Title: Shakespeare's Bohemia : terror and toleration in early modern Europe
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2019, vol. 45, iss. 1, pp. [191]-209
Extent
[191]-209
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2019-1-12
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/141003
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This article argues that William Shakespeare was not ignorant of the geographic location and political importance of the kingdom of Bohemia, as critics of The Winter's Tale have traditionally assumed since Ben Jonson's infamous jibe of 1618. Shakespeare inherited the motif of Bohemia from his source but significantly inverted it (and gave it a sea coast) in order to make Bohemia the refuge for Perdita, the outcast baby daughter of King Leontes and his wife Hermione. The paper proposes that this inversion is not coincidental but is crucial to the play's oblique message and allegorical plea for religious toleration in Jacobean England, where Catholics had been persecuted since the reign of Elizabeth I. Drawing on previously overlooked primary sources by Shakespeare's Protestant and Catholic contemporaries who lived in or visited Bohemia (including Edmund Campion, John Taylor and Fynes Morison), the text demonstrates that Rudolfine Bohemia's – and Prague's – reputation for religious toleration in the years prior to the catastrophic Battle of the White Mountain (1620) would have been well-known to the playwright and his English compatriots.
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[6] Guy, John (2016) Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years. New York: Viking.
[7] Honigmann, E. A. J. (1985) Shakespeare: The Lost Years. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
[8] Hughes, Charles (ed.) (1967) Shakespeare's Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century. 2nd ed. New York: B. Blom.
[9] Jensen, Phebe (2003) Recusancy, Festivity and Community: The Simpsons of Gowlthwaite Hall. In: Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (eds.) Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 101–120.
[10] Jonson, Ben (1995) The Masque of Queens. In: Lindley, David (ed.) Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainment 1605–1640. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 35–53.
[11] Kesselring, A. J. (2010) The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics, and Protest in Elizabethan England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[12] Limon, Jerzy (1985) Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[13] Louthan, Howard (1997) The Quest for Compromise: Peace-Makers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[14] Lupton, Julia Reinhard (1969) Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
[15] Marotti, Arthur (2003) Shakespeare and Catholicism. In: Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (eds.) Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 218–241.
[16] Milward, Peter (2003) Shakespeare's Jesuit Schoolmasters. In: Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay and
[17] Richard Wilson (eds.) Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 58–70.
[18] Nicholl, Charles (2008) The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street. London: Penguin.
[19] Paul, Henry N. (1950) The Royal Play of Macbeth: When, Why, and How it was Written by Shakespeare. New York: Macmillan.
[20] Pecock, Reginald (1860) The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy. Edited by Churchill Babington. 2 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts.
[21] Polišenský, Josef (1949) Anglie a Bílá Hora. Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts.
[22] Pritchard, Arnold (1979) Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
[23] Questier, Michael C. (2006) Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[24] Rabb, Theodore K. (1998) Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[25] Scarry, Elaine (2016) Naming Thy Name: Crosstalk in Shakespeare's Sonnets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[26] Schechter, Ronald (2018) A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[27] Shakespeare, William (1974) The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
[28] Shapiro, James (2015) The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. New York: Simon and Schuster.
[29] Sharpe, James (2005) Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[30] Shell, Alison (1999) Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[31] Shell, Alison (2011) Shakespeare and Religion. London: Arden Shakespeare.
[32] Stach, Rainer (2017) Kafka: The Early Years, translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[33] Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara (2018) The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History. Translated by Yair Mintzker. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[34] Tavers, James (2005) Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot. Kew: The National Archives.
[35] Tesimond, Oswald (1973) The Gunpowder Plot: The Narrative of Oswald Tesimond alias Greenway. Translated by Francis Edwards SJ. London: Folio Society.
[36] Taylor, John (1620) Taylor his Travels: From the Citty of London in England to the Citty of Prague in Bohemia. London: Nicholas Okes for Henry Gosson.
[37] Thomas, Alfred (2007) A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
[38] Thomas, Alfred (2014) Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War. New York: Palgrave.
[39] Vanita, Ruth (2000) Mariological Memory in The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII. Studies in English Literature 40, 311–337. | DOI 10.2307/1556131
[40] Wills, Garry (1996) Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[41] Wilson, Richard (2004) Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester: Manchester University Press.