From THE COASTS OF BOHEMIA: A Czech History by Derek Sayer
From THE COASTS OF BOHEMIA: A Czech History by Derek Sayer

Summary/Abstract: Thou art perfect then our ship hath touched upon the deserts of Bohemia?” asks Antigonus in act 3, scene 3, of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1609-10). Czechs are inclined to see Shakespeare’s furnishing of their country with a coastline as a typical example of foreigners’ ignorance of their land, which was to reach its shameful nadir in British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s description of Czechoslovakia in 1938 as “a faraway country” inhabited by quarreling peoples “of whom we know nothing.” Such flights of geographic fancy can rankle with those unlucky enough to have to suffer their consequences; Chamberlain was distancing the Czech lands from the known world in order to justify his acquiescence in Adolf Hitler’s carving them up. Shakespeare, however, was probably doing no more than signaling that the second part of his fable was set in an imagined Arcadia, a realm of youth and innocence located at the opposite moral pole from the world-weariness, sophistication, and decadence of the equally fictionalized Sicilian court in which the play begins. [...]

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