Recreation in the Renaissance

108 Recreation in the Renaissance
Rather than piling up individual social practices, though, in the
remaining part of this chapter we will look at the way in which they
were interpreted and arranged. During the Renaissance period, there was
never such a thing as a universally shared paradigm, a single intellectual
or ideological scheme against which pastimes were conceived, organized
and valued. The next section will introduce a series of different
sets of categories, each with its own chronology and disciplinary roots,
but all simultaneously present, overlapping and partly competing in
shaping people’s ideas on the matter.
Medieval and Renaissance taxonomies
In 1580 Samuel Bird, a pastor at Ipswich, published A friendlie communication
or Dialogue betweene Paule and Demas, wherein is disputed how we
are to use the pleasures of this life – a tract representative of Elizabethan
Puritanism. It shows obvious relation to contemporary literature
against theatre and the breaking of the observation of the Sabbath
(which could fill a bibliography on its own), but deals more specifically
than other pamphlets with topics with which I am concerned in this
book. The opening passage offers the author’s own classification of the
world of pleasures. ‘The pleasures of this life maie verie well bee divided
into such as are common to all men, as meate, drinke, and such like;
or else into such as are used but of some men, of this kind are games,
for all men you knowe, are not gamesters.’ The former category –
which is discussed in the first chapter of the dialogue – is fairly
unproblematic, since it mainly consists in the right use of nature,
God’s gift to mankind. The latter is defined as the sort of exercise which
is taken to delight (as opposed to continuous exercise for profit, that is,
a man’s calling, ‘labour of the minde’ or ‘travell of the bodie’). Games
are further distinguished ‘into such, the chiefe sport whereof consisteth
in looking on, of which kinde, are hunting, hawking, stage plaies, and
such like. And into such wherein men are the chiefe dooers, of which
kinde are daunsing, dicing, tenesing, and such like.’ 48 While the distinction
is reminiscent of the role of such a category as theatrics (see
above, Chapter 4), some of its nuances are not obvious and are worth
registering (significantly, hunting appears to have been redefined as a
spectator sport).
Renaissance writers were well aware of the problems concerning the
nature of leisure activities and their classification. Some of the categories
that feature in Caillois’s modern taxonomy can be easily traced in
sixteenth-century texts. Torquato Tasso’s Il Gonzaga secondo overo del