Boundless Fat in Middleton’s a Game at Chess

Abstract

Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess, performed in the Globe in 1624, is important to the history of fat because it promotes a puritan bodily style that contributes to the emerging modern bodily aesthetic I have been describing. Drawing on the moralistic horror evident in Piers Plowman, A Game at Chess promotes a bodily style that values the closed, bounded body. To bulge forth beyond the boundaries of the individualized body is to elicit the horror felt at the grotesque behavior Gluttony exhibits in Piers Plowman. Any violation of these boundaries, whether by rape, sodomy, or fat, is an abomination that reinforces the sense that individual bodily boundaries must be policed and protected. Middleton recommends such a bodily aesthetic by focusing on the abominations of the Black House (Catholic Spain). More particularly, he uses the grotesque bodies of the Black House as a warning to the White House (Protestant England). The bodies of the Black House threaten to invade or to penetrate the White House, thereby despoiling the Black House’s claims to bodily purity and inviolability. At the same time, the Black bodies themselves become an emblem of a bodily excess, disruption, and decay that the White House (Protestant England) must avoid at all costs. The leaky body of the Black Knight, with his leaking bottom (anal fistula), and the foggy fat body of the Fat Bishop both offer lessons to the English “puritan” reader of the need to police the boundaries of his body.1KeywordsAnal FistulaThin BodyCatholic ChurchLate ModernityEnglish StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.