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  3. Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare on Cricket
1st April 2020 by Eddie Lewis

Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare on Cricket

It is of course well known that both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were enamoured of cricket. Joyce learned to play the sport when at school in Clongoes and he carried his love for it through into his writing with passages in both Finnegan’s Wake and a Portrait of an Artist as Young Man peppered with cricket references. His love of the sport is nicely captured in the following extract from the latter book: 

". . .and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl."

In Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ there is much anticipation and time spent when nothing happens. A metaphor for cricket surely. And of course Beckett was a cricketer himself.  According to the Leinster Senior records he played  19 games for Trinity between 1924 and 1926. He made 326 runs with an average of 16.20 [including one fifty] and took 12 wickets at an average of 24.42. His time at Trinity also included two games against Northampton in 1925 and 1926 which count as ‘First Class’ matches. The only Nobel Prize winner for Literature with that singular distinction. 

But perhaps most surprising of all are the early references to cricket in Shakespeare. Part of the original Hamlet, subsequently lost, related to an incident in the second Act that takes place during a cricket match between Denmark and some other team [not known]. Only a fragment remains of Hamlet’s soliloquy on the subject. 

Hamlet: ‘I’m out, Polonius.’

Polonius (batting at the other end): ‘I fear so, sire. 

Or so the umpire doth declaim.’

Hamlet: ‘Then I must go; yet ‘tis a monstrous thing

That all this great and most momentous issue 

Should hang upon a churlish umpire’s nod.

(Enters pavilion)

How now, my lords. The ball hath bias on it,

And if my leg hath been in front, as ‘twas not,

Would not have hit the sticks, no, not by yards.

It did not pitch straight; it was rising high.

Besides, the man was bowling round the wicket.

Yea, I could summon up a thousand reasons,

Which being pondered on, conspire to show

The verdict of yon purblind idiot false.

Well, well, the thing’s an allegory.

How accident doth await on carefulness

And all precaution used. I took ‘one leg’,

I wisely questioned if my toes were clear,

And all for this! .... Oh, Sirs, the pity of it!

I was fairly set as an oak tree

In the sylvan glade. The ball to me appeared

As large as the full harvest moon,

Sailing above the straw-stack. I had meant

To score an hundred, when that echoing yell,

Both from bowler and the wicket-keeper

(A prearranged duet of knavery)

Checked me in mid-success and cut me down.

What weak-kneed umpire could resist that roar?

There’s not a doubt on it; I was bustled out.

Give me a pipe; I’ll drown my grief in smoke.

This cricket is a passing beastly game.’

The discovery of the above extract is attributed to the Shakespearian scholar and Merrion cricketer Paddy Waldron. 

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