Cotswold Olimpick Games - Shakespearean Connection

Shakespearean Connection

Some historians have suggested that the Games were alluded to in playwright William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, and used that as evidence to suggest that Shakespeare may have seen the Games. But the allusion is not present in the quarto edition of 1602, making its first appearance in the posthumous First Folio of 1623, edited by Henry Condell and John Hemminges. It is therefore uncertain whether or not it was written by Shakespeare.

The first Shakespearean scholars to make a connection between Dover and Shakespeare were Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Thomas Warton, and Edmond Malone; historian Jean Wilson has commented that it required "quite imaginative leaps such as a hill referred to by Bolingbroke being the hill on which the games were held". More recently, the historian and secretary of the Robert Dover's Games Society, Francis Burns, has suggested that the wrestling scene in As You Like It "reflects the wrestling at the Games".

Although Shakespeare may have been acquainted with Robert Dover, there is no evidence that he ever attended the Games.