SOURCE: Semenza, Gregory M. Colon. “Sport, War, and Contest in Shakespeare's Henry VI.” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 4 (winter 2001): 1251-72.

[In the following essay, Semenza explores the ways in which Shakespeare used sports metaphors to describe the selfish wars conducted by the greedy nobles in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3.]

When, in 1 Henry VI, a Messenger of the Countess of Auvergne requests that Talbot visit his lady's castle, Burgundy derisively remarks:

I see our wars
Will turn unto a peaceful comic sport,
When ladies crave to be encountered with.

(2.2.44-6)¹

Burgundy's scoff seizes upon one contemporary signification of sport as amorous dalliance,² and suggests how Talbot's warlike heroism might be compromised or even undermined by his encounter with a woman. The adjective “peaceful comic” indicates a sort of sport that actually differs from war, as though the two phenomena are otherwise linked by some inextricable bond. Burgundy's warning that war will become indistinguishable from sport—through a process of emasculation—is merely the most explicit statement of a general concern that runs throughout the entire trilogy.

In early modern England it was assumed that sport would turn, or be turned, into war. In fact, the state's primary justification for declaring any sports to be “lawful,” even in the face of hostile opposition from conservative polemicists and religious zealots, was based upon the ancient argument that sports provided men with the physical training and conditioning necessary to their successful military engagement with foreign enemies. In Henry VI not only are war and sport collapsed, but their normal relation is reversed: war is constantly in danger of turning into sport.

In the famous Miracle of St. Albans scene in 2 Henry VI, for instance, the King and his counselors have just returned from the field where they have been hawking. The King admires Gloucester's hawk, which has captured its prey despite the high wind, and he compares its fearless magnificence to the spirit of man: “To see how God in all his creatures works! / Yea, man and bird are fain of climbing high” (2.1.7-8). Suffolk and Beauford respond by using the King's simple metaphor to indict what they perceive to be Gloucester's limitless ambition:

SUFFOLK.
No marvel, and it like your Majesty,
My Lord Protector's hawks do tow'r so well;
They know their master loves to be aloft,
And bears his thoughts above his falcon's pitch.
GLOUCESTER.
My lord, 'tis but a base ignoble mind
That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.
CARDINAL.
I thought as much, he would be above the clouds.

(2.1.9-15)

The ensuing verbal battle between Gloucester and Beauford, which includes their mutual promise to settle the issue through one-on-one combat, takes place under the guise of “sports talk.” When Henry finally senses and questions the actual meaning of their exchange, Gloucester denies that anything is wrong: “Talking of hawking; nothing else, my lord” (49).

In a sense, the suggestion that two of the most powerful men in the realm really were discussing hawking, and nothing else, would have been as troubling to Elizabethans as the actual feud between Gloucester and Beauford itself. For decades, English writers had warned gentlemen about the dangers of excessive recreation and exercise. In sixteenth-century treatises on sport, the warnings became something of a literary convention. Most authors had recommended hawking with some reservation. Unlike hunting, the sport with which hawking is most often associated, hawking's military function is not immediately apparent. Sir Thomas Elyot approved of the pastime as a “right delectable solace,” while admitting that “thereof cometh nat so moche utilitie, (concerning exercise), as there dothe of huntinge” (1:199-200). Likewise, some time later, James I explains to his son in Basilikon Doron: “As for hawking I condemn it not but I must praise it more sparingly; because it neither resembleth the warres so neere as hunting doth in making a man hardy, and skilfully ridden in all groundes” (122) The general ambivalence of contemporaries toward hawking seemed to depend upon how the sport was being used—properly or improperly.

A sport's propriety was usually determined by the degree to which it prepared men for warfare, though maintenance of health was sometimes considered as well. Because the military function of hawking was less than clear, however, contemporaries often characterized the sport as useless, idle, or superfluous. In the anonymous Institution of a Gentleman, for instance, the author recommends honest pastimes, for they bring “muche proffyt bothe to the healthe of man and recreacion of hys wytte,” but warns against excess in the “gentlemanly” sports, which include hawking:

I take occasion to speake of hawking and huntyng, pastymes used (yea rather abused) of Gentlemen, whych pastimes in their right kinds are good & allowable, yet by superfluous use and overmuch hauntyng of them, they be rather chaunged into faults & transgressions, then honest exercises ordeyned for man's recreacion.

(sig. b3)

The author proceeds to explain that unlike field sports—wrestling, running, leaping—which prepare men for war, excessive hawking “is cause of neglectyng the thyngs … [to which] al gentlemen are instituted,” and he specifically includes war within these neglected gentlemanly affairs:

That is to saye, a measure ought to be kept in pastyme. Which worde measure bryngeth in good occasion to speake here of hawkinge and huntynge, for in these dayes manye Gentlemen will do almoste nothinge els. … This is the cause why there bee founde so many raw Soldyers when tyme of warres requyreth their helpe.

In the St. Albans passage, the conflation of hawking and political conflict—the general inability of the King, and perhaps the reader, to distinguish between them—serves to indict the irresponsibility of the ruling nobility. On the one hand, the time spent hawking is time spent away from serious matters of state. While the nobles pursue their sport, the much lamented, lost French territories remain lost, and a number of insurrectionary plots threaten to destroy the kingdom. Shakespeare's very placement of the leisurely aristocratic activity in the opening of the second act—immediately after the Duchess' ambiguous oracles suggest the potential, impending deposition of the King—strikes the reader as oddly out of place. Yet the scene illustrates quite vividly, on a microcosmic level, why Henry is unable to maintain political stability: hawking is cause of neglecting the things whereunto the monarch is instituted.

On the other hand, the sport is not merely presented as a frivolous pastime, for Gloucester and Beauford actually are engaged in serious political conflict. Yet the conflict is represented through the terminology of sport. In this case, the collapse of discursive difference renders the conflict a type of sport: it calls attention to the fact that we are witnessing not a disagreement over political difference per se but, rather, a sort of competition between two men. Regardless of Shakespeare's own political agenda in writing his English history plays—and critical opinion is famously divided over this issue³—the agendas of the characters within the plays are motivated only rarely by any explicit adherence to, advocacy of, or protest against specific political policies or principles. Personal ambition replaces such principles and becomes the chief signifier of the historical shift from an idealistic political system based on the chivalric code to a more cynical one governed by the demands of realpolitik. The St. Albans passage demonstrates not only the centrality of personal ambition as the source of eventual military conflict in 2 Henry VI, but also the usefulness (and complexity) of sport as a metaphor for the contestatory struggles that result from such ambition. Furthermore, the relative uselessness of hawking in the lives of the English statesmen indicates the equal uselessness and even dangerousness of personal ambition to the stability of the state.

Shakespeare's attention in the trilogy to the degeneration of chivalry into realpolitik—apparent in the shift of focus from the Anglo-French wars in 1 Henry VI to the petty civil squabbles of the subsequent plays—should be examined within the context of contemporary anxieties about war having become less noble and, to a certain degree, less justifiable. The St. Albans passage demonstrates not only Shakespeare's conflation of war and sport as a sign of this degeneration, but his complete reversal of their normal relation as traditionally figured by humanists, military scientists, and statesmen, among others. Examination of the contemporary evidence suggests that this relation was itself undergoing important alterations throughout the sixteenth century.

Sport often had been linked with war in classical theory, and the parallels between the two phenomena were reaffirmed and elaborated by early modern educators and military scientists. The tendency to view certain sports as microcosms of military conflict doubtless has much to do with the violent aspect of sport. Considering the probable origins of athletics, Donald G. Kyle highlights man's violent impulses as the lowest common denominator between sport and war: “Seeking the original stimulus for athletics … [m]ilitary considerations may be relevant since many early sports appear related to primitive warfare. One can appreciate the cathartic effect of athletics in providing an outlet for hostility other than war and death” (10). Norbert Elias goes further to suggest that the cathartic function of sport is essential to the maintenance of any civilized society:

For example, belligerence and aggression find socially permitted expression in sporting contests. And they are expressed especially in “spectating” (e.g., at boxing matches), in the imaginary identification with a small number of combatants to whom moderate and precisely regulated scope is granted for the release of such affects. … [T]his … is a particularly characteristic feature of civilized society.

(1616)

Emeric Crucé seems intuitively to have recognized this point; when, in 1623, he proposed that a European peacekeeping court be established in Venice, he specifically recommended that sport and hunting be used to satisfy men's thirst for violence.⁴

Such arguments—that sport could serve as an alternative to war—were extremely rare. More often, sport was advocated and justified because of its preparatory military function. Like battle, success in sports demanded courage, toughness, and activity-specific skills like those of the archer. Though Plato first advocated a systematic “physical training that [was] simple and flexible, especially in its training for war” (108), it was Aristotle who influentially stressed the courage that physical training could instill in youth when balanced by a proper focus on the exercises of the mind. Courage is said to result from what is noble, and what is truly noble must originate in the mind. In Book VIII of Politics, the author warns that without a noble education, men trained merely in athletics will become violent and beast-like, but not courageous: “For among the barbarians and among animals courage is found associated, not with the greatest ferocity, but with a gentle and lion-like temper. … And parents who devote their children to gymnastics while they neglect their necessary education, in reality make them mechanics” (Aristotle, 198-99). Athleticism unfiltered by education results in a violent, warlike disposition.

Such a disposition could be useful, of course, within certain contexts. Early modern educational theorists and military scientists stressed the benefits of athletic training for would-be warriors. In the Governour, Elyot prefaces his recommendation of individual sports by remarking,

I wyll nowe only speake of those exercises, apt to the furniture of a gentilmannes personage, adapting his body to hardness, strength, and agilitie, and to helpe therwith hym selfe in perile, whiche may happen in warres or other necessitie.

(1:172)

He praises wrestling, “in case that a capitayne shall be constrayned to cope with his adversary hande to hande, hauyng his weapon broken or loste” (173). Running is useful in overtaking or escaping one's enemy, riding in presenting a majestic and dreadful image to the enemy, and even swimming is said to be an “excellent commoditie,”

Sens no kyng … may assure hym selfe from the necessities which fortune sowethe amonge men that be mortall. And sens on the helth and saulfe garde of a noble capitayne … nothing shulde be kepte from his knowledge, wherby his persone may be in every jeoperdie preserved.

(181)

In support, he cites the military exploits and swimming skills of Alexander, Caesar, and Sertorius.

Lawrence Humphrey, author of The Nobles (1563), declares to be lawful only those ancient sports—casting the dart, running, wrestling, etc.—which are “stouter and manlier,” and have in them “somewhat stately and warlike” (sigs. B4 r-v). In this case, the very fact that such sports can be turned into war renders them tolerable. Activities such as dancing, dice, and chess, on the other hand, are often pursued merely for “filthye gayne.” In The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham is more specific: “[A]ll pastimes generally, which be joyned with labor, used in open place, and on the day light, conteining either some fitte exercise for warre, or some pleasant pastime for peace, be not onelie cumlie and decent, but also verie necessarie, for a Courtlie Gentleman to use” (1904; 217).

As usual, though, it is Richard Mulcaster who, among the Castiglione-inspired educational theorists, most systematically outlines sport's martial function:

For the use of warre, and defence, it is more then evident, that exercise beares the bell: Can one have a bodie to abide cold, not to melte with heat, not to starve for hunger, not to dye for thirst, not to shrinke at any hardness, almost beyond nature, and above common reache, if he never have it trained? Will nimbleness of limmes awaie with all labour, surpasse all difficulties, of never so divers, and dangerous groundes, pursue enemies to vanquish, reskue freinds to save, retire from danger without harme … ?

(61-62)

Mulcaster goes beyond making a simple comparison between vigorous sports and the vigorous nature of war: he focuses on the ability of exercise to prepare men for the physiological strains of military hardship. He recovers the argument, systematized by Galen and passed on though Mercurialis, that three things come from the use of exercise: “hardness of the organs from mutual attrition, increase of the intrinsic warmth, and accelerated movement of respiration” (Galen, 54). By hardening the organs, one gains both “insensitivity and strength for function.” By increasing intrinsic warmth, one can shape a body that abides cold, and by improving respiration, one can surpass all difficulties through nimbleness of limbs.

By the time Mulcaster wrote Positions (first ed. 1581), a small section offering a tempered advocacy of sport—especially its martial function—was a predictable component of the English educational treatise. He may have been the last of the great Renaissance educators to deal so extensively with the benefits of sport, the last to be seriously invested in the enterprise. The convention continued well into the next century but with less originality and, as we will see in a moment, less to back it up. Both James Cleland's The Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607) and Henry Peacham's Compleat Gentleman (1634) advocated sport for military purposes. In Of Education (1644), Milton recommended as “equally good for peace and war” the arts of weaponry and cavalry, and exercises like wrestling (234).

Early modern military scientists were no less enthusiastic about the significance of sport for the training up of soldiers. Writers like Barnabe Rich, who argued that only those men showing quickness, nimbleness, and readiness should be soldiers, based their programs on Vegetius' Epitome (c. 383-450) and Machiavelli's Art of War (1521).⁵ In both works, the authors recommend idealistic military training programs but only for young men who show strength and athletic prowess. It is Vegetius who influences Rich's argument: “jumping and running should be attempted before the body stiffens with age. For it is speed which, with training, makes a brave warrior” (5). Vegetius actually details the proper physique for a potential soldier: “So let the adolescent who is to be selected for martial activity have alert eyes, straight neck, broad chest, muscular shoulders, strong arms, long fingers, let him be small in the stomach, slender in the buttocks, and have calves and feet that are not swollen by surplus fat but firm with hard muscle” (6). He goes on to praise running, leaping, and swimming in particular. Only a true sportsman may be turned into a true soldier.

Machiavelli, like Vegetius before him, stressed the difference between enlisting a true athlete and an idle sportsman. Though one's occupation might help to signify his potential military prowess, appearances are deceiving. Moral uprightness matters:

Some authors who have written about this subject will not take fowlers, fishermen, cooks, bawdyhouse keepers, or any other sort of people who make an occupation of pleasure or sport; they prefer plowmen, smiths, farriers, carpenters, butchers, hunters, and such occupations. For my own part, I should not so much consider the nature of their profession as the moral virtue of the men.

(Machiavelli, 33)

Nonetheless, Machiavelli stresses that once the men are chosen, they must be trained in “running, wrestling, leaping,” etc. (59). The Elizabethan military scientists also upheld moral virtue as paramount in determining the ideal soldier, and they differentiated between useful and dangerous sports to be used in his training. Rich describes men who are utterly incapable of becoming good soldiers as those who spend all of their time dicing, drinking, and swearing. He is particularly critical of the nobility which, he says, has begun to neglect its military responsibilities and has become a slave to pleasure and idleness: “And generally it is seene, where pleasure is preferred so excessively, and the people followe it so inordinately, that they lye and wallowe in it so carelessly, they commonlie end with it most miserably” (Rich, sig. F3). The sanctity of war and the stability of the state are threatened by the tempting pleasures of unlawful recreations.

Up until about the time that Barnabe Rich wrote Allarme to England (1578), sport had usually been figured as conducive to war. The educational humanist writers influenced by Baldassarre Castiglione and the Italian school of Vittorino da Feltre relied on classical examples of sport's usefulness and stressed the numerous ways that athletic skills could be employed in battle. Military scientists influenced by Vegetius and Machiavelli, and indirectly by Frontinus, argued that athletes, among all men, could be most easily transformed into soldiers. By the second half of the sixteenth century, however, writers and polemicists became more ambivalent about the traditional progression from sport to war. The new skepticism had much to do with the new challenges to sport by godly preachers and, perhaps, as much to do with the increasingly widespread tendency to scrutinize war itself—its horrific nature and effects on society. As Rich's critique of the nobility suggests, there is an emerging sense that sport has become an end in itself and that the military has been seriously weakened as a result.

Contemporary records indicate that the greatest blow to the military was dealt by the failure of the secular cult of the gentleman to serve as an adequate substitute for chivalrous knighthood: “By the early sixteenth century the practice whereby aristocratic youths were packed off to a noble household to learn the crafts of combat while serving as page-servants was dwindling. Fewer nobles maintained both a scholarly and arms-and-athletics tutor to prepare their sons for war.”⁶ Though Sir Philip Sidney could sing of the glory of martial athleticism—“In martial sports I had my cunning tried, / And yet to break more staves did me address, / While, with the people's shouts, I must confess, / Youth, luck and praise even filled my veins with pride” (53: 1-4)—evidence shows that most English gentlemen were less enthusiastic about military glory. While it would be shortsighted to blame waning enthusiasm on the development of guns alone, the unchivalric new weapons served as a useful scapegoat for explaining the mounting aristocratic aversion to war. J. R. Hale attributes this aversion to a number of other factors:

Death in wars and the succession of minors; the shrinkage of land-based fortunes as the real value of money declined; the gaining of titles of by men without a militant heredity; the virtual absence—given the smallness of permanent military establishments and the way they were run—of a military career structure that could allow an aristocrat to be “in the army” while still agreeably responding to changes in the peacetime manners of his class: all played some part in the process of civilianization.

(1985, 96-97)

Nonetheless—and perhaps because gentlemanly complaints about the lack of a military career structure would have sounded jejune—the most cited reason for the abandonment of the battlefield by aristocrats was the decline of chivalry, and this decline was directly linked to the development of guns. Shakespeare notes the effects of guns on the aristocracy in 1 Henry IV when Hotspur ridicules one “popingay's” remark that, “but for these vile guns / He would himself have been a soldier” (1.3.63-64).

The increasing prominence of gunpowder in the early modern period, and the subsequent tactical transition from cavalry to infantry, seriously altered traditional methods of warfare. As John Hale remarks, “New weapons involved fresh tactics, and here too there was much discussion: of the changing roles of horse and foot, and how best to combine shock and missile troops” (1962, 21). Such tactical matters the ancients never had to contemplate, and the old manuals were silent on issues of modern artillery. Usually Elizabethan military writers insisted on close adherence to the ancient principles of warfare, allowing only slight modifications to account for the new weaponry. Paul Ive's translation in 1589 of Fourquevaux's Instructions for the Warres conveys the seriousness of such modifications: “[A]lthough I follow the ancient manner in most things, … it is without rejecting our own fashions in any thing that I think them to be surer than theirs” (Fourquevaux, sigs. b1 r-v.). As Henry J. Webb remarks, the Elizabethan military scientists “fervently believed that to be indoctrinated by the classical principles of war was to be moulded in the form of a perfect soldier” (16). Somewhat ironically, then, the rise of a neo-classical military science in England was contemporaneous with the development of the modern weapons. Military writers like Barnabe Rich, Thomas Digges, and Thomas Styward revived the ancient science in reaction to the threat posed by gunpowder to the stability of that science.

One effect of the new developments was that sport and war became more easily separable phenomena. The problem with guns was that they required no athleticism: no strength, no speed, and no endurance. J. R. Hale notes that “Guns, because of the force of their bullets owed nothing to the muscle power that tensed a bow-stave or wound the string of a crossbow into its notch” (1985, 95.) In fact, guns were often described as unnatural or even Satanic because they required so little human physical interaction.⁷

The development of artillery greatly reduced the amount of hand-to-hand combat that had been typical in early modern warfare prior to the sixteenth century. For this reason, training in sports such as wrestling became less necessary and, therefore, less acceptable for nobles. Wrestling, as one of the oldest sports, had been advocated for its usefulness in war from the very earliest times, through the medieval period, and in the early modern period by men like Elyot, Ascham, and Mulcaster. By 1622, however, Henry Peacham could condemn wrestling with a few strokes of his pen, wiping away an entire literary history of praise for the sport:

For throwing and wrestling, I hold them exercises not so well beseeming nobility, but rather soldiers in a camp or a prince's guard.

(137).

The description of wrestling as an improper sport for nobles, but as suitable for mere soldiers, demonstrates the degree to which the nobility had abandoned war.

The gradual transition from cavalry to infantry—facilitated by the growing importance of artillery—also threatened to undermine the military benefits of riding, the great aristocratic sport. Although “Cavalry had been the core of all medieval armies,” Webb explains, “sometime in the fifteenth century the English army ceased to employ it to any great extent.”⁸ New tactics are cited as the cause of this decline. As in the case of wrestling, once riding's military function is undermined, the sport wanes as an aristocratic pastime. And, as in the case of archery, once the sport begins to wane, numerous tracts are written to revive it. Works like Federico Grisone's Art of Riding (1560) only signal the crisis through which the art is going. Again it is Peacham who announces the sport's relative extinction: “at this day, it is only the exercise of the Italian nobility, … and great pity that it is no more practiced among our English gentry.”⁹ He also attributes the death of the joust to the irrelevance of the lance in contemporary warfare.

The sport dealt the biggest blow by gunpowder was archery, of course. Described by Ascham in Toxophilus as having always had “the cheife stroke in warre,” archery is routinely advocated for its military benefits (1904², 55).¹⁰ The controversy surrounding the sport in the sixteenth century had to do with archery's reputation as the most thoroughly English sport. Ascham attributes all great military triumphs to shooting, remarking that “The feare onely of Englysh Archers hathe done more wonderfull thinges than ever I redde in anye historye greke or latin” (54). Archery was already dying by 1545, the year Ascham published his famous work. Written about five years after the issuance of a monarchical statute promoting archery and banning bowling, which had become more popular,¹¹Toxophilus is patriotic propaganda designed to revive the waning military sport. Despite numerous defenses of archery written well into the seventeenth century, Webb tells us that “after 1588 bows were generally replaced by firearms” (85).

Wrestling, riding, and archery were not, of course, the only sports affected by the rise of firearms, but the rapid demise of such thoroughly established sports demonstrates the degree to which perceptions of war and sport, and especially their previously inextricable relation, were altered by the new technology. Sports that had been deemed lawful and advocated for centuries could no longer be justified for the old reasons. Arguments stressing the importance of turning them into useful military tools were no longer persuasive. In addition, men accurately understood that the hardening of the body through athletic training could do very little to stop a bullet from inflicting a fatal wound. In numerous ways, sport was becoming less necessary.

Partly because sport was now detached from its major utilitarian function, sixteenth-century writers and polemicists increasingly represented it as superfluous, idle, and licentious. Old distinctions between useful and lawful sports like wrestling and hunting and idle, profitless sports like dicing and bowls broke down by the turn of the century. Godly writers like Philip Stubbes could interweave descriptions and condemnations of various athletic exercises including football, tennis, hunting, and May games, among non-athletic activities such as stage plays and interludes, church ales, wakes, baitings, and readings of wicked books. Stubbes is merely the most famous representative of a powerful movement that strove to render all sports unlawful. As a result of this movement, athleticism was systematically stripped of its hitherto positive associations and reduced to violence, disorder, and sinfulness.

At the same time, contemporary warfare—no longer reliant on the physical or athletic prowess of its participants—was frequently represented as an effeminate, cowardly, or at best unheroic enterprise. The gentleman became less and less likely to pursue a military career as war became—or was, at least, represented as having become—less heroic: “The growing anonymity of the individual warrior, the indiscriminate death dealt by shot and ball; these factors, it was claimed, had ruined war as a finishing school for the knightly character” (1962, 23). Not only did gunpowder eliminate opportunities for the demonstration of physical prowess, but it also eliminated the significance of social or class difference between soldiers. When the Boy of the Master Gunner of Orleance shoots and kills Salisbury with a musket in 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare highlights the ironic fact that Salisbury's “sword did ne'er leave striking in the field” (1.4.81). In a moment, gunpowder erases whatever value chivalric warfare once held. But it also erases the theoretically advantageous position that the noble Salisbury once held over the common Boy. Ariosto's apostrophe to gunpowder in Orlando Furioso best describes the sense of loss felt by contemporaries:

Through thee is martial glory lost, through thee
The trade of arms become a worthless art:
And at such ebb are worth and chivalry
That the base often plays the better part.

(Canto 11, stanza 25)

Gunpowder is a great equalizer of men.

The gradual decline of chivalry, the erasure of social difference in battle, and the undermining of traditional military tactics all enhanced the contemporary sense that war was becoming increasingly unpredictable and even chaotic. As Paul A. Jorgensen argues, early modern “[w]ar was one of the most precariously ordered and civilized of human enterprises; far more seriously than peace-inspired institutions like civil government and marriage, it threatened to revert to chaos” (35). Links between war and unruliness extended far beyond the battlefield, however, and into the civilian realm of early modern life. During wartime, armies could be as terrible to their own citizens as to their enemies in the field. In ways, the soldier's life away from the battlefield was akin to a permanent holiday festival, or to Carnival—that temporary state of misrule Mikhail Bakhtin describes as a “suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (10). J. R. Hale suggests that, for many men, this suspension was the only truly appealing aspect of the military life in early modern Europe:

For those uneasy amidst the constraints of civilian life, an army provided, however shoddily, a Land of Cockayne. And even though it was as heartless in throwing out as it had been in wooing while enticing in, for some of its glamour remained [sic]. So the military vagrants padded on from tavern to tavern, brawl to brawl, in danger of arrest but at least still on holiday from the routine of families, porters' baskets, mattocks, and ploughs.

(1985, 89)

Sport was still very much a part of war and military life. But the relationship between war and sport had changed as the cultural cachet of both had declined.

Shakespeare uses the term “sport,” or one of its variants, several hundred times in his career. He uses the term to signify everything from diversion (Venus' “A summer's day will seem an hour but short, / Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport” [24]) to amorous dallying (Iago's “she is sport for Jove” [1.3.17]) to outdoor games like the hawking episode in 2 Henry VI. Occasionally sport, in the sense of an athletic contest, figures prominently in the plays (the wrestling match in As You Like It), but more often as part of a passing jest (e.g. Kent's insult of Oswald in King Lear—“you base football player” [1.4.86]). “Sport” is often used to signify war or battle itself—for instance, when Hotspur in 1 Henry IV shouts “O, let the hours be short, / Till fields, and blows, and groans applaud our sport” (1.3.301-2). On the surface, those lines recall the proverbial phrase “Sport of Kings,” which applied historically to war making. Interestingly, the phrase acquired new meaning in the early modern period when it began to describe the athletic practices of hunting and horseracing.¹²

Sport, in the athletic sense, is as central to the meaning of Henry VI as any of Shakespeare's other plays. Burgundy's fear, in 1 Henry VI, that war will turn into sport is gradually realized over the course of the three plays. As in the case of the Miracle of St. Albans scene, the collapse of war and sport works to indict the competitiveness of the ruling nobility—its lapse into selfish personal rivalries and conflicts. Not only does this collapse reflect contemporary concerns about the gentlemanly neglect of war and politics for frivolous pastimes, but it also highlights contestatory ambition as the major cause of both war and political conflict in Henry VI. It is startling to discover how little of the action in the trilogy is prompted by actual political disagreement. Whereas H. M. Richmond includes Henry VI among a group of plays that “deliberately engage in a substantial and steadily evolving study of man as a political animal” (ix), many critics have highlighted how seldom characters in the trilogy are identified with particular political positions or policies. David Riggs, for instance, has discussed the replacement of political honor and policy with a “ruthless logic of outrage and revenge” (91). This is not to deny that certain characters are representative of political ideals—Gloucester as champion of the commonwealth, for example—but rather to suggest that such ideals are rarely the cause of conflict in the plays. One may consider the garden scene in 1 Henry VI as emblematic of this point. When Vernon plucks a white rose in the name of the “truth and plainness of the case” (2.4.46), Somerset mocks the seeming arbitrariness of his decision:

Prick not your finger as you pluck it off,
Lest, bleeding, you do paint the white rose red,
And fall on my side so against your will.

(2.4.49-51)

Alexander Leggatt describes the accidental quality of choosing sides in the garden scene: “The fundamental, chilling irony of the scene is that we never know what the quarrel is about—it is the tendency to quarrel and choose sides that matters” (8). This tendency to quarrel defines the civil struggle beyond the garden scene and throughout the entire trilogy; again, the motivational factor seems simply to be a competitive tendency in the nobility, as Jonas Barish suggests: “[T]he opposing clans of York and Lancaster … turn into warring tribes whose purpose is to dominate and humiliate if not exterminate each other” (13). These purposes become embarrassingly apparent at such moments as when Clifford swears eternal allegiance to Henry by declaring, “King Henry, be thy title right or wrong, / Lord Clifford vows to fight in thy defense” (3 Henry VI 1.1.159-60; emphasis added).

The fact that war and sport often become indistinguishable is, at once, the result and the cause of this competitive tendency in the nobility. The politics of individual expediency and ambition, which come to replace the old chivalric code of the common good, serve to highlight the simultaneous shift from a culture of honor to a culture of competition. Contrast the chivalric nature of Talbot—the hero of the first part of Henry VI—with the Machiavellian individualism of Richard, the central figure of the last part. After Talbot accepts the Countess' invitation, he arrives at her castle only to be insulted by her mockery of his rather unheroic stature:

I thought I should have seen some Hercules,
A second Hector, for his grim aspect
And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.
Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!
It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp
Should strike such terror to his enemies.

(2.3.19-24)

The Countess believes that she is witnessing the substance of Talbot and that it falls far short of the shadow she has feared for so long. Leggatt is correct to point out that she is completely wrong. She has, in fact, been viewing Talbot's shadow, for his “substance lies in his army, which he summons by winding his horn” (4). Leggatt's shrewd reading of the scene accurately conveys the degree to which chivalric notions of heroism depended on communal effort and solidarity: “Success in battle is the achievement of the group, not the individual” (3). Perhaps no other subject has occupied more critical attention regarding Henry VI than the decline of chivalry over the three plays. The plays trace a rapid movement from the communal notion of heroism and order dominant in the Talbot episodes to the earth shattering solipsism and misanthropic individualism embodied in Richard's famous words, “I am myself alone” (3 Henry VI, 5.6.83). Riggs describes the manner in which this decline serves to expose the dangerous contingency of abstract concepts like “honor”: “In effect these plays keep saying that the received ideals of heroic greatness may be admirable in themselves, but they invariably decay, engender destructive violence and deadly rivalries, and, in the process, make chaos out of history” (99).

Shakespeare's use of sport, as a synonym or metaphor for war, demonstrates the degree to which traditional notions of chivalric honor disintegrate into merely personal rivalries and struggles. This mixing of public with private conflicts always threatens to undermine the stability of the commonwealth. In the opening act of Henry V, for example, the young king rightly interprets the Dolphin's gift of tennis balls as a personal insult, and he promises to meet the challenge on a highly personal level:

But tell the Dolphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king, and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France.
          I will rise there with so full a glory
That I will dazzle all the eyes of France,
And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones, and his soul
Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them.

(1.2.273-84)

The Dolphin's “gift” alludes to Henry's “wilder days,” and represents a personal challenge both to his masculinity and his ability to rule. It triggers a response that, though voiced in the language of fearless heroism and bravery, reveals the danger of cultural concepts such as honor. Henry's promise to “be like a king”—that is, his promise to fulfill the sacred, public duties he has sworn to uphold—quickly disintegrates into a personal competition with the Dolphin. The “wasteful vengeance” Henry will reap on the husbands and sons of a thousand widows, as well as the deaths of numerous Englishmen and boys, largely result from his distorted sense of personal honor. Shakespeare cleverly appoints a box of tennis balls a major source of Henry's wrath in Henry V.¹³

In the earlier histories, Shakespeare employs the same technique, but the collapse of war and sport is much more thorough than in the latter play. After Burgundy's scoff in 1 Henry VI, war quickly becomes indistinguishable from sport. Hunting imagery is most common, perhaps because hunting is the primary sport of the nobility. Imagery of the hunter and hunted is used to signify the simultaneous helplessness and ferocity the soldier experiences in battle. Talbot uses the hunting/warfare metaphor to represent the battle between the warring enemies:

How we are park'd and bounded in a pale,
A little herd of England's timorous deer,
Maz'd with a yelping kennel of French curs!
If we be English deer, be then in blood,
Not rascal-like, but fall down with a pinch,
But rather, moody-mad; and, desperate stags,
Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel,
And make cowards stand aloof at bay.
Sell every man his life as dear as mine,
And they shall find dear deer of us, my friends.

(4.2.45-54)

When York meets a Messenger in the very next scene, he inquires: “Are not the speedy scouts return'd again / That dogg'd the mighty army of the Dolphin?” (4.3.1-2; emphasis added).

In the case of the French-English war, hunting is a useful metaphor for describing the ceaseless oscillations of battle. When Shakespeare uses hunting imagery later in the trilogy—now to describe the changing fortunes of rival English factions—he literalizes the metaphorical relation between sport and battle. In 3 Henry VI, the Lancastrian king is taken prisoner by Yorkist sympathizers who also happen to be gamekeepers. The first Keeper announces their intention:

Under this thick-grown brake we'll shroud ourselves,
For through this laund anon the deer will come,
And in this covert will we make our stand,
Culling the principal of all the deer.

(3.1.1-4)

When Henry enters shortly after, the first Keeper remarks: “Ay, here's a deer whose skin's a keeper's fee / This is the quondam king” (22-3). Henry becomes the hunted prey in the scene, taken prisoner by two actual hunters.

In the next act, it is the captive Edward who is represented as a deer. When he enters the stage with a Huntsman, he is met by his rescuers who have hidden themselves in the park. Gloucester explains that

[O]ften but attended with a weak guard,
[Edward] Comes hunting this way to disport himself.
I have advertis'd him by secret means
That if about this hour he make this way,
Under the color of his usual game,
He shall here find his friends with horse and men
To set him free from his captivity.

(4.5.7-13)

When Edward sees his men, he jokingly asks, “Stand you thus close to steal the Bishop's deer?” (17). In both scenes, the warring monarchs have become hunted prey—specifically, they have become deer. In employing the hunting imagery as a surrogate for actual military confrontation, Shakespeare exploits one of the more fruitful metaphors of the late sixteenth century. Not only had hunting become a target of contempt for precise authors concerned about gentlemen wasting their time, but it also served as a symbolic substitute for land warfare during peacetime. As Roger B. Manning notes,

Hunting was many things in Tudor and early Stuart England. Certainly, it afforded sport and recreation for kings and aristocrats as it had always done and provided an opportunity to develop and display the skills and the courage necessary for war. It was also a ritualized simulation of war involving calculated and controlled levels of violence carried on between rival factions of gentry and peerage. Symbolically, the various rites of hunters derive from the elements of traditional land warfare. …

(54)

Deer parks were frequent battlegrounds for rival factions during the Wars of the Roses and in Shakespeare's own day. The playwright's parallel hunting scenes demonstrate the negligence of the idle nobility and indict the court factionalism of the 1590s. Competitive ambition—not differences of political policy—is the cause of England's woes. Furthermore, the scenes demonstrate the degree to which the fears of Burgundy have been realized; war, once only capable of becoming sport, is now superseded by sport. The political struggles that previously took place on various battlefields now occur in a hunting park. Moreover, hunting itself has degenerated from a vigorous contest between “moody-mad and desperate stags” and “bloody hounds” to the less heroic activity of trapping vulnerable prey.

James L. Calderwood has called attention to the prevalence of trapping imagery in 2 Henry VI. The dominance of such imagery in the transitional play, I should like to argue, emphasizes the degeneration of war from 1 Henry, in which the battle with France is merely comparable to sport, to 3 Henry where civil war has literally become sport. Calderwood focuses on several key passages where trapping imagery is used to describe the nobles' conspiracy against Humphrey, concluding that “the division of characters into the trappers and the trapped … is at best a rudimentary means of distinguishing Humphrey from the nobles,” since he is the one character who “lacks self-interest and political ambition, and hence cannot be lured.”¹⁴ Calderwood correctly acknowledges the degree to which representations of the conspirators as trappers signal their “sheer craft and self interest.”¹⁵

That ambition and contest are the sources of conflict in Henry VI becomes yet clearer during the actual battles between the York and Lancaster factions. In the second act of 3 Henry, the battlefield is figured as an athletic space wherein athletes compete for victory. When Warwick stumbles on stage in the third scene, he remarks, “Forespent with toil, as runners with a race, / I lay me down a little while to breathe” (2.3.1-2). A moment later, Enter Edward running. And shortly after, Enter Richard running. The “forespent” runners wail their losses and lament their current, bleak situation. But the scene ends with Clarence's attempt to stir up their courage and spirits:

Yet let us all together to our troops,
And give them leave to fly that will not stay;
And call them pillars that will stand to us;
And if we thrive, promise them such rewards
As victors wear at the Olympian games.
This may plant courage in their quailing breasts,
For yet is hope of life and victory.

(2.3.49-55)

The scene begins with thoroughly exhausted athletes and ends with psyched-up would-be champions.

Clarence's words grant as much glory to victory as to life itself. But there is no politically inspired argument underlying them. Unlike Henry V's rallying speech at Agincourt or Richard's speech at Bosworth—both of which focus on national duty and the contingent stability of the nation—Clarence's speech focuses on the agony and the defeat of contest. Victory becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end. In Henry's pastoral lament—which Edward Berry calls “the most important scene in the series” (163)—a scene that begins twelve lines after Clarence's speech, the ineffective monarch ponders the nature of victory. Henry compares the fluctuating fortunes of war to the furious takedowns and reversals of two Olympians engaged in a wrestling match:

Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind,
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered;
So is the equal poise of this fell war.
Here on this molehill will I sit me down.
To whom God will, there be the victory!

(2.5.9-15)

Henry's relinquishment of military victory to the will of God stands in stark contrast to the Yorkist will to power. When juxtaposed with Clarence's rallying speech or Richard's great soliloquy in Act 3, the monarch's paralyzing, self-pitying lament exposes a general lack of will as the cause of his inability to rule. Not a true competitor, Henry grants to God what Richard seeks for himself.

When Richard finally murders Henry in the final act of the trilogy, Shakespeare returns to the hunting/trapping metaphor. Henry describes his son's murder by Richard as the trapping of an innocent bird by a snare, and sees his own similar, impending fate:

The bird that hath been lim'd in a bush,
With trembling wings misdoubteth every bush;
And I, the hapless male to one sweet bird,
Have now the fatal object in my eye
Where my poor young was lim'd, was caught, and kill'd.

(5.6.13-17)

Richard stabs Henry savagely. The final image of the monarch is that of a helpless animal seized and destroyed by a fierce hunter. Indeed, the very absence of any connotation of athleticism in the final sporting metaphor—signified again by the shift from hunting to trapping imagery—suggests the further degeneration of war over the course of the three plays.

War and political conflict are a sort of royal sport in the world of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays. Though authors had emphasized the similarities between sport and war for centuries, Shakespeare struck out in a notably original direction by appropriating sport in order to condemn the evils of modern warfare. “Writing in the post-chivalric era,” remarks Theodor Meron, Shakespeare “shows that wars are not only tragic and bloody, but also futile” (8). The numerous instances in which Shakespeare employs athletic metaphors and imagery serve to expose the military and political conflicts as little more than empty contests between noblemen. These men wish desperately to be kings, but their ambition stems less from political principle than from an infectious will to power. Whereas sport had traditionally figured as a vital component of military training and a cultivator of prowess, its purposiveness and functionality were undermined by the development of early modern weaponry and changing attitudes toward war. In the minds of many Renaissance intellectuals, including the author of Henry VI, sport by the 1590s had become as base and superfluous a phenomenon as warfare itself.

Notes

1. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare.

2. Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “Sport.”

3. The conversation begins with Tillyard where the author argues that the two tetralogies “show … the justice of God punishing and working out the effects of a crime [the deposition of Richard II], till prosperity is re-established in the Tudor monarchy” (36). For works that support this Tillyardian notion of justice, see: Campbell; Ribner; Traversi; Reese; Sprague; Richmond; and Riggs. Though they depart from this viewpoint in significant ways, Helgerson and Greenblatt both uphold the notion of Shakespeare as conservative historiographer. The literature prompted by both authors is too great to record here. Over the past thirty years, however, critics have questioned Tillyardian conceptions of the histories as mere propaganda for the Tudor establishment: see Talbert; Keeton; Bevington; Kelly; Prior; and Boris. For a useful overview of the debate, see Wells. Leggatt may state something like a consensus viewpoint when he remarks: “It is now customary for a critic dealing with the English histories … to begin with a ritual attack on E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays. I think we have had enough of this. We have established that to see Shakespeare as a propagandist for the Tudor Myth, the Great Chain of Being, and the Elizabethan World Picture will not do” (x).

4. See Hale, 1985, 41-42.

5. Milner argues that Machiavelli's Art is a “thoroughgoing attempt to augment, modernize, illustrate and supplement Vegetius” (Vegetius, xiv).

6. Hale, 1985, 91.

7. Milton's comments in Paradise Lost are the most famous: after Satan has revealed his war engines to his legions, the narrator remarks: “In future days, if malice should abound, / Someone intent on mischief, or inspired / With devilish machination might devise / Like instrument to plague the sons of men / For sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent” (6:502-506).

8. Webb, 108. See also Hale, 1962, 21.

9. Peacham, 136.

10. Ascham, 1904², 55.

11. See Hughes and Larkin, 1:266-68.

12. Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “Sport.”

13. That it is not the only source is clear both from Henry IV's advice to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” (2 Henry IV 4.5.213-14) and the bishops' extended discussion of motives for invading France at the opening of Henry V.

14. Calderwood, 484. The author notes trapping imagery in the following passages from 2 Henry: 1.2.91-4; 2.2.73-74; 2.2.54-7; 2.2.261-64; 2.4.59-63; and 2.4.15-16.

15. Ibid., 484.

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