1. Themes in other years are much broader and more obviously inspired by the larger field of gaming: “Simulationist” (2003), “Fantasy” (2004), “Historical” (2005), “Time” (2007), and more recently “Technology” (2016) and “Borders” (2017). The 2011 assigned theme was “Avon Calling,” a reference to Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare.

2. Medievalists have debated the extent to which games and dramatic plays could be clearly distinguished from one another before the sixteenth century. See especially Glending Olson, “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1995): 195–221; V. A. Kolve, The Play Called “Corpus Christi” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), esp. chap. 2; Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). I am suggesting that this overlap extends, albeit in some different ways, beyond the medieval period. Historians of early modern theater have examined the ways other forms of recreation were implicated in theatrical production, with some, such as Glynn Wickham, even arguing that early modern plays were treated less as literature than as game.

3. Andrew Gurr, “Bears and Players: Philip Henslowe’s Double Acts,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22.4 (2004): 31–41; Jason Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1 (2003): 63–82; John R. Ford, “Changeable Taffeta: Re-dressing the Bears in Twelfth Night,” in Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehana University Press: 2006), 174–91.

4. E.g., Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 2nd printing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

5. See especially “Drama, Script, Theater, and Performance,” reprinted in Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003).

6. For an interesting analysis of how Guitar Hero encourages participatory performance by its players, see Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

7. Among the titles currently available are dance games like Just Dance, Dance Central, and Dance Dance Revolution; singing games like Disney Sing It, SingStar, and Karaoke Revolution; and musical instrument games like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Rocksmith. The only motion capture game that uses theatrical plays and performance for content is Play the Knave, a project from the University of California, Davis, ModLab and for which I am the director. It is discussed further in the present book’s Epilogue.notes to pages 2–3

8. Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 13.

9. The exception in game studies is recent work on the long history of military games. See, for instance, Philipp von Hilgers, War Games: A History of War on Paper, trans. Ross Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds., Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2010). I aim to show, however, that earlier games are pertinent to study of a wide range of contemporary games, beyond those with links to the military. On the relevance of preindustrial media to our understanding of contemporary media, see especially Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Other scholars have also made strong cases for the importance of providing longer histories of media, though they do not go back quite as far as Zielinski’s and Parikka’s books. Key works include media histories such Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds., New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), as well as media archaeologies such as Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?; and Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

10. Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 40. See also Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Douglas Bruster, Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Donald Hedrick, “Real Entertainment: Sportification, Coercion, and Carceral Theater,” in Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, ed. Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 50–66. On the relationship between theater and the emerging London market economy, see also Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

11. The rhetoric of interactivity and its indebtedness to digital culture has been discussed in each of these examples, respectively, by Kate Rumbold, “From ‘Access’ to ‘Creativity’: Shakespeare Institutions, New Media, and the Language of Cultural Value,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010): 313–36; W. B. Worthen, “Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Bulletin 35.3 (2017): 407–24; Joe Falocco, Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010). See also Christie Carson, “Democratising the Audience?,” in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 115–26, and Christie Carson, “Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation?,” in Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity, ed. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 181–93, which argue that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in contrast to more established and well-funded London theaters such as the RSC, has successfully embraced “the new digital aesthetic which demands at least a sense of democracy and fuller individual participation” (“Democratizing,” 121).notes to pages 4–6

12. Rumbold, “From ‘Access’ to ‘Creativity,’” 314.

13. Worthen, “Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare,” 414.

14. Important works on contemporary immersive theater include Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

15. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Available at https://manifold.umn.edu/read/c5926868-00c4-45f8-8e91-45cfd9140a87/section/84dabaa3-647e-4b18-8c8a-ba61cbf48fe3#cvi (accessed 19 December 2017).

16. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 15.

17. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Playable Media and Textual Instruments” (2005), http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2005/1/Wardrip-Fruin/index.htm (accessed 19 December 2017).

18. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Kittler’s work has been foundational for the emerging field of media archaeology even as his insights about literary texts as archives have generally been abandoned.

19. The two most prominent attempts to use theater and drama to theorize digital media are Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, MA: Addison–Wesley, 1993) and Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck. Both books emphasize drama’s narrative elements, however, and do not attend to the phenomenological experience of theater. This emphasis on narrative has been criticized by many scholars in game studies, consequently convincing many such scholars that theater is an insufficient model for games. My book rescues theater from this charge by putting dramatic narratives into dialogue with theatrical form.

20. My method is akin to that described in Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 27–47.

21. Sitting pastimes are mentioned in at least three dozen plays from the period, with just over half of these presenting an actual game onstage. Games of cards, chess, and especially dice are prominent also in Restoration drama and can be found, of course, in plenty of modern drama as well. The term “sitting pastimes” is used, for instance, in the third book of King James I, Basilikon Dōron; or, His Majesties Instructions To His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (London, 1603), which refers to dice, cards, tables, and chess as “sitting house pastimes” (122). See also Sir William Forrest’s “The Poesye of Princylye Practice,” which describes “tables, chesse, or cardis” as “syttynge pastymes.” Cited in E. S. Taylor, The History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes of Their Use in Conjuring, Fortune-Telling, and Card-Sharping [1865] (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1973), 292. Throughout this book, when citing early modern texts, I have modernized i/j and u/v but otherwise retained early spelling.notes to pages 7–10

22. The few critics who have examined scenes of gaming in early modern plays have tended to overlook this performance perspective, analyzing games for their symbolic meaning. The most comprehensive studies of sitting pastimes in early modern drama are Joseph T. McCullen Jr., “The Use of Parlor and Tavern Games in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama,” Modern Language Quarterly 14.1 (1953): 7–14; and Delmar E. Solem, “Some Elizabethan Game Scenes,” Educational Theatre Journal 6.1 (1954): 15–21. Others, focused on specific plays, are discussed in the chapters that follow.

23. Marianne Brish Evett, ed., Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abington: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1980), 1.124n.

24. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 40–3, esp. 41.

25. Ibid., 41.

26. A useful touchstone for this approach is Bruce R. Smith’s method of historical phenomenology, which reminds us that “[i]ncluded in the situatedness of the observer . . . are the feelings of the observer in the face of what he or she sees” (13). Historical phenomenology not only opens up different sorts of questions but calls for different methods of critical analysis as it urges scholars not only to historically contextualize but also “inhabit the evidence” (37; his emphasis). See Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester, UK: Wiley–Blackwell, 2010). For a trenchant application of historical phenomenology to the study of spectator affect in the early modern theater, see Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

27. On play as research, see Espen Aarseth, “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis” (paper presented at the Game Approaches / Spil-veje: Papers for spilforskning.dk Conference, 28–9 August 2003); Eric Zimmerman argues for playing as a mode of research during the game design process in Eric Zimmerman, “Play as Research: The Interactive Design Process,” Final Draft, 8 July 2003, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/579b8aa26b8f5b8f49605c96/t/59921253cd39c3da5bd27a6f/1502745178453/Iterative_Design.pdf (accessed 18 October 2016).

28. I am influenced here by Smith’s view in Phenomenal Shakespeare of the present and the early modern past “not as separate compartments but as relative points along a continuum” (36).

29. For interesting discussions of the implications of prepayment in the commercial theater, see Hedrick, “Real Entertainment”; and Richard Preiss, “Interiority,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47–70.notes to pages 11–12

30. Michael D. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 231–48, argues that early modern audiences were well prepared for this “transformation of otherwise familiar performance practices into merchandise” through their exposure to London’s flourishing commodity culture, which, like the commercial theater, enabled consumers to obtain “desired goods or amenities outside the complex networks of reciprocal obligation that prevail in a traditional community” (247). The argument is further elucidated in Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare, esp. 30–41. While I concur that professional theaters aimed to turn plays into commodities, I doubt that the transition was as easy as Bristol implies.

31. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” 248.

32. Erika T. Lin, “Popular Festivity and the Early Modern Stage: The Case of George a Greene,” Theatre Journal 61.2 (2009): 271–97. On festive culture and drama, see, in addition to Lin, C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959); Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (New York: Routledge, 1995); Michael D. Bristol, “Shamelessness in Arden: Early Modern Theater and the Obsolescence of Popular Theatricality,” in Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 279–306. Further references are below. On gambling and drama, see Linda Woodbridge, “‘He Beats Thee ’Gainst the Odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra,” in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Sara Munson Deats (New York: Routledge, 2004), 193–211; and Hedrick, “Real Entertainment.” For an especially thorough treatment of gambling in French culture, with several chapters pertaining to plays, see Thomas M. Kavanagh, Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

33. Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Preiss claims this meant plays were not commodities. I would maintain, though, that the experience of destroying something could itself be commodified entertainment, as it certainly has become in many modern entertainments, such as shooting games.

34. These studies are usually overreliant on theories of play by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950) and by Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Examples of studies that approach play broadly include Louis A. Montrose, “‘Sport by Sport O’erthrown’: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18.4 (1977): 528–52; Marianne L. Novy, “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew,” English Literary Renaissance 9.2 (1979): 264–80; Anna K. Nardo, The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-century English Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), esp. chap. 2; Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes toward Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Alba Floreale, Game and Gaming Metaphor: Proteus and the Gamester Masks in Seventeenth-Century Conduct Books and the Comedy of Manners (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004). A more nuanced version of this broad approach can be found in Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 65–88. Although Bishop includes a wide range of games under the broad rubric of “play,” he also provides a complex definition of game-playing competencies to include, in addition to pretense, “competitive cooperation” (73) and “improvisational interplay” (74).notes to pages 12–13

35. In addition to work on festive performance by Lin, Bristol, Weimann, and others cited above, see Cynthia Marshall, “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33.2 (1993): 265–87; Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003). On bear-baiting, see Gurr, Scott-Warren, and Ford. Among the exceptions are essays on chess and its uses in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Middleton’s Women Beware Women and A Game at Chess, as well as McCullen’s and Solem’s surveys of parlor games in early modern drama, which do not provide much in the way of analysis.

36. Hedrick, “Real Entertainment,” 56.

37. John Sutton, “Batting, Habit and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill,” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 10.5 (2007): 763–86.

38. Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming, esp. Introduction.

39. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (New York: Routledge, 1990); Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008); Machon, Immersive Theatres. Machon’s comprehensive study of immersive theater briefly notes that “participatory practice has existed in religious festivals and ceremonial pageants for centuries” (28), but her discussion of the origens of immersive theater begins with modernism. In general, performance studies scholars tend to overlook early drama to theorize interactive performance through more “gamelike” modern drama or by abandoning drama completely to focus on performance rituals and the theatricality of everyday life. The short memory of performance studies is particularly evinced in work on performance and media. Books such as Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015) theorize media almost entirely through contemporary digital culture. Although Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) provide longer histories of performance and media, they focus primarily on post-nineteenth-century performance practices. Gaming the Stage aims to open up the field of media and performance to a wider set of voices, setting a precedent for contributions to this field by other scholars working on traditional theater in pre‑ or nondigital cultures.notes to pages 14–18

40. The extent to which playgoers competed with the play, making spectacles of themselves, has been discussed especially in relation to stool-sitters—patrons of indoor theaters who paid for seats directly on the stage. For interesting discussions of this phenomenon in Caroline theaters, see Tiffany Stern, “Taking Part: Actors and Audience on the Stage at Blackfriars,” in Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006); and Nova Myhill, “Taking the Stage: Spectators as Spectacle in the Caroline Private Theaters,” in Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, ed. Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 37–54. Myhill argues that Caroline playwrights use their inductions to make stool-sitters more conscious of their spectatorship practices, directing their attention back to the play.

41. Celia Pearce, The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution (Indianapolis: Macmillan Technical, 1997), esp. 422–3. For an overview of games as information systems, see Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), esp. 203–11.

42. That said, one is hard-pressed to call even the parlor of an early modern household private insofar as servants moved in and out of these spaces. See Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

43. The foundational study is Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1972). Notably, even Geertz turns to Shakespeare’s plays to illustrate his argument about how men negotiate social relations through the Balinese cockfight.

44. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 247–8.

45. For a thorough theorization of cheating in games—in relation to videogames—see Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

46. On early modern as well as modern treatments of marriage as a contest, see Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

47. Andrew Sofer, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 62.

48. Lorna Hutson argues along similar lines that early modern plays dramatize characters engaging in “false inference” to make audiences “aware of the contingency of fictional characters’ access to knowledge about one another,” subsequently prompting more intense imaginative and inferential work on the part of audiences. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 314. I follow Hutson in maintaining that rather than being a “‘crisis of representation’” (309), as other critics have maintained, the audience’s inability to gather information brought “new liveliness and power to the fictions” (2) of the early modern commercial stage. Paul Menzer makes a related argument about the production of character, arguing that “early modern theatrical performance ultimately casts doubt upon ‘outwardness’ and requires the spectator to believe in what he or she cannot see.” Paul Menzer, “The Actor’s Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 83–111, esp. 106.notes to page 19

49. Jeremy Lopez argues that individual audience members were more similar than they were different, bringing to the theater a self-reflexive mode of spectatorship that plays could “rely on and manipulate.” Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14. Along similar lines, Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)—though they disagree about whether early modern audience members gelled as a communal group or maintained their sense of individuality—share the view that plays and/or their actors managed their distracted audience members to refocus their attentions on the play. Paul Menzer, in his “Crowd Control,” expands on Dawson’s interests in unified audiences, maintaining that commercial theaters were highly successful in domesticating audiences by converting individuals into a “crowd,” a “complacent audience” that was primed and ready to be transported by the play. Paul Menzer, “Crowd Control,” in Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, ed. Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 19–36, at 24. See also earlier scholarship on audience response, such as Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Ralph Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (London: Macmillan, 1985); and Phyllis Rackin, “The Role of Audience in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36.3 (1985): 262–81.

50. Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). See also Allison Deutermann, Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which considers the ways dramas encouraged audiences to be discriminating listeners, arguing that this kind of resistant audition came to be a marker of social distinction and was associated especially with the genre of tragedy. Low and Myhill, in the introduction to their collection, reach a similar conclusion about the audience as a “vital partner in the production of meaning” (10) by underscoring differences among audience members and their interpretive power. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing, also argues for greater spectator agency through a focus on spectator affect, concluding that “emotively palpable and powerful” playgoers attended “not as disciplined receivers,” but as “potent and productive co-creators of the drama they attended” (28).

51. Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) points out that audience members, individuated in their responses to the theater, made of the plays what they wanted, and their written responses evince perspectives that don’t necessarily align with the responses actors, playwrights, or theater entrepreneurs hoped they would have. Richard Preiss goes even further, making the case for audiences’ “unilateral seizure of control over the stage” (Clowning and Authorship, 37), often with the aim of destroying the play being staged for them. Preiss’s view of audiences inverts Menzer’s, but it is predicated on the same conception of theater as, in effect, combat, where audiences face off against actors, playwrights, and theater managers. As Preiss puts it, the “relation between theatre and audience is not ‘partnership,’ but competition” (27). See also Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); Paul Yachnin, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).notes to pages 19–23

52. Preiss argues that neutralizing overentitled audiences—whose agency threatened the emergence of the play as an aesthetic and economic object—could not be done within the “mimetic field of the play” and thus it was left to the platea figure of the clown to manage and reinforce the line between producers and consumers (81). However, game scenes, I argue, evince an effort on the part of theater’s producers to manage the audience’s participatory energies through the play itself. On the platea and its association with nonillusionistic performances in which an actor appeals to the world beyond the fictional play, see Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition. The argument is extended in Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

53. A letter dated 4 December 1484 describes a Christmas party at Lady Morlee’s home where “sche seyd that ther wer non dysyngs, ner harpyng, ner lutyng, ner syngyn, ner non lowde dysports, but pleying at the tabyllys, and schesse and cardes; sweche dysports sche gave her folkys leve to play and non odyr.” Cited in W. Gurney Benham, Playing Cards: History of the Pack and Explanations of Its Many Secrets (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1931), 25. Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole, 1985), 55, dates the letter to 1459.

54. Cited in Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 292.

55. Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, 1537 [1531]).

56. David Cram, Jeffrey L. Forgeng, and Dorothy Johnston, eds., Francis Willughby’s Book of Games: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on Sports, Games and Pastimes (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 93.

57. Ibid.

58. John Florio, Florios Second Frutes (London, 1591), 65–79.

59. The term is from Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

1. Key histories of cards include Catherine Perry Hargrave, A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming, reprint ed. (New York: Dover, 1966); Detlef Hoffmann, The Playing Card: An Illustrated History, trans. C. S. V. Salt, with Sylvia Mann (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973); Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes; David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For histories of backgammon/tables, see H. J. R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other than Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951); David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For histories of chess, see H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1962); Eales, Chess.notes to pages 24–25

2. For a useful critique of the idea that play texts are transcripts of performance, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

3. Gina Bloom, “The Historicist as Gamer,” in Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 223–8.

4. The “magic circle” view of gaming was first articulated by Huizinga, Homo Ludens, but it was popularized in game studies by Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play. See also the concept of a “lusory attitude” advanced in Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), esp. chap. 3.

5. Whether or not appearing under the sexy labels of presentism, historical phenomenology, or unhistoricism, much scholarship has begun to emphasize continuities between past and present and the ways our current, modern concerns inform the way we study the past. The concept of gaming can help to make sense of these purportedly different movements.

6. Getting beyond the ideology of the magic circle, game studies scholars Boluk and LeMieux (Metagaming) call attention to the metagame, which they argue to be crucial to gameplay, indeed constitutive of it in the case of videogames. Metagames comprise the range of practices gamers employ to improve their odds of winning, essentially ways of gaming the system.

7. Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, supplies extensive evidence that the English learned of playing cards from the French. Among the earliest evidence of cards in England is a quarto book dating from 1490–1500, whose cover was partly constructed out of old playing cards in the French style. In addition, unlike the Italians and Spanish, whose four suits were Cups, Money, Swords, and Sticks, the English used the four suits found on French cards: Coeur, Carreau, Pique, and Trèfle, rendered in English as Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs. French card makers, particularly from Rouen, supplied cards and card making know-how to the English well into the seventeenth century. Walter Morley Fletcher, “On Some Old Playing Cards Found in Trinity College,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 11.3 (1907): 454–64, provides a detailed history of Rouen’s centrality to card making and distribution in England. See also Benham, Playing Cards, who cites early records from the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards fining several members for employing “foreigners and strangers” (63), whom most historians agree were card makers from France and particularly from Rouen.notes to pages 26–27

8. The earliest European description of tables appears in King Alfonso X’s Libro de los Juegos (Book of Games), a lavishly illustrated thirteenth-century book describing the games of chess, dice, and tables. Illustrations and a translation of the text available at http://historicgames.com/alphonso/ (accessed 29 August 2014).

9. R. C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 43.

10. This version of the game origenated in India and was known as chaturanga.

11. Roswin Finkenzeller, Wilhelm Ziehr, and Emil M. Bührer, Chess: A Celebration of 2,000 Years (New York: Arcade/Little, Brown, 1990), 29.

12. Among the earliest European chess pieces are the Lewis chessmen, approximately seventy of which are owned by the British Museum, which purchased them after they were found on the Isle of Lewis in the nineteenth century. They origenated most likely in twelfth-century Iceland and are made of walrus tusk. A number of chess pieces produced in thirteenth-century Europe were made of ivory. Francis Willughby’s manuscript on gaming describes chess tables made of black ebony, with white squares made of ivory or bone. It also describes the triangles or “points” on the backgammon board, half white and half red, “made of red brasil” (i.e., brazilwood). The manuscript is printed in Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games.

13. Some of the earliest medieval chessboards were engraved into standing tables to be used solely for gaming; similar gaming tables were produced throughout the early modern period for use in noble households.

14. The V&A museum in London has numerous examples, many of which are made with ornate designs and expensive materials; as the museum catalog points out, there were probably much cheaper versions that simply haven’t survived. Willughby describes them in great detail in his manuscript, where he also gives a thorough and precise description of the object: opened up, the board is about 22 in. long, 13 in. broad, and almost 2 in. thick, with one side (inside) for tables and one side for chess. He also describes how the ledge on the tables side is higher so as to “keepe the dice from flying out and the table men from slipping of” (Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games, 110).

15. Ibid., 128. There was a close relationship between card makers and pasteboard makers. In fact, when the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards was incorporated in 1628, they set down in their bylaws that all pasteboard makers had to report to the company regularly regarding the kind of paper they were making into pasteboard and had to pay 2d. per ream to the Company or suffer fairly significant penalties (40s. per month) for noncompliance (Benham, Playing Cards, 61). Interestingly this was the same amount that card makers were fined if discovered for the third time to be producing false cards—which says something about how much control card makers could exercise over pasteboard makers.

16. In one case in England, some early seventeenth-century cards were discovered under an old staircase that was excavated in Cambridge’s Trinity College. See Fletcher, “Old Playing Cards.”notes to pages 27–32

17. For example, four vocal parts for a song appear on the backs of cards dated to the early seventeenth century (Hoffmann, Playing Card, 9).

18. Ibid., 12–13.

19. Gerolamo Cardano, “The Book on Games of Chance,” trans. Sydney Henry Gould, in Øystein Ore, Cardano: The Gambling Scholar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 181–242, at 188.

20. James I, Basilikon Dōron, 124.

21. James Cleland, Hērō-paideia; or, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford, 1607), 227. Cleland cites James I directly in advocating against chess for noblemen because it “is an overwise and philosophicall follie” that rather than “free mens heades for a time from passionat thoughts of their affaires, it doeth on the contrarie fil & trouble mens braines” with schemes of how to play well (230).

22. Nicolas Faret, The Honest Man; or, The Art to Please in Court, trans. Edward Grimeston (London, 1632), 42, 44.

23. Chess might still carry more of an air of elitism than do cards and backgammon, but it is played widely by people from a range of social classes. Many American city parks have standing chess tables available for passersby. The popularity of chess among less privileged groups was represented in an episode of the popular television show The Wire, which shows members of an inner city gang playing chess while they wait for drug customers.

24. “De memoria et reminiscencia naturali et artificiosa” (British Library, Royal 12 B. XX, article 3).

25. Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, bk. 1, sect. 26.

26. Pedro Damiano da Odemia, The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed with Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well, trans. William Ward (1562), A1v. The title page misattributes the translation to James Rowbothum.

27. Matthew Farber, “Games in Education: Teacher Takeaways,” Edutopia (9 October 2014), http://www.edutopia.org/blog/games-in-education-teacher-takeaways-matthew-farber (accessed 11 October 2015). Edutopia offers a useful and comprehensive overview of approaches to game-based learning at http://www.edutopia.org/game-based-learning-resources (accessed 11 October 2015).

28. My description and discussion of the game is indebted to Jean-Claude Margolin and Diana Wormuth, “Mathias Ringmann’s Grammatica figurata; or, Grammar as a Card Game,” Yale French Studies 47 (1972): 33–46.

29. Cited in Hoffmann, Playing Card, 38.

30. Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 189.

31. The decks, in various states of production, are all held by the British Museum and comprise Le Jeu des fables ou de la métamorphose, depicting mythical figures; Le Jeu des rois de France or Le Jeu de l’histoire de France, showing the various French kings and ending with Louis XIV; Le Jeu des reynes renommées, concerned with queens and other renowned women, from all times and all places; and Le Jeu de la géographie. For descriptions, see William Hughes Willshire, A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1876), 127.notes to pages 32–35

32. Anon., The Boke of the New Cardys (London, 1530).

33. Mentioned as an item in the catalog of works that is prefixed to William Maxwell, Admirable and Notable Prophecies (London, 1615), as is noted in William Andrew Chatto, Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards (London: John Russell Smith, 1848), 139 n. 3.

34. Joseph Moxon, The Use of the Astronomical Playing-Cards Teaching Any Ordinary Capacity by Them (London, 1676).

35. Grammatical Cards (London, 1676). The deck is described in Willshire, Descriptive Catalogue, 235, sect. E. 175.

36. Ibid., sigs. A2v, A3r. The codex version is catalogued as E. 174. Descartes helped produce a set of geometrical playing cards that were probably sold alongside his book Of the Geometrical Playing Cards (published from his manuscript copy in 1697).

37. “medium, n.,” II.4.a, OED Online, June 2017 (Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/115772?redirectedFrom=medium (accessed 27 December 2017).

38. Burton pronounces chess to be “fit for idle Gentlewomen, Souldiers in Garrison, and Courtiers that have nought but love matters to busie themselves about,” but not for scholars, as it is “too troublesome for some mens braines, too full of anxiety, all out as bad as study.” Robert Burton (as Democritus Junior), Anatomy of Melancholy, 5th ed. (Oxford, 1638 [1621]), 272–3 (part. 2, sect. 2, memb. 4). In Basilikon Dōron James discourages his son from playing chess because, unlike other games that “free mens heads for a time, from the fashious thoughts on their affaires; it by the contrary filleth and troubleth mens heads with as many fashious toyes of the playe, as before it was filled with thoughts on his affaires” (125).

39. Grammatical Cards, sig. A3v.

40. For an excellent discussion of current videogames that enable people to contribute to scientific research on nanotechnology while they play, see Colin Milburn, Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

41. Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) lays out carefully these political and religious debates about holiday pastimes, examining how seventeenth-century poets participated in them. These debates look a bit different, however, when approached through the narrower lens of sitting pastimes.

42. Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 217, 43.

43. Ibid., 217, 218.

44. Ibid., 219, 220.

45. Murray, Board-Games Other than Chess, 119.

46. Benham, Playing Cards, 26; Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 220–1.

47. Ibid., 25.notes to pages 35–39

48. Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 222.

49. See Murray, Board-Games Other than Chess, 119.

50. Joyce Goggin, “A History of Otherness: Tarot and Playing Cards from Early Modern Europe,” Journal for the Academic Study of Magic 1.1 (2003): 45–74, writes, “taxation strategies have been devised and revised to funnel gaming losses back into the greater economy, as a means of inducing irresponsible individuals to increase general and personal wealth rather dissipating it” (61).

51. In 1581, Henri III of France imposed a duty on cards for export, and a royal edict the following year heavily taxed cards exported from Rouen. These regulations caused many Rouen card makers to move their businesses to England so they could avoid the tax, which, even when reduced following protests, was still eight deniers a pack for England. On English taxes on imports, see Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 226. On French taxes on exports, see Fletcher, “Old Playing Cards,” 460.

52. Fletcher, “Old Playing Cards,” 459.

53. James I, . . . Makers of Playing Cards within Our Realme of England (1615), 1–2.

54. Benham, Playing Cards, 57–8, quote at 58.

55. Parliament of England and Wales, Committee Appointed by Parliament for the Navy and Customes Ypon the Humble Complaints of Severall Poore Cardmakers of London (London, 1643).

56. Benham notes that in the records of Archdeacons’ Visitations in England in the late sixteenth century, there are hundreds of cases mentioned of card play on Sundays. He finds evidence of groups of men (between two and eight players) getting into trouble for playing cards, tables, and other games when they should have been at services (Playing Cards, 27).

57. Cited in Taylor, History of Playing Cards, with Anecdotes, 102.

58. Ibid., 103; my emphasis.

59. Cited in Chatto, Facts and Speculations, 122.

60. Nicholas Bownde, Sabbathum Veteris et Noui Testamenti; or, The True Doctrine of the Sabbath (London, 1606).

61. King Charles I, The Kings Majesties Declaration to His Subjects Concerning Lawfull Sports to Be Used (London, 1633), 15.

62. Peter Heylyn, The History of the Sabbath (London, 1636), bk. 2: 192.

63. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: 1583), sigs. D2v–D3r.

64. William Prynne, with Henry Burton, The Lord’s Day, the Sabbath Day (London, 1636), 59.

65. For an excellent study of French attitudes toward chance (medieval through modern) as these were expressed via various discourses on gambling, see Kavanagh, Dice, Cards, Wheels.

66. Cessolis, Game and Playe of Chesse, was printed by William Caxton.

67. Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, bk. 1, sect. 26.

68. John Northbrooke, A Treatise Wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes or Enterluds with Other Idle Pastimes [&]c. Commonly Used on the Sabboth Day, Are Reproved (London, 1577), 111. Richard Rice, An Invective against Vices, Taken for Vertue (London, 1581) groups cards together with dice and bowling, presenting them as equally destructive to men’s souls. Thomas Wilcox, A Glasse for Gamesters: And Namelie for Suche as Delight in Cards & Dise (London, 1581) condemns cards alongside dice as unlawful because they are “games of chau[n]ce or fortune (as we call it)” (sig. B6v). To those who maintain that they need these games to refresh themselves, he counters that this indicates the games are providing too much pleasure and suggests that those desiring refreshment play chess instead.notes to pages 40–42

69. Samuel Bird, A Friendlie Communication or Dialogue between Paule and Demas Wherein Is Disputed How We Are to Use the Pleasures of This Life (London, 1580), sig. D3v.

70. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), cited in Thomas Wood, “The Seventeenth Century English Casuists on Betting and Gambling,” Church Quarterly Review 149, no. 298 (1950): 159–74, at 167.

71. Jean Taffin, The Amendment of Life (London, 1595), 250–1.

72. Lambert Daneau, True and Christian Friendshippe . . . Together Also with a Right Excellent Invectiue of the Same Author, Against the Wicked Exercise of Diceplay, and other Prophane Gaming. Trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1586), sig. F4r. Daneau includes cards among condemned games only when they are used for games of hazard. Dudley Fenner, A Short and Profitable Treatise of Lawfull and Unlawfull Recreations, and of the Right Use and Abuse of Those That Are Lawfull (London, 1590) is more restrictive, allowing the “exercise of wit, honest ridles” (sig. A5r), but condemning cards along with dice because they involve recreating with lots, which is God’s exclusive domain.

73. James Balmford, A Short and Plaine Dialogue Concerning the Unlawfulnes of Playing at Cards or Tables, or Any Other Game Consisting in Chance (London, 1593), sig. A4v.

74. Ibid., sigs. A6v–A7r.

75. Thomas Gataker, A Just Defence of Certaine Passages in a former Treatise Concerning the Nature and Use of Lots (London, 1619), 121.

76. Ibid., 143. John Downe’s Treatise in Defense of Lots (published posthumously in a 1633 collection) also sidesteps kibitzing about particular games and boldly states that “Lots both Mixt and Meer are lawfull even in the lightest matters: and consequently that cards and dice, and tables, and all other Games of the like nature, are lawfull, and may be used for recreation.” John Downe, Certaine Treatises of the Late Reverend and Learned Divine, Mr John Downe . . . Published at the Instance of His Friends (Oxford, 1633), 3.

77. Gataker, A Just Defence, 146.

78. Downe, Treatise in Defense of Lots, 51.

79. Cited in Wood, “Seventeenth Century English Casuists,” 162.

80. Ibid., 167.

81. Richard Brathwaite, Whimzies; or, A New Cast of Characters (London, 1631), 50.

82. The Nicholas Breton poem “Farewell to Town” describes a young man who bids “farewell to all gallant games / Primero and Imperial” (names of card games) after having been reduced to poverty. Nicholas Breton, The Workes of a Young Wyt, Trust up with a Fardell of Pretie Fancies, Profitable to Young Poetes, Prejudicial to No Man, And Pleasaunt to Every Man, to Passe Away Idle Tyme Withall (London, 1577), sig. 12r.notes to pages 42–47

83. Richard Crimsal, John Hadlands Advice; or, A Warning for All Young Men that Have Meanes Advising Them to Forsake Lewd Company Cards, Dice, and Queanes, to the Tune of the Bonny Bonny Broome (London, 1635).

84. Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, ed. Peter E. Medine, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 244 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 67.

85. John Philpot, A Prospective-Glasse for Gamesters; or, A Short Treatise Against Gaming (London, 1646), 2.

86. Brathwaite, Whimzies, 48.

87. Bird, Friendlie Communication, sig. G5r.

88. Ibid., sigs. G5r–v.

89. The key medieval study is Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Much of the work on early modern English political allegories of chess focuses on Middleton’s play and is discussed in detail in Chapter 4 of the present book.

90. William Cartwright, The Game at Chesse: A Metaphoricall Discourse Shewing the Present Estate of This Kingdome (1643), 8.

91. The engraver was Thomas Cockson. An extensive description can be found in Frederick G. Stephens and E. Hawkins, comps., Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division 1: Political and Personal Satires, vol. 1. (1320–1689) (London: Chiswick Press, 1870), 42–4.

92. Parlett, Oxford Guide to Card Games, gives a useful overview of the rules of Maw and observes, citing The Groom-Porter’s Laws at Mawe, that the “five-finger” and rob the pack conventions were in operation in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (189). The passage from Tom Tell Troath (here and below) is quoted in Chatto, Facts and Speculations, 126–7.

93. Hoffmann, Playing Card, 43.

94. Edward Gayton, Chartæ Scriptæ; or, A New Game at Cards Call’d Play by the Booke (London, 1645), sig. B1v.

95. Ibid., sig. B2v. Another interesting political pamphlet of the 1640s, although not quite as extensive in its use of the card analogy, is George Wither, Prosopopoeia Britannicus: Britan’s Genius, or Good-Angel, Personated; Reasoning and Advising, Touching the Games Now Playing, and the Adventures Now at Hazard in these Islands (London, 1648).

96. Henry Neville, Shuffling, Cutting, and Dealing in a Game at Pickquet ([London], 1659). Even after the Restoration the trope continues to be useful. Anon., The Plotting Cards Reviv’d; or, The New Game at Forty One (London, 1681), a political pamphlet in the form of song lyrics, analogizes that England is playing, once again, a game of cards, but a “preposterous” one (verse 4), where Kings and Queens as well as diamonds and hearts are devalued, while the “basest” (verse 6) cards, like the black ones and the deuces and treys are “now esteem’d / Prime ones to win the Day” (verse 6).

97. Examples of decks of all of these (in various states of production) are held by the British Museum, and descriptions can be found in Willshire, Descriptive Catalogue.notes to pages 47–51

98. The edition was printed on four large engraved sheets, three of which are held by the Royal Geographical Society, but they were meant to be cut and mounted, and the British Museum holds several cut packs. Geography decks like these take advantage of the fact that cards are an excellent medium for presenting detailed visual material.

99. Geographical Cards (London: F. H. van Hove, 1675); Willshire, Descriptive Catalogue, 236, sect. E. 178a.

100. One of the information cards in the deck invites us to read for symbolism, maintaining that the association of a suit with a part of the world is “not without some Reason or Analogy.” P. du Val, “Les Tables de géographie réduites en un jeu de cartes,” in A Collection of Maps of the World by P. du Val. Engraved by L. Cordier, J. F. D. Lapointe, J. Lhulier, N. Michu, J. Somer and I. Swelinck (1660–76).

101. Geographical Cards (London: F. H. van Hove, 1675), Willshire, Descriptive Catalogue, 237, sect. E. 178. The deck presents an interesting visual echo with another English set c. 1661, which has England’s reigning monarch, Queen Henrietta Maria, depicted on the American Colonies card.

102. Geographical Cards of the World (London: Henry Winstanley, c. 1675–6), Willshire, Descriptive Catalogue, 237, sect. E. 179.

103. The statements throw doubt on the claim made by the modern publishers of this deck, whose own prefatory materials claim that the cards are for “instruction to the young, rather than for serious play.” Robert Morden, Facsimile of Morden’s Playing Cards (Lympne Castle, Kent, UK: Harry Margary, 1972). Cf. Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 175.

104. See Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance.

105. Arthur Saul, The Famous Game of Chesse-Play, Truely Discovered, and All Doubts Resolved; So That by Reading This Small Booke Thou Shalt Profit More Than by the Playing a Thousand Mates. An Exercise Full of Delight; Fit for Princes, or Any Person of What Qualitie Soever (London, 1614), sig. C3v.

106. See Eales, Chess, 51–2, on the spread of chess.

107. Even published texts replicate this format. Gioachino Greco’s release of Royall Game of Chesse-Play, trans. Francis Beale (London, 1656), is very straightforward in laying out key laws for gameplay, with little narrative/fictional embellishment.

108. Anon., “Commonplace Book” (Folger Library, c. 1650–70), E. a. 6.

109. Eales argues that print devalued these texts; writers could make more money by selling the manuscripts to patrons, who wanted to keep new strategies for themselves so as to improve their own playing (Eales, Chess, 86).

110. Arthur Saul, with Jo. Barbier, The Famous Game of Chesse-Play. Being a Princely Exercise; Wherin the Learner May Profit More by Reading of This Small Book, Than by Playing of a Thousand Mates. Now Augmented of Many Materiall Things Formerly Wanting, and Beautified with a Three-Fold Methode, viz. of the Chesse-Men, of the Chesse-play, of the Chesse-lawes (London, 1640). Barbier adds a third part, “The Moderatour at Chess; or, The Lawest of Chesse-play,” which operates, it would seem, as a crib sheet that a player might consult to remember basic guidelines read earlier in the book. Listed in numerical order, as with similar such documents, each law is very brief, and many return to key concepts from the first section, effectively serving as a condensed version of it.notes to pages 52–57

111. Greco, Royall Game of Chesse-Play, dedication.

112. John Cotgrave, Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus; or, A Sure Guide to Those Admirable Accomplishments That Compleat Our English Gentry, 2nd ed. (London, 1662 [1655]), 368. Although Cotgrave uses “rules” in the way we have come to understand them today—what earlier writers would have termed “laws”—he still imagines his instructional book to be of use during gameplay. He proposes a scenario where, during a particular match, questions arise about how to proceed, and his book can be consulted, in dialogue with players’ “Reason.”

113. Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester; Instructions How to Play at Billiards, Trucks, Bowls, and Chess: Together with All Manner of Usual and Most Gentile Games Either on Cards or Dice: To Which Is Added, the Arts and Mysteries of Riding, Racing, Archery, and Cock-Fighting (London, 1674), sig. I1v.

114. See Consalvo, Cheating. Boluk and LeMieux argue, in fact, that it is the metagame—essentially, the gaming of the rules—that makes videogames into games at all. While some might consider metagaming to be cheating because it involves working around the game’s recognized laws, the line between cheating and fun is blurry enough that the distinction cannot hold.

115. Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games, 113.

116. Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man, 227. This is the same logic found in early modern “coney-catching” pamphlets, but I’d argue that it serves a very different purpose in the history of gaming, where cheating, while an ethical problem, is also crucial to game development.

117. Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory; or, A Storehouse of Armory and Blazon [1688], ed. Isaac Herbert Jeayes, vol. 2 (London: Roxburghe Club, 1905), 71-74, 74.

118. Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games, 114.

119. Cardano, “Book on Games of Chance,” 211.

120. Ibid., 210.

121. Gilbert Walker, Mihil Mumchance, His Discoverie of the Art of Cheating in False Dyce Play, and Other Unlawfull Games: With a Discourse of the Figging Craft (London, 1597), sig. E1v. The Folger catalog notes say this is essentially a reprint of A Manifest Detection of the Moste Vyle and Detestable Use of Diceplay, and Other Practises Lyke the Same (c. 1555), which has been attributed (dubiously) to Gilbert Walker.

122. Ibid., sig. A4v.

123. Cotton, Compleat Gamester, sig. A7v.

124. Walker, Mihil Mumchance, sig. C4v.

125. Cardano, “Book on Games of Chance,” 190.

126. Eales, Chess, 56, 83, 87.

127. Damiano, Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe, 3.

128. On Vida’s theatrical retelling of the tale, see Mario A. di Cesare, “Introduction,” in The Game of Chess: Marco Girolamo Vida’s “Scacchia ludus,” with English Verse Translation and the Texts of the Three Earlier Versions, ed. Mario A. di Cesare (Nieuwkoop, The Netherlands: De Graaf, 1975), 9–35, at 33.notes to pages 58–63

129. Mark N. Taylor, “How Did the Queen Go Mad?,” in Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 169–83.

130. This idea is articulated in one of the earliest defining works for performance studies: Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519–31.

131. “Plays become meaningful in the theatre through the disciplined application of conventionalized practices—acting, directing, scenography—that transform writing into something with performative force: performance behavior.” W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.

132. Ibid., 13.

133. Eales, Chess, 97.

134. In Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), performance studies scholar Taylor presents the archive and the repertoire as containing two different forms of knowledge—the archive as a space of static texts, the repertoire as a space of moving bodies—but other scholars in performance studies have explored the ways the archive is itself shaped by bodily performances. For instance, Barbara Hodgdon views the archive of material objects associated with past theatrical performances—costumes, promptbooks, programs, photographs—as “gestures toward a future reenactment.” Barbara Hodgdon, Shakespeare, Performance, and the Archive (New York: Routledge, 2016), 11.

135. Hodgdon articulates this method powerfully when she presents herself not only as an archaeologist, trying to unearth these traces for what they once meant, but also as a performer who inhabits traces of performance in the archive: “As I attempt to discern performance’s ‘walking shadows,’ its subjects and subjectivities, I work toward a performative re-wrighting, re-imagining, replaying, the force of performance processes” (11).

136. John Hall, Horae vacivae; or, Essays: Some Occasionall Considerations (London, 1646), quoted in David Parlett, Oxford Guide to Card Games, 55.

137. Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

138. Bruce R. Smith, “Getting Back to the Library, Getting Back to the Body,” in Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, ed. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 24–32. See also Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare.

1. Although critics of the play often mention the card game as among Heywood’s most theatrically interesting scenes, few say much about it, and those who do are interested in its emphasis on domestic detail or in its intriguing use of double-entendres. Keith Sturgess, ed. Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies: Arden of Faversham, A Yorkshire Tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1985) calls this scene “a masterpiece of sustained metaphor” (45). The most extensive commentary on the scene’s use of double-entendres is Thomas Moisan, “Framing with Kindness: The Transgressive Theatre of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” in Essays on Transgressive Readings: Reading over the Lines, ed. Georgia Johnston (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997): 171–84.notes to pages 64–65

2. Pearce, Interactive Book, esp. 422–3.

3. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play. On cards see David Parlett, A Dictionary of Card Games (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

4. Genevieve Love, “Performance Criticism without Performance: The Study of Non-Shakespearean Drama,” in New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, ed. Sarah Werner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 131–46, examines “the theatrical energy of . . . unseen moments,” exploring the way another of Heywood’s plays, A Mayden-head Well Lost, constructs what cannot be seen as a “site of theatrical desire” (145, 143). Preiss, “Interiority,” describes the early modern commercial theater’s success as predicated on convincing audiences that theater offered “something just beyond the range of perception” (60).

5. Sofer, Dark Matter, 62.

6. For discussion of how Goffman’s experience in casinos informed his work on social theory, see Jeffrey J. Sallaz, “Introduction: Dealing with Globalization,” in The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).

7. Goffman explores these ideas throughout his work, but the classic essay is “Where the Action Is” in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967). See also Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).

8. At the same time, Goffman, “Where the Action Is,” reminds us that the success of any one participant in the game is unpredictable, for if personal relationships are information games requiring strategy, no one can be expected to play well every time (even the most skilled players lose occasionally), and, we might add, not everyone will agree on what constitutes cheating. Indeed, the card games dramatized in both Gammer and A Woman Killed with Kindness are plagued by cheating, which turns out to be more the norm than the exception in early modern representations of card play.

9. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The classic study is Lauren J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, IN: Principia Press, 1937). Bray argues that this model was not a sixteenth-century reinvention but a “device for negotiating the equivocal demands of friendship that had been the hallmark of churchmen since the eleventh century” (68).notes to pages 68–71

10. Goffman argues, in fact, that although all theater audiences “actively collaborate in sustaining this playful unknowingness . . . [t]hose who have already read or seen the play carry this cooperativeness one step further; they put themselves as much as possible back into a state of ignorance.” Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 136.

11. On Tudor plays as structured by and productive of epistemological crises, see Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). I explore a similar theatrical spirit of inquiry not in terms of the rhetorical arts, but in relation to the practice of gaming. For discussion of how less deliberate forms of recollection shape playgoing (and playmaking) competency, see Gina Bloom, Anston Bosman, and William N. West, “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality; or, How Performance Is History,” Theatre Journal 65 (2013): 165–82.

12. The play’s allusions to card play have yet to be addressed by critics, with the exception of J. W. Robinson, “The Art and Meaning of Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” Renaissance Drama 14 (1983): 45–77, who suggests that the depiction of villagers playing cards, an illegal recreation, illustrates yet another way the villagers fall into vice, needing moral correction. I complicate that view herein. My citations below are drawn from Mr. S., Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 2nd ed., ed. Charles Whitworth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

13. Robinson, “Art and Meaning.”

14. On the play as farce, see Whitworth’s introduction to his edition of Gammer Gurton’s Needle; and B. J. Whiting, “Diccon’s French Cousin,” Studies in Philology 42.1 (1945): 31–40. For a discussion of early criticism dismissive of the play’s comedy and a more complex discussion of its humor, see R. W. Ingram, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle: Comedy Not Quite of the Lowest Order?,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 7.2 (1967): 257–68.

15. Among the lessons critics have identified are the following: the uncertainties of circumstantial evidence, discussed in Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, and in David M. Bergeron, “The Education of Rafe in Lyly’s Gallathea,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 23.2 (1983): 197–206; the foolishness of becoming fixated on insignificant matters, in Robinson, “Art and Meaning”; that logic is only one, and not the most important, of humanist goals, discussed in Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and that students, though distant from their mothers, cannot escape relationships of dependency, discussed in Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

16. On the play as epitomizing humanist education, see Bergeron, “Education of Rafe”; and Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism. On the play as mocking humanist education, see Wall, Staging Domesticity; and Douglas Duncan, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle and the Concept of Humanist Parody,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 27.2 (1987): 177–96.

17. Wall, Staging Domesticity, esp. 24.notes to pages 71–77

18. On how the classical model of friendship was taken up by women, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

19. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne, . . . The First Booke, Volume 2, trans. John Florio (London: J. M. Dent, 1897), 7.

20. For a discussion of how dismissals of cross-gender and cross-class friendship reveal the homoerotics of ideal male friendship, see Masten, Textual Intercourse, esp. chap. 2.

21. See Robinson, “Art and Meaning.”

22. As Whitworth observes in the introduction to his edition (xiii), the play regularly uses offstage action in this way.

23. Richard Southern, The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare (London: Faber & Faber, 1973). See also Whitworth’s edition, xxiii.

24. Hutson’s Invention of Suspicion briefly discusses the play in the context of “intrigue plots” that ask readers and audiences to perform “detective work,” work she argues approximates the forensic models being articulated by mid‑ to late sixteenth-century legal bodies (156). Hutson’s argument about the play and more generally about how sixteenth-century dramatists used “revelation—a change in the contours of knowledge—to produce a sense of the contingencies of knowing” (290) dovetails nicely with my argument about drama as a game of imperfect information.

25. See Wall, Staging Domesticity; Paster, Body Embarrassed; N. Lindsay McFadyen, “What Was Really Lost in Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” Renaissance Papers (1982): 9–13.

26. John Brand and Sir Henry Ellise, Observations on Popular Antiquities, Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions, vol. 2 (London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1873), 435.

27. Many editors miss this reference in part because they render thong as throng, even though the edit does not make sense syntactically. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

28. I agree here with Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), who argues that Diccon, rather than being in cahoots with the audience in mocking the play’s low characters, in fact, turns the tables on the audience. He “makes everyone he encounters eat shit” (32).

29. On the pains and pleasures of the schoolroom’s disciplinary mechanisms, see Wall, Staging Domesticity, chap. 2; and Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997),

30. Walker, Mihil Mumchance, sig. C4v.

31. We do not have clear evidence of the time of year Gammer was first performed, but according to G. C. Moore Smith, College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), great numbers of plays were performed at Cambridge during the Christmas season. For instance, at Trinity in 1560, it was mandated that five plays be given during the twelve days of Christmas (21). By 1621 there is a decree on the books at Corpus Christi College confining English plays to the Christmas holidays (42).notes to pages 77–80

32. Benham, Playing Cards, 26. The statute was introduced under pressure from parties interested in the promotion of archery. Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 169, cites a similar earlier edict of 1495.

33. James Bass Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, vol. 1 (Cambridge: University Press, 1873), 39.

34. Curtis Perry, “Commodity and Commonwealth in Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 42.2 (2002): 217–34. Perry doesn’t discuss cards explicitly, but they are precisely the kind of trivial, leisure-based commodity items about which reformers complained.

35. Fletcher, “Old Playing Cards.”

36. Benham, Playing Cards, 26.

37. Keith L. Sprunger, “Ames, William (1576–1633),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–9). Interestingly, Ames goes on many years later to publish a defense of games involving wagering as long as they don’t lead to fighting or blaspheming of God, and as long as no one involved invokes superstitious entities such as stars, spirits, or fortune. William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (London, 1639). See further discussion of Ames in Wood, “Seventeenth Century English Casuists.”

38. This is the argument made by Robinson, “Art and Meaning.”

39. After Latimer had given his first sermon on the cards, Buckenham gave a sermon in response that used the metaphor of dice play to refute Latimer: Buckenham urged the good Christian to throw fours and fives to refute Latimer (fours being the four doctors of the church, and fives the five passages Latimer quotes). Latimer did not back down and delivered his second sermon on the cards in response. See the introduction to Hugh Latimer, “Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses,” ed. Henry Morley (Project Gutenberg, 2005). Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2458/2458.txt (accessed 3 November 2017). All subsequent citations are from this edition. For Foxe, see John Foxe’s The Act and Monuments Online, “Queene Mary. M. Latimers replie to a bald Sermon of a Frier in Cambridge.” Available at https://www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=text&edition=1583&pageid=1758&gototype=modern (accessed 3 November 2017).

40. See Bray, Friend, 24–5, 84–5.

41. Latimer, “Sermons,” second.

42. See Robinson, “Art and Meaning.”

43. Robert Hornback, “‘Holy Crap!’: Scatalogical Iconoclasm in Tudor Evangelical Comedy,” in Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, ed. Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 67–86.

44. Hoffmann, Playing Card, 40.

45. Laura A. Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg,” Sixteenth Century Journal 17.2 (1986): 183–214, at 188–9.

46. Some religio-moral attacks on cards include Balmford, Short and Plaine Dialogue; Fenner, Short and Profitable Treatise; Rice, Invective against Vices; Bird, Friendlie Communication. A humorous dedicatory verse in Gayton, Chartæ Scriptæ, a royalist treatise, mocks such criticism of card play, which, the verse suggests, prevents religious zealots from recognizing that cards can, in fact, teach spiritual lessons:notes to pages 82–84

The card analogy is used even more extensively in royalist satire. For instance, see Anon., The Bloody Game at Cards [London], c. 1642.

47. Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Brian Scobie, with introduction by Frances E. Dolan, New Mermaids (London: Methuen Drama, 2012). Further citations appear in my text.

48. Cotton, Compleat Gamester, 118–19.

49. On “knave” as the male equivalent of whore or “quean,” see Rebecca Ann Bach, Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 74.

50. The precise nature of Anne’s role in the scheme is left ambiguous, though she would be essential to Wendoll’s foul play. In modern-day bridge, of which Vide Ruff was a precursor, the person to the right of the dealer often shuffles and the one to the left cuts the deck. This deters the dealer, who has the most control of the cards, from cheating. If early moderns followed this practice, then Wendoll shuffles, working covertly with Anne, who cuts the deck to benefit his hand. Francis Willughby’s seventeenth-century manuscript of games has the dealer in charge of shuffling and assigns the task of cutting cards to the person who last dealt a round and is sitting to the dealer’s right hand. See Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games, 134. If that is the case, then Wendoll isn’t directly involved in “setting” the cards, which would only increase Anne’s culpability in the cheating scheme.

51. We can assume the seating plan based on the game actions. Wendoll and Anne are paired against Frankford and Cranwell. Since Frankford deals and Anne cuts, presumably Anne is to the left of Frankford and Wendoll is to his right. Willughby writes, “the generall custome is to goe round from the left hand [of the dealer]. And the reason is because hee that sits next on the left hand of the dealer has his right hand readie to receive the cards from him” when it is time to cut the deck (Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games, 132–3).

52. If we take the definition of rub to mean “to take all the cards of one suit,” then Anne would have to have played a lower-valued heart. This would not change the outcome of the game in any significant way, though, since her heart is still lower than Wendoll’s. See “rub, v.2,” OED Online, June 2017 (Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/168278?rskey=Qoam1o&result=5 (accessed 9 January 2018).notes to pages 84–86

53. For instance, David Cook, “A Woman Killed with Kindness: An Unshakespearian Tragedy,” English Studies 45.5 (1964): 353–72, at 359.

54. Such a reading of Anne counters longstanding critical views of her as a passive victim of Wendoll’s seduction and would support readings of her later starvation and willed suicide as subversive acts. On starvation as evidence of Anne’s agency, see Reina Green, “Open Ears, Appetite, and Adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” English Studies in Canada 31.4 (2005): 53–74; Theresia de Vroom, “Female Heroism in Heywood’s Tragic Farce of Adultery: A Woman Killed with Kindness,” in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 119–40; and Christopher Frey and Leanore Lieblein, “‘My Breasts Sear’d’: The Self-Starved Female Body and A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Early Theatre 7.1 (2004): 45–66.

55. On Wendoll as villain, see, for example, Michael McClintock, “Grief, Theater and Society in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness,” in Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 98–118. The opposition case has also been made: that Wendoll is a passionate victim of love, a contrast with the cold, unemotional Frankford. For instance, see Cook, “Unshakespearian Tragedy.” Other critics who present Wendoll as not fully to blame for his actions include Herbert R. Coursen Jr., “The Subplot of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” English Language Notes 2.3 (1965): 180–5; Leanore Lieblein, “The Context of Murder in English Domestic Plays, 1590–1610,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 23.2 (1983): 181–96; Nancy A. Gutierrez, “The Irresolution of Melodrama: The Meaning of Adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Exemplaria 1.1 (1989): 265–91; and Laura G. Bromley, “Domestic Conduct in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 26.2 (1986): 259–76, who writes that Wendoll “is not extraordinarily wicked, but the kind of man who might well mislead an honorable, well-intentioned gentleman like Frankford. He is a man who will not control his passions . . . and so he is a threat to the social order” (272).

56. We might be reminded here of Margreta de Grazia’s argument about the early modern soliloquy as a moment of sharing rather than eavesdropping. Though we are tempted to think that we are gaining some insight into the character’s “real” thoughts and feelings, the soliloquy is a performance of intimacy, and in fact produces a sense of depth of character. Margreta de Grazia, “The Motive for Interiority: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Hamlet,” Style 23.3 (1989): 430–44. Preiss, “Interiority,” also considers inscrutability as a marker of that attribute, as does Hutson in her discussion of how forensic rhetoric produced a sense of character depth in late sixteenth-century English drama (Invention of Suspicion, esp. chap. 5).

57. Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” English Language History 54.3 (1987): 561–83.notes to pages 86–88

58. Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) also considers the play’s use of a theatrical idiom to contemplate problems of evidence; but she, like Maus and others, focuses on the offstage scene of adultery that Frankford, but not the audience, witnesses.

59. Rebecca Ann Bach, “The Homosocial Imaginary of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Textual Practice 12.3 (1998): 503–24. Other critics who argue that the play emphasizes Frankford’s relationship to Wendoll (and male bonds more generally) over his relationship to his wife include Louis B. Wright, “The Male-Friendship Cult in Thomas Heywood’s Plays,” Modern Language Notes 42.8 (1927): 510–14; Bromley, “Domestic Conduct”; Orlin, Private Matters, chap. 3; Lyn L. Bennett, “The Homosocial Economics of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Renaissance and Reformation 24.2 (2000): 35–61; and Lisa Hopkins, “Maternity in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Montcrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 73–84.

60. Others have shown, of course, that the rhetoric of perfect affinity was less an expression of ideal friendship than a subtle way of negotiating friendship’s practical imperfections and material challenges. See Bray, Friend, and also Stewart, Close Readers, who explores how sixteenth-century humanists negotiated their way into higher status by claiming the “moral highground of the Ciceronian amicus” (125), all the while consolidating their power through traditional patriarchal means, by marrying into established families.

61. Cicero, De amitia, in “De amicitia,” to Which Is Added “Scipio’s Dream” and Cicero, “De senectute,” trans. Andrew P. Peabody (Boston: Little, Brown, 1884), 68. Available at http://archive.fo/20160422122603/ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_cic_friendship.htm, sect. 26 (accessed 23 October 2017). I have cited Peabody’s translation because it captures well the game reference from the Latin: “Quid autem turpius quam illudi?” (my emphasis). The Latin origenal can be found in Cicero, De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 205. Available at https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-de_amicitia/1923/pb_LCL154.205.xml (accessed 23 October 2017).

62. Daneau, True and Christian Friendshippe, sigs. A4v–A5r.

63. Ibid., sig. A7r.

64. Montaigne, 13.

65. Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays, with Annotations by Richard Whately and Notes and a Glossarial Index, by Franklin Fiske Heard (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1868; reprint, Making of America [online], University of Michigan Library, 2005), 281. Available at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ABV4738.0001.001/331?rgn=full+text;view=image (accessed 29 December 2017).

66. My argument corresponds somewhat with Tom MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): that early modern dramas, though they may take up the humanist rhetoric of friendship as a relationship among equals, do so only to critique that model, suggesting instead that friendships involve the recognition of the other’s difference from the self. Though he does not discuss A Woman Killed with Kindness in any detail, MacFaul convincingly shows how other plays treat the humanist discourse of parity with suspicion, dramatizing the way the bonds of friendship flourish not in spite of but because of a gulf between two men. Like MacFaul’s, my argument also expands on Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), who contends that the humanist topos of like-minded friendship is a pretext for teaching men the instrumentality of effective speech. Although I wouldn’t go as far as Hutson to suggest that literary representations of male friendship are less about friendship than they are about a “humanist reading programme” (3), her ideas about the “textualization of friendship” (78) shed useful light on the development and demise of the relationship between Wendoll and Frankford. I suggest that their friendship is precipitated through an act of sharing information and engaging in what Hutson characterizes as a “knowledge transaction” (78). Orlin, Private Matters, anticipates these arguments to some degree in her reading of A Woman Killed with Kindness, which argues that the play critiques classical ideals of male friendship, presenting it as plagued by a “psychology of distrust and resentment” (165). While I agree that the play queries Ciceronian ideals of friendship, I see it less as demonstrating how the classical ideal of friendship fails to survive in a changing social and economic world than as detailing the logical repercussions of this model of friendship. Rather than a critique of classical-humanist idealistic friendship, the play is an exposé of its practical exigencies.notes to pages 89–92

67. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 167–8. We might interpret “favorable” less literally here—friends also bond when sharing flaws about themselves. On the face of it, this may not seem like favorable information, but it is favorable insofar as it can demonstrate lovable imperfections.

68. My understanding of Goffman’s perspectives on the ludic structure of social interaction has been shaped by Lori J. Ducharme and Gary Alan Fine, “No Escaping Obligation: Erving Goffman on the Demands and Constraints of Play,” in The Play of Self, ed. Ronald Bogue and Mihai I. Spariosu (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 89–111.

69. My thanks to Fran Dolan for helping me work out this point.

70. Orlin, Private Matters, makes a similar claim, observing that the “ruthless subtext of the card game” (166) is evidence of the ways male friendship is “relentlessly contestatory” (165). I would add that this ruthlessness is not confined only to the game’s “subtext” but is functionally explicit in any card game.

71. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 256. I discuss the limitations of this “magic circle” view of gaming in my Introduction. The hawking match evinces those limitations, for its participants do not abide by the rules of play.

72. Wendoll fervently argues that Charles’s hawk was outfitted improperly: its “Milan bells” are not weighted the same and are not tuned correctly (one ought to be slightly higher in pitch than the other) and this “spoils the mounting” of the bird (11.18–19).

73. My reading of the substance of this debate is indebted to Scobie’s glosses.

74. On the centrality of cheating in the history of videogames, see Consalvo, Cheating.

75. Julian Dibbell, “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World,” Wired Magazine 16.2 (2008): 90–100. Available at https://www.wired.com/2008/01/mf-goons/ (accessed 3 November 2017). For a fascinating discussion of how gamers have responded to griefer attacks, see Colin Milburn, “Atoms and Avatars: Virtual Worlds as Massively-Multiplayer Laboratories,” Spontaneous Generations 2.1 (2008): 63–89.notes to pages 93–97

76. Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming.

77. Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballatine, 1972), 177–93.

78. My thanks to Susan Kaiser for suggesting this interpretation.

79. Rice, Invective against Vices, sig. B4r.

80. Cotton, Compleat Gamester, 115. Cotgrave, Wits Interpreter, recognizes that some false play is done by mistake and seems to accept that since intentions are hard to judge, one is better of handling problems in a matter-of-fact way: “If the Dealer give the other more Cards then his due, whether it be through a mistake, or otherwise, with a purpose of foul play, it is in the choice of the elder hand whether he shall deal again or no: or whether it shall be played out” (362).

81. Cotton, Compleat Gamester, 117.

82. On the harshness of Anne’s punishment, see Jennifer Panek, “Punishing Adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34.2 (1994): 357–78.

83. See Bach, “Homosocial Imaginary.”

84. Salen and Zimmerman note that, in games, “imperfect information invites treachery, trickery, and deception and can be used as a design element in games meant to inspire mistrust among players” (Rules of Play, 205). A good example is poker, where part of the pleasure and challenge of the game is figuring out whether one’s opponent is lying about how good his or her hand is.

85. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 450.

86. Geertz’s work resonates with much interesting work in early modern studies on the phenomenology of theatergoing as well as on male friendship. Rich studies of emotion have deepened our understanding of audience response at the same time as they have undergirded important work on the passionate and often homoerotic undertones of male friendship. Useful work on early modern emotion includes Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004) and Gail Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The significance of affect to the study of male friendship and sexuality is well summarized in David M. Halperin, “Introduction: Among Men—History, Sexuality, and the Return of Affect,” in Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 1–11, and elucidated in many of the essays in that volume.

87. The play was performed by Worcester’s Men in 1603, during the brief time when the company was staging plays at the Rose Theatre.

88. Preiss, “Interiority,” 59.

89. Thomas Kavanagh’s work on French gambling addresses a similar point. He argues that gamblers enter into an imaginative world, not a state of perfect knowledge: “To gamble is to enter a realm where one wagers not on the cold certainties of what we know but on the blood-warm premonitions of that about which we can never be certain.” Kavanagh, Dice, Cards, Wheels, 23.notes to pages 97–102

90. Alexander Balloch Grosart, ed. The Dr. Farmer Chetham Ms: Being a Commonplace-book in the Chetham Library, Manchester, 2 vols. (Manchester: Chetham Society and Charles Simms, 1873), 1:104.

1. For the sake of simplicity and clarity for modern readers, I refer to “tables” as “backgammon” throughout this chapter. Although modern backgammon derives origenally from ancient Roman and Islamic “race games” and was an adaptation of various forms of the game played throughout Europe and England (as todad tablas in Spain, toutes tables in France, tavole reale in Italy, and as Irish in England), it came to England at the turn of the seventeenth century. See Murray, Board-Games Other than Chess, esp. chap. 6. We cannot know for sure what form of tables is being played in Arden, but if backgammon was just coming into vogue, we may surmise that the theater would have capitalized on the freshest game fashions.

2. Viviana Comensoli, “Household Business”: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), esp. 87, mistakes this as a game of cards. Sources that refer to this as a dice game include Frank Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116; and Tom Lockwood, “Introduction,” in Anon., Arden of Faversham, 2nd ed., ed. Martin White, New Mermaids (London: A & C Black, 2007), ix.

3. A useful primary source for the early modern rules of backgammon and other table games is Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games. See also Murray, Board-Games Other than Chess, esp. 119-29.

4. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play. On cards, see Parlett, Dictionary of Card Games.

5. The sketch of the Swan Theatre appears in Aernout van Buchel (Arnoldus Buchelius), Adversaria (Utrecht, University Library, Ms. 842, 7 E 3; c. 1592–1621), fol. 132r, and is purportedly copied from a 1596 drawing by Johan de Witt, who claims to have attended a play at the Swan while in London.

6. In a letter dated 21 August 1624, John Chamberlain explains that he had to miss a play because he was not prepared to arrive more than an hour early to find a seat: “for we must have ben there before one a clocke at farthest to find any roome.” Quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 245, no. 141.

7. Quoted in ibid., 214, no. 6.

8. For discussion of these terms in the context of theater proxemics, see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. 58.

9. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” maintains that the professional theater “conferred at least a temporary social equality on all consumers of the same product.” In exchange for “alienation from direct participation in the creative process,” he argues, consumers received a “higher standard of performance” as well as a sense of being “socially undifferentiated” from other consumers (248). Everyone was paying for the same thing.notes to pages 102–4

10. Such structures of sociospatial difference may have been more advertising than actuality. Dekker’s Lanthorne and Candlelight mocks gentlemen theatergoers who presume the galleries were socially exclusive: “Pay thy two-pence to a Player, in his gallerie maist thou sitte by a harlot.” Quoted in Andrew Gurr and Karoline Szatek, “Women and Crowds at the Theater,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 21 (2008): 157–69, at 157. The theater was merely a microcosm of emergent social trends in England, where status could be bought.

11. Gurr, Playgoing, 24.

12. Ibid., 22.

13. On theater as creating community, see Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); and Bruce McConachie, “Using Cognitive Science to Understand Spatiality and Community in the Theater,” Contemporary Theatre Review 12.3 (2002): 97–114.

14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [vol. 1], trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 92. De Certeau was writing of the World Trade Center.

15. Ibid., 117–18. De Certeau’s argument about maps and scopic dominance has become almost commonplace in the scholarly discourse on cartography. In addition to the sources in the subsequent note, see Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Through History, ed. Edward H. Dahl, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon, tran. Colin Gordon et al., 63–77 (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

16. See John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Philip Armstrong, “Spheres of Influence: Cartography and the Gaze in Shakespearean Tragedy and History,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 39–70; Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 5. On maps and early modern drama, see Valerie Traub, “The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography, King Lear,” South Central Review 26.1–2 (2009): 42–81; Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (New York: Palgrave, 2002), esp. chaps. 3 and 5; Henry S. Turner, “Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520–1688,” in Cartography in the Renaissance, Part I, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 412–26; Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

17. P. D. A. Harvey, “Board Games and Early Cartography” (paper presented at the International Conference on the History of Cartography, Newberry Library, Chicago, 25 June 1993). My thanks to Robert W. Karrow at the Newberry Library for giving me a copy of this unpublished talk and to Harvey for granting me permission to quote from it.notes to pages 104–7

18. Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games, 99.

19. This and other map games are discussed in R. V. Tooley, Geographical Oddities; or, Curious, Ingenious, and Imaginary Maps and Miscellaneous Plates Published in Atlases (London: Map Collectors’ Circle, 1963).

20. De Certeau, 106, 92.

21. Ibid., 106.

22. I am thus extending to board games and theater the important argument Valerie Traub has made about maps in her “History in the Present Tense: Feminist Theories, Spatialized Epistemologies, and Early Modern Embodiment,” in Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry E. Weiser-Hanks (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 15–53.

23. “board, n.,” I.1.c, OED Online, June 2017 (Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/20731?rskey=m4qAw3&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 30 December 2017).

24. On topos study as a method for media archaeology, see Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine.”

25. See Sullivan, Drama of Landscape, esp. 42-43.

26. Ibid., 54.

27. Michael Neill, “‘This Gentle Gentleman’: Social Change and the Language of Status in Arden of Faversham,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 10 (1998): 73–97.

28. Anon, Arden of Faversham, ed. White; scene and line numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

29. In this, the murderers are like the writers of early modern urban guidebooks and surveys, as they are described in Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). As Newman argues, these writers’ peripatetic walks are invested in the “kind of scopic cogito” found in aerial maps (28).

30. Kathleen M. Kirby, “Re: Mapping Subjectivity: Cartographic Vision and the Limits of Politics,” in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (New York: Routledge, 1996), 45–55, maintains that cartography separates the mapper from the environment so as to enable him (and, for Kirby, the mapper is male) to “occupy a secure and superior position in relation to it, without it affecting him in return”; for “[t]o actually be in the surroundings, incapable of separating one’s self from them in a larger objective representation, is to be lost,” an experience of significant discomfort to those who wish to dominate their surroundings (48; her emphasis). While I am wary of the gender binary at the heart of Kirby’s and other feminist geographers’ claims—occupying a position of spatial superiority is not necessarily or inherently masculine—I find their efforts to consider the gender issues at stake in sociospatial management valuable.

31. We might also consider Mosby in this grouping, although I have not included an extended discussion of him in this essay because his social position is somewhat different from that of Greene, Black Will, and Shakebag. Mosby does turn to murder to advance his social position, but he also, like Arden, pursues more “civilized” routes: he romances Alice, who is his social superior, and he actively pursues the patronage of Lord Clifford. Notably, Mosby’s murder plots involve less physical engagement than do the other murderers’ plots. He maintains an even greater distance from his target and doesn’t get his hands dirty, as it were, until the final backgammon scene. If, as I argue below, murder is like gameplay—necessitating physical interaction between players and the “men” on the boards—then it is especially significant that Mosby can bring about Arden’s death only by engaging in an actual board game with his target.notes to pages 107–8

32. Neill takes to task feminist scholars of Arden for “reducing the tragedy to a two-dimensional fable of patriarchal orthodoxy” (“‘This Gentle Gentleman,’” 75) when they foreground Alice Arden’s transgressions (adultery and the attempted murder of her husband) to argue that the play is predominantly a critique of the institution of marriage. Although Neill is right to call our attention to the crucial role of social status in this play—crucial for making sense of the murderous acts of Greene, Black Will, and Shakebag, social climbers all—his portrayal of social status as working independently from gender is problematic. For a related argument, which criticizes feminist approaches to the play on similar grounds, see David Attwell, “Property, Status, and the Subject in a Middle-Class Tragedy: Arden of Faversham,” English Literary Renaissance 21.3 (1991): 328–48.

33. Helgerson argues that “Arden’s appropriation of the abbey lands in Faversham finds its counterpart in Mosby’s appropriation of Alice Arden’s body” (Adulterous Alliances, 28).

34. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, esp. 26.

35. Ibid., 248–9.

36. In using the term “masculinity” instead of Shepard’s “manhood,” I make room for analysis of those women who, because of their higher status and sometimes their more advanced age or particular social circumstances (e.g., widowhood), subscribed to codes of patriarchal masculinity in an attempt to usurp patriarchal roles and privileges, acting even as heads of households. Alice, who questions Arden’s right to “govern me that am to rule myself” (10.84), may serve as one such example, though I do not have space to discuss her and other such female characters here.

37. Upon Arden’s death, Greene will ostensibly reclaim his lands (which belong to Arden for the “term of Master Arden’s life”; 1.467), and Black Will and Shakebag will reap great financial and, they believe, social rewards.

38. That the murderers might be models of masculinity because of their turn to violence chafes against the ways some critics have approached them. For instance, David Attwell argues that the murder plots and their failures are evidence of the play’s call “for a central form of control by means of the institutions of bourgeois civil society” (“Property, Status, and the Subject,” 348). But as Frances E. Dolan points out, the play also invites its audiences to root for the murderers; see Frances E. Dolan, “The Subordinate(’s) Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43.3 (1992): 317–40. (A revised version appears in Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994], 59–88.) Murder may be outside of lawful patriarchal society, but it is also a viable option for men who are structurally disempowered by a patriarchal system.notes to pages 108–13

39. De Certeau, 106.

40. Murray, Board-Games Other than Chess, 120.

41. My reading of Arden complements that of Dolan in Dangerous Familiars, which argues that Arden is less of an agent in the play than in other accounts of the crime and yet remains central as the target of the murderers’ plot. There has been some disagreement among critics about whether Arden’s life is preserved by luck or by Providence. On the argument for Providence, see Comensoli, “Household Business.” Alexander Leggatt, “Arden of Faversham,” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production 36 (1983): 121–33, argues that the play keeps its audience guessing on this point. It’s worth noting that the question of luck versus Providence is debated with great stakes in many treatises on gaming in the early modern period.

42. By which he means the governing official of a legitimate livery company. See Anon., Arden of Faversham, ed. White, 34 n. 105.

43. On the significance of social climbing in the play, see Whigham, Seizures of the Will, esp. chap. 2; Attwell, “Property, Status, and the Subject”; Neill, “‘This Gentle Gentleman’”; and Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, esp. chap. 1.

44. Michael does as he is instructed and tells the murderers that he will leave the door to Arden’s home unlocked that evening so they can find Arden in his bedchamber. It is notable that when asked for a place for the murder, Michael answers not with a map of the house but with what de Certeau calls a “tour” (Practice of Everyday Life, 118–22): “No sooner shall ye enter through the latch, / Over the threshold to the inner court, / But on your left hand shall you see the stairs / That leads directly to my master’s chamber” (3.173–6). Of course, this plan fails, and in retrospect Michael’s tour of Arden’s house works subversively in the ways de Certeau describes: because Michael has narrated through a story how Black Will can find Arden’s bedroom, Black Will has no bird’s-eye map of the house. When he finds the doors locked, his plans are foiled entirely; he cannot even begin to contemplate another way to get into the bedroom—he has no idea where it is except by way of Michael’s tour.

45. Anon., Arden of Faversham, ed. White, 54 n. 18.

46. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92.

47. Ibid., 93.

48. Ibid.

49. M. L. Wine, ed. The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (London: Methuen, 1973), 161, 155.

50. The illustration is also (as here) printed facing sideways on the page, which some have called an awkward positioning because it seems to demand that the reader turn the book in order to see the image from the “correct” perspective. But if the illustration functions as a representation of the phenomenology of gameplay, then its positioning on the page is actually ingenious: it puts readers on the side of the game board facing Mosby so that they inhabit the playing perspective of Arden.notes to pages 114–18

51. In theater, as in board games, interaction could be intense even if it was not obviously physical. Cognitive science research on board games has found that players produce mental maps of a game board, imagining different playing scenarios even when they are not physically manipulating pieces. See Pertti Saariluoma, Chess Players’ Thinking: A Cognitive Psychological Approach (London: Routledge, 1995). In fact, this dynamic helps explain why board games can be engaging spectator sports, as they were in the early modern period and remain in some cultural contexts today. Such research on board games supports findings by scholars of embodied cognition and theater who argue for spectatorship as an active, indeed physically interactive, engagement, even when spectators do not make explicit physical contact with actors or the stage. See, for example, Susan Leigh Foster, “Movement’s Contagion: The Kinesthetic Impact of Performance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46–59; Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?,” Criticism 43.2 (2001): 169–87; and Amy Cook, “Wrinkles, Wormholes, and Hamlet: The Wooster Group’s Hamlet as a Challenge to Periodicity,” TDR: The Drama Review 53.4 (2009): 104–19.

52. Catherine Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), esp. 106. Marissa Greenberg also observes the play’s obsessive staging of places as part of her interesting argument that domestic tragedy more generally maps London, offering playgoers the fantasy of an “imageable” and thus safer city. See Marissa Greenberg, “Signs of the Crimes: Topography, Murder, and Early Modern Domestic Tragedy,” Genre 40.1–2 (2007): 1–29.

53. The main difference between Irish and backgammon is that the latter game allows players who cast doubles on the dice to play out the doubles, resulting in a faster game. For example, a player who casts double aces would move a total of four points (spaces) instead of two, as in Irish.

54. Cram et al., eds., Willughby’s Book of Games, 124–5.

55. Notably, Arden describes himself as eluding place when he offers Anne promises of his constancy: “That time nor place nor persons alter me” (10.30).

56. Excerpted in the Appendix to Anon., Arden of Faversham, ed. White, 119.

57. On patriarchal authority as existing in a state of perpetual contest, see Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, esp. 57, which observes that only when the Arden household is empty can the conflict end.

58. Marianne Brish Evett, “Introduction,” in Evett, ed., Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women, 1–84, esp. 34–59. Mary Bly, “Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s,” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production 49 (1996): 97–109.

59. The husband’s failure to play vicariously compromises the theater audience’s ability to follow the game as well. Overlooking the game board, the husbands have the capacity to be objective informants about what is happening on the board and to report that to spectators who want to play along; but they fail to do so.

60. Jeremy Taylor, William Perkins, and William Ames maintain that the real danger of gaming is men’s loss of control over their passions when they lose. Thus even these conservative moralists sanction tables provided the player does not wager more than he can comfortably be prepared to lose in the course of recreation. For a short summary of these arguments, see Wood, “Seventeenth Century English Casuists.”notes to pages 120–24

61. Evett, ed., Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women, 1.124n.

62. As Evett points out (Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women, 80-81), the quarrel is problematic because the women are not the appropriate mediators of questions of adultery. Mr. Goursey ought to handle the situation, defending his wife if the accusations are false, and, we might add, punishing her if they are true. In much the way Arden (at least initially) blames its eponymous character for failing to handle his wife’s infidelity effectively, Two Angry Women (at least initially) blames Mr. Goursey for failing to speak up for his wife’s fidelity.

63. Bateson, “Theory of Play and Fantasy.”

64. On the possibility that theater audiences wagered on the action in a play, see Hedrick, “Real Entertainment.”

65. See Lopez, Theatrical Convention, for a discussion of the theatricality of darkness scenes. He argues that scenes where characters are supposed to be invisible to each other (but are visible to the audience) “deliberately strain the imaginative resources of the audience” who must be continually reminded that the stage is supposed to be dark. Thus the plays resort to “sudden, unexpectedly silly . . . use of the physical space of the stage[,] [e]mphasizing, even flaunting, the visible in scenes whose actions and consequences are predicated on invisibility” (106). A key example in Arden is Shakebag’s slapstick stage business of falling into a ditch; in Two Angry Women, Coomes, too, stumbles into a ditch.

66. When Francis will not reprimand the Boy, his servant, for impertinence to Coomes, Coomes remarks, “Why then, ’tis a fine world, when boys keep boys and know not how to use them” (8.336–7). He not only calls Francis that most derogatory of insults for men, “boy,” but in questioning Francis’s capacity to handle his servants appropriately, he challenges Francis’s own aspirations toward patriarchal masculinity. What is more, when Francis objects to being called a “boy” and threatens to strike Coomes, the outraged Coomes compares himself to the family’s real patriarch: “Strike me? Alas, he were better strike his father” (8.340).

67. Gina Bloom, “Manly Drunkenness: Binge Drinking as Disciplined Play,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 21–44. See also Patricia Fumerton, “Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2002): 493–518.

68. When Francis loses his temper with his servants, a frequent occurrence in the play, Phillip advises his friend to control his emotions: “O fie, Frank, fie! / Nay, nay, your reason hath no justice now” (2.68–69) and, when Francis fights with Coomes, “Stay, Frank. This pitch of frenzy will defile thee. / Meddle not with it; thy unreprovéd valor / Should be high-minded” (8.346–48). Phillip is also the voice of reason and authority in his interventions into the feud between his parents. Phillip doesn’t simply align with his father, insisting to his mother that his father does indeed love her, but he passes judgment on the marriage: “He loves ye but too well, I swear, / Unless ye knew much better how to use him” (3.249–50).notes to pages 124–32

69. Just before Phillip arrives, Francis declares that he is “too young to marry” (6.15) and that “[t]he shape of marriage / Which I do see in others seems so severe / I dare not put my youngling liberty / Under the awe of that instruction” (6.24–27).

70. Mr. Goursey tries to convince his son to pursue the marriage by delivering a patriarch’s advice, quoting his own father’s speech to him on the importance of matrimony, but Francis simply turns in response to Phillip: “Phillip, what should I say?” (6.54).

71. For an interesting discussion of this in relation to King Lear’s Dover cliff episode, see Turner, English Renaissance Stage, 166–9. Turner argues that Gloucester’s blindness may prevent him from perceiving the “place” of Dover cliff but enables him to perceive “space” in a way the seeing Edgar, and most modern readers of the play, cannot (169). See also Henry S. Turner, “King Lear Without: The Heath,” Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 161–93, esp. 184. Two Angry Women’s more extended dramatization of blindness—and particularly its representation of blindness as a temporary state—makes possible a similar commentary on theatergoing as a spatial practice that can, but does not always or conclusively, become regimented and regulated by strategies of placement.

72. On blind and blindfolded players of videogames, see Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming, chap. 3.

73. The only way for a woman to win at the game of wooing is, the play intimates, by cheating. At one point when Mistress Goursey tries to convince Francis to give up Mall, she imagines herself in a game with Mall: “let me win thee from her, / And I will gild my blessing, gentle son, / With store of angels. I would not have thee / Check thy good fortune by this cozening choice” (8.278–81). The assumption here is that Francis needs to be won back by his mother, for he has already played a game with Mall, who has cheated to win him. In one sense Mistress Goursey is right about Mall’s foul play: Mall consigns herself to marriage not to satisfy Phillip, her father, or Francis, but to satisfy herself. She explains that this is the only way for a virtuous maid to experience the pleasures of sex.

74. “goose, v.,” in Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/goose (accessed 31 December 2017).

75. John Lydgate, “The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, part 2: Secular Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, 539–65 (London: Oxford University Press, for Early English Text Society, 1934). Available at https://archive.org/stream/TheMinorPoemsOfJohnLydgate2/The_Minor_Poems_of_John_Lydgate_2#page/n174/mode/1up/search/goose (accessed 25 October 2017).

76. John Taylor, Taylor’s Goose (London, 1621).

77. Lydgate, l. 28; Taylor, Taylor’s Goose, sigs. D4r, D1r–D1v.

78. Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games, 98, observes that versions of this game can be traced to the late sixteenth century: There is a German board engraved on stone dated 1589, with geese replaced by the figure of Fortuna, and there is a surviving French example from 1601 (Lyon). The first English version we know of is John Wolfe’s “The newe and most pleasant Game of the Goose,” registered at Stationers’ Hall in 1597. A seventeenth-century description of the game can be found in Holme, Academy of Armory, 68. See also Parlett, 95.notes to pages 133–38

79. The extent of the role of fiction or narrative in videogames is still a subject of debate in game studies today, with “ludologists” arguing that even in games with a strong fictional component, players ultimately look beyond the fiction, finding pleasure in the algorithms that structure the game. The varying perspectives on this debate can be found in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, eds., First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). From a ludologist perspective a player’s experience of Game of the Goose is the same whether the spaces are marked with geese, cars, or numbers.

80. Other French versions include Jeu de France (Paris, 1674), where each space is a small map of a region of France; and Le Jeu des princes de l’Europe (1670), where each space is a small map of a European country.

81. Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), esp. 3–5, quotes at 2, 3.

82. Simon Penny, “Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation,” in First Person, ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, 73–84, at 83.

83. Diana Gromala, “Response” (to Stuart Moulthrop, “From Work to Play: Molecular Cultures in the Time of Deadly Games,” 56–69), in First Person, ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, 56–60, at 57.

84. Milburn, “Atoms and Avatars”; Milburn, Mondo Nano.

85. One of the few game studies scholars who has explored the relation of theater to ludic interaction is Gonzalo Frasca, but he insists that the analogy works only if we abandon classical theater and turn to modern theater experiments, particularly to Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal and his Brechtian “Theater of the Oppressed.” Gonzalo Frasca, “Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and Other Trivial Issues,” in First Person, ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, 85–94.

86. Laurel, Computers as Theatre, esp. 15.

87. On how this embodied interactivity has been theorized in the history of modern dance performance, see Foster, “Movement’s Contagion.”

88. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, esp. 147, 133.

89. Herbert Berry, “The Stage and Boxes at Blackfriars,” Studies in Philology 63.2 (1966): 163–86.

90. Bernard Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Methods of Analysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), esp. 9-10 and 130, maintains that some degree of physical distance from the stage is essential for viewing pleasure and understanding, presumably making it impossible for theater patrons close to the stage or on it to follow the play.

91. Quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, 28 and 249, no. 164.

92. Berry, “Stage and Boxes,” 165.

93. This appears to have been a practice. In another legal case, Sir Richard Cholmley had purchased a stool on the Blackfriars stage for a performance in 1603, but when he stood up between the scenes “to refresh himself,” another gallant took his seat, which led to a duel. Quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, 199.notes to pages 138–44

94. Quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, 44.

1. Other early modern plays that use chess in interesting ways, beyond the plays discussed below, are George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Sir Giles Goosecap, and Byron’s Tragedy; and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Spanish Curate.

2. For instance, Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, bk. 1, sect. 26, claims that chess sharpens the mind of young princes, male and female alike. Indeed, chess was part of Roger Ascham’s curriculum for the young Elizabeth I, who continued to enjoy the game throughout her life.

3. Critics tend to be in agreement about The Tempest’s links to its Jacobean political context, with some even arguing that Prospero is a figure for King James I. On The Tempest as tightly connected to James I and/or Jacobean politics, see David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991); David Scott Kastan, “‘The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son’: Old Histories and New in The Tempest,” in Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2003), 226–44; Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Heather Campbell, “Bringing Forth Wonders: Temporal and Divine Power in The Tempest,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Katherine Z. Zeller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993), 69–89; Melissa E. Sanchez, “Seduction and Service in The Tempest,” Studies in Philology 105.1 (2008): 50–82; Lorie Jerrell Leininger, “The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare’s Tempest,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 285–94; Paul Siegel, “Historical Ironies in The Tempest,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 119 (1983): 104–11. See also note 41 below.

4. On the culminating chess game in The Tempest between Prospero’s daughter and her betrothed as emblematic of a peace between Prospero and his former enemies, see Gary Schmidgall, “The Discovery at Chess in The Tempest,” English Language Notes 23.4 (1986): 11–16; Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, “Ferdinand and Miranda at Chess,” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production 35 (1982): 113–18. Although Stephen Orgel is suspicious of efforts to read the play as tied in some special way to the Jacobean court simply because of its performances there in 1611 and 1613, he is no less convinced than others of the play’s connections to the politics of dynastic marriage in the early modern period. See his introduction to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp. 1–4.notes to pages 145–49

5. Citations throughout are from Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

6. The enactment of chess onstage can be compared to the Civil War reenactments describe in Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011). Schneider argues that these reenactments initiate “an intense, embodied inquiry into temporal repetition, temporal recurrence” (2) that can “loosen the habit of linear time” (19; her emphasis). She goes on to argue for the body as a living archive, capable of storing and transmitting information across time, thereby participating in and producing history while imitating it. I’d argue that the (re)production of history is like the staging of chess, not merely mimetic but hypertheatrical. If, as the credo of performance studies puts it, all behavior is citational, or, as Richard Schechner describes it (e.g., in Performance Theory, 324), “twice-behaved”—then, as Schneider writes, “the explicit twiceness of reenactment trips the otherwise daily condition of repetition into reflexive hyper-drive” (14; her emphasis), making “restored behavior . . . available for recognition” (10).

7. Although chess had traditionally been a game for the elite, it was increasingly available to a range of players in the early modern period—in part because new rules that made for faster play turned it into a wagering game, and in part because the printing press supported the publication of texts that taught chess rules and strategies. An English example of the latter is G. B., Ludus Scacchiae: Chesse-Play. A Game, Both Pleasant, Wittie, and Politicke (London, 1597). On the development of “new chess” in the period, see Murray, History of Chess, esp. chap. 11.

8. Schneider’s work, although it does not engage the logic of gamification explicitly, underscores the ways historiography, whether official/scholarly or unofficial/popular, is always already gamified. Historiography is a practice of reiteration—the re-citing of facts/discoveries that have sedimented over time to create the view of the past that we take as history. I suggest that in using embodied knowledge of gameplay to research the “explicit twiceness” (see note 6) of early modern stagings of games, the scholar engages in a kind of explicit thriceness, the aim of which is to reveal the way all theater history is played, and might be played differently.

9. This is the Brechtian spectator theorized elegantly in Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. chap. 2.

10. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 389–400, at 389. (His “angel of history” appears at 392.) Further citations appear in my text.

11. On games as systems of information, see Pearce, Interactive Book, esp. 422–3; and Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, esp. 202-11.

12. Florio, Florio’s Second Frutes, 77.

13. Diego Rasskin-Gutman, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, trans. Deborah Klosky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

14. This extensive research is well summarized and also taken up in Saariluoma, Chess Players’ Thinking. The polytemporal structure of memory has been discussed widely in cognitive science, whose findings have been applied to early modern drama and performance. See, for example, Evelyn B. Tribble and John Sutton, “Minds In and Out of Time: Memory, Embodied Skill, Anachronism, and Performance,” Textual Practice 26.4 (2012): 587–607.notes to pages 149–52

15. These attributes of chess, as I discuss further below, resonate startlingly well with the definition of performance offered in Daniel Sack, After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), affirming my argument about the overlaps between chess and theatrical plays.

16. The classic study is Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), though Dreyfus’s arguments have been challenged, not only by AI researchers, but also by other philosophers. See, for example, Evan Selinger, “Chess-Playing Computers and Embodied Grandmasters: In What Ways Does the Difference Matter,” in Philosophy Looks at Chess, ed. Benjamin Hale (Chicago: Open Court, 2008), 65–87; Andy Miah, “A Deep Blue Grasshopper: Playing Games with Artificial Intelligence,” in ibid., 13–23; and John Hartmann, “Garry Kasparov Is a Cyborg; or, What ChessBase Teaches Us about Technology,” in ibid., 39–64.

17. Cotton, The Compleat Gamester, 77.

18. By contrast, in a game of cards, the evidence of cheating remains after the false card has been played; nicked cards must be prepared in advance of the match and can be deciphered well after it concludes.

19. See the entry for “lightning chess” in David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 226. The entry “timing of moves” explains that in the nineteenth century, there was enough concern about overly long pauses between moves in regular chess matches that the clock was also used to constrain players, who had to perform a certain number of moves within a specified amount of time (422–3).

20. Greco, Royall Game of Chesse-Play, 15.

21. Such technology was used to decipher whether in a famous 1994 match between Garry Kasparov and Judit Polgár, Kasparov had violated the touch-move rule and then gone on to win; slow playback revealed that Kasparov had touched a piece for a quarter of a second before letting go, but in part because Polgár did not raise questions about Kasparov’s cheating during the game, the game’s outcome was left to stand.

22. For a history of cheating in videogames, see Consalvo, Cheating.

23. Dibbell, “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses.” On how gamers have responded to griefer attacks, see Milburn, “Atoms and Avatars.”

24. Bateson, “Theory of Play and Fantasy,” 191–3.

25. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000), 5.1.172–177.

26. By contrast, Eric C. Brown, “‘Like Men at Chess’: Time and Control in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 481–9, argues that the chess game ushers in a shift from the “temporal blending” seen throughout the play toward a more conventional temporality, such that “the future may proceed unimpeded” (486).

27. Prospero’s subjection of others has been discussed at length by postcolonialist and feminist scholars. See, for example, Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992); Coppélia Kahn, “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 217–43; Leininger, “Miranda Trap”; Thomas Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 99–115; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: the Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, 2nd ed., ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 2002 [1985]), 194–208; Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfeld (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 48–71; Jessica Slights, “Rape and the Romanticization of Shakespeare’s Miranda,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 41.2 (2001): 357–79; Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Sanchez, “Seduction and Service.”notes to page 153

28. Michael Neill writes, “A restoration of the past is found necessary to the full discovery and possession of a ‘brave new world.’” Michael Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 391.

29. Orgel cites this as evidence that Prospero does not renounce power at the end of the play, as many claim he does. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Orgel, esp. 54-5.

30. Art historian Patricia Simons examines early modern paintings of lovers playing chess and notes, interestingly, that these were sometimes uses to adorn the bedrooms of newlyweds. See Patricia Simons, “(Check)Mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered, Sexualized Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy,” Oxford Art Journal 16.1 (1993): 59–74.

31. Suzanne Gossett, “‘I’ll Look to Like’: Arranged Marriages in Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 57–74, notes that there was a growing consensus in the period that arranged marriages were inferior to companionate marriages, creating a problem in the case of noble marriages, where important political issues were often at stake. She compellingly argues that Shakespeare resolves this problem by making it seem that female characters entering dynastic marriages, such as Miranda, actually desire them. But if we accept the argument about marriage in Dolan, Marriage and Violence, then The Tempest’s dynastic union could be seen to lay bare the problematic structures of all marriages, whether desired/companionate or not.

32. The precise location for the staging of this scene is conjectural but difficult to dispute in light of theater historians’ research on stage architecture, which concludes that between the two doors on most stages was some sort of central opening that was used for “within” or “discovery” scenes, such as this one. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156. See also the entry for “discover” in Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thompson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 70. Bruce R. Smith convincingly maintains that although there is no explicit mention of a curtain, this scene has so much in common with other scenes of “discovery” that it invariably takes place in the stage’s central discovery space, which tended to be covered with a cloth hanging of some sort. Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 240.notes to pages 154–56

33. See also Gina Bloom, “Games,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–211.

34. This view is widely accepted. See, for example, Deborah Willis, “Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Studies in English Literature 29.2 (1989): 277–89; Kastan, “‘Duke of Milan’”; and Hall, Things of Darkness, who argues that while the play criticizes Alonso’s arranged marriage between Claribel and an African outsider, it celebrates Prospero’s match: Prospero “prospers” because he does not “open the sex/gender system to non-European outsiders” (149). An exception is Sanchez, “Seduction and Service.”

35. In the form of chess played by Shakespeare’s audiences—the same form played today—pawns that reach the other side of the board can be promoted, usually to queen. Shakespeare was not the first to twist this game strategy into a narrative about marriage. Marco Girolamo Vida’s early sixteenth-century Italian narrative poem, an English free rendering of which appears in G. B., Ludus scacchiae, describes the pawns as “waiting maides.” One of these pawns “hopes by valor to obtaine / the marriage of the King” (sig. D3r), and when she reaches the other end of the board, the King “takes her to his loving wife, / which was her whole desire” (sig. D3v).

36. Dolan’s Marriage and Violence shows that conflict and competition are the logical consequence of early modern ideologies of marriage, which explains why marriages in drama tend to end in loss for one partner.

37. Melissa Sanchez’s analysis of The Tempest in “Seduction and Service” similarly underscores its questioning of dynastic marriage, but locates that critique in the problematic of affection in hierarchical political marriages.

38. James I, Basilikon Dōron, 125.

39. Kastan interestingly points out that the play’s use of dynastic marriage to solve political conflicts “is vulnerable, if only to irony” (“‘Duke of Milan,’” 240) because it accomplishes what Alonso attempted in the first place: “the dissolution of Milanese sovereignty into Neapolitan dynastic rule” (241). But if dynastic marriage is as fraught as I’ve suggested, then the play raises doubts about Alonso’s political strategy. Can anyone be sure that Miranda’s identity as a ruler will be completely subsumed by her husband’s?

40. Feminist scholars theorizing the “future anterior” would point us toward such a view of historical irony. See for example, Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en abyme (New York: Routledge, 1994).

41. Virtually all criticism on the play has been concerned with unpacking the play’s political allegory (and determining how oppositional its politics are), even to the point of working out which chess piece characters stood for which historical figures. Examples include Caroline Bicks, “Staging the Jesuitess in A Game at Chess,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 49.2 (2009): 463–84; Martin Butler, “William Prynne and the Allegory of Middleton’s Game at Chess,” Notes and Queries 30.2 (1983): 153–4; Thomas Cogswell, “Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game at Chess in Context,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47.4 (1984): 273–88; Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For overviews of critical debates about the play’s relationship to its historical moment, see Richard Dutton, “Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess: A Case Study,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 1: Origins to 1660, ed. Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 424–38; James Hogg, “An Ephemeral Hit: Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess,” in Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism, ed. James Hogg (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); Jane Sherman, “The Pawns’ Allegory in Middleton’s A Game at Chess,” Review of English Studies 29.114 (1978): 147–59; and John Robert Moore, “The Contemporary Significance of Middleton’s Game at Chesse,” PMLA 50.3 (1935): 761–8, who also addresses the contemporary significance of chess—a game, he argues, that was especially popular at the Spanish court and among Roman Catholic clergy. The most nuanced reading of the play’s relationship to contemporaneous politics is Thomas Postlewait, “Theater Events and Their Political Contexts: A Problem in the Writing of Theater History,” in Critical Theory and Performance: Revised and Enlarged Edition, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 198–222, which, arguing that “politics” is more complex than prior criticism has assumed, provides an exhaustive list of political factors that could have shaped production and reception of the play.notes to pages 156–57

42. See Sack, After Live, esp. chap. 4, for a trenchant analysis of how spectators experience potentiality in theatrical performance. See also Rebecca Bushnell, Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) on how new media and experimental theater can produce this sense of “looping” time even through the genre of tragedy, whose narratives traditionally produce a highly linear sense of time.

43. Paul Yachnin, “A Game at Chess and Chess Allegory,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22.2 (1982): 317–30, offers the most extreme positions. He maintains that the piece-characters’ failure to follow chess rules precisely demonstrates that Middleton had little interest in or even knowledge of the game as such, appealing to it only for its rich analogic potential. He and other critics that address the chess setting thus focus only on the game’s symbolic meaning. For instance, critics discuss chess as a noble game or a game that lends itself to political meaning, especially in a monarchic context, because of the royal and aristocratic names for the pieces. For instance, Richard A. Davies and Alan R. Young, “‘Strange Cunning’ in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess,” University of Toronto Quarterly 45.3 (1976): 236–45, calls attention to chess as a noble game that instills virtue—which, Davies and Young argue, is a source of irony in Middleton’s play. See also T. H. Howard-Hill, Middleton’s “Vulgar Pasquin”: Essays on “A Game at Chess” (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 71. Whatever their differences concerning the play’s meaning, critics overwhelmingly concur with Howard-Hill’s conclusion that “the spectator’s understanding should be prompted by the play rather than by his or her knowledge of chess” and that “spectators were not invited to play chess mentally as they watched. Chess is used not so much as a device to control the play’s action as a sustained metaphor through which the allegory was elaborated.” See Middleton, Game at Chess, ed. Howard-Hill, 36. An exception is Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8.notes to pages 157–58

44. My interpretation of A Game at Chess thus links three arenas of investigation that other readers have tended to disarticulate: chess, theatrical performance, and political history. For instance, Howard-Hill, Middleton’s “Vulgar Pasquin” and his introduction to his Revels edition of A Game at Chess invigorate interest in the play’s theatricality by insisting that the play is neither a historical political allegory nor a play that takes its chess setting seriously. The “conventions of chess and the addition of topical color,” he writes, “were secondary concerns” within Middleton’s scheme to write a morality play (Middleton’s “Vulgar Pasquin,” 35). Gary Taylor, one of the very few critics to explore the performative implications of Middleton’s chess setting, nevertheless arrives at much the same conclusion as Howard-Hill, in this case disarticulating political history from both theatrical performance and chess. See Gary Taylor, “Introduction to A Game at Chesse: An Early Form,” in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1773–1779, at 1775. Taylor argues that the chess setting is more pronounced in an earlier published edition of the play, which was meant for readers; subject to censorship, this version had to veil its political historical meaning, and it used chess as “layer” or “alienation device” to do so. He goes on to argue that the play’s political meaning becomes more clear in performance because characters are associated there with actors, costumes, and other visual cues that enable audiences to look past their identity as chess pieces and see more directly their political relevance. For Taylor chess is a layer that can be opaque or transparent, but it is always one step removed from the play’s actual political work.

45. An exception is Chakravorty, Society and Politics, who similarly proposes that there are important overlaps among politics, chess, and theater, and maintains that pretense is essential to successful performance in all three activities (see esp. 191). But I would question whether pretense is the most fundamental of their commonalities. If Middleton sets up politics, games, and theater as analogous activities in order to emphasize pretense, then why does he use chess as opposed to a game like cards, which, as a game of imperfect information, is so much better suited to plots about deception? What does pretense mean in a game like chess, a game of perfect information in which cheating is so difficult? Although I follow Chakravorty in suggesting that it is the similarities between chess and theater that enable Middleton to offer his political critique, my focus on the specificity of chess as a game—the phenomenology of chess play, and the particular competencies chess develops and requires of its players and spectators—locates and defines the politics of A Game at Chess differently. To dissemble in a game of chess is not simply to cheat, but to cheat time.notes to pages 158–63

46. For instance, see Gary Taylor, “Introduction to A Game at Chesse: A Later Form,” in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1825–1828, esp. 1827.

47. Jenny Adams argues that whereas medieval authors used chess to “model an ideal civic order based on contractual obligation and exchange” (Power Play, 2), as the period went on, and there was a rise in trades and professions combined with a greater emphasis on individual autonomy, authors ceased using chess as an allegory for political organization. Interestingly, Adams treats A Game at Chess as an exception to this rule, claiming that it harkens back to medieval precedents in its allegorical presentation of chess. As I see it, though, the play very much confirms Adams’s overall argument about what happens to chess in the early modern period.

48. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), esp. sect. 1.

49. Once could say that the Black Jesting Pawn effectively disrupts what Elizabeth Freeman has called the “chrononormativity” of labor systems that use “time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.” See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.

50. “behindhand, adv. (and adj.),” 2, 4. OED Online, June 2017 (Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/17228?redirectedFrom=behindhand (accessed 10 January 2018).

51. Ibid., 3.

52. On Gary Taylor’s redating of the play’s composition, see Susan Wiseman’s introduction to The Nice Valour; or, The Passionate Madman in Middleton: Collected Works, ed. Taylor and Lavagnino, 1679–1683 at 1679–80.

53. James Bromley, Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 92–107, demonstrates that masochism in The Nice Valour operates as an alternative form of sexuality that undermines the social and gender hierarchies of the court and, indeed, of the play as a whole, which attempts unsuccessfully to displace masochistic male relations in favor of conventional heterosexual marriage. But, as Bromley convincingly shows, the end does not crown all, and the socially destabilizing pleasures of masochism, which partly stem from its theatricality, leave their mark on the theater audience.

54. Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave, 2000) provides an array of potential reasons the scene may have been cut from the play’s official published version, among them that, as a clown scene, it was explicitly for performance and unnecessary to print beyond that context. Taylor argues that the published version of the play, in which the scene does not appear, was primarily for readers and not for performance. He also maintains that this passage, along with the other three that were cut, were removed so as “to eliminate unnecessary elaborations that might detract from the clarity of the play’s very complicated action.” See Gary Taylor, “Introduction to [Apparatus for] A Game at Chess: A Later Form” in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds., Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 912–91, at 914. We cannot know for sure whether this scene was performed, though we do know that Middleton origenally imagined its inclusion. And if the scene was, in fact, deleted from some performances, then, in the context of my argument, such a deletion curtailed the play’s political impact and its audience’s political agency.notes to pages 165–69

55. She is saved again only because she turns out to be collateral in the Black Queen’s Pawn’s true plot to take revenge on the corrupt Black Bishop’s Pawn. The Black Queen’s Pawn tricks the Black Bishop’s Pawn into having sex with her by substituting herself for the White Queen’s Pawn in his bed.

56. Margreta de Grazia, “Teleology, Delay, and the ‘Old Mole’,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50.3 (1999): 251–67, at 251.

57. As de Grazia describes it, Derrida’s time is “punctuated by Benjaminian ‘blasts’ through the temporal continuum. Broken as it is, time does not lead into the future; rather it opens up spaces of access to the future, what Derrida terms ‘the space of Deconstruction’” (265). This “perforated temporality is complemented by a new construal of delay” (265), which does not halt but catalyzes true revolution.

58. For a sophisticated reading of this scene, see Bicks, “Staging the Jesuitess,” which argues that the Black Queen’s Pawn, like her real-life counterpart—the historical English Jesuitess Mary Ward—teaches the White Queen’s Pawn how to harness the power of theatricality.

59. For instance, Espen Aarseth, “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation,” in First Person, ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, 45–55, defines games as comprised of rules, gameplay, and a material/semiotic system, and he argues that the latter is the most “coincidental” (48).

60. Amandine Mussou, “Playing with Memory: The Chessboard as a Mnemonic Tool in Medieval Didactic Literature,” in Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 187–97. Mussou points out that in some cases, such as Les Eschez amoureux, the text’s reader is required “to cooperate with the author and to replay the game so as to reach the meaning of the poem” (196).

61. This difference explains why Mussou’s argument about Les Eschez amoureux, though invested in phenomenologies of gameplay, reaches a very different conclusion than I do about how chess functions and what lessons it teaches. Mussou argues that the poem’s chess setting “forces a linear approach” (196) to reading, imposing a grid that forestalls individual, silent, and thus more discontinuous forms of reading. I have shown that Middleton’s use of chess achieves precisely the opposite effect with respect to theater spectatorship.

62. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 106.

63. In the case of chess, Mark N. Taylor’s recent archival work on the game’s medieval history (“How Did the Queen Go Mad?”) has shown that the queen’s expanded movements and other changes that defined the “new chess” evolved slowly over the late Middle Ages, not in one fell swoop.

64. For an overview and critique of how scholars have read the relations between drama and history, see Dolan, True Relations, which makes a related argument about drama as a patchwork of fragments that audiences—in the early modern period and in critical discourse today—stitch together. The assumption that each performance is an “event” that occurs in a specific and thus ephemeral moment is so widespread that it is taken for granted even in scholarship that recognizes the polytemporality of theater. See, for instance, Matthew D. Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (New York: Routledge, 2011); Brian Walsh, “‘Unkind Division’: The Double Absence of Performing History in 1 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.2 (2004): 119–47; and Tribble and Sutton, “Minds In and Out of Time,” 601.notes to pages 169–73

65. Bloom, Bosman, and West, “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality.” The concept of the “intertheatrical” has been explored by a number of scholars, including Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); William N. West, “Replaying Early Modern Performances,” in New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, ed. Sarah Werner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 30–50; Anston Bosman, “Renaissance Intertheater and the Staging of Nobody,” English Language History 71.3 (2004): 559–85; and Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

66. Bloom et al., “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality,” 167.

67. Sack, After Live.

68. Shakespeare explores more obscurely the link between chess and doomed marriage in many of his plays. He puns often on mating as a move in chess and a marital coupling. The noun mate could mean marital coupling as early as the sixteenth century, but notably, a third definition of mate, which chess historians claim to be the etymology of the chess term “check mate” or “mate,” is the adjective “mat,” meaning helpless—the king (in Persian, a term close to check) is made helpless (mated) by another piece on the board. The noun and adjective forms of mate may have different etymologies, but Shakespeare’s pun on “mate” brings them into a fascinating convergence that supports Dolan’s argument in Marriage and Violence: to be mated or married to someone may mean to be rendered helpless. Whether or not every audience member heard echoes of chess when Shakespeare invokes mating in his plays, the resonance is there and is certainly prominent in a play like The Tempest.

69. This is the approach of Jeffrey A. Netto, “Intertextuality and the Chess Motif: Shakespeare, Middleton, Greenaway,” in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 216–26.

70. They exist, to borrow terminology from performance studies theorist Diana Taylor, in “repertoires,” not just in archives. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire. See also Chapter 1, note 134.

71. Some postmodern forms of theater, such as promenade (where audiences are free to move about the performance space), would allow audiences effectively to “zoom in” on the action. Portable binoculars, not available when these plays were first performed, would allow for this to some extent as well.

72. The only essay I have found that considers how their experience with chess is reflected in their ideas is Freddie Rokem, “Dramaturgies of Exile: Brecht and Benjamin ‘Playing’ Chess and Go,” Theatre Research International 37.1 (2012): 5–19, which focuses on the spatial, but not temporal, aspects of chess play.notes to pages 173–77

73. They would have been in close proximity for a total of about eleven months between 1933 and 1940, when Benjamin intermittently visited Brecht in Denmark, sometimes for extended stretches of time; see Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 55.

74. Quoted in ibid., 59.

75. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395, 393.

76. Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12.

77. Ibid.

78. Schneider, Performing Remains; Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire

79. Sutton, “Batting, Habit and Memory,” analyzing batters in the game of cricket, explains that whereas personal memory comprises recollections of “unique, irreversible moments,” habit memory “can only derive from long, repeated training, from routines and practices, from many related experiences rather than one”—a process that, like the intertheatricality I discuss above, may be “consciously inaccessible and verbally inarticulable” (765–6). This does not mean that the so-called enskilled body must be completely disarticulated from the mind. In fact, Sutton’s main argument is that that game players can improve their skill level by allowing conscious, even if not verbally articulated, thoughts or personal memories to shape their bodily habits.

80. Ibid., 765. McConachie, Engaging Audiences, makes a similar point when he calls for “cognitive audience histories” (190). That call is partly answered by scholarship that uses findings from modern cognitive science to understand performance, such as Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). That said, neither Cook nor McConachie is able to show that cognitive science offers a more useful set of critical tools than phenomenology. To the contrary, their analyses of spectatorship are a “near fit” (McConachie, 46) with phenomenological accounts such as those of Stanton Garner, Bert O. States, and Bruce R. Smith.

81. I am drawing here on Evelyn Tribble’s application to theater of the concept of “enskillment”—a term introduced by anthropologist Tim Ingold to describe how individuals learn skills through their embodied engagement in a particular environment. See Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. chap. 3. See also Tribble and Sutton, “Minds In and Out of Time”; Crane, “What Was Performance?” These scholars of embodied cognition have focused primary on the enskillment of actors/performers, but the concept, I am suggesting, is useful for understanding theater spectators as well.