The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Twenty-Six Of the games of William Shakespeare when he was young

In this box there is a top and a ball. The top is many-coloured. The ball won't bounce. But once the ball bounced - when the boy William tossed it against the wall of his father's house on Henley Street, catching it on the tricky spin as it came back.

I have made a list of all the games the poet played when he was young. The ball he gave me himself, not long after we first met. Joan Hart, his sister, made me a gift of the top, when I was in Stratford much later pursuing my researches. The other games I infer from the plays and the poems. Perhaps we should more truly say that our man had knowledge of them all, rather than claim that he played them. But with Mr Shakespeare knowing was nearly always doing.

Many times in his writings there is mention of marbles and bowls. As well as the top-spinning already mentioned, he tells also of hoop-rolling, of hide-and-seek, and of blind-man's-buff.

That he knew how to fence and all the language of fencing and sword-play could be proved from a score of his plays. And he was a toxophilite - well able, like old Double as recalled by Justice Shallow, to draw a bow and clap you an arrow in the clout at twelve score, even if he couldn't on horse-back hit a sparrow flying, any more than could that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, according to scornful Prince Hal.

Of course, he played tennis - real tennis, I mean - for besides the Dauphin's tennis-balls there are a dozen allusions to and terms drawn from that game. But this was not a pastime of his childhood. There was no tennis-court in Stratford. Mr Shakespeare learnt the game later, in London, on the Earl of Southampton's private tennis-court.

And he played football - that's in Lear. And at push-pin, like Nestor in Love's Labour's Lost. And at more-sacks-to-the-mill (see Berowne's reference to this 'old infant play' in the same piece).

Swimming, of course. He did that in the Avon. And skating on the ponds when they froze in winter. Jumping and wrestling, hand-to-hand fighting, wielding the lance and greyhound-racing were all things the boy Shakespeare saw done at Mr Robert Dover's Olimpick Games upon the Cotswold Hills. Nobility and commoners came from many miles around to this annual event. 'How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say he was outrun on Cotsall,' says Abraham Slender, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

But the real sport in the Forest of Arden was hunting. Mr Shakespeare certainly hunted, but I think on foot. What sort of hounds were those of Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream? Basset hounds? Spaniels? The poet had in mind a memory of the Stratford beagles, I suspect. I have no doubt that he coursed hares, running afoot with them when he was a boy or a young man.

Add to the list that he was a fowler, and went out with a gun and shot wild geese and choughs. Cards he played too; with me, sometimes, for kisses. There are not many allusions to card-playing in the plays, when you come to look for them, though there's a game going on in Act V Scene 1 of King Henry VIII. Primero was the late Mr Shakespeare's favourite card-game, though like Falstaff he was inclined to get too excited and foreswear himself when he saw good cards in his hand. In all honesty, Mr Shakespeare's face was always too much the index of his heart and mind for him to be any good at bluffing card-games. Yet he loved to play them - gleek, brag, and post and pair were others that he liked.

Let me tell you why I think William Shakespeare knew little about chess. It is not just that I never saw him play a game of it in the Mermaid tavern, where Mr Beaumont and Mr Fletcher were always locked in combat of wits, blond head against black, above the chequered board. Nor is it that to the best of my knowledge he employed no chess-terms in the course of his imagery. No, sir, I think Mr Shakespeare knew little or nothing about chess because in The Tempest he has Miranda say that Ferdinand is cheating - and it isn't easy at all to cheat at chess.

It was at the Mermaid that I first met Dr Warner. He was one of those poor fellows who do good and original work, only to find reward and credit for it go to other men. A thin little person, almost fleshless, with a withered left hand which he always kept hidden in his sleeve, the first time I saw him he was taking a frog from his pocket to demonstrate on the table among the tankards that heart-beats could only be explained by the circulation of the blood. The honour for this discovery went some twenty years later to Dr William Harvey, who had also been present when Warner produced that frog from out of his pocket.

So the world wags, and fame is a foul strumpet.

As for the doctrine which made Harvey famous, Mr Shakespeare accepted it long before it was made public in that great anatomist's Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628). Witness Biron in Act IV, Scene 3 of Love's Labour's Lost, where he speaks of the nimble spirits in the arteries. Witness King John in Act III, Scene 3 of the play of that name, where he talks of blood thickened by melancholy, and then goes on:

Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,

Had bak'd thy blood, and made it heavy-thick,

Which else runs tickling up and down the veins,

Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes ...

All of which tells you that Mr Shakespeare was also paying attention to Dr Warner and his frog that night at the Mermaid.

But Pickleherring has wandered somewhat (as is his wont and manner) from the subject of this chapter - which was the boy Shakespeare's games. O dear O simple long-lost days of childhood.

And how I wish I had left to drink some of that Scorbutick Ale which Mr Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr John Hall, once prescribed for me. It was a truly excellent stomach drink, and John Hall was another wise doctor of the kind unsung by history, even though all his ministrations failed to save Mr Shakespeare when it came down to it.

That Scorbutick Ale helped digestion, expelled wind, and dissolved congealed phlegm upon the lungs. It was therefore sovereign against colds and coughs, as well as scurvy. Being drunk in the evening, it moderately fortified Nature, causing good rest, and hugely corroborating both the brain and the memory.

Yes, I could do with a deep draught of Scorbutick Ale to help me to write my Life of William Shakespeare. In the absence of the reality, I will drink the remembrance. And boil and eat this egg which a whore just fetched me.