Shakespeare in Sports

His companies unletter'd, rude and shallow,
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports,
And never noted in him any study,
Car!
Game on! (Henry V 1.1)

Although the word “sport” is used frequently by Shakespeare, he doesn’t use it in the sense of “an activity involving physical exertion and skill, [especially] one in which an individual competes against another or others to achieve the best performance,” a meaning that had been in use from early in the sixteenth century (OED). Instead, he uses sport to describe, among others, a diversion, pastime, amusement or pleasure; a jest; hunting; war and fighting; gambling; “amourous dallying”; and, in a usage specific to the late sixteenth-century, a play or theatrical performance (Schmidt 1104-05).

It is appropriate, then, that a number of contemporary playwrights have used sports—activities involving physical exertion and skill (but not in the sense of amorous dallying)—to frame or stage their theatrical adaptations. In 2000, Ken Hudson presented his The King #5 Henry (published for the first time in the CASP Online Anthology) in a hockey arena with the Battle of Agincourt (fought on October 25, 1415 during the Hundred Years War) choreographed as a hockey game.

(The word “hockey” was coined in the early sixteenth-century, but Shakespeare never uses it. He does, however, call Robin Goodfellow, his mischievous sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck. It is an Old English word that means “mischievous demon” that only began to refer to the flat rubber disc used in hockey in the late nineteenth-century—but anyone who has played goal will understand the aptness of the etymology.)

In 1998, Richard Rose directed a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Stratford Festival using costumes inspired by a 1917 photo of the Upper Canada College hockey team. Chris Coculuzzi and Matt Toner plan to adapt Shakespeare’s 37 plays into five sports-based adaptations. In 2001, they presented 1Henry VI, 2Henry VI, 3Henry VI and Richard III—the Wars of the Roses tetralogy—as a single rugby match in Shakespeare’s Rugby Wars. In 2002, they condensed Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello into brief soccer matches in Shakespeare’s World Cup. In 2003, Shakespeare’s Roman-themed plays became Shakespeare’s Gladiator Games. In 2004, Coculuzzi and Toner plan to present Shakespeare’s Comic Olympics, followed in 2005 by Shakespeare’s NHL (National History League)—another hockey adaptation. And Rod Carley is also planning a Henry V adaptation based on the infamous 1967 Stanley Cup play-offs between the underdog Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens dynasty, the last time the Leafs won the Cup.

Considering how prominent sports are in North American educational institutions, advertising, and popular culture in general, it is not surprising that modern adaptations have found expression through sports. Wayne and Shuster’s The Shakespearean Baseball Game was first presented in 1958 on The Ed Sullivan Show, and became their most popular sketch on both sides of the border. Tim Blake Nelson’s O, a modernized film treatment of Othello, makes Othello a high school basketball star. In Fall 2003, American comedian Jack Black did a fantastic Shakespearean parody to introduce a Monday Night Football game. The combination of Shakespeare and sport has proven consistently popular and sellable so there’s every reason to expect this sub-genre of adaptation to continue.

Gordon Lester

Schmidt , Alexander. Shakespeare 's Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary. Vol. 2. New York: Dover, 1971.

The King #5 Henry (2000), Ken Hudson
Link to Online Anthology
Link to Database

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Shakespeare's Rugby Wars (2001), Chris Coculuzzi and Matt Toner
Link to Online Anthology
Link to Interview with Chris Coculuzzi
Link to Database

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Shakespeare's World Cup (2002), Chris Coculuzzi and Matt Toner
Link to Online Anthology
Link to Interview with Chris Coculuzzi
Link to Database