William Shakespeare
© UIG via Getty Images

The Zaltzmeister

The greatest allrounder never

First in our series on historical figures as cricketers: would the Bard have given a pound of flesh to have a bat?

Andy Zaltzman

No. 1: William Shakespeare
(Warwickshire, Surrey, England, and sundry T20)

William Shakespeare, the celebrity former England playwright and world literature Hall of Famer, would undoubtedly have been a first-rate cricketer, had the opportunity arisen.

Tragically, for both Shakespeare and cricket, his sporting peak occurred almost 300 years before the advent of Test cricket and the County Championship, so the self-styled "Stratford Scribbler" sensibly made the decision to concentrate on the then-lucrative professional play-writing circuit, rather than pursue his impossible childhood dream of leading Warwickshire to a major one-day final.

Given what we know of his life, moreover, it seems likely that Shakespeare would have controversially left Edgbaston as a precocious teenager, moved to London and joined Surrey - an inverse Bob Willis in terms of his cricketing career, just as he was in his use of language.

Shakespeare, who this year celebrated his 450th birthday with what onlookers described as "the rogue mother-in-law of all parties", would unquestionably have been an allrounder. He cranked out hit after hit in various formats, from the platinum-selling rom-trag Hamlet, via controversially poorly researched historical documentaries such as Richard III - Tricky Dicky Gets The Hump (to give it its rarely used complete title), to the proto-Warholian cross-dressing alleged comedy As You Like It. He was, in many ways, the Jacques Kallis of his day, but with more flamboyant hair and a greater sense of drama.

Others, including sources within the ECB, have suggested that Shakespeare's obsession with pentameter-based verse, which earned him the sobriquet "The Big Iamb", calls to mind another South-African-born cricketer.

The ruff-wearing wordsmith was also renowned for his concoction of barbs, insults and waspish zingers in his plays. We can assume, therefore, that he would have brought the same linguistic inventiveness and invectiveness to the art of sledging.

Shakespeare was, in many ways, the Jacques Kallis of his day, but with more flamboyant hair and a greater sense of drama

How much better might England have withstood the insultative barrages of the turn-of-the-millennium Australians had they been able to respond by putting Shakespeare under the lid at short leg, from where he could have accused Steve Waugh of being a "cream-faced loon" (Macbeth), slammed Shane Warne as "a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle" (King Lear), and responded to the moustachioed splutterings of Merv Hughes with a simple "Peace, ye fat guts" (Henry IV, Part One - The Morning Session)?

Shakespeare, or "Billy Big-Words" as he was known by his friends, churned out the classics year after year, and was a star performer in both long-form and short-form literature - the elongated, sinuous dramas and contemplative stylings of his five-act tragedies, as well as his racy, thrill-a-couplet, all-action love sonnets. This suggests that he would have been equally at home in both Test cricket and T20, and the volume of his output implies that he would unquestionably have "worked his calendar" in order to be available for the IPL season and the five-day game.

In terms of level of celebrity and national profile, Shakespeare was very much the Sachin Tendulkar of his day. Like the Mumbai Magician, Shakespeare married a woman several years older, was extremely prolific in his mid-to-late-30s, and scored one fewer Test match century at Lord's than Ajit Agarkar. The parallels between the two great cultural icons are truly uncanny.

With his flamboyant late-Elizabethan dress sense and "you-don't-own-me" coiffeuring, Shakespeare would have been a 21st-century advertising agency's dream, and, according to computer simulations, would have been one of the highest-earning cricketers in 2013, had he been (a) alive and (b) a cricketer.

Andy Zaltzman is a stand-up comedian, a regular on BBC Radio 4, and a writer