William Shakespeare, Critical Commentary of The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra
Horace Howard Furness, Ed.

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let's to Billards Malone: This game was not known in ancient times.— Hudson: ‘An anachronism,’ say the critics. But how do they know this? Late researches have shown that many things were in use in old Egypt, which, afterwards lost, have been reinvented in modern times. But Shakespeare did not know this? Doubtless, not; but then he knew that by using a term familiar to his audience he would lead their thoughts to what has always followed in the train of luxury and refinement. Suppose he had been so learned, and withal such a slave to his learning, as to use a term signifying some game which the English people had never heard of. Which were the greater anachronism?—A. A. Adee (Lit. World, 21 April, 1883, Boston): For about one hundred and fifty years, the favourite anachronism in

Shakespeare's plays, singled out by the hypercritics, has been [this passage]. Of late, however, certain investigators have turned the tables, and instead of leaving the unlucky anachronism to support the Farmerian theory of Shakespeare's want of learning, or the more kindly modern belief that he wrote too impetuously to be bound by mere chronology and scientific facts, they find in it an argument against the Shakespearian authorship of the plays, since as one of them says: ‘The human encyclopedia who wrote that sentence appears to have known,—what very few people know nowadays,—that the game of billiards is older than Cleopatra.’ It may be, as asserted, that a rudimentary game, in which ivory balls were punched with a stick into holes in a table, after the fashion of our modern ‘tivoli’ or ‘bagatelle,’ was really in vogue more than two thousand years ago, but it is very certain that Shakespeare never bothered his head about it. He simply followed his habit, and cribbed the idea from somebody else. In Chapman's Blind Beggar of Alexandria, Ægiale says: ‘Go, Aspasia, Send for some ladies to go play with you At chess, at billiards, and at other game.’ As Chapman's play was printed in 1598, ten years before Ant. & Cleo. was written, it is easy to see where Shakespeare got the idea that billiards was an Egyptian game, and a favourite pastime of women. Whether George Chapman, whose classical learning enabled him to translate Homer, wrote from actual knowledge, or committed an anachronism, may be disputed; but the probabilities lean to the latter conjecture, for, in this same play, the hero flourishes a pistol, smokes tobacco, swears by ‘God's wounds,’ and talks fair modern Spanish, in the time of the Ptolomies.—Murray (N. E. D.): An adopted form of French billard, the game; so named from billard, ‘a cue,’ originally ‘a stick with curved end, a hockey-stick,’ diminutive of bille, piece of wood, stick. In England introduced only as the name of the game, and made plural as in draughts, skittles, bowls, etc. 1591 Spenser, Mother Hubberd, 803, ‘With all the thriftles games that may be found . . . With dice, with cards, with balliards. 1598 Florio, Trucco, a kinde of play with balles vpon a table, called billiards.’—[Then follows the present passage. In an Article in the Edinburgh Review (April, 1871, p. 377) on the ‘Chorizontes,’ the writer observes that ‘Shakespeare could not have made any of his characters speak of tobacco without being grossly anachronistic, the incidents in all his plays having occurred at remote periods, or, at any rate, much anterior to the introduction of tobacco into Europe, whereas Ben Jonson [who does mention tobacco] laid the plot of many a play in his own time when tobacco was familiar to all.’ This statement having been criticised by Dr Hayman, the editor of the Odyssey, the author of the Article replied (Athenæum, 6 Sept. 1873), and admirably defines the distinction between anachronisms, that might be termed permissible and those that are too ‘gross’ to be ever tolerated. After referring to the mention by Shakespeare of ‘cannon’ in King John, a ‘clock striking’ in Julius Cæsar, and ‘billiards’ in this present play, the writer continues, ‘but no dramatic author, to produce a scenic effect, would shrink from such anachronisms, because they are not “gross,” not so “gross” as to be detected in an instant by a theatrical audience, which knows nothing whatever about the origin of cannon, clocks, and billiards. But all Shakespeare's contemporaries, even the most ignorant, knowing that tobacco had been introduced into the old world during their lives, would have derided the great dramatist had he represented Sir John Falstaff consoling himself at Dame Quickly's in the reign of Henry the Fourth, with a pipe of tobacco. . . . So a dramatist of our age could not speak of William the Conqueror travelling by an express train, or sending a message by the electric telegraph; the

anachronism would be “gross”; it would come immediately within the cognizance of the audience, who know what is going on in their own generation, with some knowing what went on in the generation immediately preceding; and, thinking the mistake ridiculous, they would burst into an excessive merriment. . . . But the anachronism would not be discovered by anybody in his audience, if a dramatic author were to represent the Egyptian Pharaoh Cheops going in a pair of boots to witness the progress of the building of the Great Pyramid, or the Jews returning in hats and shoes from their Babylonish captivity. For where can the theatrical audience be found that knows anything about the history of boots, hats, and shoes, when it does not comprise, peradventure, one man possessing sound learning and extensive information?’ —Ed.]

11. And when good will, etc.] Steevens: Compare, ‘For never any thing can be amiss, When simpleness and duty tender it.’—Mid N. D. V, i, 82.