“We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have match’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.
Tell him, he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturb’d
With chases.”
In “Hamlet” (ii. 1), Polonius speaks of this pastime, and alludes to “falling out at tennis.” In the sixteenth century tennis-courts were common in England, and the establishment of such places was countenanced by the example of royalty. It is evident that Henry VII. was a tennis-player. In a MS. register of his expenditures, made in the thirteenth year of his reign, this entry occurs: “Item, for the king’s loss at tennis, twelvepence; for the loss of balls, threepence.” Stow, in his “Survey of London,” tells us that among the additions that King Henry VIII. made to Whitehall, were “divers fair tennis-courts, bowling-allies, and a cock-pit.” Charles II. frequently diverted himself with playing at tennis, and had a particular kind of dress made for that purpose. Pericles, when he is shipwrecked and cast upon the coast of Pentapolis, addresses himself and the three fishermen whom he chances to meet thus (“Pericles,” ii. 1):
“A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him.”
In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), Claudio, referring to Benedick, says: “the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls;”[819] and in “Henry V.” (iii. 7), the Dauphin says his horse “bounds from the earth as if his entrails were hairs.” Again, “bandy” was originally a term at tennis, to which Juliet refers in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 5), when speaking of her Nurse:
“Had she affections, and warm youthful blood,
She’d be as swift in motion as a ball;
My words would bandy her to my sweet love,
And his to me.”
Also, King Lear (i. 4) says to Oswald: “Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal?”
Tick-tack. This was a sort of backgammon, and is alluded to by Lucio in “Measure for Measure” (i. 2) who, referring to Claudio’s unpleasant predicament, says: “I would be sorry should be thus foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack.” In Weaver’s “Lusty Juventus,” Hipocrisye, seeing Lusty Juventus kiss Abhominable Lyuing, says:
“What a hurly burly is here!
Smicke smacke, and all thys gere!
You well [will] to tycke take, I fere,
If thou had tyme.”[820]
“Jouer au tric-trac” is used, too, in France in a wanton sense.
Tray-trip. This was probably a game at cards, played with dice as well as with cards, the success in which chiefly depended upon the throwing of treys. Thus, in a satire called “Machivell’s Dog” (1617):