Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

In answer of which claim, the prince our master

Says that you savour too much of your youth,

And bids you be advised there’s naught in France

That can be with a nimble galliard won;

-First Ambassador

King Henry the Fifth             Act II, Scene i, Line 257

That can be with a nimble galliard won; that’s the line that we ended up with this morning. So, I gave you most of the sentence, but I’d like to give you the context and then a little more, and you’ll see why in a moment.

The ambassadors from France have shown up in King Henry’s court and he has asked them to tell him what’s on the mind of the Dauphin, the crown prince of France. Here is the ambassador’s reply in full.

Thus then in few.

Your highness, lately sending into France,

Did claim some certain dukedoms, in the right

Of your great predecessor, King Edward the Third.

In answer of which claim, the prince our master

Says that you savour too much of your youth,

And bids you be advised there’s naught in France

That can be with a nimble galliard won;

You cannot revel into dukedoms there.

He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit,

This tun of treasure; and, in lieu of this,

Desires you let the dukedoms that you claim

Hear no more of you. This the Dauphin speaks.

 

For clarification, a galliard is a lively dance, and meeter means more suitable. So, in other words, stay the heck out of France and here’s something to spend your energy on instead. And when Henry asks what the treasure is that the Dauphin has sent him, Exeter replies,

                        Tennis-balls, my liege. 

That’s right; tennis-balls. The Dauphin sent the king of England tennis-balls to say, blow off your steam playing tennis instead of invading my country.

Tennis-balls, that’s the part I wanted to get to. I thought it was pretty interesting that Shakespeare had a reference to tennis-balls. I had no idea tennis had even been invented in Shakespeare’s time. Did you?

Of course, I would try to show you a pic of a tennis ball for today's post, wouldn't I. I'm not sure what good that would have done, but I don't have a pic of a tennis ball anyway. So here's a pic of a few baseballs. There are some interesting stories behind these balls, but I'm not going to go into that right now. Suffice it to say that I didn't receive any of these balls from an ambassador of a world leader. 

But now I'm thinking, in light of current events maybes I should send these balls to Moscow and tell Vlad to use them to blow off some steam instead of invading Ukraine? Ahh, that's useless. I don't think there's anything gonna stop Vlad any more than the tennis-balls stopped Henry (spoiler alert: they didn't).

Oyyy. So very little has changed in four hundred years; so very, very little.