JONATHAN DUKE-EVANS TELLS US that the first recorded use of the phrase “fair play” is to be found in an obscure mid-fourteenth-century poem called Titus & Vespasian. Having taken their leave and went their way, “He thanked [t]hem of [t]here faire play”. Duke-Evans goes on to say that there are 39 printed mentions of “fair play” in English for the sixteenth century, 600 for the seventeenth, 1,400 for the eighteenth, and (with no equivalent databases to draw on) British Periodical samples indicate an Edwardian peak of mentions, a twentieth-century levelling off, and a twenty-first century falling off.
What all this tells us I couldn’t really say.
As for the great writers, Shakespeare comes out top with a very creditable
