National Unity and English (Dis)Honour: Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess

Abstract

The 1620s in England was a decade characterized by division, political upheaval, and despair. Negotiations between the Spanish and King James i had led to an intense and probably realistic fear of a liaison with Spain that in turn fed the anti-papist and, particularly, the anti-Jesuit sentiments of the period. In an age when religion was inextricably linked to both politics and a sense of nationalism — Englishness itself did, in part, originate in the idea that a Protestant England was God’s elect nation — the fear of life under a Roman Catholic king led to not only a perceived need for national unity, but also an effort among the writers of the period to inspire a sense of nationalism in all English people. This budding nationalism is clearly reflected in the evolution of the seventeenth-century honour code as writers of the 1620s found, intentionally or not, that the evolving codes of masculine honour were useful as a unifying force that identified the English as English. An idealized, uniquely national code of honour is itself a sub-text of Thomas Middleton’s intensely nationalist play A Game at Chess (1624), for Middleton first constructs, and then deconstructs, a dichotomy of honour that assigns shame and dishonour to the Spanish and honour to the English.