English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Merry Sport

Gregory M. Colón Semenza. Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. 239 pp. Cloth. $49.50.

By Jeffrey Powers-Beck, East Tennessee State University

            Sports in the twentieth century sometimes gave presidents and prime ministers an international venue for gestures of goodwill, as in the ping-pong diplomacy between Nixon and China in 1971, or the wrestling diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran in 1998. More ominously, sports have offered to dictators opportunities to burnish their images and present their ideologies on a world stage: think of Castro’s long-time use of the Cuban baseball team and Olympic athletes, or Hitler’s Nazification of the 1936 Olympics. But the singular “sport” in Gregory M. Colón Semenza’s book, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance, concerns mostly activities other than athletic competitions in an era before professional and Olympic sports emerged. This is a book about the religious and political dimensions of “sport,” which we might label “recreation and merry making,” and which contributed to the national crisis of the English Civil War (1642-1646).

            “Sport” in the English Renaissance, as Semenza points out, was both a potent and an ambiguous term. It could refer to athletic endeavors, such as running and wrestling, to other forms of popular entertainment, such as theatre, dancing, or bear-baiting, to hunting, or to informal game-playing, mirth, and carnival. When Andrew Marvell (a moderate Puritan who also enjoyed Carpe Diem poems) wrote his seductive lines “To His Coy Mistress,” he urged the shy lady: “Now let us sport us while we may.” And famously, King James issued his declaration “Concerning Lawful Sports to be used” for Lancashire in 1617, but published it to all his subjects. The Book of Sport, as it came to be known, was republished in 1618, and again under Charles I, eventually becoming a political lightning rod that drew attacks from Puritan critics of the court. “Sport,” from the Puritan perspective, often broke into license and threatened to disturb a strict observance of the Sabbath.

            The University of Delaware Press claims Semenza’s book is “the first book-length study of the crucial relationship between sport and the political and imaginative literature of Renaissance England” (dust jacket). But if “sport” is broadly defined, there have been other such books and articles, including Leah Marcus’s Politics of Mirth (University of Chicago, 1986) and Peter Stallybrass’s “Wee Feaste in our Defense” (ELR, 1986). Semenza is well aware of these works: indeed, it is his book’s objective to revise the definition of “sport” in Marcus’s and Stallybrass’s works, to show that a Bakhtinian concept of Carnival did not prevail in all Renaissance “sport.”  Rather, Semenza cites the commonplace Elizabethan distinction between lawful and unlawful sport: leaping, racing, archery, fishing, some traditional ceremonies (as for May Day or Rogationtide), and some forms of dancing were often considered lawful, even by many Puritans, whereas bear-baiting, bull-baiting, promiscuous dancing, heavy drinking, and gambling were often considered unlawful.  Such a distinction, Semenza argues, is necessary to understanding the pervasive and temperate character of sport in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Bakhtinian Carnival and riot, the author suggests, did not characterize most sport in the English Renaissance.

            Athletic “sport,” such as running or wrestling, was considered not only lawful, but also beneficial to the commonwealth, as it prepared men for military service. But “unlawful” sports were thought to disable men from military service. A few puritans, like Philip Stubbes and William Prynne, denounced all manner of “sport,” as idle and ungodly, but this was an extreme view. Puritans like John Milton, in fact, advocated regimens of physical exercise--marching, riding, wrestling, and fencing--to prepare young men for military duties.  While the advent of artillery began to make this concept of “sport” obsolete, this conservative notion of the soldier-scholar-leader had adherents throughout the Renaissance, from Roger Ascham in Toxophilis through Milton in “Of Education.”

            Semenza’s work applies this nuanced understanding of lawful and unlawful “sport” to literature, claiming that literary works contributed vitally to the cultural dialogue about sport in the period. For example, the third chapter argues that dramas depicting James I’s court as corrupt and unlicensed (e.g., If This be Not a Good Play, The Isle of Gulls) motivated the king’s “moderate public policy [statement] on sports and pastimes” and his nationwide declaration in 1617 and 1618.  Similarly, in Chapter 5, Semenza reads Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler as a strong reaction to the Puritans’ suppression of sport—a response that emphasizes the sport’s communal nature--and in chapter 6, he interprets the horrific temple scene at the conclusion of  Milton’s Samson Agonistes (because Milton quietly added athletic competitions to the Biblical account) as a covert criticism of the sporting culture of Charles I’s court.

            Interestingly, literature, far from being a discrete field of academic study, was also considered “sport” in Jacobean England. In fact, puritan criticism of “sport” usually began with attacks on Shakespeare and Jonson’s theatre. So Quaker founder George Fox objected to the people’s “wakes or feasts, may-games, sports and plays” as a violation of the Sabbath (my emphasis). As dramatic writing itself was sport (licensed and censored, like other entertainments, by the King’s Master of Revels), playwrights often celebrated sport, or at least defended it against Calvinist criticism. Recall Shakespeare’s mock punishment of the Puritan Malvolio in Twelfth Night (conducted through a writing game), or Jonson’s harsh treatment of Zeal-of –the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair. While Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Jonson’s Ursula the pig woman transgress against legal restrictions on sport, these characters do embody England’s social needs for imaginative and physical recreation. Here,  pace Semenza, Bakhtin’s description of Carnival as “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming” needed to preserve the social order from stagnation, seems especially relevant to Renaissance sport. In other words, this reader does not find the author’s anti-Bakhtinian argument entirely persuasive.

            Two characteristics make Semenza’s book distinctive in the field of sports studies. One is his reading of historical and political documents, especially James I’s Kings Majesties Declaration to His Subjects Concerning Lawfull Sports to be Used, as literary texts in dialogue with literary texts. The chapter on The Book of Sports is a fresh perspective on a historical document that deserves further examination. The second characteristic is Semenza’s willingness to read obscure works alongside established classics—in this case, Shakespeare early Henry VI plays alongside his more mature dramas, and the Annalia Dubrensia, a collection of sports poems published in 1636 to celebrate the Cotswold Games in Gloucestershire, next to Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler and John Milton’s Samson Agonistes. In the second chapter, Semenza argues that sport appears as noble idleness and  war appears as a “royal sport” in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, a degeneration of the Renaissance ideals of both sport and war. The fourth chapter on the Annalia Dubrensia details how Robert Dover’s establishment of the Cotswold Games was a tribute to the Classical games of Olympia, and how the collection of poem in 1636 was a salvo in the Sabbatarian conflict between the puritans and the royalists.

            Stylistically, throughout Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance Semenza’s writing is clear and direct. Although he does cite literary theorists (referring, for example, to Derrida’s concept of “performative” interpretation in Chapter 3), the presentation is lucid and thoughtful.  The five chapters of the book are discrete and organized chronologically, starting with the Renaissance meaning of “sport” and the political debate about “sport” in England, moving to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, then to James’s Book of Sports, the Annalia Dubrensia, The Compleat Angler, and Samson Agonistes . Readers interested in sports primarily as athletic competition may find Sport, Politics, and Literature a bit obscure in places, but they will glean new insights about the political ramifications of sports in the English Renaissance and today.