How sport plays a key role in Shakespeare’s Henry V.

KING HENRY. What treasure, uncle?

EXETER. Tennis-balls, my liege.

KING HENRY. We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us; His present and your pains we thank you for. When we have match’d our rackets to these balls, We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set. Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard…

William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act I, Scene II

Shakespeare is probably the furthest thing from the minds of tennis fans on their way to the Australian Open this summer. But before Lleyton Hewitt, Mark Philippoussis and the Williams sisters, there was Henry V, Shakespeare and the small matter of a war with the French. And tennis – or at least tennis balls – is centre court in the story.

Paul Campbell, who has recently completed his PhD on sport in Shakespeare’s Henry V, was struck by the number of under-explained references to sport, notably tennis, in Shakespeare. “Why is it famously known that the French Dauphin gave Henry V a ‘tun’ of tennis balls (a casket of tennis balls),” he says. “What does that mean? I usually make the assumption that Shakespeare and his audience know what that means, but I don’t think we know necessarily what that means. I think we do in a sense – it’s basically an insult. An insult which says you’re a boy and you should be playing games, so don’t come and wage war on my country. But when I started thinking about it that wasn’t quite enough of an explanation.”

Campbell explains the King is about to embark on a war with France, a war he must win for the sake of his sovereignty and his reputation, as well as the future of the realm. “Of course, we, like Shakespeare’s audience, know that Henry will ultimately be successful. We know of the legendary exploits of the English army at Agincourt, and so we tend not to question the decision to go to war. It’s difficult for us - just as it would have been for Shakespeare’s audiences - to forget that the King was ultimately victorious, in a victory so glorious that he has long been an exempla of the martial ruler.”

But Campbell wondered if the injection of the sport of tennis, through the gift of the tennis balls and the attendant message, is meant to make us a little uneasy at the King’s bravado.

Rereading the bard’s work and the work of other prominent authors of the period, he says, “I kept coming up with these references to tennis, which is so surreal and bizarre. Someone understood what that meant. Why are they coming up all the time? Why are people being compared to tennis balls? Why is the world being compared to a tennis ball being struck about the gods? It all seemed very odd to me”.

Campbell’s interest was roused, so he began to uncover what was a well-developed metaphor during Shakespeare’s lifetime. “Life could be seen as a game. You were at the whim of the King, bashing you about as if you were a tennis ball, when the King himself was at the whim of the gods. Everything was less certain than some people like to think, so it was a bit reliant on fortune, as a game would be.”

It seemed to Campbell that while the Elizabethans may have recognised the well-developed metaphor, modern scholars and theatregoers might be missing out on something significant.

“It seemed very much to me that you can’t get away with explaining the first few lines in a scene, which should be setting up something, by just saying, ‘Oh, that’s some trivial little aside that the author has decided to put in’. It’s a waste of their effort to do that, and Shakespeare, being a poet, didn’t really waste many words. A lot of the time people have recognised that in relation to the role of the fool character, for example in King Lear. You take note of the minor characters and the juxtaposed scenes. So the great epic battle will go on and then two little characters will have a talk to the side and comment on it. You get the other perspective, so I was just sort of interested in why that was sitting there.”

He points out that the significance of the tennis balls shouldn’t be underestimated, as historians of the period in potted histories of Britain often mentioned little else about Henry V than his victory at Agincourt and the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls.

Something else became clear to Campbell during his research – that the concept of sport was very different in the early modern period and included many things that we would consider recreation or entertainment. Campbell says that when he started looking into sport, he began to wonder “What did they think it was? What was it to them?”

Life was very full for most of the population during that era. “You had your religious observances, you worked and you only had a small amount of time for recreation. Pretty well everything you could fit into that small amount of time was defined as sport, or ‘disport’ for them really. That could go as far as archery practice, going to plays, bear baiting, or tennis and other games of the period.”

Aside from having little time for leisure, Campbell found such disparate recreational activities often occurred in one place, so “all of those things were conceptually the same thing”.

“If you were an aristocrat or a member of the nobility really your role was to be a warrior. That was your work. If you were a peasant you went to work. Your other options, really, apart from going to church, were to go to the theatre, to hunt, to drink, to play ball games including tennis, or maybe even to dance around the maypole – but it was all sport.

“In Henry V the French say, ‘Go off and play sport’, and the English say, ‘No, we’re going to go off to war’. So effectively there is a war and sport divide, or a work and sport divide.”

Campbell says that there was a constant tension between the values of leisure, work and church. “Clearly the leadership like the people to work, so they don’t want their apprentices off at the plays. It’s also the same for the artists. For example, Dekker complains the aristocracy is out sweating at tennis while the people are out sweating digging ditches, so it’s a wasted effort or an excessive effort.

“Its all very good to be fit and to do these things, play sport and enjoy yourself, but if you do too much of it you are more or less wasting the country’s resources, and you’re doing it on the back of someone else’s work. It was better if your sport had a military connection. Keeping your fitness up was well regarded because it helped you to be ready for battle.”

And history, be it factual or legend, tells us that Henry V, despite his enjoyment of tennis, certainly was ready for battle.

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ANU Reporter 
Summer 2007