Jan Hus in Shakespeare's Bohemia?
"Bohemia and English literature? Everybody who sees this title will instantly think if Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the sea-coast of Bohemia..." - RENÉ WELLEK [1] If Shakespeare critics mention one thing about Bohemia, it's that Shakespeare got the geography wrong: You can't get there by boat. For example, Susan Halstead writes , "This glaring geographical error – attributing a sea-shore to the landlocked territory of Bohemia – has frequently been cited as an instance of Shakespeare’s ignorance of Central European topography..." [2] But what if the thing we read and heard most often was that Bohemia was the land of Jan Hus, who advocated communion under both kinds (bread and wine), something very common today even in Roman Catholic parishes. Yet Jan Hus was burned at the stake for it. What if we heard that the ideas of Jan Hus influenced the "Confesio Bohemica" (Czech Confession), "the first ecumenical confession," and...