To
Master Robert Dover First printed in
Annalia
Dubrensia: Upon the Yearly Celebration of Mr Robert Dover’s Olympic
Games upon Cotswold Hills (
1636), which contained poems and
acrostics by thirty-three authors, including Drayton, Thomas Heywood,
and this poem by Jonson on sig. D2.
Randolph, Poems,
118–23 reprints an Eclogue on the subject, and Felltham,
Resolves (
1661), 19–20 reprints his poem on the
event. Robert Dover (?1575–1645), a lawyer who was brought up a Catholic
in Norfolk, re-established Whitsun games in the Cotswold countryside
between Evesham and Stow-on-the-Wold,
c. 1612. Several
poems present the games as a practical revival of a classical custom;
others make it quite plain that the volume was a propaganda exercise in
support of the republication of the ‘Declaration of Sports’ by Charles Ⅰ
on 10 Oct. 1633, which had the backing of Archbishop Laud, and was part
of an attempt to break down puritan opposition to rural sports and
pastimes. The celebrations of the games continued until 1852. See Dover,
Cotswold Games (
1962) and Whitfield (
1958), 92–101. [Editor: Colin Burrow]
0.3 Instauration renewal or founding (word not recorded before
1603; the usage here may result from the publication of Bacon’s
Instauratio Magna (
1620), which promised a revival of
science as Dover’s games do of sports).
1 drop her
vies cease comparing. A ‘vie’ is a bid in a card game (
OED,
n.3 1). The gaming
metaphor supports the argument of the poem that there is no harm in
sport.
4 James
James I had originally issued the
Declaration of
Sports in 1618, which had sanctioned recreations on Sundays,
and had shown an interest in Dover’s games (Dover,
Cotswold
Games,
1962, 19); hence the games revive James’s efforts to
counterbalance puritan hostility to sports.
10 burst The
envious Codrus ‘bursts his sides with envy’ in
Virgil, Eclogues,
7.26. The reminiscence of a pastoral singing contest may be
artful.