"Thy bankes with pioned, and twilled brims": A Solution to a Double Crux

Early in Act 4 of The Tempest, Iris rehearses some of the possessions of Ceres, which include

. . . bankes with pioned, and twilled brims
Which spungie Aprill, at thy hest betrims;
To make cold Nymphes chast crownes. . . .

(TLN 1520-22) ¹

The first line in this passage presents two familiar problems, the discussion of which occupies six pages in the 1892 Variorum edition of the play. ² First, the sense of the word pioned is uncertain: some editors prefer to emend to pionied, which they explain as an otherwise-unrecorded formation from piony (i.e., peony). Others prefer to take the word as formed from pioning, which means "excavating". ³ Second, the sense of twilled is also difficult. It can mean "woven with a pattern of slanting lines," but it is difficult to see why any bank should be so described. Editors have sometimes emended twilled to tulip'd (an anachronism), lilied, or willow'd. ⁴ I wish to propose a new, more precise and satisfactory explanation of pioned and to suggest an emendation of twilled that is both plausible in its own right and that accords with this explanation.

Before doing so, the general sense of this somewhat unclear passage should be established. Shakespeare in his other works uses nymph to mean "young woman" as well as "minor deity of water" and bank to mean "sloping ground in general" as well as "the sloping ground at the edges of rivers." Why should it be April in particular who "betrims" the banks? There is, conveniently, a passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen (among lines attributed to Shakespeare) in which exactly the same cluster of images reappears. This passsage is Arcite's soliloquy at the beginning of Act 3, spoken, according to the stage direction printed in the margin of the 1634 quarto, above a "Noise and hallowing as people a Maying":

This is a solemne Right
They owe bloomd May, and the Athenians pay it
To'th heart of Ceremony: O Queene Emilia
Fresher then May, sweeter
Then hir gold Buttons on the bowes, or all
Th'enamelld knackes o'th Meade, or garden, yea
(We challenge too) the bancke of any Nymph
That makes the streame seeme flowers.

(sig. F2^r)

Here, the nymphs are evidently these of streams or rivers—the naiads, indeed, who dance in 4.1 of The Tempest—and their banks are riverbanks, overgrown with flowers that stand so tall that their reflections cover the whole surface of the flowing water. At least some of these flowers, then, grow on bushes or trees; indeed, Arcite mentions "gold Buttons on the bowes [i.e., boughs]." The Athenians are described as paying the "solemne Right / They owe bloomd May": they are maying, which means that they are gathering one particular flower, the may itself, the blossom of the hawthorn. If we connect this activity with Iris's speech, we can see why she describes the banks as betrimmed by spongy April: they are being brought into flower by the April rains, so that by May Day they will be covered with blossom and especially with hawthorn-blossom. Maying was associated with amorous frolicking, and since the masque in which Iris speaks condemns premarital sexual intercourse, her reference to maying is qualified with the insistence that the nymphs are "cold [i.e., chaste]" and that their crowns, too, are "chast." The question to ask about these lines in The Tempest, then, is how "pioned, and twilled brims" will bring forth the materials, especially hawthorn blossom, for the crowns or garlands of a May Day celebration.

The emendation of pioned to pionied (i.e., peonied) certainly plants flowers on the banks. But the peony is not a flower that characteristically covers English riverbanks, particularly in April. Defenders of the emendation propose that peony might actually be a local name for the marsh-marigold or for a variety of wild...