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

In the following essay, Oruch argues that Camden's De Connubio Tamae et Isis likely influenced Spenser's plans to write Epithalamion Thamesis, a poem about mythological river marriages.

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...