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Abstract
The first half of this article looks at the period 1612 to 1642, when Robert Dover reinvented the existing Cotswold Games as annual ‘Olimpick’ celebrations of sport and, to an extent, culture. The second section reviews subsequent published editions of the Annalia Dubrensia, a collection of poems written in celebration of the games and first published by Dover in 1636. Examining the changing meaning of the Annalia as a text is intended to critique simplistic notions that place our sporting and literary heritage as part of the ‘Merrie England’ industry, particularly in the context of the so-called Cultural Olympiad in the approach to 2012.
Notes
BL: British Library
BOALA: British Olympic Association Library and Archive
IOCLA: International Olympic Committee Library and Archive, Lausanne.
SCLA: Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive.
Where information has been held in the form of rare books, pamphlets or individual documents the full accession number has been given using the abbreviations above.
1. Theodore Cook, The Field, the Farm, the Garden, the Country Gentleman's Newspaper, Letter to Sir Sidney Lee, Windsor House, Bream's Buildings, London, 24 Feb. 1916.
2. Obviously the discussion could go back much further with Pindar (518–438 BC) a starting point for referrals to the victories in the great games, including those at Olympia in Elis and the Pythian held at Delphi (held every fourth year) and the Nemean and Isthmian (held every second). In antiquity Pindar's poems were collected in seventeen books and from these survive four books of poems of Epinician Odes (choral songs written in honour of victories) each dealing with one of these games. See for example Maurice Bowra, trans. and ed., The Odes of Pindar (Harmondsworth, 1969) and the earlier Pindar: the Pythian odes (London, 1928) with H.T. Wade-Gery. Bowra indicates that Pindar was far less interested in the taking part than the glory of winning: pp. xii–xiii.
3. Daniel Fischlin (director, Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project), ‘Nation and/as adaptation: Shakespeare, Canada and authenticity’, available online at www.canadianshakespeares.ca , accessed 10 Aug. 2008
4. Christopher Whitfield, A new edition of Annalia Dubrensia (London, 1962), p. x.
5. Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, suggests between 1602 and 1612, but most question this source, written in 1691 with ambitious claims for the games’ significance.
6. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, Occassional issues of unique and very rare books in seventeen volumes, vol. 5 (Manchester, 1877), Introduction, p. viii.
7. Francis Burns, Heigh for Cotswold! A history of Robert Dover's Olimpick Games. A new and revised edition (Chipping Camden, 2000), p. 16.
8. Ben Jonson, ‘An Epigram to my Jovial Good Friend’, in Whitfield, Annalia Dubrensia, p. 134; ‘draw vies’ is to make comparisons.
9. Bill Bryson, Shakespeare (London, 2007), p. 114.
10. Whitfield, Annalia Dubrensia, p. 22.
11. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, Supplement to the edition of Shakespeare's plays published in 1778, vol. 1: Supplemental observations (London, 1778), p. 90 (227. After Wharton's [sic] Note): ‘The Cotswold Hills in Gloucestershire are large tracts of downs, famous for their fine turf, and therefore excellent for coursing. I believe there is no village of that name.’ See also Steevens’ four editions of Shakespeare in 1773, 1778, 1785 (and then 1793) respectively. For an outline of the friendship and later feud of Steevens and Malone see Bryson, Shakespeare, pp. 173–4.
12. Whitfield, Annalia Dubrensia, p. ix. The author sees his object as ‘replacing sentimental enlarging on un-proved assumptions with such facts as can be discovered’.
13. Whitfield, Annalia Dubrensia, p. 7.
14. Celia Haddon, The first ever English Olimpick Games (London, 2004) pp. 40–1. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds, The Oxford Shakespeare: The complete works (Oxford, 1994) take issue with this, suggesting that Ben Jonson's charge is a spurious one and that as a grammar school pupil, Latin, rhetoric, and literature would have been the majority of the curriculum. Bryson, perhaps wisely, concurs: Shakespeare, p. 17.
15. Haddon, The first ever English Olimpick Games, p. 47 She also notes two brief references to seventeenth-century Olympic or Olympian Games on the Gog Magog hills outside Cambridge, and another at Hampton Court later in the century.
16. Burns, Heigh for Cotswold! p. 16.
17. Peter Heylin, ‘To Mr Rob. Dover on his Pastorall and Wandering Jewe Presented before SR J.W’. Collected verses (London, 1925) Addit. BL MSS.46885
18. In the Partridge copy of the Annalia in the Gloucestershire Public Library.
19. The phrase is from the The King's Book of Sports which lists dancing, archery, leaping, vaulting or any other harmless recreations and other sports had in ‘due and convenient time’.
20. Whitfield, Annalia Dubrensia, p. xi.
21. Burns, Heigh for Cotswold! p. 18.
22. Robert Dover, Annalia Dubrensia: Upon the yeerly celebration of Mr Robert Dovers Olimpick Games upon Cotswold Hills (London: Robert Raworth for Matthew Walbancke, 1636 inside cover); note all spellings mine (i.e. no long ‘s’ or V for ‘u’. BL mark B.630; C34; G.11 (1). Not all copies have this additional note or the engraving.
23. Bent Juel-Jensen, ed., Matthew Walbancke Annalia Dubrensia 1636 (Yorkshire, 1973) 1st edn facsimile reprint introductory note (unpaginated).
24. Bent Juel-Jensen, ed., Matthew Walbancke Annalia Dubrensia 1636 (Yorkshire, 1973) 1st edn facsimile reprint introductory note (unpaginated).; he cites ‘best and fullest account of Dover, His Circle and Games’ as Whitfield.
25. E.R. Vyvyan, ed., Cotswold Games: Annalia Dubrensia (London, 1970), p. x. It is thought 30,000 attended these last games.
26. Joseph Strutt, The sports and pastimes of the people of England; including the rural and domestic recreations, may games, mummeries, shows, processions, pageants and pompous spectacles from the earliest period to the present time (London, 1810); Joseph Strutt, ed. William Hone, The sports and pastimes of the people of England; including the rural and domestic recreations, may games, mummeries, shows, processions, pageants and pompous spectacles from the earliest period to the present time (London, 1845); Joseph Strutt, ed. William Hone, The sports and pastimes of the people of England; including the rural and domestic recreations, may games, mummeries, shows, processions, pageants and pompous spectacles from the earliest period to the present time (London, 1867); Joseph Strutt, ed. William Hone, The sports and pastimes of the people of England; including the rural and domestic recreations, may games, mummeries, shows, processions, pageants and pompous spectacles from the earliest period to the present time (London, 1876) p. 352: ‘The mountebanks usually preface the vending of their medicines with pompous orations, in which they pay as little regard to truth as to propriety. Shakspeare [sic] speaks of these wandering empirics in very disrespectful terms.’
27. Robert Bearman, ‘Victorian rugby in Stratford Upon Avon’, Focus (Stratford), Feb. 1982, p. 20.
28. Committee of the Stratford-Upon-Avon Cricket Club poster for flower show, cricket match and local amateur regatta, 4 Aug. 1874, SCLA Stratford DR 25/3/31/1.
29. Raymond Williams, The country and the city (London, 1973).
30. T. Broadbent Trowsdale, ‘Glimpses of olden England’, The Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser & Leamington Gazette, 29 July 1882, p. 3. SCLA Stratford ER 25/68/1.
31. Grosart, Occassional issues of unique and very rare books, p. vi.
32. Grosart, Occassional issues of unique and very rare books, Introduction to Annalia.
33. Vyvyan, Cotswold Games, p. vi.
34. Ron Pickering, ‘It's not the winning but the taking part’, History of the Olympic Games Pamphlet BOALA (Wandsworth, 1972).
35. Haddon, The first ever English Olimpick Games, p. 177.
36. Haddon, The first ever English Olimpick Games, pp. 177–8.
37. Sam Mullins, British Olympians: William Penny Brookes and the Wenlock Games (BOALA London Wandsworth, 1986), p. 10. The comment was reportedly given at an address to the Hadley (Shropshire) Athletic Club in 1882 as reported by the Shrewsbury Chronicle, 17 Feb. 1882. For London journalists the creation of a Birmingham Olympic Council (in association with the British Olympic Association) was seen to be evidence of the conceit of Denis Howell as personifying the ‘second city's’ self-importance. The Birmingham Olympic bid publication, Heart of Gold, produced in 1986 showed that the initiative had government backing to the extent of guaranteeing losses in excess of £100 million but was otherwise felt to be entirely the responsibility of Birmingham City Council to make and promote its own bid.
38. Haddon, The first ever English Olimpick Games, pp. 178–9.
39. Mullins, British Olympians, referring to the Salopian Journal, 19 Sept. 1852.
40. William Penny-Brookes, Letter to de Coubertin, 13 June 1894, Much Wenlock, IOCLA.
41. See for example Mullins, British Olympians; Denis Howell, Made in Birmingham: The memoirs of Denis Howell (London, 1990). Birmingham held the first British International Olympic Committee Session since 1948 with Howell as ‘president’ of the 97th IOC session organizing committee in 1991, some small consolation for losing the 1992 games to Barcelona. Howell had widely predicted twenty-five votes ‘in the bag’ for Birmingham as host in the press. It eventually had eight. Unlike the contemporary newspaper accounts, many of those covering the award of 2012 to London acknowledged the groundwork of the Birmingham and Manchester unsuccessful Olympic bids and Manchester's successful (if refinanced) hosting of the Commonwealth Games in 2002.
42. Jo Willey, ‘The Best of British’, Daily Express, 24 June 2008, p. 13.
43. Fintan O'Toole, Shakespeare is hard but so is life (London, 2002), p. 1 – previously published as No More Heroes (London, 1990).
44. Michael Oriard, Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1993), p. 11.