[P. 206.] “‘A chase at tennis is that spot where a ball falls, beyond which the adversary must strike his ball to gain a point or chace. At long tennis, it is the spot where the ball leaves off rolling.’ Douce’s Illust. of Shakespeare, i. 485.”
In “Additional Notes and Corrections” to his ed. of Shakespeare (vol. i. cclxxxvii.) Mr. Collier observes: “Douce in his ‘Illustrations,’ from not understanding the game of tennis, is mistaken in his definition of a ‘chase:’ a ‘chase’ is not ‘the spot where a ball falls,’ but the duration of a contest in which the players hunt or ‘chase’ the ball, bandying it from one to the other. For the same reason, probably, the Rev. A. Dyce in his Skelton’s Works, vol. ii. p. 206, commits a similar error, and we think misunderstands the passage he quotes from the ‘Merry Jests of the Widow Edith.’ To ‘mark a chase,’ the expression there employed, is to have a chase scored or marked in favour of the successful player; and such is the metaphorical meaning, as applied to the widow, who scored her own chases as she walked along.”
Now, from Douce’s intimate acquaintance with the technicalities of games, I cannot but think that he must have had some authority for his explanation of ‘chase’—(I speak of it, without reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V.): and that the word chase was not always used by early writers in the sense to which Mr. Collier would limit it—“the duration of a contest in which the players hunt or ‘chase’ the ball, bandying it from one to the other,”—might be shewn by other passages besides the following;
“Ric. Reueng’d! and why, good childe?
Olde Faukenbridge hath had a worser basting.
Fa. I, they haue banded [me] from chase to chase;
I haue been their tennis ball since I did coort.”
A pleasant Commodie called Looke about you, 1600, sig. K 2.
R. Holme gives, among the “terms,” at tennis, “Chase, is to miss the second striking of the Ball back;” and, among its “laws,” he informs us, “6. You must observe that there is no changing sides without two Chases or Forty one Chase, and then they may change sides, and the other serves upon the Pent-house beyond the Blew, and then the other is bound to play the Ball over the Line, between the Chase and the end Wall; and if the other side misses to return the Ball, he loses 15.” Acad. of Armory, 1688, B. iii. p. 265. The passage of Skelton,
“She mutid [i. e. dunged] there a chase