The Game’s the Thing: Politics and Play in Middleton’s A Game at Chess

Abstract

Readings of Middleton’s A Game at Chess have tended to focus on its political and historical implications, viewing the chess game itself as an allegorical device that simply presents itself for decoding. Using some insights from Clifford Geertz, this essay makes the game central to a reading of the play. It asks how the game of chess, serving as a fictional space within which characters gamble and cheat for high stakes, operates in relation to its vehicle, Middleton’s play, itself a high-risk enterprise in a political field where art has a stake, but one whose value is never entirely quantifiable. The implicit distinction between a ‘real’ world of political machinations and rivalries where playwrights can be put in prison for commenting on public affairs, and the play-world that occupies the stage or the chessboard is not as straightforward as it appears, since games also take up space in the world, a contested space with ill-defined boundaries. By putting the resources of early modern theatre and its assembling of theatrical publics to use in representing Anglo-Spanish political conflicts, Middleton’s play even anticipates some of the charged, tension-laden atmosphere of a face-off between two opposed ‘sides’ that is characteristic both of modern sport and of modern politics. In both, cheating and gambling have important roles to play.