Hoccleve's Dangerous Game of Draughts

Abstract

IN the early fourteenth-century De ludo scaccorum, Jacobus de Cessolis asserts that the game of chess was devised by a philosopher, Philometer, who was charged with advising the monstrous king Evylmerodach.1 Philometer realized that his life was endangered by this activity, and he developed a game that would amuse the king and simultaneously teach him morals and ethics. In order to accomplish this task, de Cessolis explains that Philometer identified each of the chess pieces with a social class or political office and invested it with moral and ethical traits. Evylmerodach enjoyed the game so much that he mended his ways, and he and his people lived happily ever after, thanks to chess and the manual that accompanied it, De ludo scaccorum. The premise for writing a manual for princely instruction or devising a new game are similar for Philometer and Thomas Hoccleve; Hoccleve's textbook of advice, Regiment of Princes, must reach the future Henry V without irritating him, just as Philometer had to avoid angering Evylmerodach. One way to attempt this was for both creator and author to maintain a light and playful tone. Although critics have noticed the verbal play with which Hoccleve stocks his stanza on chess, little research has been done on the way the poet cites not only de Cessolis's text, but also appropriates his game by using chess-puns to express radical social ideas throughout the Prologue.2 One of these ideas is that Hoccleve's practical experience as a clerk of the Privy Seal legitimates both his address to Henry, and also his repeated requests for payment for his bureaucratic labour, rather than for his poetry. Like Philometer, Hoccleve is aware of the danger this game poses to him, and in the end of the Prologue he implies that the process of writing can feel like judicial torture.