In A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor wonders “How could the famous stage direction–‘The Coast of Bohemia’–have ever slipped from Shakespeare’s pen?”* Because Bohemia is an ancient landlocked kingdom (now occupying the westernmost part of the Czech Republic), and because it does not border on the sea, it has no ‘coast’ at all. Was Shakespeare’s geography wrong? As Fermor asks, “How could Shakespeare have thought that her kingdom was on the sea?”
Eventually, Fermor sensibly concludes that “‘Coast’ must have originally meant ‘side’ or ‘edge,’ not necessarily connected with ‘sea’ at all.”** . Fermor, walking his way from the Netherlands to Constantinople, and spending this portion of his walk along the the edge of the thick forest, thinks, “Perhaps this very path was the Coast of Bohemia–at any rate, the Coast of the Forest: near enough!”***
People tend to defend those whom they hold in high esteem, and somehow, we don’t want Shakespeare to have been wrong. Our treasured memory of our father or grandfather, our mother or grandmother, often cannot admit mistake that might indicate mere mortal fallibility. Shakespeare must have had some reason for writing that stage direction in The Winter’s Tale. Mustn’t he? Certainly he can’t have been wrong.
Leaving aside the ‘what if he had been wrong?’ argument, and setting Fermor’s fine conclusions aside as well, let’s look at the idea of a ‘Coast of Bohemia’ in the context of the play, because only by anchoring these items in their contextual literary seabed does anything begin to make sense.
First, begin with the title of the play: The Winter’s Tale. What does this title mean? We know this much, that a tale told in winter was traditionally a fanciful tale by a fireside, a tale told to make the long winter nights pass more quickly. Such stories are not to be taken at face value, but rather are crafted to bring us within ourselves, to meet the devils that we might find within in a way that acknowledges more than it confronts. We know that tall tales seldom, if ever, describe their components with scientific accuracy. The point of such tales lies in their side stepping of the mundane and factual. Winter tales often fascinate precisely because they are fantastical, because they take us aside from the reality of our bleaker winter existence.
In The Winter’s Tale, the jealous Leontes’ son, Mamillius, has such a tale at the ready for his mother:
HERMIONE
What wisdom stirs amongst you? Come, sir, now
I am for you again: pray you, sit by us,
And tell ‘s a tale.
MAMILLIUS
Merry or sad shall’t be?
HERMIONE
As merry as you will.
MAMILLIUS
A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
HERMIONE
Let’s have that, good sir.
Come on, sit down: come on, and do your best
To fright me with your sprites; you’re powerful at it.
MAMILLIUS
There was a man–
HERMIONE
Nay, come, sit down; then on.
MAMILLIUS
Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly;
Yond crickets shall not hear it.
HERMIONE
Come on, then,
(The Winter’s Tale, 2.1.21-32)****
And give’t me in mine ear.
The dialogue itself has all the elements of a thrilling tale, a ghost story, woven to pass the time. A sad tale of sprites and goblins, whispered into the listener’s ear. Except that in this instance, Mamillius’ tale seems to subtly insinuate itself into the present within the play’s context. “A man dwelt by a churchyard”, Mamillius tells us, but the tale’s initial softness carries into the present, until he is whispering his tale into his mother’s ear. Churchyard crickets, chirruping their choruses in tawny grass around the graves, become ‘yond’ crickets–crickets that are present in the onstage moment of the play.
This making of the tale’s tone, content, and context subtly promiscuous with the present action in the play is a device that Shakespeare uses repeatedly to underscore moments in life, bad or good, when things flow together. Imagination merges with past, present, and future like elements in a watercolour, defining new borders and outlines, and transcending traditional boundaries of our preconceptions. As in Fermor’s forest edge ‘Coast of Bohemia’, we find ourselves at a kind of crossroads, a place where we may meet devils or angels, where the dead may or may not find their way, or where goblins and sprites may come to us through whispers uttered below even a cricket’s threshold. Like this tale lying hidden beneath the surface of the play, a tale which we do not hear, Shakespeare’s point may be exactly that of ripples in the pond. Because, not just on ‘some level’, but on many levels, the fanciful tale extends into the reality of our human experience and our lives as well.
Perhaps Bohemia’s coast extends into Shakespeare’s play not just as a metaphor for the edge of a forest populated by darkness and the threat of bears, but because this coast extends always and ever into our lives. Those sprites and goblins always lurk just over the horizon, just beneath the cricket haunted threshold. Death reaches coldly into us even on the sunniest of days. Love’s rejections kills us, not just now, but also forever, and whispered tales may be more powerful than any speech. These elements exist beyond any mere physical ear because they lie at our core, simultaneously outside of us and within us, penetrating deeply into our emotional and intellectual landscapes, and profoundly colouring all our subsequent experience. We do not recover from Hamlet’s pangs of despised love, the proud man’s contumely, or the whips and scorns of time. Instead, they scar us and we live with the scars. Or sometimes we do not live with them. We never really forget, but if we are extremely lucky, we forgive and move on.
After his enraged, jealous explosion takes apart his world, Leontes eventually gets his second chance, but it also costs him. By the time the sixteen years have passed, by the time Hermione’s ‘statue’ returns to life, when his lost daughter, Perdita, is finally returned to him, Leontes’ son has already been so long lost. This may be fitting, in a sense, as Mamillius was the original teller of the tale who figuratively unwittingly brought the sprites and goblins, graveyards and crickets into the play. If there is a caution here, it may be that we should take care to be very careful with our words and thoughts. Otherwise, we risk falling off that forest/world edge that Shakespeare and Fermor envision. We may lose ourselves in storms at sea and find ourselves stranded on a wild coast, on the margin of a wood teeming with voracious bears. Goblins may come boiling from our own story and thrust themselves into our lives, sprites staying forever by our fireside even after the tale is done, and after that ancient story has been told.
Sometimes we long to return to the story, but we know that this can never be. Brook water flows on beneath the slanting willow. Voices come through the riotous growth of flowers, surrounding us and clamouring for something else, for more of what seemed to please us then or there. We try to keep up with the story, but sometimes we lose the meaning as we lose our page, losing our place in a book that long ago may have become available for free in digital format on some electronic tablet. Perhaps our only companions are joy and sorrow, and only one of those really seems to go any distance.
Once, long ago, we had stood in a field under a night sky as the stars came down to us. They spoke to us in ancient tongues and seemed to be our friends, awakening memories that had long lain buried within us. Now, we only ache with the memory of that reunion. Now, seas boil and choke around us, and the old high offices are filled with vultures. Schools too often trade in passing ignorance, with our basic rubrics founded upon trend rather than the depth or breadth that might lend texture to the fabric of our lives. Empty words rumble down the streets in massive pickup trucks, while we clamour for entertainments filled with spectacular balloons. Our leaders kill us either slowly or right away, and we let them do it because we give away our power for pablum dressed as trendy participation.
“Strong reasons make strong actions” says the Dauphin, but does he mean the reasons for the things we do, or the reasoning we use to choose what we are doing?***** For we are anchored in our faith or we are anchored without it. We are left, right, center, up or down, standing on the Coast of Bohemia:
The Sea of Faith
(“Dover Beach”, Matthew Arnold)******
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Like Leontes’ daughter, our loss, our Perdita, may yet come home from the wild and distant shores where she grew up. She may yet sail back to us, even if her attendant lord, Antigonus, has been devoured by a bear spawned from our own collective human ignorance. Like Leontes, we may be forgiven our defects. We may atone for our sins. Stranger things have happened, and there are more things in heaven and earth than we can put into a pudding.
Yet, brother Mamillius will still be gone. Some of us will never return. Victims of genocides ignored by governments who saw no financial interest in stopping them. Those deported back to places where only death awaited them. Children left behind, slipping through the cracks of political posturing. The sad tale of sprites and goblins that swept into our world will have swept out again like dust. The tale’s teller has been swept away as well; brushed across the threshold by a hobgoblin’s broom. It is us. We sweep such dust away, removing the old world, the old ashes, the old dead, and we sweep away ourselves. We also sweep away our understanding, erecting thought scarecrows in the place of knowledge. For the forlorn Coast of Bohemia is the edge of the proverbial wood, and that threshold is the very place where anything might happen, and frightening straw figures stand there, warding off whatever people think might threaten them.
Still, there is one rule:
Ah, love, let us be true
“Dover Beach”
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Let us be true to one another and stop cutting cane to kill our toads, or killing toads to cut the cane. We need them, all of them, as we need all of us. Cane spiders big as a dinner plate, faster than snakes, harder to apprehend than faith based arguments. We dodge left or right, weaving our way through the world; and weaving the world while we are ignorant armies too. What we can do is try our best to pay attention, and to help whenever and wherever we can.
*Fermor, Patrick Leigh, and Jan Morris. A Time of Gifts. New York: New York Review Books, 2005, p. 171.
**Ibid.
***Ibid.
****Shakespeare, William. The Winters Tale. Edited by Stephen Orgel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
*****Shakespeare, William. King John. 3.4.185. https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&play=Jn&loc=p7
******Arnold’s poem may be found many places. The entire poem may be read here:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach