Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/246



latter half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth is regarded as the golden age of Bohemian prose. This period also saw the first Bohemian dramas. But in 1620 Bohemia lost its freedom and political independence in the battle of the White Mountain, and the House of Austria began a systematical persecution of the people, and carried it on so successfully that almost for two hundred years there seemed to be no such thing as a Bohemian nationality. The French Revolution, however, which shook all European thrones, reminded other nations also of their rights, and its echo was heard in Bohemia. Accordingly, the long-oppressed nation slowly rose from its sleep of two centuries, and the dawn of the nineteenth century was the morning of modern Bohemian literature, which was naturally founded, in the main, upon foreign models. It was the genius of Shakespeare that inspired the best of the new Bohemian dramatists. Wellnigh impossible was it to dramatize the glorious deeds of their domestic forefathers, because that would mean to celebrate heroes who were enemies either to the dynasty or to the Established Church; and so the dramatists first undertook to translate foreign works, and among them those of Shakespeare. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was the first to be translated. The tragedy was rendered into Bohemian by Mr. F. Doucha, and the translation published in 1847 by the Matice Ceska, an institution for encouraging Bohemian literature. The success of this first attempt was greater than was expected; and in 1854 the directors of the Matice determined to publish translations of all the thirty-seven Shakespearian dramas. Five authors were engaged in the work,—namely, J. Cejka, F. Doucha, J. J. Kolar, L. Celakovsky, and J. Maly, —and within three years thirty-two dramas were published. The translations of the remaining five, however, were delayed for political reasons and not finished until 1872. Besides this collective publication, many of the plays were reprinted separately in cheaper editions, to secure the greatest possible circulation for them; thus a copy of ‘Macbeth,’ for example, may be had for