A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (review)

The Bohemian seacoast of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a litmus test. It irritated his romance-hating contemporary, Ben Jonson, who complained about it to Drummond of Hawthornden, and forced the editor Sir Thomas Hanmer to “correct” it to “Bithynia” in Asia Minor. For others, this detail, which originated in Greene’s Pandosto, sums up the romance genre, removing the play from the limitations of historical fact. Alfred Thomas’s new book, A Blessed Shore, explains how the Bohemian seacoast symbolizes the liberties taken by the Shakespearean imagination, uncovering a longstanding tradition of identifying Bohemia with, on the one hand, an artistic life and a people unfettered by the constraints of normalcy, and, on the other, the forces of conservatism and repression.

Thomas takes his title from the words of the English Jesuit Thomas Campion, writing home to England from exile in Prague: “For this at least we are indebted to those by whose heresy and persecution we have been driven forth and cast gently on a pleasant and blessed shore.” Campion’s letter associates his Bohemian refuge with the combination of romance and religious tolerance that Thomas locates throughout England’s history with Bohemia in the early modern period. Deploying the romance device of the shipwreck that appears in some of Shakespeare’s late plays, the letter, addressed to a Robert Arden of Warwickshire, may even have been read to the young Shakespeare.

The subtitle’s “Chaucer to Shakespeare” aligns the book with current attempts to break down the disciplinary barriers between medieval and Renaissance and to attend to the period between 1350 or so and 1600 or so. Yet rather than offer a survey, the book presents a selection of Wordsworthian “spots of time” that illuminate Anglo-Bohemian relations from each perspective. Two of the most important spots are the royal weddings that bookend Thomas’s material: the marriage of Anne of Bohemia and Richard II in 1382, which defined the Bohemian aesthetic of the Ricardian court, and the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, later King of Bohemia, in 1613: the couple fled Prague in the aftermath of the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, which brought the longstanding Bohemian tradition of religious tolerance to a close.

Building on his important work in Anne’s Bohemia, as well as Paul Strohm’s Hochon’s Arrow and David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity, Thomas offers a detailed account of the artistic and literary inclinations of Bohemian royalty, from the Gothic piety of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, which shaped the tastes of his English son-in-law, to the Kunstkammer of another Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. Chapters on the hospitality John Wyclif enjoyed in Bohemia, and the lack thereof suffered by Bohemian visitors to the English court, explain the lively Bohemian history of Protestantism and uncover startling material on Bohemian attitudes to the English. Throughout, Thomas highlights Bohemia’s dual nature: on the one side, utopian, pluralistic, and artistic (excellent bohemian virtues all) and, on the other, dystopian, aggressive, and reactionary. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women figures here as a kind of love-letter to the profeminist and humanist culture of England’s Queen Anne, while The Winter’s Tale works through the dialectic between the paranoiac repression and dreams of peace and harmony that characterize English attitudes to Bohemia.

This book offers a fascinating prehistory of the idea of the “bohemian,” which the OED attributes to eighteenth-century notions about the provenance of gypsies. It teaches us that Mimi’s Paris has a distinguished past peopled with emperors and Protestants, and offers a heartfelt meditation upon the predicaments of “a tolerant artist anxious to maintain a fragile European peace.” In his ominous closing pages, Thomas narrates a historical counterpart to the psychological landscape of Shakespeare’s late plays, in which King James stoutly refuses to provide his own daughter and her husband...