The Seacoast of Bohemia: Devil's Race Track

I had a poem published today with the Pacifica Literary Review.

From The Winter's Tale

Enter Antigonus carrying the baby, and a Mariner

Antigonus
Thou art perfect, then, our ship hath touched upon / The deserts of Bohemia? (WT 3.3.1-2)

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Clown
I have seen two such sights, by sea and by land! But I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky; betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point. (WT 3.3.80-84)

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"In The Winter's Tale the tragicomic aspects of the mode are epitomized at once in those two touchstones of theatrical perversity, the shipwreck on the seacoast of Bohemia and the bear that devours Antigonus. The bear, indeed, has been shown by Louise Clubb to constitute, in itself, a tragicomic topos in sixteenth century continental drama, a generic commonplace. As for the Bohemian seacoast, which Shakespeare found in Pandosto and retained, it is not an error, but one of the elements stamping the play as a moral fable -- like the title itself, it removes the action from the world of literal geographical space as it is removed from historical time."

Stephen Orgel, the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Winter's Tale

The Seacoast of Bohemia

Monday, January 21, 2013

Devil's Race Track

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