"Merry sport": The Olympic Games are afoot!

The 2024 Paris Olympics offers the perfect opportunity to look at how William Shakespeare not only incorporates sports into his plays, but also uses them to depict the historical tensions between England and France in both dramatic and comic terms.

In Henry V, Shakespeare combines sports and the French in a single brilliant sequence that utilizes the equipment of an Olympic sport in both the play’s inciting incident and an extended metaphor. The Dauphin (son of the French King) sends King Henry a box of tennis balls as a passive-aggressive insult, “as matching to his youth and vanity,” thinking Henry is still the callow Prince Hal depicted in Henry IV, Part 1. Henry answers this condescension with a promise of how devastatingly these balls will be returned, including the punning insinuation of how a tennis court victory will also be one over the French royal court (the last two lines are cut in the scene from Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of Henry V, embedded below):

When we have matched 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.
Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturbed

Henry is already predisposed to retake the parts of France he considers his by ancestral right, but the Dauphin’s infantilizing treatment of tennis as a kids’ game would be enough to drive any serious sports fan to thoughts of war.

Speaking of war, while another Olympic sport, archery, was a martial skill in Shakespeare’s day (and before), it was also such a popular recreational pastime that casual allusions to it show up all the time in his plays, notably Love’s Labor’s Lost, King Lear, Henry IV, Part 2, and Romeo and Juliet. In fact, Henry V is framed by the paraphernalia of two sports, beginning with tennis balls and ending with arrows. After Henry rallies his heavily outnumbered troops with an inspirational speech (one that continues to inspire halftime locker-room speeches to this day), English and Welsh archers use their longbows at the Battle of Agincourt to defeat—who else? —the French.

The events of As You Like It are similarly set into motion at an athletic competition (in a scene that, perhaps unsurprisingly, includes another enthusiastic Frenchman who’s also a sports fan). Orlando agrees to participate in a wrestling match against an opponent his older brother Oliver has arranged to kill him. Instead, Orlando wins the match and ultimately has to flee to the Forest of Arden when he learns that his brother still wishes him dead. He doesn’t win a gold medal, but he wins the heart of Rosalind, possibly an even better prize.

While the wrestling match in As You Like It is typically (but not always) played for laughs, the climactic fencing duel in Hamlet is played for mortal stakes under the guise of being a friendly competition. Hamlet scores the first two points and declines a celebratory (though secretly poisoned) drink offered by Claudius, but the sportsmanlike pretense quickly disappears. First Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup, then Laertes wounds Hamlet with his poisoned rapier, and finally Hamlet disarms Laertes and fatally stabs him with his own “envenomed” sword. At which point, any scorekeepers throw up their pencils and pads in frustration.

References to football (the kind Americans call soccer) show up twice in Shakespeare’s plays, and weirdly, both references echo the disdain Americans have historically had for the sport, adding fuel to the arguments that Shakespeare was actually American. (Editor’s note: He wasn’t.) In The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus summons the image of a soccer ball being brutally kicked around the pitch when he asks Adriana: “Am I so round with you as you with me, / That like a football you do spurn me thus?” And in King Lear, Kent calls Goneril’s impertinent servant Oswald a “base football player” and purposely trips him, which would almost certainly draw a red card from the referee.

Falconry isn’t an Olympic sport, but it was such a popular pastime that Shakespeare alludes to it often, including Hamlet’s passing reference to “French falconers” when encouraging the players. And though Shakespeare dramatizes quite seriously England’s famous antipathy towards the French in most of his history plays, he turns this Anglo-Franco tension into darkly “comic sport” in Henry VI, Part 1. In keeping with this English comic tradition, my Reduced Shakespeare Company has made merry sport of the French over the years, especially in our production of The Complete Millennium Musical (abridged), in which my co-author Reed Martin wondered why “Everybody Hates The French,” despite many other Europeans being equally worthy of disdain, including (especially?) the English.

It’s no surprise that Shakespeare used competitive sports in narrative situations: as in well-written debate or trial scenes, they’re inherently compelling; and like the best fight scenes or action sequences, they’re viscerally exciting to watch. What is surprising is that more playwrights don’t incorporate athletic competition into their work, something Reed and I tried to address by writing The Complete World of Sports (abridged) and then performing it in London during the 2012 Olympics. We believe more theaters should get into the Olympic spirit and create their own college-style fight songs.

Our own three-part contrapuntal suggestion pairs Shakespeare with French author Alexandre Dumas, finally bringing England and France together in a triumphant championship celebration:

We band of brothers
We few, we happy few
We fight all others
For honor; glory too
We band of brothers
We answer freedom’s call
Stay strong, it’s all for one
And one for all!

Lyrics from The Complete World of Sports (abridged) by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, published by Broadway Play Publishing, 2013. All rights reserved.