“The Streame and Currant of Time”: Land, Myth, and History in the Works of Spenser

Abstract

From his “most kyndly nurse” London “on Themmes brode aged backe” to his Irish home on “the Mullaes shore,” Spenser recurrently situated himself in relation to rivers. In so doing the poet drew upon an established tradition of chorographic verse and prose. That tradition (which centered on Camden’s Britannia) characteristically combined the description of land, myth, and history. This article approaches “The Place of Edmund Spenser” in relation to this mode of what George Wither called “topo-chrono-graphical” writing. In particular, it looks at the Marriage of Thames and Medway in Book IV of The Faerie Queene and at Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. Both, it suggests, are concerned with chorography, and in particular with the historical and mythic differences between Irish and English rivers when described by way of this form. Looking in detail at the Britannia and Spenser’s river verses, the article sets out their complex engagement with what Camden himself termed “the stream and current of time.”