Recreation in the Renaissance

82 Recreation in the Renaissance
As for Britain, James VI and I’s Book of Sports (1618) clearly shows how
the legal discourse on amusements did not always produce prohibitions
and repression: a whole range of ‘lawfull games’ could be given considerable
importance as means to promote social cohesion. The norm
introduced a multi-step classification of Sunday pastimes from the point
of view of their acceptability. At one end of the spectrum we find those
sports which are licit, provided that they ‘be had in due and convenient
time, without impediment or neglect of divine Service’ (dancing,
archery, leaping, vaulting, but also May poles and May games, ales and
morris dancing). At the opposite end, one example is given of unconditioned
prohibition (bowling). In between, some games are forbidden
on Sundays only (bear- and bull-baiting, interludes). 18 The royal disposition
obtained Robert Burton’s approval: ‘for my part, I will subscribe
to the Kings Declaration, and was ever of that mind, those May-games,
wakes, and Whitson-ales, etc., if they be not at unseasonable houres,
may justly be permitted. Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have
their poppet playes, hobby-horses, tabers, croudes, bag-pipes, etc. play
at ball, and barley-breakes, and what sports and recreations they like
best [. . .]; better doe so than worse, as without question otherwise (such
is the corruption of mans nature) many of them will doe.’ 19 As King of
Scotland, James VI had already theoretically subscribed, in his Basilicon
Doron, to the political conviction that honest pastimes are a good practice
for the people, particularly with the purpose of strengthening their
reciprocal friendship. 20
A well-known Latin phrase – which I have borrowed as the title
for this section – summarized all that was needed in order to keep
the Roman plebs quiet and satisfied as ‘bread and circuses’, food and
popular entertainments. 21 The ‘argument for the Roman circus’ can be
found in a variety of early modern sources. Cardinal Cajetan, the theologian
and prominent Dominican whom we have already encountered
for his assessment of play, also warned Catholic confessors that forbidding
peasants from their traditional Sunday dancing would abandon
them to idleness and political unrest. 22 It goes without saying that the
relation between play and state covers a wider range of motifs, from the
military training of the nobility and the populace to the use of spectacles
as means of propaganda, all of which can be traced in Renaissance
political theory and practice. The case of the Venetian ‘war of the fists’
shows a ruling élite – and one particularly effective in controlling threats
to the public order – only mildly attempting to suppress (with a series
of decrees, dating from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth
century, but with limited law-enforcement) a violent popular amuse-