ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Edmund Spenser's depiction of the marriage ceremony between the Thames and the Medway is further evidence of this tendency for apparently fixed binary opposites to collapse into each other. Spenser presents us with an English landscape into which Irish rivers have been absorbed. The Variorum edition identified six critics who thought that the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, which occurs in Book 4 canto 11 of The Faerie Queene, completes the intention announced in Spenser's letter to Gabriel Harvey concerning Epithalamion Thamesis, with just one dissenting voice. In The Faerie Queene Spenser has changed the sex of the Medway with the effect that the rivers are transformed from brothers to betrothed. That the rivers should become lovers is hinted at in The Shepherd's Calender by reference to the Medway's 'brackish waues' which are 'meynt', that is 'mingled', with those of his brother.
