Pula - an ancient city on the shores of Croatia (photo from wikipedia.com)

              Even the very name ‘Polixenes’ may well have its linguistic and historical origins in a thread of knowledge which also runs through other Shakespeare plays.  At one end of the thread, Twelfth Night is another play set in winter, and it is also set in a country associated with the Adriatic.  This country is Illyria, historically called Illyricum, a land partly situated in Dalmatia, which encompassed the eastern part of the Adriatic coast.  During Shakespeare’s time, the ancient Indo-European language spoken in Illyricum was thought to be associated with Venetic, the language spoken around Venice – the city in which he had famously set an earlier play.  The country now known as Croatia was part of this same linguistic continuum.  It was variously ruled by Venetians and Hungarians, the Hungarians being in power in ‘Croatia’ when Ottakar conquered the Hungarian kingdom, thus meaning that Croatia was then incorporated as part of Bohemia too.  Now, Croatia has a town on its Adriatic coast named Pula, which was first called by its plural, Polai (probably because the city of Pula is extended by many deserted peninsulas)^[1].  This, then, could well be the origin of the name ‘Polixenes’.  ‘Xenes’ suggests the Greek for ‘stranger’, and Ottakar, King of Bohemia, was certainly a stranger to Pula during the relatively short time in which ‘Croatia’ was part of the kingdom of Bohemia.  However, Polixenes/Ottakar probably eventually learned that Pula is known for both its Roman Amphitheatre and its folk festivals.  The Satyrs dance in The Winter’s Tale suggests the former, while the rural side of the sheep-shearing festival surely suggests the latter.  Polixenes, then, was King of Bohemia who, in Shakespeare’s play, reigns over Polai on the coast of Bohemia/Croatia.

              There are mythological and literary echoes in The Winter’s Tale too which also re-inforce the identities of Polixenes, King of Bohemia, and Leontes, King of Sicily, and the location of Bohemia/Croatia as the setting for the second half of the drama.  In two Greek poets’ versions of the myth surrounding Jason, Jason is a very skilled sailor with whom his pursuers cannot keep up.  These pursuers wanted to take the golden fleece from him, but they failed and did not dare to return home without it, so they settled in an area of the Adriatic where the Illyric people lived.  The name of the city in which they landed was Polai, which meant the city of refuge. Polixenes’ country was a refuge for Perdita, Leontes’ rejected daughter.  The tribe chasing Jason hailed from Greece, and Greek pottery has been found in and around Pula.  The Greeks had settled in Sicily, so the story of the daughter of a Sicilian King finding refuge in Bohemia (i.e. Pula, Croatia) has its mythological and historical parallels.  Also, Dante writes about King Rudolph I, so it is possible that any English writer who could read Italian would learn more about that particular monarch from his Inferno.

              Ben Jonson jibed at ‘Shakespeare’ for writing about the coast of Bohemia, saying that everyone knew Bohemia was landlocked.  The fact that ‘Shakespeare’ did not change the name of his chosen location therefore surely suggests a strong intent on the true author’s part to stick to his guns in the face of what seemed to be popular public opinion.  The true author must therefore have had enough knowledge behind him to know that he was historically correct.  Ben Jonson, on the other hand, did not have this knowledge, yet Ben Jonson had been the protegé of Camden, the great educator who took him under his wing because Ben could not afford to go to university.  Ben Jonson was therefore better educated than William Shakespeare, the Stratford actor, and had easier access to English historical data collected by Camden, yet, unaccountably, ‘Shakespeare’ knew more about international history than Ben.  If Ben was in Camden’s and the Earl of Pembroke’s circle yet failed to discover anything concerning the history of Bohemia, then how did ‘Shakespeare’ discover it?  The answer is that Shakespeare of Stratford had no known access to such information, which seems to have been picked up only by those who had attended Oxford and/or Cambridge university.

              The Winter’s Tale was based on a novel by a man whose knowledge – that of Robert Greene – had been expanded by attending both Oxford and Cambridge universities, which was a privilege poor Ben Jonson never attained.  Robert Greene’s novel Pandosto also implies that Bohemia formerly extended to the Adriatic.  In his turn, though, Greene had early jibed at Shakespeare, the actor, for ever imagining that he could write with such depth and erudition as a university graduate.^[2]  Greene’s jibing has been taken to mean that he did not approve of William Shakespeare of Stratford or his writing, but I wonder if there might not be another interpretation of Greene’s criticism.  Might not Greene be saying that he did not believe the primary-school educated actor, William Shakespeare of Stratford, possessed the knowledge to write even the early works which were claimed to come from his pen?  Sir Henry Neville, on the other hand, had been educated at university, and had travelled to both Bohemia and Italy, staying for many months in Venice, in which city books and relics from ancient Greece were arriving by the boatload.  (Who else but someone who had stayed in Venice would have known the local word ‘traghetto’ for the water-borne transport in that city?  No English travel book on Italy existed before 1611.)  As demonstrated in this article, Venice appears to have been the beginning of a historical and linguistic thread that wove itself into at least three Shakespeare plays, including The Winter’s Tale.  Added to all his specialist knowledge, Neville too might well have experienced the spring floods in the Bohemia of his own day, as the Danube regularly overflows its banks, joining the rise of the river Elbe and creating a veritable sea around the area – a ‘sea’ in which the smaller vessels of the 16th century have occasionally been wrecked.

              That William Shakespeare, the actor, possessed innate talent cannot be doubted, but the plays display great knowledge on top of this talent.  It is to be mourned that Shakespeare was not given the opportunity of overlaying his talent with knowledge, but it is nevertheless a sad fact that must be faced – and also an argument that any civilised society should attempt to provide the means for talent to be developed, no matter how poor financially the possessor of that talent might be.  But sad facts of the past cannot be mended by fond hopes for the future; as Ben Jonson later said, ‘...a good poet’s poet’s made as well as born.’  A poet’s mind regularly merges personal experience with historical data.  But in order to do so, that poet must have the experience and the specialist, esoteric knowledge in the first place.  The Winter’s Tale displays esoteric and historical knowledge in plenty.  Sir Henry Neville had this experience and knowledge; Shakespeare of Stratford did not.  Sir Henry could write confidently about the Coast of Bohemia because he had access to the then rare historical sources which proved Bohemia once extended to the sea.

 ©Brenda James, 18th November, 2005

 [1] In The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Sc.III, the part of Bohemia in which Antigonus lands is described as ‘A Desert (deserted) country near the sea.’

[2] Robert Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit.. (published posthumously, 1592) wrote: “There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his 'tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide,' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; being an absolute Johannes Factotum, in his conceit the only shake-scene in a country. “  The ‘abosolut Johannes Factotum’ really describes Neville very accurately.  Courtier, businessman, ironfounder, politician – all these were Neville's attributes.  The feathers that beautified the crow might well have been meant to represent the quills (pens) of educated men.  Neville was a gentleman, but could be a tiger when roused, as Cecil discovered after the Queen announced how much she wished to fine him following the Essex affair.  ‘Conceit’ means ‘extended metaphor’, and this is what the name ‘Shakespeare’ became for the kind of early, political-historical works under his name which Greene would have known.

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