William Shakespeare played bowls. I know, I know. It’s a bit difficult conjuring up the image of the bard sending down a few, occasionally with the wrong bias no doubt, and then ducking into the clubhouse for a quick ale before he hurried home to Anne.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But the history books all seem to say he was a bowler.
I don’t think he ever played pennants though.
I was asked the other day where the expression “there’s the rub” came from.
This is where Shakespeare comes in, because in Richard II, Act 3, Scene 4, he writes:
Queen: What sport shall we devise here in this garden,
To drive away the heavy thought of care?
First Lady: Madam, we’ll play at bowls.
Queen: ‘Twill make me think the world is full of rubs. And that my fortune runs against the bias.
The words “there’s the rub” come in Macbeth when Shakespeare writes: “To die, to sleep – To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”
OK, I know that just because a fellow wrote of terms that were used in bowls, that doesn’t make him a bowler, but some of the people who wrote about Shakespeare said he was a bowler.
One even went so far as to say he played lawn bowls, not lanes (a reference, no doubt, to tenpin bowling).
Shakespeare, in my opinion, was suggesting that an obstacle, such as a fault in the green, sent the bowl in another direction (it happens to me all the time).
It also appears in the history of golf, but I couldn’t find any reference to Bill ever playing golf.
Actually, Shakespeare made many other references to sport in his plays.
I don’t have room for them all here, but they include archery, bear-baiting, billiards, blind man’s bluff, falconry, fencing, football, leapfrog (a letter writer to a newspaper I edited a long time ago said, with some indignation, that he had seen a man and a woman leapfrogging on a local beach, but he rang us later to say he had been mistaken), quoits, tennis and wrestling and a whole host of sports that seems to have died out over the years.
He also referred to other practices in bowls.
Rub has several meanings and the word takes up a few pages of my big dictionary. In its early days it was spelt as rubbe.
In the bowls sense the first use I could find came in 1586. In 1593 Shakespeare wrote about the world being full of rubs and his fortune running against the bias.
In 1876 Encyclopedia Britannica wrote that a rub was “when a jack or bowl, in transitu (their term, not mine), comes in contact with any object on the green”.
Author Gregory Titelman in the book America‘s Popular Sayings said rub meant something that hindered the movement of the ball in the game of bowls. He said the saying “there’s the rub” was first used by Shakespeare in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.
I haven’t been able to ascertain whether Shakespeare won the weekly meat tray at his bowling club, but I’ll keep looking.
lauriebarber.com.au