Surely they have finished reading the play by now (some two months later) but the question of the Bohemian seacoast has lingered for centuries now (since a comment by Ben Jonson) without a definitive answer. It is much bigger than a reading group question. As it turned out, I found myself making my way through a particularly dense historical thicket. The question revealed itself to actually be several questions. I could only forge onward on the chance that I might reach the answers to those several questions surrounding Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that have evaded those who came before.
The first question is: What is the source of Shakespeare's play? The answer is that the main source of the plot comes from Robert Greene's Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588). The first edition of this work appeared in 1588. According to Bullough:
Shakespeare's main source was Robert Greene's romance, Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, which had as running title “The History of Dorastus and Fawnia”. Editions of this popular work appeared in 1592, 1595, 1607, and often later.1
P. G. Thomas adds “editions of 1614, 1632, 1636, 1648, 1688, 1696 and 1703.”2
A key line in the 1588, edition reads “the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.”3 Beginning with the 1607, all further editions read “the King shall die without an heir”. The line in The Winter's Tale reads “the King shall liue without an Heire, if that which is lost, be not found.”4 For this reason, Shakespeare's play is understood by many to have been based upon one of the 1588, 1592, or 1595 editions of the Greene novel.
Next question: Does Pandosto feature a Bohemian seacoast? In Pandosto we find the following:
they got to the sea shore; where, with many a bitter curse taking their leave of Bohemia, they went aboard.
There are other references to the seacoast, as well. Pandosto, the king of Bohemia is hosting his childhood friend, Egistus, king of Sicily. Because Shakespeare follows his source, his play, too, features a seashore.
Antigonus. Thou art perfect then, our ship hath toucht upon
The Desarts of Bohemia.
But his play begins not hosting the king of Sicily in Bohemia but the king of Bohemia in Sicily. It is difficult to imagine any other reason for this than that he knew or suspected that Bohemia did not have a seacoast in the immediate vicinity of the royal palace as of the time the play was being written.
Regardless, the only way Shakespeare could place the baby girl where Florizell, the prince of Bohemia, could meet and fall in love with her, some 16 years later, was to have the ship that was carrying her deposit her on a shore in faraway Bohemia. On each disparate shore, Greene and Shakespeare had the babe discovered by a shepherd who took her home to his wife. In both, the old couple brought her up as their own.
It is likely that one or more of three options explains this first part of our inquiry. Shakespeare either 1) wanted to keep Bohemia in the play, regardless that it had no coast, so his audience would connect it with the highly popular novel Pandosto; or, 2) didn't know or care whether Bohemia had a seacoast, from time to time, in history, or not. (It was, after all, a play not a geography lesson); or, 3) decided that there was a seacoast near enough Bohemia to serve in a pinch so long as the baby's destination was a desert distant from land-locked Bohemia-proper. Options 1 & 3 seem likely, option 2 quite possible.
Actually, the author with a major problem, geographically speaking, was Greene, who had the tiny babe float in a tiny boat for two days in order to arrive in Sicily.
at last let us come to shew the tragical discourse of the young infant. Who being tossed with wind and wave floated two whole days without succour, ready at every puff to be drowned in the sea, till at last the tempest ceased and the little boat was driven with the tide into the coast of Sicilia, where sticking upon the sands it rested.
Writing a fairy tale, of sorts, he may have reasoned, the tiny boat could safely transport the babe wherever he wished in however impossibly short a time.
Like many such incongruities, Greene's will provide clues that allow us painstakingly to untangle the thicket of which I have spoken. A thicket so tangled that I have spent many hours of spare time (actually, there is no such thing in my life), for these two past months, sputtering and struggling to get through to the other side.
First, how did Greene get his Bohemian seacoast? Upon the death of Boleslau III, king of Poland, in 1138, Poland was divided into five principalities, ruled by his four eldest sons. This greatly weakened the country. It was soon a country no longer, but, rather, an area fractured into shifting duchies and principates. One of those duchies was Silesia. It, the pieces of Poland, and their neighbor, Bohemia, fluctuated in the amount of territory each commanded, and, thus, claimed, during any period of time from 1138 to the early-15th century.
The borders of these duchies with neighboring Germany, was marked by the Oder River. Germany controlled the west bank and German was the common language there. The various duchies/principates controlled various portions of the east bank at different times. Most often, Bohemia and/or Silesia controlled the east bank. They and/or Denmark controlled the city and port of Szczecin, at the mouth of the Oder, at any given time. Even when control of the east bank was uncertain, the locals continued to speak the Silesian dialect of the Slavic language.
The Oder River delta formed the Szczecin lagoon, at its mouth, on the seaside of which was the port for the region. The lagoon was rimmed by what the Latin writers of the Chronicles of the Time (Greene's source, to which we will return) would often refer to a des(i)ertus. To them it meant “scrub land” rather than desert. At the end of the Oder River, then, was the Bohemian seaport of Szczecin.
This only begins to describe the alternative possibilities of where Shakespeare's desert came from (there is no desert in what remains of Greene's text) and Shakespeare appears to have known nothing of Silesian chronicles. From just where the desert might have come is an interesting subject in itself which must wait its turn in the infamous interminable queue.
There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare knew Greene's source much less had read it. His choices seem to have been entirely exigent. Greene's novel was so popular that the playwright desired to keep the connection between it and his play clear by having the baby girl sail between Sicily and Bohemia.
It is also clear that Robert Greene took portions of his tale from old Silesian chronicles that he did not feel the need to understand with precision. I look forward to provide an explanation of the relationship between the two as time permits (vide "interminable queue" supra).
Given the level of stylistic maturity of The Winter's Tale, and the quote mentioned above, it seems likely that the play was composed following the release of the 1596 edition of the novel. Like the early version of The Merchant of Venice (known by the title The Jew),5 an earlier could well have been staged in 1589 and revised for production in 1596. External references suggest it was brought on the stage of the Globe in 1612 for a run following the release of the 1607 edition of the novel.
Among the references implying a 16th century run are several in a novel entitled The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621) as I have revealed in my recent book Shakespeare's The Tempest: a Wedding Masque for Susan de Vere (2024).6 Of course, the Countess of Montgomery was Susan de Vere, the daughter of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
Ironically, then, Shakespeare was right for all the wrong reasons. During the time of the chronicles, which were the main source of Robert Green's Pandosto, Bohemia had a seacoast. Orders of magnitude more ironic, we will next see that Greene was wrong about it having a seacoast. Go figger.
1 Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: Romances (1957). 118.
2 Thomas, P. G. Greene's 'Pandosto' Or 'Dorastus And Fawnia' Being The Original Of Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale' (1907). ix.
3 Thomas, 26.
4 A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Horace Howard Furness, ed. (1928), III.ii.143-4.
5 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. The Tempest: a Wedding Masque for Susan de Vere (2024). ii.37. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY5YYG1F/
6 Purdy, Tempest. ii.10-12.
[General note] The observations on the language and political situations on the banks of the Oder River incorporate considerable information from:
Kamusella, Tomasz. "The Changing Lattice of Languages, Borders, and Identities in Silesia".
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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