I remember one game where Mr Shakespeare kept on serving what they call double faults. Of course, he blamed his opponent for this small deficiency. John Florio, he said, was a KNAVE. Then, standing at the tasselled rope, racquet in hand, which he waved above his head to punctuate each verbal thrust, he gave it as his opinion that John Florio was not just a KNAVE, but a foul-mouthed and caluminous KNAVE, and not just a foul-mouthed and caluminous KNAVE, but a wrangling KNAVE, a poor, decayed, ingenious, foolish, rascally KNAVE, a KNAVE that smelt of sweat, a shrewd KNAVE and unhappy, a sly and constant KNAVE, a lousy KNAVE, a bacon-fed KNAVE, a counterfeit cowardly KNAVE, a crafty KNAVE, a subtle KNAVE, the lying'st KNAVE in Christendom, a beastly KNAVE, a stubborn ancient KNAVE, a muddy KNAVE, a whoreson beetle-headed, flap-ear'd KNAVE, a base notorious KNAVE, a KNAVE very voluble, a pestilent complete KNAVE, a KNAVE fit only to be beat into a twiggen-bottle, an arrant, malmsy-nose KNAVE, a KNAVE most untoward, a muddy KNAVE, a ruddy KNAVE, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking KNAVE. In short, a villain.
And not just a villain, of course, but a bloody, bawdy villain, a remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, landless villain. A honeysuckle villain. A villain fit to lie unburied. Even a chaffy lord not worth the name of villain.
Mr Shakespeare had a very good line in expletives, also. Here are just a few which I recall from the tennis court - William Shakespeare's tennis court oaths:
Cupid have mercy! O woeful day! What rubbish and what offal! Pluto and hell! O, vengeance, vengeance! Chops! Pish for thee! By Chrish, la! Figo for thy friendship! Bedlam, have done! Plague of your policy! Good worts! Froth and scum! By cock and pie! Divinity of hell! O blood, blood, blood! Pow-waw! Fut! My breath and blood! O curse of marriage! Fire and brimstone! Hell gnaw his bones! Goats and monkeys! Puttock! Puppies! A pox of wrinkles! Chaff and bran! Tilly-vally! God's lid! Disgrace and blows! O piteous spectacle! Let all the dukes and all the devils roar! A bugbear take you! O plague and madness! Foh! Fie! Leprosy o'ertake! For the love of Juno! O viper vile!
And so on. But his favourites, in the expletive art, were 'A pox on this gout! or a gout on this pox!' (which line he gave to Falstaff), and (if he noticed me, note-taking in the dedans) A plague o' these pickle-herring!'
As this will indicate, some of these terms of abuse were borrowed from his own plays, but there were as many or more which he had not used in his work at the time when he uttered them extempore.
All of which makes me think that William Shakespeare employed his games at tennis to put some critical part of his mind to sleep in action, and to see what words and phrases would bubble up from the depths if he lost his temper as a result. Not that he ever did lose his temper; not exactly. He would let himself go just far enough to have access to his great store of original invective. Then he would turn his fury into words. Then he would stop playing tennis. Often I thought he was playing some other game all the time.
* Cf. 'The barber's man hath been seen with him; and the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls.' Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene 2, lines 45-7.
Chapter Eighty-Four What Shakespeare got from Florio + a word about George Peele
I am apt to believe that Mr Shakespeare's skill in the French and Italian tongues exceeded his knowledge in the Roman. For we find him not only beholding to Cinthio, Giraldi, and Bandello for his plots, but also able to write such a scene as that in Henry V where the princess Katharine and her governante converse in their native language quite believably. More cogent, though, to my memories of the playwright's performance on the tennis court is the very great number of Italian proverbs scattered up and down in his writings. Where did these come from if not from John Florio?
Southampton's tutor had been born in London, the son of an Italian refugee of Jewish ancestry. He was educated under the direction of the scholar Vergerio at Tubingen. He travelled through Italy and returned to England in the middle 1570s. Here he made a living from private lessons, taught at Oxford, and was authorised to wear the gown of Magdalen College. Patronised by Walsingham, he was recommended to Lord Burghley, who appointed him as tutor to his ward. This would have been at the start of the Nineties, about the time when Shakespeare was beginning that monumental work more durable than bronze or stone, the immortal sonnets, which as we have seen began as advice to the pupil Rizley.
So we have this interesting little triangle if not trinity - rich patron, learned teacher, eager poet. I think it was Rizley's wish to see some of the furnishings of Italian romance transported to England, and Shakespeare's wish both to please him and to have a certain edge over his rival playwrights by substituting for their classical scenes the much more colourful Italy of the Renaissance. As for the pedagogue, he was happy enough no doubt to have found both a powerful nobleman and a poet of genius to act as propagandists for the culture he personified.
Florio's library was magnificent. It contained more than three hundred volumes. It was this precious collection, to which Shakespeare soon had access, which provided the plot source of nearly every one of the early plays. Here he found the Novelle of Cinthio, and Luigi da Porto, and Boccaccio, and Bandello. Here he found the works of Machiavelli, and Ariosto, and Ser Giovanni, and Florio Fiorentino, and Petrarch, and Aretino, and Dante. Many of these texts were not yet translated into English, but with Florio to guide him to the treasures in the magic cavern the man from Stratford was soon rubbing lamps and releasing genii for himself. Everything he found got thoroughly turned into English in the process of his imagination, but Florio should be acknowledged as the one who gave him access to the cave.