Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Professor of English Literature, Specializing in the Renaissance

Review of Greg's Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance

by Achsah Guibbory, University of Illinois

in “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45.1 (2005) 230-231.

Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance
by Gregory M. Colón Semenza

Gregory M. Colón Semenza's Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance demonstrates that "sport" did not always have the low and lower-class associations our (high? academic?) culture now tends to give it, nor was it simply merriment and pastimes. Indeed, he argues that negative attitudes toward sport in fact derive from attitudes that only developed during the English Renaissance. Reminding us of the seriousness of athletic contests as training in life and defending sport as important and worthy of study, Semenza argues that "the practice of sport and exercise was central to Renaissance conceptions of both the ideal English gentleman and the ideal English nation-state" (p. 13), but that in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certain (Puritan) forces increasingly challenged sport, insisting on the disorderly aspect of "sports and pastimes." Focusing on "athletic games and exercises" (p. 20), he discusses the anti-sport polemic, Shakespeare's Henry VI, James's Book of Sports, Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, and, finally, Samson's athletic performance in Milton's Samson Agonistes. Particularly valuable is his [End Page 230] reading of Samson, and his chapter on a little known collection of poems (by Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and others) celebrating the Cotswold Games in 1636—the same year many sabbatarian pamphlets were published. Semenza intriguingly suggests that changing attitudes toward sports were related to changes in warfare, and that poetic and athletic competition were connected. His well-chosen range of texts allows him to chart changes over time. Some of the large claims in this book require a chronologically broader and deeper exploration, but Semenza has made a fine start.