The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

From Bohemia to California (via Primrose Hill)

Bohemia holds a special place in literary geography. The third scene of the third act of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale occurs upon the shores of Bohemia. Indeed, the first line makes sure of it:

What is so special about that? Well, let’s jump forward by a century and quote Tristram Shandy:

Whether or not it pleased God, the fallacious notion that Bohemia isn’t landlocked pleased Shakespeare, and Bohemia gained in fiction what it never had in fact. Never? Well, almost never. Uncle Toby doesn’t seem to know that Bohemia did get a tiny bit of territory on the coast of the Adriatic for a short period in the late thirteenth century, and again in the early sixteenth.

Shakespeare almost certainly didn’t know that Bohemia had ever been anything other than landlocked. Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about geography. In The Tempest, Prospero is abducted from his palace in Milan and bundled down to the docks under cover of darkness. Seventy-four miles overnight is a good bit of bundling in the days before the Ferrari. Not that that bothered the Bard. He had people sailing from Verona and a sail-maker working in Bergamo, an Italian town that’s over a hundred miles from the nearest port.

Writers these days devote their time to research, Shakespeare devoted his to writing. He set a whole play in Venice, apparently unaware that there were any canals there; at least he never mentions any, and whenever the city pops up he refers to it as a land, even though it’s in the sea.

Shakespeare seems never to have consulted a map, and anybody who feels too sniffy about that can, like Cleopatra, go and hang themselves from the top of the pyramids. After all, fiction is only fact minus time. If the polar ice caps keep melting the sea will, eventually, come to Verona, to Milan and finally to Bergamo. Then the Sun will expand and the Earth, in a few billion years’ time, will be a parched and burning rock, and the charred bones of Shakespeare, resting in their grave, will be vindicated because all the canals in Venice will be dry.

The poet A.E. Housman took the same attitude with his poem ‘Hughley Steeple’. In a letter to his brother he wrote:

A French playwright called Alfred de Vigny once wrote a play set in London about the doomed poet Chatterton. Apparently it’s a rather good play if you’re French, but any Londoner is bound to snigger when Chatterton’s friends set off to hunt wild boar on Primrose Hill, which is a small park in a rather leafy little suburb. However, Primrose Hill adjoins London Zoo, so it would only take a loose railing or two to render de Vigny right, and Londoners endangered.

Under the tutelage of time, nonsense becomes geography. The Greeks believed in a country called Amazonia filled with fierce female warriors that never existed. Then, a couple of thousand years later, an explorer called Francisco de Orellana was attacked by angry women during a voyage up a big South American river, so he called it the Amazon. Or take the case of the utterly fictional island of California.