Chapter 4: The Uses and Transformations of Early Modern Tennis

“A man, she would reflect, who could be so feeble and miserable a failure at tennis, could not be good for much in any department of life.” ¹ When P.G. Wodehouse thus conveys his hero’s anxiety, he is talking about a different game from the game of tennis that was played in the early modern period. Lawn tennis, itself a probable revival of the late eighteenth-century “field tennis,” had by then replaced the royal game, also known as “jeu de paume” in France. But the humorous dimension of the sport, which combines the metaphors of love and life, builds on centuries of writings about tennis. Indeed, the uses of tennis as a suitable medium for reflections on life can already be found in medieval literature.