centuries.

Any attempt to assess the genre must face the difficulties of treating a hypothetical work, the Epithalamion Thamesis, and an anonymous one, De Connubio Tamae et Isis. Yet many of the problems can be overcome by a careful study of the Latin poem. While such a study of De Connubio is valuable for its own sake, it also reveals that the author of the fragments performed a substantial service to Spenser as an intermediary between his early and late topographical poetry of river marriages.

In the past, perhaps as a consequence of their complex publishing history, the eleven fragments of De Connubio have not been examined closely or described accurately.³ Moreover, following the largely intuitive conclusion of Bishop Edmund Gibson, who edited the Britannia in 1695 and 1722, modern scholars have merely assumed without question that Camden is the author. In the discussion which follows, I offer a bibliographical account of the poem, consider new evidence pertaining to its authorship and date, and summarize its full contents for the first time. Then, by employing the knowledge gained from the analysis of De Connubio, it becomes easier to visualize what Spenser's hypothetical river-marriage poem might have been and to show how his conception of the genre, and therefore his artistic expression in it, developed and matured in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and the Faerie Queene.

The publishing history of De Connubio in the Britannia is confusing enough to require schematic presentation:

1. Two passages inserted in the chapter on Oxfordshire:
   • 1) 6[frac12] lines on the defeat of the Earl of Oxford at Radcot Bridge in 1387, printed with no indication that they belonged to a river-marriage poem. Not until the edition of 1600 did Camden identify these lines as part of De Connubio.
   • 2) A group of 25 lines followed immediately by a group of 3[frac12] lines, both describing the marriage of the two rivers and plainly labeled as part of the poem De Connubio Tamae et Isis.
2. No new passages.
3. Three new fragments:
   • 3) 9 lines on the head of the Thames tidewater in Middlesex, identified as part of the poem.
   • 4) 28[frac12] lines on the source of the Isis in Gloucestershire, also labeled.
   • 5) 8 lines praising London, not assigned to the poem until the edition of 1600.
4. No new passages.
5. Four more fragments inserted, all marked as part of the poem:
   • 6) 54 lines describing Windsor and praising Queen Elizabeth.
   • 7) 7 lines on Runnymede.
   • 8) 5 lines on Hampton Court.
   • 9) 9[frac12] lines on Richmond, printed immediately preceding fragment 3.
6. Two new passages joined to fragment 2:
   • 10) 14 lines preceding the original group of 25, thus enlarging the description of the marriage of the two rivers.
   • 11) 19 lines following the original group of 25, but preceding the smaller group of 3[frac12], also enlarging the description of the marriage.
7. Holland's translation makes no significant changes in the text of the fragments printed in the 1607 edition.

Thus 189 lines of the poem are all that survive.⁴

The irregular yet important additions to De Connubio parallel the growth of the Britannia itself, and one is tempted to assume that later insertions were composed as the need for them was felt.⁵ However, in the one passage which refers to contemporary events, the panegyric on Elizabeth added in 1600, the evidence points to composition sometime between 1583 and 1586. Only in 1583 were the Scots free of the French influence of James' cousin Esmè Stuart, Duke of Lennox, and only for a few years after 1583 did Ulster seem to “learne civility anew.”⁶ Both of these conditions are named in the poem. Also, Camden's practice of quoting half-lines seems to indicate that the fragments are part of a larger, finished work. Thus it is likely that by 1586 most or all of the important parts of De Connubio Tamae et Isis had been written.

Camden is almost certainly the author. As Bishop Gibson pointed out, “if we compare the subject matter of this Poem with his own Description of several Places which it touches upon, we shall find them to be much the same.”⁷ Camden quoted many passages of poetry by many authors in the Britannia, and his practice was to identify if possible his source and to praise or excuse the verses, depending upon their quality. But in this case there is a deliberate reluctance to reveal the author, and the obvious reason would appear to be modesty or diffidence. Shorter parts of De Connubio are usually introduced with a brief, neutral comment, and longer parts with an unusual statement such as this one prefixed to the passage on the source of the Isis:

The poeticall description of whose Source or first head, I haue here put downe out of a Poem entituled The Marriage of Tame and Isis, which whether you admit or omit, it skilleth but little.⁸

Such an attitude toward a contemporary poet would be impolite by comparison with the great courtesy shown others, for example Daniel Rogers, unless Camden himself was the author.

The gradual publication also suggests Camden's authorship; a growing confidence in the poem would prompt him to reveal more of it. And although, as we have seen, the poem probably was composed by 1586, Camden made several minor changes in the text in 1600 and 1607 which suggest authorial revision similar to that lavished upon the entire volume.⁹ It is typical of Camden to want the description of the Rhine changed from “Limpidus” (clear) to “Vicini” (neighboring); and it is surely Camden who discovered between 1600 and 1607 that in Europe not only the Elbe but also the Schelde experience the effects of the regular tide as far inland as the Thames—and therefore carefully revised a line in De Connubio to include the Schelde. In 1600 and two earlier editions the Thames says,

Nulla per Europae dotatas nomine terras
Flumina, tam longè sic certis legibus vndas
Alternas renouant, nisi sit Germanicus Albis.

But in 1607 the last phrase is changed to “nisi sit fratres Scaldis, & Albis.”¹⁰ Camden must also be responsible for the omission in 1607 of one line from the fragment on the source of the Isis which referred to the domination of “Britannia” over the Scots and the Irish; a Scot had assumed the British throne since the preceding edition.¹¹

One more bit of evidence may be relevant here—a highly flattering reference to the poem by Camden's student Ben Jonson. In the printed text of Part of the Coronation Entertainment (1604) is a long marginal note justifying Jonson's use of the Brutus legend, a note which quotes a line from the fragment on London in De Connubio:

Rather then the Citie should want a Founder, we choose to follow the receiued storie of Brute, whether fabulous, or true, and not altogether vnwarranted in Poetrie. … Besides, a learned Poet of our time, in a most elegant worke of his Con. Tam. & Isis, celebrating London, hath this verse of her: Æmula maternae tollens sua lumina Troiae.¹²

In the Britannia Camden had cautiously rejected the legend of Brutus, and therefore Jonson's best defense of himself is to allude slyly to the “learned Poet” Camden as his precedent.¹³ He must have been in on the secret.

If we consider Camden as the author of De Connubio Tamae et Isis, we can begin to understand why the whole poem was never printed separately. Camden's chief interest was antiquarian, and he was apparently content to dismember his poem for use as illustration and decoration in five chapters of the book upon which he knew his fame would rest. When the fragments are arranged in order according to the topography of the Thames, they still do not form a unified poem, but a clear picture of the presumably complete manuscript in Camden's possession emerges. De Connubio tells a pleasant tale of the course of the Tame and Isis, their “marriage” at Dorchester, and then the progress of their union in the Thamisis (Thames) to London. In the Cotswold Hills, the story begins, is a rich cave adorned with paintings of the moon, ruler of the seas, and all the great rivers of the earth. In the cave sits the king of waters, mighty Isis, pouring forth his stream from an urn. Meanwhile at Dorchester, Grace, Concord, Hymen, and the Naiads prepare a magnificent bridal chamber, and Tame leaves the town of Thame in Oxfordshire. She is decked with ears of corn and arrives at Dorchester all aglitter and anxious to join Isis, who has passed historically important Radcot Bridge on his way. They meet, kiss, clasp each other, and retire to the beautiful nuptial chamber. The wedding celebration now begins, attended by water nymphs, dryads, and wanton satyrs, all of whom dance on the grass while Echo doubles and redoubles the songs of the birds. Then Britona plays on her harp and tells how Britain was divided from the world and was later visited by Neptune's son Albion, Hercules, Ulysses, Brute with his friend Corineus, and Caesar. Tame and Isis rise from the bridal bed, one in name and love, and Thamisis sets forth to seek his sire the Ocean. Along the way he passes Windsor, Runnymede, Hampton Court, Richmond, the head of his tidewater, and London.

Except for the section on Windsor, none of the passages describing places along the banks of the Thames is over nine lines long, and it is conceivable that a similarly short treatment of a few more important towns and the provision of several connecting links are all that may be lacking of the poem.¹⁴ The fifty-four-line passage on Windsor is a special case, for there the Queen lived. This long section is organized on the standard classical pattern of an encomium urbis: a general laudatory description of the place followed by an account of its heroes, in this case represented by Elizabeth alone. The first part of twenty-one lines describes Windsor in a speech by Father Thames to the castle bidding it to tell no more of its glories,

Of high-rais'd mounts, of temples, wals that rise with stately staire,
Of yron-bound beames, of battlements, and pinnacles so faire:
Of gamefull parks, of meadowes fresh, ay-spring-like pleasant fields,
Of goodly gardens clad with flowers, that holesome Zephyrus yeilds,
Of nurseries, gilt-mariage bowers, and sumptuous tombes of Kings.(15)

Nor should Windsor speak of its knighthood, which is unequaled in all the world, for “all yeeld to one”—Elizabeth. The remaining thirty-three lines are a panegyric on the Queen, listing her accomplishments and virtues.

For the conception of De Connubio Camden's first debt is to the Cygnea Cantio of John Leland, published in 1545. Since the title and aims of the Britannia itself are a fulfillment of Leland's unfinished plans for a topographical-antiquarian survey of Britain, Camden would naturally turn for a model to Leland's topographical poem on the Thames when he thought of writing one of his own. Leland's purpose, much like Camden's, had been to describe the Thames from Oxford to London and Greenwich as a means of showing off the towns and especially the royal residences along the way.

The Cygnea Cantio is a swan song, sung by a swan in anticipation of its death when it leaves home in the divided island of Isis at Oxford. Taken with wanderlust, the swan chooses twelve companions (pictured in the title page woodcut) and sets off down the Thames. Together they observe Abingdon and Dorchester, the Sinodun Hills, Wallingford, Reading, Eton, Richmond, Kew, and so on. The beauties and antiquities passed on the banks all impress the group, but especially Windsor Castle, Westminster, and the English fleet anchored at Deptford, the latter a subject which provides the transition to a general laudatory review of Henry VIII's accomplishments. Having seen and sung of the Thames and its King, the leading swan says goodbye to its companions and prepares to die.

Clearly in De Connubio Camden imitates Leland's choice of subject and organization; he even describes several of the same places and quotes comparable passages from both poems on the same page in the Britannia.¹⁶ Leland had appended to his poem a long prose alphabetical survey of supplementary information, called Commentarii, dealing with towns, tributaries of the Thames, and ancient British tribes. Camden accomplished a similar effect by distributing his verses among various chapters of his prose.

What Leland did not supply to Camden was the idea of making the central device of his poem a myth centered in the marriage of two rivers.¹⁷ For that remarkable innovation Camden probably took inspiration from Spenser's description of his proposed Epithalamion Thamesis in the Spenser-Harvey letters printed in 1580. Spenser, in turn, appears also to have known Leland's Cygnea Cantio, judging by his emphasis upon antiquarian and topographical material in the correspondence with Harvey.

Although the letters do not reveal whether the Epithalamion Thamesis was actually finished or not, Spenser does say enough about the poem to provide details for an approximate reconstruction of what it would have been and for a comparison of the hypothetical work with subsequent poetry of the same type, especially Spenser's own. Such a comparison will help to show what Spenser learned about topographical river poetry after he decided not to pursue his original plans and after he had read part of Camden's De Connubio. In the letter of 1580 he writes to Harvey that he is about to give him an example of the new “Englishe Versifying,” for,

I minde shortely at conuenient leysure, to sette forth a Booke in this kinde, whyche I entitle, Epithalamion Thamesis, whyche Booke I dare vndertake wil be very profitable for the knowledge, and rare for the Inuention, and manner of handling.¹⁸

This statement could be the advertising puff on the title page of nearly any Renaissance book, but Spenser no doubt meant what he said: a poet must teach and delight. He goes on:

For in setting forth the marriage of the Thames: I shewe his first beginning, and offspring, and all the Countrey, that he passeth thorough, and also describe all the Riuers throughout Englande, whyche came to this Wedding, and their righte names, and right passage, etc.¹⁹

In short, the Epithalamion Thamesis would have been a veritable Britannia of English river lore and topography, an ambitious poem of the first magnitude. Harvey uses it as a standard of bigness when, in commenting on another work, he replies that “for length, bredth, and depth, it will not come far behinde your Epithalamion Thamesis.”²⁰ Spenser himself realized that it would be an immense undertaking, but the prose topography which had obviously suggested the poem to him would also serve as his primary source, for he concludes by saying of the Epithalamion Thamesis that it is

A worke beleeue me, of much labour, wherein notwithstanding Master Holinshed hath muche furthered and aduantaged me, who therein hath bestowed singular paines, in searching oute their [the rivers'] firste heades, and sourses: and also in tracing, and dogging oute all their Course, til they fall into the Sea.²¹

“Master Holinshed” is, of course, William Harrison, whose share of the Chronicles (1577, 1587), then as now, usually went by the senior compiler's name. In Harrison's Description of Britain, which constitutes the first part of the Chronicles, six long chapters are devoted to describing the courses and tributaries of “all the Riuers throughout Englande.” Uninteresting as that section of Harrison's work seems today, Spenser found it fascinating reading in 1580 and intended to draw heavily upon it for his river-marriage poem.

As Spenser writes of it, the Epithalamion Thamesis would in many respects have been similar to Camden's De Connubio Tamae et Isis. The Latin poem describes the origins of the two “bridal” rivers, some of the places they pass, their “marriage,” and their “offspring” the Thames. But apparently unlike Camden, Spenser also meant to include all the rivers of England as wedding guests along with accounts of their courses and their correct names. And while information of this kind is given meagerly in the Cygnea Cantio and more generously in its prose appendix, in Harrison's river chapters, and in prose topographies like the Britannia, no poem ever successfully embodied such material in wholesale quantities. Years later Drayton tried it in the Poly-Olbion, and few of his contemporaries relished the outcome. The usual guess about the Epithalamion Thamesis is that Spenser did not complete it because he lost interest in the quantitative system, the new “versifying.” While that may be true, there would have been nothing to prevent him from recasting the poem in an established verse form had he been as enthusiastic about the subject matter as his letter implies. One is inclined to believe that after writing Harvey, Spenser realized the impossibility of treating so large a subject and abandoned it at an early stage.

When Spenser was writing Book Four of the Faerie Queene many years later, he again thought of composing a topographical piece about the Thames. Since the subject was the same one he had considered before, it is easy to see why some critics have thought that the pageant of the Thames and Medway is a revision of the lost poem.²² But by this time Spenser could view his material in perspective. Harrison's methodical chapters on English rivers no longer seemed worthy of an extensive verse paraphrase, nor did the poet feel obliged to describe the sources, courses, and correct names of every waterway in the realm. By this time also he must have read part of De Connubio Tamae et Isis, and he was able to profit by the example and to write a variation upon it. Spenser had already shown his reverence for Camden several years earlier when in the Ruines of Time he made the spirit of ancient Verulam speak of

Cambden the nourice of antiquitie,
And lanterne vnto late succeeding age.

(169-70)

What Spenser found in De Connubio may have influenced his own poem. Camden had made the Tame, the female river, anxious to achieve a measure of sovereignty by placing her name ahead of her husband's:

Until I say, ambitious she,
          May now before her love
Her own name set: see whereunto
          Ambition minds doth move!(23)

But this idea is subordinated in the nuptial chamber when Tame and Isis are joined with Fide Concordia to become a single river, the Thamesis. Spenser too associates Concord with the special “friendship” of river marriages. In Book Four of the Faerie Queene, Concord sits at the gate of the Temple of Venus in the canto preceding the marriage pageant of the Thames and Medway, which itself symbolizes concord in nature. There is, however, no hint of premarital “ambition” in the bride Medway; and as Osgood suggests, Spenser may make the parent Tame a male river to show the proper dominance of the husband in the union which produced Thamesis.²⁴ By avoiding even these minor “flaws” in inter-river relationships, Spenser makes his pageant a perfect example of the virtue it presents.

On the other hand, the most important change to be found in the Faerie Queene episode, in contrast with the hypothetical Epithalamion Thamesis and the real De Connubio, is the subordination of topography to the demands of poetry. Topography as such is not the primary concern, nor is the presentation of information (the “profitable for the knowledge” aspect of Epithalamion Thamesis). Ironically, Spenser's limited knowledge of Camden's complete poem may have contributed to the difference in his approach. When Book Four of the Faerie Queene was published, only three parts of De Connubio had been labeled in the Britannia, and none of them described the history and notable features of towns and royal residences along the Thames. From Spenser's point of view De Connubio would appear to be a more joyful and imaginative poem and also a less antiquarian one than later readers found it. He read only of the gorgeously decorated cave of Isis, the glad approach of the two rivers to their confluence followed by their eager embrace, and a short description of the Thames tidewater. Unless Spenser had personal contact with Camden, of which there is no evidence, he could not have recognized the passages on London and on the Earl of Oxford's defeat at Radcot Bridge as part of De Connubio. Nor, of course, would he have seen the passages on Windsor, Hampton Court, Richmond, and Runnymede, which were not introduced until 1600.

In the place of the topographical survey of towns along the Thames, which Leland's Cygnea Cantio included and the Epithalamion Thamesis was to include, Spenser now draws upon the rich associations evoked by merely pronouncing exotic proper names to a receptive audience, and he explores the technical problems of arranging those names harmoniously in a poem. As the vehicle for his song, he uses a dignified, slow-moving pageant in order to avoid the complications of action and drama among dozens of personified rivers.²⁵ This approach dictates that the Thames and Medway be described and passed over in two stanzas each, and it pushes the actual “wedding” out of the poem entirely. Only in the next canto is the reader informed that while Marinell moped over Florimell, the great banquet ended and all the guests returned home (IV. xii. 17).

Spenser's pageant is clearly a poetical tour de force. While one can justify its inclusion as an illustration and extension of the theme of Book Four—the power of love and harmony—it still has a separate, unintegrated character. Although Proteus and Cymodoce do link the river marriage to the Marinell-Florimell story, the episode is set off from what precedes and follows by invocations to the muse and declarations by the poet insisting upon the difficulty of the task. Attempts to read allegorical significance into the passage have not been successful; at best it simply illustrates the titular virtue of friendship in terms of concord in nature.²⁶ For the most part, Spenser is here showing off his knowledge of mythology, topography, and poetic technique. The wedding procession is led by Neptune and the sea gods, and it ends with a full fifty Nereides. In less than 400 lines Spenser has introduced over 170 proper names with consummate skill.

Of these, sixty-four are the names of English and Irish rivers, and while there is naturally no space for extensive descriptions, it is part of Spenser's achievement that each stream is described, most of them by a well-chosen word or phrase, but many by the etymologies of their names, the locations of their courses, or short legends. In giving such “information” about the domestic rivers, Spenser reveals that he has not abandoned the plan and purposes of the Epithalamion Thamesis entirely. Thus we learn that the three Irish rivers, the Shure, Newre, and Barrow, were begotten on the nymph Rheusa by the giant Blomius (xlii-xliii); that the Tamar divides Devon and Cornwall, joins with the Plim, and eventually reaches Plymouth (xxxi); that the Humber was named after King Humber, drowned in the river by Locrine for drowning six brother knights who became the Ure, Werfe, Oze, Swale, Nide, and Skell (xxxvii-xxxviii). But in this canto Spenser's greatest accomplishment as a poet of rivers is in effectively using the melodious sound of their names as they tumble through the stanzas:

There was the Liffy rolling downe the lea,
          The sandy Slane, the stony Aubrian,
          The spacious Shenan spreading like a sea,
          The pleasant Boyne, the fishy fruitfull Ban,
          Swift Awniduff, which of the English man
          Is cal'de Blacke water, and the Liffar deep,
          Sad Trowis, that once his people ouerran,
          Strong Allo tombling from Slewlogher steep,
And Mulla mine, whose waues I whilom taught to weep.

(xli)

While it is not Spenser's purpose in the marriage pageant of the Thames and Medway to dwell upon any one river, he manages, as we have seen, to include two brief legends, one about the Humber and the other about the three Irish brother-rivers born to Rheusa and Blomius. These stories are especially interesting because Spenser invents or partially invents them himself and because he does the same thing at greater length in two other poems. To the familiar old legend of Humber and Locrine he adds the six valiant knights of York slain by Humber, and he creates the account of the three Irish rivers born to Rheusa (flowing water or rain water) and Blomius (Spirit of the Slieve Bloom Mountains). The idea of manufacturing a myth to explain place names or features in a landscape appealed strongly to Spenser, and he expanded upon it in the long topographical sections of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (104-55) and the Mutabilitie Cantos (VII. vi. 38-55).

Since most of Spenser's life after 1580 was spent in Ireland, it is not surprising that he displays his love for rivers and landscape in poetry dealing with the countryside around his adopted home. The stories of Mulla and Bregog in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and of Molanna and Fanchin in the Mutabilitie Cantos both take place in the neighborhood of Spenser's home at Kilcolman. Possibly these episodes are adapted from native Irish legends which are now lost;²⁷ but considering the thoroughly Spenserian flavor of the passages and the fact that the rivers in both are part of the same “family,” it seems more likely that Spenser imagined them himself, prompted perhaps by a knowledge of similar native legends. Moreover, as Professor Gottfried has shown, Spenser was probably imitating Italian Renaissance poetry of this very type in what may be called the “myth of locality.”²⁸ Examples would be Boccaccio's Ninfale Fiesolano, Luca Pulci's Driadeo d'Amore, Lorenzo de' Medici's Ambra, and Jacopo Sannazaro's Salices and In Morum Candidam. Another typical “myth of locality” is Giovanni Pontano's story of Pan's love for the nymph of Nar in “De Quercu Diis Sacra”: after resisting the god's advances for some time, the nymph at last returns his affection in a cavern situated in a willow grove; ever since then the place has been held sacred. In several other myths, for example in Lorenzo's Ambra and Spenser's own Molanna story, the goddess Diana takes part.

Spenser's treatment of the Italian myth of locality makes it clear that he is no slavish imitator of his models. One distinguishing feature of the Mulla and Molanna stories is the highly personal quality which transforms them from purely ingenious topographical jeux d'esprit into delicate expressions of the poet's love for his natural surroundings. In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe the song about Mulla and Bregog is appropriately sung by the shepherd Colin himself. Prompted by Hobbinol to tell of his trip to England with the “shepherd of the Ocean” (Ralegh), Colin sets the scene:

One day (quoth he) I sat, (as was my trade)
Vnder the foote of Mole that mountaine hore,
Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade,
Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore.

(56-59)

Then, at Cuddy's request, Colin consents to sing for the assembly the song which so pleased the Shepherd of the Ocean. There follows the legend of the river Bregog's winning of Mulla against the wishes of her father Mole, who intended her to marry Allo.

If the fascination of the Irish countryside for Spenser were not sufficiently obvious from Colin's song and his reference to “my riuer Bregogs loue,” the use of Arlo Hill for the scene of Mutability's appeal to Nature makes that conclusion unmistakable. Once again the poet indicates his feelings toward his surroundings by carefully choosing the location of the trial:

That was, to weet, vpon the highest hights
Of Arlo-hill (Who knowes not Arlo-hill?)
That is the highest head (in all mens sights)
Of my old father Mole, whom Shepheards quill
Renowmed hath with hymnes fit for a rurall skill.

(FQ, VII. vi. 36)

Following the admission that it is not appropriate “To sing of hilles and woods, mongst warres and Knights,” Spenser nevertheless concludes the canto with eighteen stanzas telling how Arlo Hill became the haunt of thieves and wolves after Diana took displeasure at Molanna's betrayal of her bathing place to Faunus. The wood-god rewarded Molanna by uniting her with her beloved Fanchin to form “one faire riuer,” but Diana and her nymphs threw stones into the Molanna as punishment and left Arlo Hill for good.

The modern reader of the two river myths may not realize how deeply Spenser was committed to his subject. Then or now it probably would not seem unusual for a poet to refer to familiar places as “Mulla mine” and “my old father Mole,” or to speak of “my riuer Bregogs loue.” But several other aspects of the myths which also seem natural were original and even contrary to “standard” poetic practice in the sixteenth century. For example, Spenser admits that he is ignoring decorum when he brings the Molanna story into the Faerie Queene, but he likes telling it so well that the rules seem unimportant by comparison. Still more significant is the selection of the Irish setting itself. For an English poet to choose such scenes and to treat them sympathetically was hardly typical. From the English point of view Ireland in the sixteenth century was a little known and rather hostile place, and the Irish people were rebels, Catholics, and strangers. Most readers knew the topography of the western island only imperfectly through Richard Stanyhurst's Description of Ireland in Holinshed's Chronicles and the short section on Ireland in Camden's Britannia.

Yet Spenser had grown to love the “foreign” countryside about Kilcolman, enough indeed to send abroad poetry in which references to “his” rivers and “his” hills would not be understood by the average reader. Even so he did not stop with the strange Irish place names; in many cases he invented more appealing or more poetic ones for himself. Only the “male” rivers Bregog, Fanchin, and Allo retain their proper titles. Galtymore becomes Arlo Hill with only a slight change in spelling from “Aherlow,” the name of a neighboring district, but the Mulla River is actually the Awbeg; the Molanna is the Behanna or Behanagh; Armulla Dale is the valley of the Blackwater or Broadwater; and the parent mountains of Mole are the Ballyhoura and Galtee ranges.²⁹ No indication of the actual names was provided in the early editions of these poems. Thus, when Spenser asks rhetorically, in parentheses, “Who knowes not Arlo-hill?” the answer might have been, “Nobody except Mrs. Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and Sir Walter Ralegh.”

In short, these myths are not simply veiled conceits or allegory; they are private poetry written to please the author's own fancy and to be fully understood by a small group of friends and patrons. The sixteenth-century general reader, who had already had practice with the place names in classical and Italian poetry, could still enjoy them, to be sure; and he might easily think (knowing Spenser's poetry) that the events related represented imaginative myth-making in which the poet accounted for real features of the Irish landscape. In practice these ideas could not be conveniently confirmed by personal inquiry, but few readers would dream of questioning the poet's accuracy. Today, thanks to the investigations of P. W. Joyce and others, curious modern readers are assured that the behavior of the Bregog really is “deceitful,” that the Mulla is the Awbeg, and so on. A. C. Judson, after a trip to the Kilcolman area, finds in the “account of Molanna and Funcheon, another proof of [Spenser's] powers of keen observation.”³⁰ But although accurate topographical description forms the nucleus for the two river stories, Spenser is not attempting to prove his powers of observation in them, nor is he offering the stories as topographical description per se. Even more than in Book Four of the Faerie Queene, topography in the Irish river episodes has been wisely subordinated to the ends of myth-making, which lends itself more readily to poetic expression.

It was no doubt the myth-making of Spenser and Camden that appealed most to contemporary readers of their river poetry. Among the immediate imitators, several writers took over only the concept of personifying rivers as nymphs and male figures, a common device in Ovid's Metamorphoses.³¹ Others, including Jonson, Daniel, and Milton, made rivers speak or dance in several pageants and masques. But actual marriages of rivers figure in only a small group of works in the Stuart period. The Fifteenth Song of Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) is devoted to the wedding of Tame and Isis, and much of it is clearly an expansion and variation on the examples of Spenser and Camden—the dressing of Tame and Isis in native flowers, the bridal bower prepared by nymphs, the song commemorating great English rivers, and the birth of Thames (Drayton follows Spenser in making Tame male and Isis female); the other songs of the Poly-Olbion are, of course, full of personified rivers. Drayton's young friend William Browne of Tavistock included a myth of locality in the second book of his Britannia's Pastorals (1616), the story of the marriage of Walla and Tavy. A similar but untitled and anonymous poem may also be by Browne; it describes a race between the Tamar and the Torridge which ends in the wedding of the Torridge with his beloved Ock.³² Finally, Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Grayes Inne (1613) celebrates the wedding of the Thames (Princess Elizabeth) and the Rhine (the Elector Palatine).

We have seen that the genre of river-marriage poems began with Spenser's announced but unfulfilled plans for a huge Epithalamion Thamesis, which common sense must have caused him to abandon. But his remarks in the correspondence with Harvey no doubt stimulated Camden to write De Connubio Tamae et Isis, and that in turn influenced Spenser's subsequent efforts in the genre. The pageant of the Thames and Medway and the two Irish river myths indicate a new awareness on Spenser's part that antiquarian description of river courses, comments on incorrect names, and historical accounts of towns are essentially inappropriate to the medium of verse. Ultimately he seems to have preferred the personal, private, invented stories of Mulla and Molanna. Imitators of Spenser and Camden usually lacked their restraint. Drayton in the Poly-Olbion not only took as his method the personification of rivers and other features of the English landscape, but he also adopted the aims and scope of the Epithalamion Thamesis and the Britannia. After the publication of the Poly-Olbion, Drayton superseded Spenser as the fountainhead of a trickle of river marriages conceived by minor poets whose gurgling songs no longer are remembered.³³

Notes

1. Edition of 1590, sig. A2 (STC 24590). Statements by several scholars (e.g., Charles G. Osgood, Leicester Bradner, and Thomas P. Roche, Jr.) that this first edition does not survive are incorrect; I quote from a microfilm of the Huntington Library copy.

2. This explanation for Vallans' remarks was first made by Leicester Bradner in Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry, 1500-1925 (New York and London, 1940), pp. 40-41.

3. Charles G. Osgood noticed only 93 lines of the poem in the Britannia, less than half of the total, and his commentary is correspondingly restricted in “Spenser's English Rivers,” Trans. Conn. Academy of Arts and Sciences, XXIII (1919-20), 102-3; Osgood's curtailed version is all that F. M. Padelford considers in his “E. W. His Thameseidos,” Shaksp. Assoc. Bul., XII (1937), 69; Leicester Bradner is aware of all except one of the fragments, but his bibliographic account of their publication is inaccurate, and he makes no attempt to summarize their contents in Musae Anglicanae, pp. 40-42. Although aware of Bradner's notice of De Connubio, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., still overlooks four fragments of the poem and thus is led to make several incorrect statements about it in The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser's Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1964), pp. 171-72.

4. Page references for first appearance of a passage: 1586, pp. 197, 206-7; 1590, pp. 222, 282, 336; 1600, pp. 252-54, 261, 366 (2); 1607, pp. 272, 273.

5. Leicester Bradner thinks Camden “was probably still adding to it and polishing it when he died in 1623” (Musae Anglicanae, p. 41), but he overlooks the evidence presented here.

6. When Camden published these references to Scotland and Ireland in 1600, Lennox had been dead for seventeen years and Ulster had been in almost total rebellion for the past six years. The passage on Windsor is introduced by the statement that the lines were “penned certaine yeeres past” (1610, p. 289). See William C. Dickinson, A New History of Scotland, Vol. I: From the Earliest Times to 1603 (London, 1961), pp. 354-55, and Edward A. D'Alton, History of Ireland (London, 1903-6), II, chaps. vi-ix.

7. Britannia (London, 1722), I, sig. [c2].

8. Edition of 1610, trans. Philemon Holland, p. 367. Camden supervised this translation.

9. For a demonstration of Camden's scrupulous concern for accurate details in revision, see Rudolf B. Gottfried, “The Early Development of the Section on Ireland in Camden's Britannia,” ELH, X (1943), 117-30.

10. The adjectives for the Rhine occur in fragment 4, line 15: 1590, p. 282; 1594, p. 275; 1600, p. 322; 1607, p. 259. On the Elbe and Schelde see fragment 3: 1590, p. 222; 1594, p. 220; 1600, p. 262; 1607, p. 215. Several other examples of minor textual changes in phrasing could be cited.

11. See fragment 4, lines 17-18, on the pages given for the Rhine in note 10.

12. Ben Jonson, edd. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), VII, 92. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., incorrectly reports that this line is not in the Britannia fragments and asserts that “we cannot be certain whether Camden continued his poem to London” (Kindly Flame, p. 171n). But the line occurs in the 1590 Britannia, p. 336, and in the Middlesex chapter of all subsequent editions.

13. Jonson's defense has a further touch of irony in it; he is speaking only to Camden and the few others who had rejected the Brutus legend by 1604. Spenser, and later Milton, adopted the same attitude toward Brutus—that he belonged in poetic myths.

14. It is possible that one fourteen-line passage describing Reading which was inserted in the edition of 1600 (p. 248) also belongs to the poem, although it was not marked as such in any edition until Gough's in 1789 (Index, Vol. I, s.v. “Marriage of Thame and Isis”). Reading is described by Father Thames from the same point of view as Windsor and Richmond; and in terms of the topography of the river, it is the most important town not represented.

15. Edition of 1610, p. 290.

16. See, e.g., the passages on London in the edition of 1600, p. 366.

17. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Kindly Flame, p. 171) is quite mistaken in calling the Cygnea Cantio a “poem constructed around a river marriage” and in asserting that the etymology of Thamesis (Tame plus Isis) forms the basis for Leland's work.

18. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, edd. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles G. Osgood, Frederick M. Padelford, et al. (Baltimore, 1932-57), IX, 17. Quotations from Spenser and Harvey are from this edition.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 470.

21. Ibid., p. 17.

22. Professor Osgood has shown that little of the earlier piece could survive in this episode of the Faerie Queene. Much of the substance of the forty-three stanzas is derived from the Britannia (first published in 1586) and Spenser's own knowledge of Irish rivers; and both “sources” postdate the letter to Harvey of 1580. Furthermore, there is nothing in the letter about sea-gods, nymphs, or foreign rivers, all of whom are prominent in the later work. See “Spenser's English Rivers,” pp. 106-8.

23. Edition of 1610, p. 386. In “The Political Allegory of Book IV of The Faerie Queene” (ELH, XI [1944], 242-43) A. M. Buchan points out that Spenser may have conceived a river pageant as a symbol of Concord by seeing Fide Concordia boldly capitalized in the Britannia.

24. “Spenser's English Rivers,” p. 72.

25. The pageant-like quality of the Thames-Medway episode closely resembles that of Giovanni Pontano's Lepidina, a poem which may represent the ultimate source for the concept of river-marriage poetry. Pontano describes a topographical pageant at the marriage of Sebeto, a river god, and Parthenopaea, patron divinity of Naples. In the seven processions of the Lepidina are nereids, nymphs, dryads, oreads, and the gods of nearby places; like Spenser's pageant of the Thames and the Medway, digressions into legends about some of these figures are occasionally inserted. See Rudolf B. Gottfried, “Spenser and the Italian Myth of Locality,” SP, XXXIV (1937), 120. Roche's conclusion (Kindly Flame, pp. 171-72) that the river-marriage idea “may be entirely native to England” must be modified to take the Lepidina into account, and his statement that Vallans' Tale of Two Swannes is an instance of “the river marriage before Spenser” (p. 173) is incorrect—the poem includes no river marriage at all.

26. Buchan argues (“Political Allegory,” pp. 237-48) that the Medway represents Sidney and Essex while the Thames is England; like the other rivers, Ralegh should become friends with Essex and all unite in one policy for England. A sounder interpretation, in this writer's opinion, is that of William Nelson, which considers the wedding episode as a symbolic unit expressing nationalism and patriotism and also as “a symbol of cosmic harmony and plenitude.” See The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York and London, 1963), pp. 254-55.

27. That is the view of Roland M. Smith, “Spenser's Irish River Stories,” PMLA, L (1935), 1047-56.

28. “Spenser and the Italian Myth of Locality,” SP, XXXIV (1937), 107-125. The present paragraph is based upon this article; to it the reader is referred for a fuller discussion and enumeration of the Italian poems and a comparison with Spenser's myths.

29. See Patrick W. Joyce, “Spenser's Irish Rivers,” Fraser's Magazine, n. s. XVII (1878), 315-33; reprinted in The Wonders of Ireland (London, 1911), pp. 72-114. For other opinions about the rivers and hills of these passages, which largely follow Joyce's identifications, see the commentaries in the Variorum Edition of Spenser's Works, VI and VII.

30. Spenser in Southern Ireland (Bloomington, Ind., 1933), p. 43. Judson gives a delightful and well-illustrated description of the Spenser country which might profitably be read in conjunction with the Irish river myths.

31. These include Edward Wilkinson, whose Thameseidos (1600) involves no river-marriages, and Gervase Markham, who includes only one small reference to a river marriage in The Newe Metamorphosis (1600-13) but peoples his poem with a feminine Thames and other streams. For Wilkinson's debt to Spenser see F. M. Padelford, “E. W. His Thameseidos,” Shaksp. Assoc. Bul., XII (1937), 69-76; for Markham's river-marriage episode see John H. H. Lyon, A Study of the Newe Metamorphosis, Columbia Univ. Stud. in English and Comp. Lit., No. 65 (New York, 1919), p. xxvii.

32. This poem was copied by Thomas Westcote in his View of Devonshire in 1630, edd. George Oliver and Pitman Jones (Exeter, 1845), p. 349.

33. Brief notice of later river-marriage poems is given in Robert A. Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1936), pp. 229 and 293, note 11.