Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries 9789048544844

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Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries

Cultures of Play, 1300‒1700 Cultures of Play, 1300‒1700 provides a forum for investigating the full scope of medieval and early modern play, from toys and games to dramatic performances, from etiquette manuals and literary texts to bulls and tractates, from jousting to duels, and from education to early scientific investigation. Inspired by the foundational work of Johan Huizinga as well as later contributions by Roger Caillois, Eugen Fink, and Bernard Suits, this series publishes monographs and essay collections that address the ludic aspects of premodern life. The accent of this series falls on cultural practices that have thus far eluded traditional disciplinary models. Our goal is to make legible modes of thought and action that until recently seemed untraceable, thereby shaping the growing scholarly discourses on playfulness both past and present. Series editors: Bret Rothstein (Chair), Indiana University, Bloomington; Alessandro Arcangeli, Università di Verona; Christina Normore, Northwestern University

Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries

Edited by Robin O’Bryan

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Pieter van der Heyden, Het spel tegen de monniken, c. 1570, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 811 9 e-isbn 978 90 4854 484 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463728119 nur 685 © R. O’Bryan / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

“That you have seen the pride, beheld the sport, And all the games of fortune, played at court …” Ben Jonson, “An Epigram” (c. 1625) “Gaming is an enchanting witchery …” Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester (1674)



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments 15 Introduction 17 A Passion for Games Robin O’Bryan

Part I  Chess and Luxury Playing Cards 1. “Mad Chess” with a Mad Dwarf Jester

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2. Changing Hands

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Robin O’Bryan

Jean Desmarets, Stefano della Bella, and the Jeux de Cartes Naomi Lebens

Part II  Gambling and Games of Chance 3. “A game played home”

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4. “Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his”

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5. The World Upside Down

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The Gendered Stakes of Gambling in Shakespeare’s Plays Megan Herrold

Dice Games on the English Stage in the Seventeenth Century Kevin Chovanec

Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Games and the Performance of Identity in the Early Modern World Patricia Rocco

Part III  Outdoor and Sportive Games 6. “To catch the fellow, and come back again”

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7. Against Opposition (at Home)

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Games of Prisoner’s Base in Early Modern English Drama Bethany Packard

Middleton and Rowley’s The World Tossed at Tennis as Tennis Mark Kaethler

Part IV  Games on Display 8. Ordering the World

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9. The Games of Philipp Hainhofer

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Games in the Architectural Iconography of Stirling Castle, Scotland Giovanna Guidicini

Ludic Appreciation and Use in Early Modern Art Cabinets Greger Sundin

Index 277 Index of Literature

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List of Illustrations

Figure I.1

Figure I.2

Figure I.3 Figure I.4

Figure I.5 Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4 Figure 2.1

Ambrogio Brambilla, “Il piacevole e nuovo giuoco novamente trovato detto pela il chiu” (The pleasant and new game recently found called skin the owl) [Game of Skin the Owl], 1589. Hand-colored engraving, 398 × 519 mm. Collection Luigi Ciompi and Adrian Seville, no. 448. Photo: courtesy of Adrian Seville. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Il giuocatore, from Le ventiquattr’hore dell’humana felicità (The twenty-four hours of human happiness), 1675. Engraving. Collezione d’Arte Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna. Georges de La Tour, The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, c. 1630–34. Oil on canvas, 38.5 × 61.5 in. (97.8 × 156.2 cm), AP 1981.06. Photo: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Coryn Boel (after David Teniers the Younger), Two Monkeys Playing Backgammon, 1635–68. Etching, 10.9 × 14.5 cm (4.3 × 5.7 in.). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Melvin R. Seiden, S5.7.1. Photo: Imaging Department @ President and Fellows of Harvard College. Lubin Bauguin, Still Life with Chessboard. 1630. Oil on canvas, 55 × 73 cm. Louvre, inv. RF 3968. Photo: Gérard Blot, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Giulio Campi, Partita a scacchi (The Game of Chess), c. 1530–32. Oil on canvas, 90 × 127 cm. Torino, Palazzo Madama–Museo Civico d’Arte Antica. Photo: Studio Fotografico Gonella. Liberale da Verona, The Chess Game, c. 1475. Tempera on wood, overall 13.75 × 16.25 in. (34.9 × 41.3 cm); painted surface 13.1 × 15.9 in. (33.3 × 40.3 cm). Maitland F. Griggs Collection, Bequest of Maitland F. Griggs, 1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artwork in the public domain. Knight and a lady playing chess, 1330–40. Ivory mirror case, 4.25 in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. 803-1891. Photo: V&A Images, London/Art Resource, NY. Schematic of Queen’s chess moves. After Mark Taylor, “How Did the Queen Go Mad?”, p. 171. Stefano della Bella, fifteen of thirty-nine playing cards (and one title card) from the Cartes des rois de France (Game of

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Figure 2.2

Figure 2.3

Figure 2.4

Figure 2.5

Figure 2.6

Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3

French Kings), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644). Etching, 87 × 56 mm (approx. size of each card). © Trustees of the British Museum. Stefano della Bella, thirteen of fifty-two playing cards (and one title card) from the Jeu de la géographie (Game of Geography), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644). Etching, 88 × 55 mm (approx. size of each card). © Trustees of the British Museum. Stefano della Bella, thirteen of fifty-two playing cards (and one title card) from the Jeu des fables (Game of Fables), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644). Etching, 88 × 57 mm (approx. size of each card). © Trustees of the British Museum. Stefano della Bella, title card and thirteen of fifty-two playing cards from the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644). Etching, 90 × 57 mm (approx. size of each card). © Trustees of the British Museum. Stefano della Bella, nine studies for the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), c. 1644. Black chalk, pen and ink, and grey wash, 21.6 × 23.7 cm. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust/© HM Queen Elizabeth II 2016. Stefano della Bella (after) and Pierre Mortier (published by), wrapper and booklet of explanatory text for the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), c. 1721 (1st ed. c. 1692). 86 × 54 mm (approx. size of each card). © Trustees of the British Museum. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Gioco importantissimo del fornaro, banco che mai falisce (The most important game of the baker—the bank which never fails) [Game of the Baker], 1692. Etching. Bologna, Collezione d’Arte Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Signora gola tira tutto (Mrs. Glutton takes all) [Game of Gluttony], 1699. Etching. Bologna, Collezione d’Arte Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Gioco gustoso della Simona e Filippa, compagne fideli (The tasteful game of Simona and Filippa, faithful companions) [Game of Simona and Filippa], 1695. Etching. Bologna, Collezione d’Arte Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna.

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Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2

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Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, La cucagna nuova, trovato nella porcolandria l’anno 1703 da seigoffo quale raconta esservi tutte le delitie e chi dessidera andarvi gli ariva prestissimo con il pensiere con tutta facilita e finalmente qui chi sempre vive mai-more (The game of the new cockaigne—the new Cockaigne found in Piglandia in the year 1703 by “you are clumsy,” who recounts having all the delights there, and he who wishes to go there will arrive there quickly and easily by thinking, and finally here, he who always lives never dies) [Game of the New Cockaigne], 1703. Etching. Bologna, Collezione d’Arte Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna. 173 Schematic of prisoner’s base playing ground. Author. 187 Francis Willughby’s depiction of a prisoner’s base playing ground. Synopsis and illustration from Francis Willughby, volume containing descriptions by Francis Willughby of games and pastimes (Mi LM 14, fol. 153), Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. 188 Title page of A Courtly Masque: the Device called, The World Tossed at Tennis, 1620. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland. Photo: National Library of Scotland. 207 View of the south facade of James V’s Palace and Bowling Green at Stirling Castle. Photo: author. 224 Ornamented playing cards. Top row, left to right: Le Diable (the Devil); Le Fou (the Fool), both from Jean Noblet’s deck; originals at the French National Library, Paris. From the restored Jean Noblet deck, courtesy of the J.C. Flornoy estate and Letarot.com Editions, www.tarot-history.com/. Photo: author’s own copy of this deck; The Fool from the Visconti-Sforza deck; original at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. From I Tarocchi dei Visconti, produced and distributed by Dal Negro fabbrica carte da gioco, Treviso. Photo: author’s own copy of this deck. Bottom row, right to left: The King of Falcons, from the Stuttgart Playing Cards, © Landesmuseum Württemberg, Hendrik Zwietasch; The Cook, from the Courtly Household Cards; original at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. From the Ambraser Hofämterspiel, authorized by Wiener Spielkartenfabrik Ferd, Piatnik & Söhne A-1140, Vienna, © by Piatnik Vienna, www. piatnik.com. Photo: author’s copy of this deck; Fameio, from

Figure 8.3 Figure 8.4 Figure 8.5 Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3

Figure 9.4

Figure 9.5

Figure 9.6

Figure 9.7

the Mantegna deck; original at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. From I Tarocchi del Mantegna, Edizione ristampata dal Il Meneghello Edizioni, Milano, 1988. Photo: author’s own copy of this deck. 226 Schematic of the south, east, and north facades of the royal apartments at Stirling Castle. Photo: author. 230 Sculptures from James V’s Palace at Stirling Castle. Photos: Author. 232 Statue of the Fool in bay 7, east facade of James V’s Palace at Stirling Castle. Photo: author. 241 The Pomeranian art cabinet, Berlin, 1610–17. Destroyed 1945. Photo: from Julius Lessing and Adolph Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, Berlin, 1905, fig. 2. 252 The Gustavus Adolphus art cabinet, Uppsala, 1626–31. Photo: © Uppsala University Art Collection. 253 A combined draughts game (left), a Game of the Goose (right), and a “Tower game” (the eight spandrel ovals). Ebony, mother-of-pearl, and engraved silver, 12.3 × 7.1 in. (31.3 × 18 cm) each. Kunstgewerbemuseum, inv. P77.2; P77.3. Photo: © bpk/Kunstgewerbemuseum, SMB/Helge Mundt. 256 Game of the Goose, Uppsala. Oil on paper laid on panel, 11.6 × 8.7 in. (29.5 × 22.2 cm). Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK0007. Photo: © Mikael Wallerstedt, Uppsala University Collections. 257 Two of Hainhofer’s Kronbrautspiele. Left: Uppsala, oil on paper, partly gilt, laid on panel, 11.6 × 8.7 in. (29.5 × 22.2 cm). Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK0007. Photo: © Mikael Wallerstedt, Uppsala University Collections. Right: Berlin, ebony and engraved silver, 12.9 × 9.6 in. (32.8 × 24.3 cm). Kunstgewerbemuseum, inv. P77.5. Photo: © bpk/Kunstgewerbemuseum, SMB/Helge Mundt. 259 Tafelspiel, Uppsala. Ebony, ivory, velvet, gilt bronze. The arcade (Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK0009) is mounted on the joined reversed sides of inv. UUK0007 and inv. UUK0008. Photo: © Mikael Wallerstedt, Uppsala University Collections. 260 Jacob van der Heyden, Two women and a man playing a ball game on a table. Engraving, 3.3 × 4.53 in. (84 × 115 mm). Photo: Rijksmuseum, image in the public domain. 261

Figure 9.8

Figure 9.9

Figure 9.10 Figure 9.11

Figure 9.12

Figure 9.13

Nicolas de Larmessin II, Habit de Tabletier (dealer in fancy turnery, chessboards, etc.) from Les costumes grotesques, 1695. Engraving, 14.4 × 11.1 in. (36.6 × 28.2 cm). Detail. Photo: image in public domain. Matthias Gerung, Die Melancholie im Garten des Lebens (detail), 1558. Mixed media on panel, 34.6 × 26.8 in. (88 × 68 cm). Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, inv. 2619. Detail. Photo: © bpk/Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe/Annette Fischer/Heike Kohler. Singwürfel (singing dice), Uppsala. A set of three. Engraved silver, .5 in. (13 mm). Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK165. Photo: © Greger Sundin Vexierkartenspiel, Uppsala. Forty-two cards (originally fiftytwo). Ink, watercolor and wash on paper laid on cardboard, 3.7 × 2.2 in. (9.4 × 5.7 cm). Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK0502. Photo: © Mikael Wallerstedt, Uppsala University Collections. Tourniquet (roulette), Uppsala. Oil on paper laid on panel, bronze-gilt spinner, 11.6 × 8.7 in. (29.5 × 22.2 cm). Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK0008. Photo: © Mikael Wallerstedt, Uppsala University Collections. Unknown game, Uppsala. Oil on paper laid on panel, 11.6 × 8.7 in. (29.5 × 22.2 cm). Uppsala University Collections, inv. UUK0008. Photo: © Mikael Wallerstedt, Uppsala University Collections.

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Acknowledgments This collection of essays grew out of a session devoted to “Renaissance Games” that was organized for the Renaissance Society of America conference held in Boston, 31 March–2 April 2016. I thank Erika Gaffney for inviting me to edit a book on the topic and for enthusiastically supporting this project throughout the twists and turns of its development. Special thanks, too, to the series editor Bret Rothstein, our resident game expert Greger Sundin for his helpful advice, the editorial staff at AUP, and to Ann A. Huse and Kimberlee Cloutier-Blazzard for their earlier reviews of some of the chapters.

Introduction A Passion for Games Robin O’Bryan Abstract This introductory chapter provides a general background on the European passion for games in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As well as giving a brief overview of some of the most popular games in the period, the discussion addresses the various roles that games played in early modern society. The examination then moves on to elucidate a wide range of ancillary topics related to games and their play, while also looking at the ways in which games and game playing revealed greater truths about the inner workings of European culture. In identifying leitmotifs and metaphors used by authors, dramatists, and artists, the investigation shows that the games and issues discussed in the essays are part of a much larger cultural narrative. Keywords: chess, playing cards, gambling, tennis, educational games, game metaphors

Writing in his Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), Baldassare Castiglione engages his characters in a dialogue on the role of game play in the making of an ideal courtier. A young man asks if it is “wrong for the courtier to play at cards and dice?,” with his respondent—a courtier himself—assuring him that it is fine as long as he does not neglect things of greater importance nor play to win money and cheat his partner.1 As for chess, although acknowledging that it is “a refined and ingenious recreation,” the speaker goes on to say that it takes too much time and study to master the game, time and effort that is best spent in more noble pursuits; in short, he concludes that for chess “mediocrity is more to Unless otherwise attributed, translations are mine. 1 Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 140. The original Italian reads: “[…] parvi che sia vizio nel Cortegiano il giocare alle carte ed ai dadi? […] A me no […] eccetto a cui nol facesse troppo assiduamente e per quello lasciasse l’altre cose di maggior importanzia, o veramente non per altro che per vincer danari, ed ingannasse il compagno […]”; Castiglione, Il cortegiano, ed. Cian, 162–63.

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be praised than excellence.”2 While there were a number of chess advocates who would have certainly disagreed with him, Castiglione seems to be arguing for temperance in game play, recognizing, if not anticipating, the burgeoning taste for such diversions that was to gain traction as the century progressed. That a discussion on the relative merits of game play should figure in a manual on courtier conduct is indicative of how thoroughly the penchant for games had been embraced by European society. Indeed, commensurate with an increased interest in, and opportunity for leisurely pastimes, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented vogue for playing games.3 We may get a good idea of this phenomenon by considering the way games are presented in François Rabelais’s classic text Gargantua and Pantagruel (1542). In one chapter the author describes how a cloth laden with all sorts of dice, cards, and board games was set before Gargantua for his postprandial amusement. 4 The names and numbers of these games is staggering—Rabelais enumerates 217 both real and imaginary games—but more surprising is the way his contemporaries augmented this number in their subsequent translations.5 In the German, Dutch, and English versions, the translators added their own expansive list of national games to those mentioned by Rabelais.6 While putting a regional stamp on the French text, their embellishments are duly suggestive of the manic hold games seemed to have exerted on the early modern imagination. Games were, of course, not new to the European cultural vocabulary. In Antiquity, as well as competitive games of sport, the Greeks and Romans played dice, knucklebones, and variants on chess, backgammon, and checkers.7 Game pieces discovered in Viking ship burials provide evidence that not only were such games still being played in the medieval epoch, but as in past traditions, game objects were considered valuable enough that they were included among the precious articles

2 “Quello certo è gentile intertenimento ed ingenioso […] di modo, che a cui vuol esser eccellente nel gioco de’ scacchi, credo bisogni consumarvi molto tempo, e mettervi tanto studio, quanto se volesse imparar qualche nobil scienzia, o far qualsivoglia altra cosa ben d’importanzia […] cioè che la mediocrità sia più laudévole che la eccellenzia”; Castiglione, Il cortegiano, ed. Cian, 163. Castiglione’s words hint at some of the negative connotations that were sometimes assigned to chess and chess players in the epoch; see discussion below. 3 See Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” and Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance. 4 Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1.22.83–85, and Oeuvres de Rabelais, 1: 392–447; and Bakhtin, “Role of Games in Rabelais.” 5 The list contains not only the names of actual games, but also reflects gaming terms and methods of playing, with the first third referencing card games and the remainder referring to sports; see discussion by Hayes, “Games,” 89. Also see Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France. 6 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 231–32, and “Role of Games in Rabelais,” 125. 7 On games in the ancient world, see, for example, Purcell, “Literate games.”

Introduc tion 

accompanying the deceased into the afterlife.8 By the late thirteenth century, King Alfonso X in Spain had had compiled his Libro de los juegos (Book of games, 1283), an encyclopedic illustrated text on tables (backgammon, similar to tric-trac), dice, and mill (or merels, an early version of nine men’s morris).9 Chess, described as the “most noble and of greater mastery than the others,” figured prominently in the text with over a hundred problems discussed. But while Alfonso’s Libro offers confirmation of the rising popularity of games during the Middle Ages, what is unique about the early modern period is the extent to which games permeated all aspects of European life. What kinds of games were being played in this epoch? Games ran the gamut, from those requiring skill and wit to those considered to be tactical games of luck, and still others that were entirely dependent upon chance. There were seasonal games, outdoor games, and educational games; games for well-heeled aristocrats, games played by those occupying the lower rungs of the social order, and often both. Some games were primarily for men, others for women, still others played by mixed sexes, and those by children. The period saw the development of entirely new games, as well as the popularization of traditional games and changes in how they were played.10 Further reflective of this interest there was an outpouring of informational works devoted to games and the rules of their play. Similarly, a host of game objects—chessboards, hand-painted playing cards, gaming tables, and the like—were produced to satisfy the demand, articles both utilitarian and those of great beauty. In art, while games and their players had long been represented in the margins of medieval manuscripts, the game topos became a prominent genre unto itself as a number of artists made game players the subject of their works. Writers, poets, and playwrights responded in kind using the game leitmotif as the theme or subtext of their literary and dramatic endeavors. Royals and nobles, traditional arbiters of culture, often encouraged these pastimes, and it is not coincidental that the plentiful treatises that were composed on games were frequently dedicated to those whose taste in such matters, mattered.

8 Hall, “Board Games in Boat Burials.” Game objects have been found in Mesopotamian and Egyptian tombs, while knucklebones have been discovered in Roman children’s graves, their presence indicating that the deceased were not slaves and thus had the luxury of being able to play games. 9 Golladay provides a translation and extensive analysis of the text in “Los libros de acedrex dados e tablas.” 10 On the new games that emerged in France in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, see Belmas, Jouer autrefois, who also discusses the social ramifications of this “global phenomenon.”

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Games and Play: Theories and Approaches Despite the overarching absorption with games and game playing that characterized the early modern period, the study of games did not emerge as a serious subject of academic inquiry until relatively modern times.11 This investigatory lapse is all the more surprising considering that from the late Middle Ages on, scholars and theologians had lent a critical eye to the subject, providing historical and ethnological surveys of games and offering commentary on ancillary issues related to game play.12 Medical, legal, and moralistic tracts added to the discussion, with jurists weighing in on the lawful implications of awarding winnings for gambling, and physicians and religious authorities evaluating game play in terms of its impact on physical and spiritual health.13 Others offered taxonomies of games, while putting forth their theories of game play. In his 1538 pedagogical treatise Dialogos (Dialogues), the Valencian humanist Juan Luis Vives presented an early classification scheme for games, differentiating them according to criteria of the players’ age, gender, and social class, and proposing a generic theory of laws of play “las leyes del juego”.14 Several decades later Torquato Tasso articulated his ideas on the cultural and social meaning of games and play in his two treatises, the Gonzaga secondo overo del giuoco (Second Gonzaga or on games, 1581) and Il Romeo overo del giuoco (Romeo or on games, 1582), written at the court of Duke Alfonso II d’Este in Ferrara.15 Reprising the dialogue format, Tasso established an analytical framework that evaluated games based upon type (for example, games contingent upon luck versus skill) and the role played by Fortune, as well related issues that brought in the 11 This is an oft-repeated observation. A short essay on the “History of Games” posted on the website of the Fondazione Benetton di Ricerche comments that the study of games was long considered to be not “serious” enough, which would account for the lacuna of scholarship on medieval games observed by Patterson, “Introduction,” 3. De Voogt has duly noted that research on board games is a relatively recent development; “Editorial,” 6. Especially striking is the assessment of Zollinger, paraphrasing Caillois, who asserts that “gambling and lottery studies were exposed to a modern form of ostracism”; Zollinger, “Dealing in Chances,” 1; and Caillois, “Unity of Play,” 93. 12 Already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example, games had begun to figure in European encyclopedic (such as Alfonso’s Libro) and other writings; see chapter 3 entitled “Early Writings on Games,” in Willughby, Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, 43–51. 13 Such issues are treated by Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance. 14 Vives distinguished between physical exercise, children’s games, games on paper or cards, and ball games. His “six laws of play” were enumerated in terms of the correct time to play, companions for playing games, the kinds of games played, their stakes, the manner of play, and the length of play; see Vives, Tudor School-Boy Life, xliii, and Vives, Dialogos, trans. Coret y Peris, 353–72. Also see Renson, “Le jeu chez Juan Luis Vivès,” who notes that this categorization of games predates twentieth-century writing and theories on the subject. 15 As McClure observes, Tasso’s treatises represent “the most ambitious theoretical attempt in the cinquecento to develop a theory that embraces all types of games”; McClure, Parlour Games, 5.

Introduc tion 

politics of gender and the moral and psychological ramifications of play.16 Girolamo Cardano’s Liber de ludo aleae (Book on Games of Chance, written sometime in the mid-1500s and published posthumously in 1663) concentrated on gambling. After acknowledging that games could be dependent on agility or strength, or on skill and/ or chance, he went on to set out the conditions appropriate for gambling, while also specifying “Who Should Play and When.”17 (Playing with professional gamblers, he deemed, was “most disgraceful” (turpissimum) and “dangerous” (periculosum).18) The Englishman Francis Willughby, an ornithologist by training, utilized his scientific background to produce his encyclopedic Book of Games (c. 1660). Unpublished and thus overlooked until recently, his text is now recognized as an invaluable source for its systematic observation, description, and classification of period games.19 While others addressed the game issue in intervening centuries, in contemporary scholarship Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938) is traditionally used as the starting point for studies on games as they fall under the larger rubric of “play.”20 Offering a model for description and classification of games as undertaken by earlier theoreticians, Huizinga distinguished play from “ordinary life” to assert the impact of the play element upon all forms of culture and social institutions.21 Other notable pioneers in the field of game studies have included Mikhail Bakhtin, whose analysis of Rabelais’s games focused on their association with popular carnival and feasts, and Peter Burke dealing with games in the context of a developing leisure society in early modern Europe.22 Alessandro 16 One of Tasso’s interlocutors addresses the notion of whether victory in games of chess and playing cards is due to ingegno (wit or skill) or fortuna (luck); Tasso, Il Gonzaga secondo, 10. Among the other issues addressed in Tasso’s treatise were the venues for game playing, the goals of various games, and archetypes of players; ibid., and McClure, Parlour Games, 4–13. 17 “Quibus, & quando magis conveniat ludere”; Cardano, Liber, 262; and Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 1–4. Written over a thirty-year period, the published version was a collection of notes and thoughts on his behalf. I thank Greger Sundin for this information. 18 Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 3; and Cardano, Liber, 262. 19 Willughby, Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, 2. 20 In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, Edmund Hoyle produced his widely influential treatise Mr. Hoyle’s Games of Whist, Quadrille, Piquet, Chess, and Back-gammon, which established rules, procedures, and strategies for playing these games, as well as discussing the laws of probability. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, several references to games in Jacob Burckhardt’s influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (published originally in German as Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien in 1860), prompted scholars such as Ludovico Zdekauer, Gerolamo Boccardo, and Angelo Solerti to tackle the subject; see Guerzoni, “Playing Great Games,” 43 and n. 2. 21 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9. Caillois discusses Huizinga’s work vis-à-vis games in Man, Play and Games, 4–5. 22 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 231–32 and 235–39, with a focused discussion in “Role of Games in Rabelais”; and Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 139. Slethaug, “Game Theory,” 66, addresses the subversive aspects of games in Bakhtin.

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Arcangeli’s recent text has advanced the discussion in exploring how games figured in Renaissance attitudes toward recreation and pastime.23 More circumscribed period and regional studies have produced encyclopedic collections and monographic works devoted to chess, playing cards, board games, parlor games, gambling, and related sports such as tennis and soccer.24 Game scholarship has duly infiltrated a number of different disciplines, with terms and mathematical concepts from game theory used to explain economics, political science, psychology, and other social and behavioral sciences.25 Some of the most important research in the field has been undertaken by Roger Caillois who issued his Man, Play and Games in 1968.26 Building on the work of Huizinga and most certainly on earlier treatises, Caillois proposed a theoretical classification of games that is widely referenced by scholars of game studies. Although not all have been in agreement over what activities should be included under the game rubric (Huizinga, for example, did not make allowances for games of chance played for money), Caillois nevertheless included gambling in his classification scheme; likewise his typology was expanded to incorporate sports.27 Placing all games in the domain of “play,” Caillois divided games into four categories.28 The 23 Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance. 24 Listed in the bibliography are notable specialized monographs and edited collections which include those by H.J.R. Murray, Richard Eales, and Daniel O’Sullivan on chess; Catherine Hargrave, Michael Dummett, Detlef Hoffmann, David Parlett, and Timothy Husband on playing cards; H.J.R. Murray, David Parlett, and Jean-Marie Lhôte on board and table games; Adrian Seville on the Game of the Goose; George McClure on parlor games; Manfred Zollinger on gambling; Heiner Gillmeister and Cees de Bondt on tennis; and sports and games of the Renaissance by Andrew Leibs, and of the early modern period by John McClelland and Brian Merrilees. Among the general edited volumes on games are Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith’s The Study of Games; the expansive Les jeux à la Renaissance edited by Philippe Ariès and Jean Claude Margolin; and Jeux de princes, jeux de vilains edited by Ève Netchine. Also noteworthy is Manfred Zollinger’s comprehensive bibliography on game treatises published between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (Bibliographie der Spielbücher). In addition, increasing scholarly interest is testified by the inauguration of journals such as Ludica (1995) devoted to the history and culture of games, and the international journal of Board Game Studies founded in 1998. Allison Levy’s edited collection on Playthings in Early Modernity, 2017 (which came out after the essays in this volume had been assembled) addresses a variety of games under the rubric of “play.” The edited text by Serina Patterson (Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature, 2015), which examines the role of games in medieval culture and literature, comes close to the orientation of this present volume. 25 This application of games to these other fields is concomitant with Huizinga’s recognition that the play element can be found in a variety of otherwise serious disciplines including art and poetry, law, war, etc.; Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 26 Slethaug, “Game Theory,” provides a succinct overview of the various approaches taken in games scholarship, which include those that are firmly rooted in philosophy. 27 Patterson discusses the disciplinary distinctions between game and sport in “Introduction,” 4. 28 See Caillois’s chapter 2 entitled “Classification of Games” (Man, Play and Games, 11–36), which includes a schematic of his classification.

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first, agōn, refers to games of skill, characterized by competitive games such as physical sports and cerebral chess; the second, alea (the Latin name for dice), denotes games of chance in which the player’s skill is sublimated to the vagaries of destiny (in other words, Fortune).29 The third type of game Caillois designated mimicry or simulation, which he used to connote theatrical representations and drama, as, for example, games of make-believe; with the fourth category—ilinx or vertigo—referring to games comprising improvisation and joy as manifested in children’s games like leapfrog.30 This theoretical construct recognizes that such types may overlap and that in some games (like cards) luck might triumph over actual skill. Caillois’s typology is invaluable for permitting us to appreciate the various ways in which games coincided with seemingly disparate areas such as theater, dance, performance, and the like, but his theory is also crucial for providing insights into how games traditionally prompted conflicting viewpoints in terms of their value to society. Those falling under the category of alea were often censured because the player’s abdication of will subjected them to dependence on external (occult) forces; conversely, games that relied on the competitive agents of skill in agōn generally merited higher in such assessments. As becomes evident in the analyses of Caillois, Huizinga, and others, because of the corollary applications of “game” to “play,” a precise definition of “game” is often elusive.31 Compounding the issue are the etymological variations in European languages which, unlike in English usage, conflate the two words. The original Latin ludus is an all-encompassing term meaning both “play” and “game,” with the German Spiel, French jeu, Spanish juego, and Italian giuoco having similar dual connotations.32 How then to define game? Bernard Suits offered a theoretical distinction between games and play in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978), defining “playing a game [as] the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”33 In “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play,” Eugen Fink proposed disregarding antithetical frameworks of “work-play” and “frivolity-seriousness” to see play as an essential element

29 According to Ortalli the distinction between games of skill and games of chance was first expressed in judicial writing of the early thirteenth century, perhaps in Azzone of Bologna’s Summa codicis; Ortalli, “Uncertain Thresholds of Tolerance,” 64. 30 Chomarat, “Les échecs d’après Vida,” 370, applies Caillois’s theory of mimicry to chess as it simulates war. 31 The fluid and amorphous parameters that extend to the meaning of game led the games historian David Parlett to dismiss the need for an exact definition; Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games, 1. 32 See, for example, Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 35–37; Patterson, “Introduction,” 5–7; and Guerzoni “Playing Great Games,” 43 n. 1, who piquantly observes that in sixteenth-century Italian courts “everything can be considered both game and play.” 33 Suits, Grasshopper, 55. Suits was responding to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assertion that games were indefinable.

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of man’s very being.34 Although his discussion finds points of comparison between games and play, he nevertheless asserted that play is not for the sake of reaching a “final goal.”35 This latter point aligns with the ideas of Jacques Derrida and other French philosophers who demarcated games as governed by rules and structure as opposed to play activities, which are open-ended.36 Caillois essentially challenged this binary assessment in his assertion that not all games subscribe to rules: those that are free and improvisational (which incorporate the highest degree of play, or paidia) can be distinguished from those that are rule-based (categorized as ludus).37 Deferring to Caillois’s more flexible interpretation, but otherwise disentangling our investigations from the complex philosophical and theoretical issues regarding notions of “play,” in this volume we put the focus squarely back on “games,” examined herein as a leitmotif of creative enterprise. In this respect, our study represents a new approach in the field of game scholarship. The first of titles to be published under AUP’s Culture of Play series, although pertinent to game scholars, this collection is envisioned to have broader appeal for the general academic readership. To that end, the introduction—admittedly expansive—is intended to provide an appropriate background for those not conversant in the specialized field of game studies. Not only does this extended discussion set out an analytical framework for the games, themes, and subtexts that are treated in the individual essays, but it also allows us to see them as part of a larger cultural construct. Keeping the inquiries “game-centric” then, the essays seek to answer two main questions: how were games used to convey special meanings in art and literature, and how did these games speak to greater issues in European society? In chapters dealing with chess, playing cards, game prints, dice, gambling, and outdoor and sportive games, our essayists show how games were used by artists, writers, game makers and collectors, in the service of love and war, didactic and moralistic instruction, commercial enterprise, politics and diplomacy, and assertions of civic and personal identity. Offering innovative iconographical and literary interpretations these analyses reveal how games played, written about, illustrated, and collected functioned as metaphors for a host of broader cultural issues related to gender relations and feminine power, class distinction and status, ethical and sexual comportment, philosophical and religious ideas, and conditions of the mind. 34 Fink, “Oasis of Happiness,” 19. Fink refined his ideas further in his more expansive Play as Symbol of the World. 35 Fink, “Oasis of Happiness,” 21. Fink characterized play as “interrupting the continuity and purposive structure of our lives,” which could also be said of games; ibid., 22. Likewise, allowing that “each game is an attempt at existence,” he went on to say that “we do find occasionally in play […] a withdrawal from the real world, which can go so far as enchantment and trance and reach a point of total enslavement […],” words that conjure up the serious game player; ibid., 23, 25. 36 Slethaug, “Game Theory,” 68. 37 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 27–35. Paidia comes from the Greek for “childish play.”

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Games, Game Play, and Cultural Response Chess As might be inferred from Alfonso’s Libro and Castiglione’s dialogue, the most prestigious game in the epoch was chess. Originating in India and passing through Persia, the game is thought to have been introduced into Europe around 1000 CE via Islamic-controlled Sicily or Spain. From the thirteenth century, chess became a fashionable pastime among the nobility and the clergy, its popularity reflected in a spate of chivalric romances, poems, and moralistic treatises. One of the most significant of the latter was the “chess morality” written by the Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis (c. 1273). The Liber de moribus hominum et de officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo schachorum (Book of morals and the duties of nobles and commoners, on the game of chess) was fashioned as an allegory of society, functioning as a speculum principis (mirror for princes) and used to instruct young nobles in the art of governance.38 Lighter in tone but equally influential were a variety of poems treating the game as an allegory for love and seduction.39 While many of these early chess classics were still being read and/or translated into the sixteenth century, the period also ushered in a host of new instructional tracts and other literary works devoted to the chess theme. 40 One such treatise was Das Schach- oder König-spiel (The Chess, or the King’s game, 1616), written by a German duke using the pseudonym Gustavus Selenus. 41 As suggested by his title chess continued to maintain its associations with elite activity. To be sure chess was played by those of more modest means, but in art and literature chess players were often portrayed in aristocratic guise playing the game in elegant settings. 42 Paris Bordone showed two finely dressed men at a chessboard set upon a table covered with an oriental carpet (c. 1550), while a portrait 38 Cessolis’s Latin text was immediately translated into French, and then into a number of other languages by the fifteenth century assuring it wide distribution. For the English translation, see Cessolis, Book of Chess. 39 For more on chess as an amatory pursuit, see the essay by Robin O’Bryan in the next chapter. 40 Besides the work of Luis Ramirez de Lucena in the 1490s, these include instructional treatises by Pedro Damiano (1512), Ruy López de Segura (1561), and Arthur Saul (1614) who published the earliest original book on chess in English, as well as the “love chess” allegorical poems by Catalan writers, and by Marco Girolamo Vida in Italy discussed in the next chapter. 41 Das Schach- oder König-spiel was written by August the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a member of the elder branch of the House of Este. He reappears in Greger Sundin’s essay in Chapter 9 of this volume. 42 Some of the more modest chess sets were fabricated of copper alloy, wood, bone, or horse teeth; Patterson, “Introduction,” 2. Interestingly, although chess was played by Dutch royals, chess players are rarely depicted in Dutch genre painting; Naumann, “Chess Players,” 358–59 and n. 6.

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by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (c. 1548) presents the Elector of Saxony outfitted in a fur garment as he plays a match. A charming miniature by Hans Mielich (1552) portrays the Duke of Bavaria and his wife playing chess accompanied by several attendants and two precious lap dogs which occupy a place of honor on the table with the chessboard. 43 William Shakespeare perpetuated the nobility of chess players in The Tempest (1610) in staging the match between the daughter of the Duke of Milan and the son of the King of Naples. Playing Cards Playing cards were another inheritance from the Arab world, filtering into Europe from Islamic territories in the mid-fourteenth century and achieving remarkable popularity within a few decades. Some of the earliest decks were luxury cards made for noble and royal patrons and decorated with hand-painted imagery; more commonly, cards printed with woodblock or engraved designs were produced for the general playing populace. 44 As with chess, the iconography of the cards was often based on courtly hierarchies, hence kings, queens, jacks/knaves, and occasionally fools/jesters; before codification in the late fifteenth century, depending on geographical region the individual suits might be represented by such motifs as flowers, animals, fruits, cups, hearts, bells, shields, and even hunting imagery.45 Cards were used in a variety of trick-taking games including tarot (tarocchi), German Karnöffel, and trappola, as well as in primero (an early version of poker). 46 An English painting from the 1560s shows a group of four men, some wearing fur-trimmed garments and all with rings on their fingers playing primero, the coins on the table indicating they are playing for stakes. 47 In Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) Falstaff invokes the game when he declares, “I never prospered since I foreswore myself [cheated] at primero.”48 (He lied.) 43 The miniature is the second illustration in the Jewel Book of the Duchess Anna of Bavaria, World Digital Library, www.wdl.org/en/item/4104/. Accessed September 10, 2018. 44 Hand-painted playing cards were produced for Charles VI of France in 1392, while the earliest of the woodblock playing cards were made around 1440–50; Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 31, and Husband, World in Play, 47. 45 Husband, World in Play, 26–41. The Knave is depicted as a jester with a marotte in a deck now in the Cloisters Museum; ibid., 85. 46 Feigenbaum provides a concise discussion of primero/a (also spelled primiero/a) in “Gamblers, Cheats, and Fortune-Tellers,” 167–68. 47 The painter is attributed to the circle of the so-called Master of the Countess of Warwick, with the image viewable at Wikimedia Commons (“Four Gentlemen of High Rank Playing Primero”), https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Primero.jpg. 48 Probably written in 1597, it was not published until 1602; see Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Melchiori, 266 (4.5.94).

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Dice and Cards and Gambling Like cards, dice were widely played in the early modern era, and both frequently used for gambling. 49 Although gambling often received the censure of moralists and religious leaders, Pietro Aretino adopted the leitmotif of playing cards in his Le carte parlanti (The speaking cards, 1543) to argue for gambling as an appropriate noble activity: “To risk nothing is a thing for a man worth nothing [uomo da niente] […] a man is not esteemed unless he loses.”50 A gambler himself, Cardano went on to advocate for dice and gambling (albeit with moderation) in his Liber de ludo aleae, while allowing that games of dice were suitable for soldiers.51 This latter was likely a reference to the ubiquitous soldiers that populated the landscape in the sixteenth century and for whom gambling was a favorite pastime.52 In art, vignettes of dice-playing soldiers had long been included in Crucifixion scenes, but in the seventeenth century artists such as Michelangelo Cerquozzi and Pieter Jansz Quast devoted their entire paintings to portraying motley groups of soldiers casting dice on overturned drums. Shakespeare used the unpredictability of dice as a metaphor for life’s fortunes and dangers in King Richard III (1592). Upon the realization that he is about to be killed by enemy forces, the king says to his minion, “I have set my life upon a cast/ And I will stand [i.e., accept] the hazard of the die,” “hazard” here meaning “risk,” but also serving as a pun on the popular dice game of the same name.53 Board Games Dice were also commonly used in the playing of board games, including backgammon, and surprisingly enough, an early variant of chess.54 One of the most well-known of the so-called “games of chance” traditionally played for money was the Game of the Goose (Gioco dell’oca), which achieved great popularity in 49 Once dice were standardized in 1450, they became readily available to the masses, fueling the Elizabethan penchant for gambling among the lower classes; Leibs, Sports and Games of the Renaissance, 96–97. 50 Cited in Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 29 n. 3. Aretino did, however, caution against the perils of high-stakes gambling. Also see discussion by Olivieri, “Jeu et capitalisme à Venise,” 156–57. 51 Cardano framed the discussion in terms of gambling being “proportionately less of a reproach to boys, young men and soldiers” (“ut contrà pueros non adeò dedecet, & adolescentes, & milites”); Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 3, and Cardano, Liber, 262. 52 As Feigenbaum observes, continual wars in the sixteenth century resulted in “large uprooted populations of soldiers”—many of whom were probably mercenaries—and gambling was a favored diversion; Feigenbaum, “Gamblers, Cheats, and Fortune-Tellers,” 154. 53 5.4.10, in Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Hammond, 328. 54 On dice used in chess, see Poole, “False Play,” 59–61.

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Fig. I.1  Ambrogio Brambilla, “Il piacevole e nuovo giuoco novamente trovato detto pela il chiu” (The pleasant and new game recently found called skin the owl) [Game of Skin the Owl], 1589

the sixteenth century.55 The goose in the game was considered to be a symbol of good luck, which in subsequent versions was sometimes replaced by the capricious figure of Fortune and other salubrious motifs. A “race game,” players rolled the dice to move along a progression of usually sixty-three, but sometimes forty-nine numbered spaces, encountering along the way the pitfalls and fortune that led to the center and eventual victory. The numerical underpinnings of the game were actually quite esoteric, with symbolism assigned to the number sixty-three based upon what the fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino had determined were nine seven-year periods in a person’s life.56 Although some Goose game boards were made of wood and stone, those printed on paper flourished from the late sixteenth century when other printed game sheets were also being produced. 55 By tradition the game was thought to have been invented by Duke Francesco I de’ Medici, but according to Adrian Seville the earliest reference to the game was in a book of sermons by the Dominican friar Gabriele da Barletta in 1480; Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 13, 16. Also see Ciompi and Seville, Giochi dell’Oca e di percorso, for expansive illustrated examples of goose and other game boards. 56 Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 16–17.

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As if to reinforce the message that chance plays in such games, dice are represented in the imagery of many of these game prints.57 In the board game illustrated by Ambrogio Brambilla, three dice are liberally displayed in segments along the two interior tracks, the number of dice representing the three that were typically used for playing games of chance (Figure I.1).58 Parlor Games Both dice and playing cards were accouterments in the fortune-telling games that became fashionable in the epoch. Dedicated to the Duke of Ferrara, Francesco Marcolini’s text Le sorti intitolate giardino di pensieri (The oracle called garden of thoughts, 1540) used cards for divination, while dice were cast to predict the players’ personal horoscopes in Lorenzo Spirto’s Libro de la ventura (Book of fortune, first published in 1482 and reprinted several times in the sixteenth century).59 Games such as these belong to the genre of aristocratic parlor games that sprang up in the sixteenth century. Appearing earlier in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, such intellectual sparring games became popular with the rise of the literary academies in Italy. In 1551, the Bolognese poet Innocenzio Ringhieri published his Cento giuochi liberali, et d’ingegno (One hundred games of learning and wit) dedicated to the French queen Catherine de’ Medici; he was followed twelve years later by Girolamo Bargagli who compiled the 130 games played by the Accademia degli Intronati (Academy of the Bewildered) in Siena.60 Referred to as giochi di veglie (games of nights of recreation), parlor games involved scintillating repartee and/or displays of knowledge with topics drawn from a variety of subject areas including music, painting, proverbs, nature, and mythology. There were also games mocking social customs, and games with titillating, if not obscene overtones. Among the so-called “forbidden games” was the rhetorical game “Letting the Bird [Uccello] Peck at the Fig [Fico],” bird and fig having been euphemisms for the male and female sexual organs respectively.61

57 Such prints were meant to be glued onto a harder surface for playing the games. 58 For the illustration and description of the rules of this game, see Ciompi and Seville, Giochi dell’Oca e di percorso. Patricia Rocco discusses game prints displaying three dice in Chapter 5 of this volume. 59 See Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 145. Spirto’s (alternative spelling, Spirito) fortune-telling game also used three dice; Céard, “Jeu et divination à la Renaissance,” 407. 60 McClure, Parlour Games, 51ff.; and Marchetti, “Le désir et la règle recherches.” 61 Specifically, uccello signified a phallus, while fica referred to the vagina. Ruggiero discusses this game in Machiavelli in Love, 19.

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Ball Games At the opposite end of the spectrum were ball games, both informal (if not violent) sports like folk or street football, and others with more regulated play such as the Italian calcio, similar to today’s soccer, where players were organized into distinct teams and wore uniforms.62 In 1580, Giovanni de’ Bardi devoted an entire treatise to calcio in his Discorso sopra ‘l giuoco del calcio Fiorentino (Discourse on the Florentine game of calcio). Dedicating it to Duke Francesco I de’ Medici, he established firm rules for the game while asserting its Florentine pedigree. Twenty-five years earlier Antonio Scaino had published his Trattato del giuoco della palla (Treatise on the game of the ball, 1555), which he dedicated to Alfonso II d’Este, later Duke of Ferrara. Written as an instructional manual for the courtier, Scaino’s treatise described several ball games including the prototype to tennis, pallacorda, so named for the cord serving as the net which was strung across the middle of a covered court.63 By the end of the fifteenth century tennis had become popular in France where it was referred to as the royal jeu de paume (literally “game of the palm”) because the ball was hit with the hand; by the sixteenth century rackets were used. Tennis proved to an equally popular theme for period artists and writers. In 1561, Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara gave a modern twist to Ovid’s Metamorphosis by transforming the discus game played between Apollo and Hyacinth into a tennis match.64 Several decades later, a follower of Caravaggio acknowledged this revised version in the Death of Hyacinth (c. 1620) by including two tennis rackets in his rendering of Apollo comforting the dying youth.65 A number of French and English poets treated the game allegorically, with Thomas Middleton and William Rowley elevating the game to dramatic prominence with the title of their court masque, The World Tossed at Tennis (1620).66

62 In his Book of the Governour of 1537, Sir Thomas Elyot condemned football for its “beastly fury”; Guttmann, Sports, 64–65. 63 Tennis was originally played in the cloisters and in the street using a building as the backdrop; see Gillmeister, Tennis, esp. figs. 31 and 58; and De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 3–4. Among some of the other ball games described by Scaino were il bracciale (a type of handball), la palla con lo scanno (ball game with a “scoop”), and la palla con la racchetta (a forerunner of racquetball). Also see Belmas’s discussion of various ball games in Jouer autrefois. 64 De Bondt, “Apollo and Hyacinth Tennis Theme,” 122. 65 The illustration is shown in ibid., 123. This conceit had staying power as evidenced by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s inclusion of a tennis racket in his 1752 painting of the subject. 66 See Gillmeister, Tennis, 132–42, and Mark Kaethler’s essay in Chapter 7 of this volume.

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Children’s Games Children of the nobility played the same games that their parents played, not only chess and cards, but also backgammon, nine men’s morris, and even dice.67 (As a seven-year-old, Henry VIII played a game for money against his father and won.68) In France royal offspring were traditionally taught tennis, while children of other European princes also played the game, considered to be beneficial for their health and well-being. Children of lesser means often resorted to inventiveness for game play. In England in 1611, the “childish game of cobnut” (a large cultivated hazelnut) involved “throwing of a ball at a heap of nuts, which done, the thrower takes as many as he hath hit or scattered.”69 Other popular children’s games included roughand-tumble ball games, quoits (ring toss, similar to horseshoes), skittles (bowling at ninepins), and prisoner’s base (called barres in French) in which two teams try to capture the others’ members by tagging them and bringing them to a prison, or base.70 In art, Pieter Bruegel’s Rabelaisian-inspired painting of Children’s Games (1560) showed over eighty different games played by youths.71 Although chess, cards, dice, and gaming boards are noticeably absent, some of these games were to reappear with youthful players in seventeenth-century painting. In Spain, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo depicted two street urchins casting dice as they sit upon crumbling stone steps, a potent illustration of Vives’s observation that in the city the worst sort of boys play with dice (taxilli).72 Dutch genre painters Judith Leyster and Dirk Hals captured the quotidian experience of humble children playing cards, while Adriaen van der Linde (1595) and Wybrand de Geest (1631) elevated the gaming theme with their portraits of young aristocratic boys with a “colf” club and a ball, equipment used in the prototype golf game played indoors.73 Such game paraphernalia must 67 Orme, Medieval Children, 178. 68 Ibid. 69 The entry appeared in Randall Cotgrave’s French dictionary; ibid., 176. 70 Although Leibs, Sports and Games of the Renaissance, 86, indicates that this game never caught on as one for grown-ups, Bethany Packard’s essay in Chapter 6 of this volume might suggest otherwise. 71 See discussion in Orrock, “Homo Ludens.” Branden, “Les jeux d’enfants de Pierre Bruegel,” provides an extensive description of the games and toys played by the children in the painting, while also tying it to contemporary interest in alchemy. 72 Asked whether school masters allow students to play any games other than tennis, one of the interlocutors responds: “But sometimes, secretly, they play at cards and dice, the little boys with knuckle-bones [tali], the worst sort of boys with dice [taxilli]”; Vives, Tudor School-Boy Life, 203–4. The original passage in Latin reads: “[…] sed interdum clam luditur foliis: pueruli talis nequiores taxillis”; in Vives, Dialogos, trans. Coret y Peris, 362. 73 On “colf,” see Wilkins, Sports and Games of Medieval Cultures, 139–40. Hendrick Avercamp’s painting (c. 1625) depicts an outdoor version of the game being played on a frozen river; see A Scene on the Ice, National Gallery of Art Online Editions, www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.50721. html.

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have been viewed as prestigious props, similar to the tennis rackets and balls accompanying the sitters in the portraits of Carlo Emanuele II of Savoy (1636) and Federico Ubaldo della Rovere (1622), the young sons of Italian dukes.74 Seasonal Games Various games were associated with seasonal events, played in conjunction with fairs, civic celebrations, church feasts, and holidays such as Christmas and Carnival. In the late seventeenth century Thomas Hyde reported on the chess matches played at trade fairs by German, Danish, Swedish, and Croatian merchants, with the results of unfinished games recorded by notaries so that the games could be continued at the next festival.75 In Florence, annual calcio matches were held in June for the birthday of St. John the Baptist, the city’s patron saint; Fat Thursday was similarly a popular occasion for calcio in Siena and for ball games elsewhere. Cards were fashionable with the nobility at Christmastime in England, with special dispensation allowed to servants and university students for playing cards during the holiday season.76 With its emphasis on overturning the established social and hierarchical conventions, Carnival presented the perfect occasion for games associated with gambling. In his painting Carnival between Lent (1550) Bruegel captured the madcap atmosphere of the festivities, showing amid the chaos two men casting dice (barely noticeable in the lower left-hand corner), and a scattering of several playing cards on the ground by the wine barrel. Tavern Games Taverns, which proliferated in northern Europe, provided the locus for games of chance—and for drink.77 That drinking and game play often went hand in hand is suggested by the frequent depictions of players and/or their spectators holding drinks as the games unfold (intimated as well by the location of the cards in Bruegel’s painting). Unlike parlor games which were played in aristocratic settings, taverns 74 As De Bondt observes, these tennis accouterments served to “emphasize the beneficial qualities of the game for the physical education of the nobility”; De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 7. 75 Murray, History of Chess, 851. Hyde’s De ludis orientalibus (The book of oriental games) was written in 1694. 76 In 1495, Henry VII issued an edict forbidding card playing for servants and apprentices except at Christmas. In English universities, although normally prohibited during the school year, cards and other game activities were permitted during the holidays. 77 Clark, “Games and Sports in the Long Eighteenth Century,” 78, observes that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of drinking establishments. Coincident with the gaming trend, drinking evidently made for good business.

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were typically associated with country folk and were generally not frequented by the upper classes. In the seventeenth century, tavern games became a specialty of Flemish and Netherlandish genre painters such as David Teniers the Younger and Adriaen van Ostade who produced several versions of peasants drinking and playing cards and backgammon. Jan Steen took the scenario a step further by showing what happens when alcohol and games are involved, cards, a backgammon board, and a tankard having been knocked to the ground from a table as peasants brawl in front of a tavern.78 Given the tavern’s acquired reputation as a place for drunkenness and gambling—and sexual encounters—it may be why one Game of the Goose board has the player landing on the space marked “tavern” losing two turns.79 Spaces for the Play and Display of Games Unless otherwise prohibited, public spaces such as large greens and grand piazzas provided ready-made spaces for game play, but period architecture duly responded to the gaming trend.80 In Venice private ridotti and social clubs called casini served as preferred sites for gambling for the nobility, notable for providing secrecy while similarly used as sites for illicit sex and drinking.81 Princely palaces were specifically designed with open areas for game play. In his De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building, 1453), Leon Battista Alberti had recommended the use of spaces such as courtyards and vestibules within palaces as suitable places where young men could practice playing ball games, throwing quoits, and the like.82 Palace gardens similarly functioned as the locus for chess, cards, backgammon, and other games that were typically played in an interior setting.83 Gardens were also frequently used as the site for the erection of special buildings used for playing games, as well as for the closed and open tennis courts that had become de rigueur additions to European 78 Such displays of unruly behavior associated with tavern folk differentiated them from nobles who were more likely to exercise self-control when playing with those of equal social standing. By contrast, nobles were themselves occasionally guilty of disruptive and violent behaviors. See discussion by Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 35, 41, 52. 79 The game is referenced in Leibs, Sports and Games of the Renaissance, 96. 80 For example, in Nuremberg a law of 1503 prohibited the playing of cards and dice on the lawn of the town hall, while in Florence “profane” gambling was not allowed near churches, nunneries, and governmental buildings; Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 190. 81 According to Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, 250, by the late sixteenth century, the terms ridotto and casino began to be used interchangeably. Prostitutes were often involved in gambling activities in Venice, from presiding over the card games to managing ridotti; see Walker’s discussion, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 33, 61–62. These venues were sometimes rooms in the palaces of the aristocracy. 82 Alberti, On the Art of Building, 121. 83 Characters playing chess in a garden was a popular topos in medieval art and literature.

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palaces in the epoch.84 Italian princes such as the Sforza, the Gonzaga, the Este, and the Medici all erected tennis courts at their residences, but the fashion duly extended to the “princes of the church” in Rome. In 1510, Paolo Cortesi’s treatise De cardinalatu (On the cardinalate) had advocated for tennis courts to be part of the cardinal’s palace; a century later there were few grand palaces in Rome that had not installed such a court in the garden or palace interior.85 Elsewhere, Francis I and his son Henry II built a number of tennis courts at their chateaus in the Loire Valley, while Henry VIII ordered the construction of five open and closed tennis courts (as well as bowling lanes) for his palace at Whitehall.86 Nor were tennis courts only for titled nobility. According to a Venetian ambassadorial report of 1596 there were 250 tennis courts in Paris; soon after, public ball houses were constructed in northern Europe as well as in Florence and Turin.87 Within the palace proper, special rooms served as dedicated areas for the play and display of games. In Italy, frescoes of game players had long graced the walls of princely and aristocratic residences, a trend that continued well into the cinquecento.88 In the mid-sixteenth century, male and female card players were represented in the frescoes of noble dwellings in Bologna and Vicenza.89 Giovanni Stradano depicted a game of calcio in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1560; a decade later, Duke Alfonso II d’Este’s castello in Ferrara included a saletta dei giochi (small games room) illustrated with children’s games including skittles, and a salone dei giochi (large games room) used as a reception area, which was frescoed with images of young men playing various ball games.90 Game objects also began to be included among the examples of natural and manmade marvels that were housed in the Kunstkammern (cabinets of curiosities). In the early sixteenth-century garden room of Margaret of Austria’s palace near Brussels, chess and other games joined the items contained in her collection of 84 For example, a “games” building was planned for the garden of the Gonzaga palace at Marmirolo in the late sixteenth century; Carpeggiani, “‘Giochi’ nei giardini dei Gonzaga.” At the Scottish royal castle in Falkland, the auxiliary structure was evidently used for billiards and bowling; see Giovanna Guidicini’s essay in Chapter 8 of this volume. 85 De Bondt, “Apollo and Hyacinth Tennis Theme,” 119–20. 86 Nederlandse Real Tennis Bond, “Jeu de Paume (France).” 87 De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 6, indicates that tennis in France was being played by urban elites and upper middle classes. 88 Notable examples include the mid-fourteenth-century fresco in the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence which shows a duchess and a knight, two characters from a popular romance, playing chess, and the Castello Borromeo in Milan which depicts women playing cards and a ball game (1440s). 89 In Bologna, Nicolò dell’Abate painted his fresco of men and women playing tarocco for the Palazzo Poggi in 1548–50. Giovanni Antonio Fasolo’s fresco (c. 1570), executed for the Caldogna family’s Palladian villa in Vicenza, shows the card game being played in a garden. 90 See Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance, 25–28.

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exotica from the New World, while playing cards were among the games listed in the inventory of Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria’s Kunstkammer at century’s end.91 In such collections, game objects might be housed in special boxes and art cabinets or even incorporated as game boards in the surfaces of elaborate gaming tables, which would have been equally sumptuous in their materials and assembly.92 Games and Ingenuity The games that typically found a home with elite owners were oftentimes unique in their fabrication. A Game of the Goose board carved on stone for Ferdinand II’s brother, Archduke Charles II of Austria, was decorated with the words and music of drinking songs—more material evidence that drinking often accompanied game play.93 The set of playing cards produced by Peter Flötner for Francesco d’Este in the 1540s was later inscribed with musical notations and lyrics on the back of the cards, with the various suits designating soprano, alto, tenor, and bass to create four-part songs.94 As is evident with these particular cards, the games in princely and aristocratic collections were not necessarily meant to be played, but rather might serve as objects of delectation for the owners and their distinguished guests. Transformed into objets d’art, such game objects were a testament to the owners’ taste and sophistication, a veritable declaration of their elevated status. A cogent example is Hans Mielich’s aforementioned miniature of the duke and duchess playing chess. The fact that this image appears in a lavishly illustrated manuscript depicting the jewels in the duchess’s holdings implicitly elevates the chessboard itself to a treasure. While many parlor games were designed to exhibit—if not test—the players’ knowledge and wit, games became the vehicle by which artists, craftsmen, writers, and game enthusiasts demonstrated their own ingenuity. In 1664, Christopher Weickmann invented a new version of chess in which the board was expanded in four different directions with the rules allowing for up to four or more players, each 91 Margaret’s collection is considered to be a forerunner of the Kunstkammer; see Eichberger, “Margaret of Austria’s Treasures.” Ferdinand’s cards are discussed in Husband, World in Play, 26, 49. Sometimes the exotic object was a game. A Game of the Goose board now in the Metropolitan Museum is fabricated of ebony and inlaid with ivory, horn and gold wire; it was made in India, probably to Italian specifications. See Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 13–14. 92 Granados, “Reflections on the Role of Baroque Games Tables,” 38–42, provides examples of elaborate gaming tables made for Max Emanuel, the electoral prince of Bavaria, in the late seventeenth century. Greger Sundin discusses the art cabinets for the display of games in Chapter 9 in this volume. 93 Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 15–16. Ferdinand II and Charles II were sons of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. 94 See Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 199–200; and Husband, World in Play, 103, who notes that the deck was evidently commissioned as a collector’s item and was never intended to be used in a card game.

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with thirty chessmen.95 Some game objects functioned as hybrids, doing double or even triple duty. Luxury game boxes were made with chess and nine men’s morris boards on alternate surfaces with a backgammon board in the interior and the box itself used for storing game pieces. Goose game boards printed on paper were designed so that the segments could be cut apart for use as playing cards, while playing cards were disseminated in the form of a book.96 Nor were such creative displays confined to game objects and their imagery. In The Tempest, Shakespeare divided the dialogue of the chess scene into two equal parts of thirty-two words each, a clever allusion to the number of pieces used in the game and the sixty-four squares on the chessboard.97 Games and Theater One of the more interesting aspects regarding games in this epoch is their conflation with theater and entertainment, of special significance given the pervasive use of the game theme in the works of Shakespeare and a number of other playwrights. Considering that games of all kinds were often played in front of an audience, this may seem a natural connection in itself, but there were actually deeper roots for the relationship. In medieval tradition vernacular dramas were referred to as “games,” while plays in early modern England were categorized together with games and sports.98 Moreover, like theatrical productions, many games involved “dressing up” (as seen in uniforms for calcio, for example).99 Parlor games were duly conceived as performances with special music composed to accompany them, and the players’ “acts” sometimes linked to contemporary theatrical productions and the commedia dell’arte.100 In turn, the commedia inspired Ambrogio Brambilla’s 1589 game board which features a range of its comedic actors (see again Figure I.1).101 The convergence 95 Influenced by Selenus’s treatise on chess, Weickmann published his game as the “Newly Invented Great King’s Game,” and dedicated it to Selenus; see discussion by von Hilgers, War Games, 19–28. 96 Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 39–40; and Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 193, 187. A print by Stefano della Bella displays twelve mythological playing cards on a sheet, where half of the individual card segments are devoted to the imagery and the remaining space below left for the insertion of text; see Stefano della Bella, Mythological Playing Cards, National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/content/ ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.51020.html. This is the system used for the cards discussed by Naomi Lebens in Chapter 2. 97 Jones-Davies advances this idea in “Chess Game and Prospero’s Epilogue,” 118. 98 Kolve discusses this connection in Play Called Corpus Christi, 12ff., noting that the French “jeu” and German “Spiel” also referred to drama. Also see Hattaway, “Playhouses and the Role of Drama.” 99 Hattaway, “Playhouses and the Role of Drama,” 138. 100 See Haar, “On Musical Games in the 16th Century,” 26–30, and McClure, Parlour Games, 63–64, who notes that Bargagli’s Game of Comedy drew from the commedia dell’arte. 101 Katritzky discusses this game in Art of Commedia, 245–47.

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between games and theater likewise extended to court masques and other entertainments devoted to the game theme. In a ballet staged in Paris in 1676, the dancers were dressed as kings, queens, and knaves with their costumes derived from the imagery of playing cards; the queens were accompanied by slaves outfitted to represent tennis, dice, backgammon, and billiards.102 In architecture, the intersection between games and entertainment is readily apparent in the design of indoor tennis courts which had seating for spectators and thus made perfect makeshift theaters. In the late sixteenth century Duke Alfonso II d’Este became the first prince to use his tennis court for such purposes, but after the game began to lose favor in the seventeenth century, public tennis buildings were converted into venues for theatrical productions—especially popular with traveling commedia dell’arte troupes.103 Gamesters and Cheats The connection between games and performance brings into play the recognition of the consummate game players, individuals who gained renown for their skill, if not luck, at various games. Tomaso Garzoni paid homage to this contemporary fascination by including a chapter on “Game Players” in his 1585 encyclopedic La piazza universale di tutte le professione del mondo (The universal piazza of all the professions of the world). Chess notables included Ruy López de Segura from Spain, the author of a popular treatise on chess, and the names of well-known card players have similarly been recorded. The reputation of tennis players lured them to the courts where they were employed to play with their princely patrons—and to entertain the court and its distinguished guests.104 Even those women skilled at the wit and repartee displayed in parlor games were acknowledged, as Bargagli indicates in his treatise.105 In art, singular portraits of individuals with game accouterments might suggest that the sitters had earned distinction for their skill at play. This is the message conveyed in the early seventeenth-century Florentine painting, over life-size, which shows a man (perhaps a fool in the Medici ducal court) in the process of throwing from under his raised leg a small ball probably used in the game of pallottole (similar to bocce).106 Then there was the dedicated habitual gambler 102 Vuillier and Grego, History of Dancing, 118. Also see Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance, for various discussions on dance in relation to games and play. 103 According to De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 8, by the eighteenth century, Europe had at least 150 tennis court theaters. 104 Among the Italian princes employing tennis professionals in the sixteenth century were Alfonso II d’Este, Francesco Maria II della Rovere, and Cosimo de’ Medici; ibid., 69–74. 105 McClure, Parlour Games, 58, 77; and McClure, “Women and the Politics of Play,” 773. 106 The portrait (c. 1620–25) is illustrated and discussed in Bisceglia et al., Buffoni, villani e giocatori, cat. 26, p. 138.

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Fig. I.2  Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Il giuocatore, from Le ventiquattr’hore dell’humana felicità (The twenty-four hours of human happiness), 1675

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Fig. I.3  Georges de La Tour, The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, c. 1630–34

known as the Gamester, who was immortalized in a number of plays including James Shirley’s eponymous drama of 1635.107 A 1675 engraving by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli entitled Il giuocatore (The player) epitomizes such a man shown with the accouterments of his profession—playing cards, dice, tennis rackets, and balls—the money on the table indicating that he is playing for stakes (Figure I.2). The Gamester had fitting company in the Cheat and the Con, who gained equal prominence in period art and literature.108 Castiglione had warned his courtier against cheating at cards and dice, but in England a genre of writings known as “rogue literature” approached the issue from the other direction. Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection of the Most Vyle and Detestable Use of Dice Play (1552) served as a manual for professional cheats at dice, with Charles Cotton providing various tricks of the trade in The Compleat Gamester (1674).109 Artists such as Caravaggio and his followers aggrandized the issue by making cheaters and cheating the

107 Zucker, “Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London,” 83. 108 As Caillois observes, the cheat “pretends to respect the rules [but] takes advantage of the other players’ loyalty to rules”; Man, Play and Games, 7. 109 Cotton also paints a very unflattering portrait of the obsessive game player in his section entitled “The Character of a Gamester”; Cotton, Compleat Gamester, 21–22. The work was attributed to Cotton in the eighteenth century; on this point and Walker’s text, see Willughby, Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, 45–47. Earlier Vives discussed such a trickster in setting out strategies for gambling and card games in his Dialogs; Renson, “Les jeux chez Juan Luis Vivès,” 477.

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subject of their paintings.110 In his Cardsharps (c. 1594), Caravaggio showed an innocent young man playing cards (probably primero) with a mercenary soldier, as the soldier’s accomplice signals to him behind the youth’s back.111 Notably, while the cheaters here are assigned a male identity, women, typically of ill-repute, were also complicit in such scams, sometimes operating as free agents. In Georges de La Tour’s painting of the Fortune Teller (c. 1630s), a young dandy is surrounded by a gypsy fortune-telling crone and three young women, two of whom are in the act of robbing the unsuspecting youth. La Tour also produced two similar versions (1635) of a courtesan conning a young man in a card game as her maidservant pours wine and her accomplice displays his own cards, some tucked behind his back (Figure I.3).112 Such compositions appear as mini-dramas with the artists using pointed gestures, sly glances (sometimes directed to the audience), and sleights-of-hand to enact the cheat—and to make the viewer complicit in the con.113 The theatricality of such works is of little surprise, as both La Tour’s and Caravaggio’s paintings were closely allied with the skits of the commedia dell’arte.114 As for the Cheat, the Con, and the unfortunate Dupe, they were to reappear on the English stage, an appropriate venue since the theater itself was associated with deceit.115 Games and Rhetorical Expression The extent to which games had invaded the popular consciousness is reflected in the use of gaming terms to flavor contemporary rhetoric.116 Sir James Melville resorted to using a tennis metaphor when he reported that Queen Elizabeth had

110 Feigenbaum provides an excellent discussion on this artistic phenomenon in “Gamblers, Cheats, and Fortune-Tellers.” 111 Ibid., 156. Caravaggio apparently produced two versions of this painting. 112 The other version is housed in the Louvre. In his Dice Players of c. 1650, the artist expanded the cheating repertoire to show a player’s pocket being picked as he plays a nocturnal game of dice. 113 In this respect, we might view these enactments of cheating as similar to the representations of “living chess”; see note 129 below. Feigenbaum, “Gamblers, Cheats, and Fortune-Tellers,” 168, discusses the details of La Tour’s paintings noting that the astute viewer would have recognized the mechanics of the game in play—and thus be in on the cheat. Similarly, in Caravaggio’s painting of Cardsharps, the attuned audience would have observed that the accomplice wears gloves with the fingertips removed, which would have allowed him to feel special marks on the cards used in the scams; ibid., 156. 114 See Gregori, “The Fortune Teller,” 215. According to Feigenbaum, “Gamblers, Cheats, and FortuneTellers,” 155, the early sixteenth-century play by Venturino da Pesaro in which a gambling cheat tries to lure a naive young man to a card game may have also served as the inspiration for Caravaggio’s Cardsharps. 115 As in painting, cheating at cards was an easily adapted subtext for playwrights such as Shakespeare, whose Falstaff, we may recall, cheated at primero. 116 Consistent with Huizinga’s observation on the play-concept expressed in language; Homo Ludens, 28.

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“a fair ruby, as great as a Tennis-ball.”117 In 1641, referring to the controversy over profane game play on Sunday, Pastor John Ley described the Sabbath as “a Ball, betwixt two Racketts bandied this way and that way […] betwixt the godly and the profane.”118 Given the obvious connotations of game play as metaphors for doing battle—and the numerous games that reinforced this idea—it may have been only natural that Sir Francis Drake saw his contest over a great sea battle in the context of a game, allegedly saying “There is plenty of time to win this game, and thrash the Spaniards, too.”119 Puns on gaming terms were especially popular in English theater, a hotbed of licentiousness. Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness employed card terminology for double entendres, particularly those of an overtly sexual nature.120 And among the salacious puns used by Shakespeare and other playwrights in the epoch were dice for genitals, ace for the vulva, and tennis balls having obvious implications for testicles.121 Games, Satire, and Social Commentary As suggested by this type of vulgar punning, the games mania provided artists and writers with ready subjects for satire and parody. In a genre of painting referred to as Singerie, a seventeenth-century engraving after the work of David Teniers the Younger portrays two monkeys playing backgammon, one wearing a plumed hat and the other holding a glass of wine (Figure I.4).122 While such works were intended to illustrate the idea that monkeys ape human activities, we might also see them as a humorous commentary on the contemporary obsession with game play. Perhaps because of their ubiquity, the illustrations of playing cards were especially suitable vehicles for satirical treatment. Cards produced in Nuremburg in the sixteenth century used carnivalesque imagery of the “world upside down,” showing parodical scenes such as wives beating husbands, rabbits roasting a hunter on a spit, a hunchback dwarf on a goat attacking a pig with a lance (imitating St. George), and fools pulling a sled of other fools, the latter reminding us that dwarfs and fools, like jesters, were common motifs in game imagery.123 Samuel Rowlands 117 Melville and Scott, Memoirs of Sir James Melvil, 97. 118 Ley, Sunday a Sabbath, pref. (no. pag.). 119 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 193. 120 See Wiggins, Woman Killed with Kindness, 311. 121 For example, playwrights such as Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Robert Greene, and John Fletcher; see Williams, Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, 1: 233–34. 122 Castiglione had written of a chess-playing monkey in his Book of the Courtier, 108–9. 123 In a Goose game print from 1690, a jester is shown at the start of the game; Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 55–56. Another Goose game board from c. 1640 displays hunchbacked dwarfs (gobbi), which were clearly indebted to Jacques Callot’s prints; figure 1 in ibid., 26. Jesters were also featured on playing cards; see note 45 above.

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Fig. I.4  Coryn Boel (after David Teniers the Younger), Two Monkeys Playing Backgammon, 1635–68

went on to use playing cards as the basis for his early seventeenth-century satirical series entitled The Four Knaves.124 And in his Henry V (c. 1599) Shakespeare parodied the period fixation with tennis when he included a scene of the French ambassador presenting an insulting gift of tennis balls to Henry on behalf of the Dauphin.125 While the implication was that the English king was better suited for frivolities such as tennis than he was for war, the analogy would not have been lost on the audience who would have equated Shakespeare’s fifteenth-century character with Henry VIII, renowned for his own love of the game.126 The reference to tennis in Henry V duly illustrates how games and gaming metaphors were called into action for making commentaries on contemporary political and religious conflicts, which were often propagandistic in nature. In the early sixteenth century, the court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais used the card game primero to frame the political battle between his patron Francis I, and Pope

124 Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 171. 125 1.2.258–97, in Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Taylor, 115–16. 126 Vienne-Guerrin, Shakespeare’s Insults, 397.

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Clement VII and Charles V.127 Anti-Catholic propaganda issued after the Protestant Reformation showed German cards with suits depicting monks’ cowls, choir robes, and fools’ caps.128 Thomas Middleton used A Game at Chess (1624) to make a satirical anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish political and religious commentary, going so far as to present his characters in the guise of White and Black Kings, Queens, Knights, and Bishops, and staging the play in the form of a “living chess” match.129 Games were also at stake in real-life politico-religious debates. The tensions that arose between Catholicism and Protestantism in England after the Reformation led King James I of England to issue his Declaration of Sports (also referred to as the Book of Sports) in 1618.130 In response to the Puritans’ attempts to prohibit game play on Sundays, James’s declaration gave license to his subjects to indulge in such activities, while duly serving a missiological purpose in convincing Protestants that prohibiting Catholics from playing games on the Sabbath made them less likely to convert.131 Games, Class, and Social Order Within the highly stratified society that was early modern Europe, certain games reinforced expectations with regard to class and social order. Cessolis’s treatise on chess had been especially influential in this regard. In his allegorical treatment of the game, he used the chessboard to represent the ideal city, with the various pieces symbolizing the roles that nobles and commoners were expected to play in an orderly society. The imagery of playing cards also implicitly upheld these divisions, the figures based upon the structure of the court setting with values attached according to rank.132 The woodblock prints of cards made by Peter Flötner were later inscribed with verses by Hans Sachs referring to proper social station and the text accompanying the king cards asserting, “Where the common good is 127 Bakhtin, “Role of Games in Rabelais,” 126. 128 In fact, although games came increasingly under attack, the Reformation had little detrimental impact upon the production of playing cards in sixteenth-century Germany; see Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 183, and for the propagandistic anti-Catholic cards, 187–88. 129 Having seen the performance at the Globe playhouse in 1624, John Holles described the “whole play [as] a chessboard, England the white house, Spain the black”; quoted in Yachnin, “Playing with Space,” 44. Middleton derived the notion of “living chess” from Rabelais, who adopted the conceit from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; see Yachnin, “Game at Chess and Chess Allegory,” 321. “Living chess” is discussed in the next chapter. 130 The actual title of the work was The Kings Majesties Declaration to His Subjects Concerning Lawfull Sports to be Used. James ruled as King James VI of Scotland until 1603 when the country was united with England, at which point he became James I. 131 James was no doubt helped along by Philip Stubbes who in his Anatomie of Abuses of 1583 attacked the theater and other recreational activities including cards, dice, tables, tennis, and bowling played on the Sabbath, a day for listening to God’s word; see discussion by Ellis, Games People Play, 18–21. 132 See Husband, World in Play, 9.

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followed, there is good government.”133 Here the textual message was explicit, but the imagery of these and other Nuremberg playing cards also tacitly reinforced class distinctions by showing peasants engaged in unseemly activities that would have been repugnant to aristocratic sensibilities; despite this, the cards were actually intended to appeal to both upper and lower class audiences.134 Other games carried built-in prejudices that similarly spoke to social station. Parlor games were primarily the reserve of the elite, while tennis, originally called “royal tennis,” was initially banned to servants and laborers.135 From the standpoint of the societal hierarchy, gambling—which offered a level playing field—was a truly egalitarian game, but it was nevertheless problematic because there was always the potential for a commoner to best a noble, thus subverting the rigid social order.136 In his treatise Cardano had specifically warned against gambling with unequal partners, a theme reiterated in seventeenth-century English tracts against card playing which complained that gambling caused people of noble birth to mix with those of lower social standing.137 Of course, during Carnival, all bets were off as the seasonal celebrations allowed for the playing of games that challenged the societal hierarchy. Games and Gender In their appeal to both men and women, games naturally brought into consideration issues having to do with gender, particularly in terms of what was deemed appropriate behavior for males versus females in game play.138 Many games were played, if not portrayed, to reinforce ideas on male dominance and masculinity, with warlike games and gambling traditionally seen as passageways to male maturity. But the period also saw women beginning to penetrate what were formerly the preserves of male activities, offering the potential to overturn the prescribed patriarchal order. In Desiderius Erasmus’s dialogue on knucklebones (tali), one of his interlocutors points 133 “Wo gemeiner nutz gefodert wird/ da ist gut Regimente”; see translation and discussion in Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 199–200, and Husband, World in Play, 102ff. 134 Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 183, 212. 135 In a more literal respect De Bondt observes that tennis “enabled the elite, playing on their purpose-built tennis courts, to raise a wall between themselves and the ordinary citizens who continued to play a crude type of tennis in the streets”; Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 196. 136 Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 30. Tennis posed similar problems when the bourgeoisie played against the nobility as realized by Scaino; see McClelland, “Sport and Scientific Thinking in the Sixteenth Century.” 137 Cardano, Liber, 262–63, and Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 3; and Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 213. 138 Vives allowed that some games were not suitable for girls, and that women should not even watch war games; Renson, “Les jeux chez Juan Luis Vivès,” 473–74. Megan Herrold approaches the theme of gambling (in the form of wagers) and gender in her essay in Chapter 3 of this volume.

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out that the age-old game was “scorned even by girls today [who] take up dice, cards, and other masculine amusements instead.”139 Although ball games were typically played by boys and men, Scaino observed that women in Italy played “all Palla”, and an account of a Parisian diarist records that in the fifteenth century a 28-year-old woman tennis player gained fame for winning at the game against men.140 In Venice, the rise of casinos in the seventeenth century offered women free access for mingling with male gamblers—if not playing at cards and gambling themselves, where they could compete on equal terms.141 The courtesan Veronica Franco was alleged to have played cards with her suitors, but even women of unquestionable repute were among those who succumbed to the lure of gambling: in Florence, Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, was an inveterate gambler.142 The theme of strong females reasserted itself in the realm of aristocratic parlor games where women were afforded the opportunity to potentially best men in a legitimized social setting, not subject to the strictures of refined courtly comportment.143 In chess, the emergence of a new version of the game at the end of the fifteenth century saw the queen becoming the most powerful piece on the board, a pertinent metaphor for the feminine challenge to masculine dominance in a game conventionally considered to be a predominantly male activity.144 Games, Love, and Sexual Comportment Games were also used to express contemporary attitudes toward love and sexual comportment (with corresponding implications for women’s reputations), not altogether surprising considering that the word “game,” like “play,” had long carried 139 “Nam istud lusus genus etiam puellis hodie fastiditum est; sed alcam, chartas, aliosque masculos lusus affectant”; Erasmus and Patrick, Colloquiorum, 414, trans. in Erasmus, Colloquies, 894. 140 “Le Donne ancora presso ad Homero giuocavano all Palla, & in Udine terra principalissima del Friuli, & altrove ancora hoggidì le vaghe Donzelle con honesti modi si trastullano in questo giuoco”; Scaino, Trattato del giuoco, 2. Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 145, interprets this as football, although De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 55, suggests the game may refer to tennis. On the woman tennis player, see Guttmann, Sports, 63. 141 Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 61. 142 Ibid., n. 145, for Veronica Franco. Eleonora as an “incorrigible gambler” is discussed by Langdon, Medici Women, 60. 143 Tasso weighed in on the issue of gender in game play, his male character allowing that men lose to women out of a sense of chivalry, with his female arguing against letting women win for amatory reasons; McClure, “Women and the Politics of Play,” 757–59. 144 In fact, the theme of Luis Ramirez de Lucena’s text dealing with the queen’s power in this new game is viewed as “a biting attack on the rising awareness of feminism”; Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, 238. This transformed game is discussed in the next chapter. Because it was initially conceived as a metaphorical war game and was part of the knight’s training, chess was long viewed as a “man’s game”; O’Sullivan, “Introduction,” 9.

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sexual connotations.145 While chess framed as an allegorical contest between men and women in amorous pursuits was a popular and traditional leitmotif in art and literature, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger turned this theme on its head in The Spanish Curate (1622), when a male chess player woos his female opponent in front of the woman’s husband.146 Thomas Heywood used the trope of playing cards and seduction as the impetus for the downfall of a marriage in A Woman Killed with Kindness.147 In his 1603 play, the virtuous wife succumbs to the attractions of her husband’s friend during the course of a card game which leads to adultery (cheating!) and her eventual death. The follower of Lucas van Leyden gave overt acknowledgement to the relationship between card games, sexual advances, and feminine respectability in showing a man nestling up to a woman and hovering his hand over her bosom as he places his other hand on her cards, one displaying the six of hearts.148 Ringhieri’s book of parlor games offered an assortment of games which fell under the rubric of “love,” with games dedicated to, among other things, Chastity—a game meant to control female sexual behavior—or to sublimate it, represented by the Game of the Bawd.149 In Giovanni Antonio de Paoli’s Goose-like board game, Il novo et piacevol gioco del giardin d’amore (The new and pleasing game of the garden of love, c. 1590), the winning player passes through a triumphal arch to enter a walled garden of love where Cupid shoots his bow.150 Paradoxically, while love emerged victorious in that game, in tennis the word “love” was used to signify zero, or complete loss.151

The Social Benefits of Games At their most basic, games were seen to be a source of pleasurable distraction, providing amusement for the players and entertainment for those invited to watch the games in progress. Although physical games such as calcio, tennis, and other 145 See, for example, Poole, “False Play,” 52 n. 10, and Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 43, who also observes that in Sanskrit, the “jewel of games” means copulation. To these we might add “match,” with its traditional connotations of partnership between the sexes. 146 Poole, “False Play,” 68. 147 See discussion by Bloom in “Games.” 148 The image is viewable at the National Gallery of Art website, Anonymous (after Lucas van Leyden), The Card Players, www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.46126.html. 149 McClure, “Women and the Politics of Play,” 772. 150 This game print is illustrated in Ciompi and Seville, Giochi dell’Oca e di percorso, www.giochidelloca. it/images/g/giardinamore1105a.jpg. Another game devoted to love, the Royal Game of Cupid, is discussed by Seville in Royal Game of the Goose, 35–37. 151 According to Leibs, this term may have derived from the English pronunciation of l’oeuf, meaning “egg” in French, which resembles a zero; Leibs, Sports and Games of the Renaissance, 81.

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ball games clearly functioned as spectator sports—Scaino allowed that calcio “gives great pleasure to spectators”—even games such as chess, cards, and board games were typically played in front of an audience as period imagery makes clear. (This is duly suggested by the numerous paintings in which one or more observers watching a game in play direct their gaze to the beholder.) More important, game playing of various kinds was touted as being good for physical and mental health.152 Tasso advocated for games as a welcome break from the rigors of daily life, providing a refreshing diversion that enabled one to return to their tasks more willingly.153 In his Remedio de jugadores (Remedy of game players, 1519) the Dominican friar Pedro de Covarrubias allowed that (some) games were necessary for “alleviation [and] relief, and relaxation from vexation and weariness of the spirit.”154 Scaino voiced a similar sentiment, observing that the ball game was especially beneficial “in the purification of the spirits through which the soul performs all its functions.”155 Cardano took this idea a step further in maintaining that gambling was helpful in times of great anxiety and grief.156 Games were deemed to be important instructional tools in the forming of moral virtues and life skills, especially by the nobility. This is the inference in an English portrait of 1568 which portrays the Earl of Warwick and his wife with their four sons, two of whom play chess as two others play cards while their nursemaid looks on.157 In Venice, card playing and gambling were seen as ways to introduce young men to the world of adulthood, with its implicit lessons to be taught on etiquette and honor.158 Games and game paraphernalia were also employed for more didactic purposes.159 In the fifteenth century the Franciscan Thomas Murner invented card games to teach elementary logic to his university students; in the sixteenth and seventeenth, playing cards were imprinted with imagery and text offering 152 On Scaino, see McClelland, “Sport and Scientific Thinking in the Sixteenth Century,” 136. Cavallo and Storey discuss the positive benefits of game play in the period in Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, 164ff., a theme also treated by McClelland, Body and Mind. 153 In the operative passage in his Il Gonzaga secondo Tasso associated games with trattenimento, or entertainment; Tasso, Il Gonzaga secondo, 9–10, with discussion in McClure, Parlour Games, 5. 154 The chapter is subtitled “como el juego es necessario para la releuacion [y] aliuio: y descanso de la vexacion y fatiga del spiritu”; Covarrubias, Remedio de jugadores, pt. 1, ch. 1 (fol. Va), with translation in Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 145. 155 Scaino, Trattato del giuoco, 1 (1555); and translation in Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 144. 156 “Itaque videtur in gravioribus curis, ad moerobius non tam licere, quàm expedire”; Cardano, Liber, 262; and Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 1. 157 Chess was considered to be an important part of the noble child’s education, a theme duly reflected in several medieval romances which contain vignettes of children playing the game; see Murray, History of Chess, 432–33. 158 Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 55–56. 159 Vives argued for the importance of games in the education of youths in his treatise of 1538, proposing that the school itself was a form of ludus; Vives, Tudor School-Boy Life, xli.

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instruction on such topics as world geography, the planets, important historical events, notable personages presented as exemplars, and even lessons on religion.160 Games were also used in the service of sophisticated mathematical concepts and philosophical theories. Popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Rithmomachia (Battle of Numbers) was played on a double (elongated) chessboard and designed to teach principles of Boethian mathematics while providing moralistic instruction; more intellectual players saw in the game (also known as the “Philosopher’s Game”) the potential to better understand the secrets of the cosmos.161 In Nicolò Cusano’s De ludo globi (The game of spheres, 1463), framing it as a dialogue conducted with the sons of the duke of Bavaria he used his ideas about the vagaries associated with the movement and handling of the ball to “playfully” discuss metaphysics, cosmology, mystical theology, and the soul.162 Scaino’s treatise on ball games relied on mathematical and geometric models for his discussion of tennis, while Cardano, a polymath as well as a gambler, used dice and card games to articulate his theory on probability.163 While board games were generally considered to be training for the game of life, some games were played to hone the tactical skills and knowledge needed for war. In the late Middle Ages, sporting games such as tournaments and jousts often took on the dimensions of a competitive game viewed as physical preparation for battle; so too, did chess and its derivatives, but from a strategic point of view.164 In his treatise on chess, Cessolis laid the groundwork for this idea, using the chessboard to signify the battlefield while expounding on the duties of the knight and rook (soldier) as reflected in the chess pieces themselves.165 In the sixteenth century Luigi Guicciardini reasserted these allegorical relationships in comparing the 160 On Murner, see especially Pauser, “Invention of Educational Card Games in the Renaissance”; and for examples of didactic playing cards, Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 107–9, 161–62, 191. Naomi Lebens examines the instructional playing cards made for the young king Louis XIV in Chapter 2 of this volume. 161 The subject is treated by Moyer, Philosopher’s Game. 162 See Duclow, “Life and Works,” 46; and Cusano, De ludo globi, 152–68. Cusano, who is also referred to as Nicholas of Cuso and Nicolaus Cusanus, is discussed by Giovanna Guidicini in Chapter 8. 163 On Scaino, see McClelland “Sport and Scientific Thinking in the Sixteenth Century”; and for Cardano’s treatise, Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 44–46. 164 For example, Rithmomachia was the game of “battling numbers,” while Weickmann’s chess game, conceived after the Thirty Years War, portrays the game as a battle for the off ices of a kingdom; von Hilgers, War Games, 21–26. Moreover, as Huizinga notes, armed combat might also be accompanied by a game of dice; Homo Ludens, 81. 165 The figurative relationship between the board and the battlefield is well expressed in Italian, with scacciera meaning chessboard, and scacciere used to denote a military zone. This connection to combat was also expressed literally: because chessboards were often constructed of wood or metal, they made for effective weapons. Medieval romances relate how chessboards and chess pieces were flung at the player’s opponent after quarrels over a game of chess, actions that were based on actual happenstance; see discussion by Murray, History of Chess, 739–42.

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game of chess to the military arts in his manuscript “Compara[z]ione del giuoco delli scacchi alla arte militaire,” which he dedicated to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Likewise, Bardi and Scaino saw ball games such as calcio and tennis fruitful for helping players cultivate the skills needed for combat.166 Cards, too, served as metaphorical battles, with Aretino likening them to playing at arms and equating gamblers with soldiers for their similar quest for Fortune.167 The educational Game of Fortifications, a variation of the Goose game produced in 1697 by an engineer in the service of Louis XIV, was designed to be played with dice or cut up to make a pack of playing cards, with each card illustrating an aspect of the military stronghold.168 Games played a part in diplomacy. Dignitaries and courtiers at the French courts were regularly invited to watch their hosts in a game of tennis—or even engage in play themselves. In London in 1522 to discuss a political alliance with Henry VIII, Emperor Charles V was asked to serve as Henry’s doubles partner in a game of tennis.169 Game objects were duly considered appropriate gifts for presentation to foreign sovereigns. The Venetian diarist Marino Sanudo wrote in 1527 about a chess set on display in the Doge’s Palace, “wrought of gold and silver and inlaid with chalcedony, jasper, and other jewels,” with the chess pieces made of the “purest crystal”; it was thought that the set might be presented to the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman.170 In the late sixteenth century, Duke Francesco I de’ Medici gave a Game of the Goose playing board to King Philip II of Spain, an especially attractive offering considering their mutual interest in numerology and symbolism.171 Less prestigious, but what must have been viewed as a masterful creation was the confectionary chessboard Cardinal Wolsey presented to the French ambassador at a banquet held in Hampton Court in 1528.172 While acknowledging the French

166 While Bardi was specif ically concerned with calcio, Scaino saw the applications in both tennis and calcio. De Bondt provides a cogent synopsis of Scaino’s views on tennis as benef icial to battle: it “constitutes the best possible test to value the player’s character and stamina in a personal battle. In his quest for personal honor the dedicated player will eventually become famous if he applies the right strategy. On court he must appear calm and collected and never show his fear of losing. The ball game will teach Capitano how to lead armies, how to plan a battle, how to capture or defend a stronghold. In addition, he will learn when to advance or retreat and how to take the enemy by surprise and lead him into making errors of judgement”; De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 65. 167 See Walker’s discussion, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 49, 68–69. 168 Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 39–40. 169 Gillmeister, Tennis, 40. 170 “[U]no scacchier grande bellissimo in tondo et alto lavorato d’arzento et d’oro con calzedonie, diaspri ed altre zoie, et li scacchi di cristallo finisimo” (Sanudo, Diari, XLIII, 599); quoted in Molmenti, Golden Age, 2: 158, with English translation by LaBalme and White, Cità Excelentissima, 263. 171 Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 16. 172 Murray, History of Chess, 773, indicates that this was a “sweetmeat,” which could have been a sugar sculpture or a cake.

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for their skill at chess, the tribute would have paid implicit homage to Francis I, himself an avid player of the game. Games were included among the activities staged for contemporary marriages. In 1558 the Florentine wedding of Lucrezia de’ Medici and Alfonso II d’Este was celebrated with the playing of two games of calcio. Over thirty years later, calcio was again included in the festivities when Ferdinando de’ Medici married Christina of Lorraine in Florence. Tasso used the occasion of Alfonso’s (third) marriage as the setting for the dialogue in his Il Romeo overo del giuoco, in which his characters discuss a range of games and the new bride watches her husband playing primero.173 Luxury gaming objects were also commissioned as wedding gifts celebrating the union of important families. A sixteenth-century Venetian gaming table incorporated the arms of two patrician families in the center of the marble top, with an inlaid backgammon and a chessboard at either end.174 Games were used to assert civic and even national identity. Scaino’s treatise on calcio had stressed its importance as a Florentine game despite the fact that it was played elsewhere. So important was calcio to the city’s identity that in 1606 authorities issued a law punishing anyone who stopped a game in progress in the piazza of Santa Croce.175 In Nuremberg, home to a thriving card-making industry, a common practice among card makers was to depict the arms of the city on the cards they produced, thus spreading the fame of Nuremberg (and the card makers themselves) wherever their cards were sold.176 A variation on the Goose game, Le jeu des princes de l’Europe (The game of the princes of Europe, c. 1662), had players traveling through various regions before arriving in France, described as “the eye and pearl of the world”; not surprisingly, the originator served as the geographer to King Louis XIV.177 This game may well have inspired the unusual game board printed in 1678 entitled Lo splendore della nobilta Napoletana (The splendors of Neapolitan nobility). The playing surface depicts 183 shields of the Neapolitan nobles, each shield serving as a claim to aristocratic status, with the player’s passage suggesting the ceremonials of a court culture.178 Even parlor games staged as public performances for visiting dignitaries were seen to enhance the reputation of the city as Bargagli informs us in his treatise.179

173 See McClure, Parlour Games, 5. 174 Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, 132, figs. 149, 150. 175 Doidge, “Il Calcio as a Source of Local and Social Identity,” 40. 176 Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 193. The card makers put their personal monograms on the cards. 177 Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 38–39. 178 Fabris, “Giochi, spettacoli e società,” 47, with illustration on 45. 179 Bargagli’s account is contained in McClure, Parlour Games, 58.

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Games contributed to European economies, playing a quantitative role in local and national commercial enterprises. While mercantile endeavors often involved taking monetary risks—in other words, gambling—business in games and gaming equipment proved to be a rewarding venture.180 In the sixteenth century, France did a brisk business supplying tennis balls to England, with over 12,000 furnished in one month in 1567 as the London port records attest.181 The demand for games also stimulated—if not was stimulated by—a vibrant print culture, with gaming paraphernalia such as game boards, playing cards, and instructional treatises easily reproduced and propagated thanks to the printing process.182 Trade in playing cards was especially lucrative.183 During Carnival when proscriptions against gambling were generally relaxed, the sales of playing cards increased dramatically, earning sizeable profits for those who made and sold them.184 Playing cards also generated funds through taxation by regional and national entities, which allowed governments and sovereigns such as Charles V and even the pope to control gambling as they profited from it.185 A similar financial benefit occurred with state-sponsored lotteries.186 On a local level, Italian communes rented out the local baratteria (gaming shop) which allowed them to fill their civic coffers with profits made from gambling.187 Games were actively promoted by purveyors of food and alcohol, who recognized the money to be made by offering venues for game playing and drinking (especially when they took a share of the winnings). If such practices are indicative of how games had a quantifiable impact upon early modern economies, Ringhieri’s Game of the Merchant offers a more cogent example, using the terminology of trade and commerce to teach players the vagaries of mercantile activities.188

180 As scholars have noted, the line between common wagers and speculating on trade was often blurred. 181 Port and Trade of Early Elizabethan London, 118. 182 As Bloom, “Games,” 197, observes, with the spread of printing technologies it was cheaper to produce playing cards, game boards, and game manuals, which made games more available to the masses. 183 By the 1680s over a million decks were being manufactured every year; Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 199; and Tosney, “The Playing Card Trade in Early Modern England,” 637. 184 Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 37 n. 36. During the period 1500 to 1700, gambling in Venice saw a substantial increase relative to the growing importance of Carnival in the social and economic life of the city; ibid., 57. 185 Depaulis, “Bingo!,” 43–45. 186 In sixteenth-century Venice, the “lotto” promoted by the doge Andrea Gritti to benefit the mercantile state was duly embraced by the clergy and monasteries, including convents, as a method of funding; see discussion by Olivieri, “Jeu et Capitalisme à Venise.” In Genoa, a new form of the lotto (the lotto di Genova) was begun in 1576, which eventually displaced other lotteries; Zollinger, “Gioco e finanza.” 187 This practice began in the late thirteenth century; Ortalli, “Uncertain Thresholds of Tolerance,” 65. The negative associations of the baratteria are reflected in the term barattiere which refers to a corrupt official or cheat. 188 See McClure, Culture of Profession, 58.

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As well as contributing to early modern economies, the period enthusiasm for games provided numerous opportunities for artists and craftsmen. Skilled artisans were called upon to fabricate luxury games and game-related objects, but even more humble materials were manufactured bearing game imagery. In seventeenth-century Netherlands, Delft tiles ornamented with motifs of children playing games were produced for decorating the walls of bourgeoisie interiors.189 We have seen how period artists responded to the gaming trend with paintings depicting game players, but their works were sometimes reproduced in cheaper prints for the popular market.190 The construction of special tennis courts and other auxiliary structures for game play provided financial incentives for those involved in the building trade. Even the work of sculptors was called into play. For the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, a new tennis court was constructed in 1625, with Gian Lorenzo Bernini tasked to create marble versions of tennis balls, which were then mounted on walnut pedestals leading the way to the court.191

The Downside to Games In his Book of Sports King James I had had to toe the fine line between honoring the Sabbath and advocating for game play, but there were plenty of moral implications against games in this epoch—ironically enough considering all the games that were meant to inculcate moralistic values. Partially the argument was expressed in terms of games being a waste of time, a counterpoise to the idea of games used to “pass time.”192 Such thinking echoed Seneca’s words in the first century CE: “It would take too long to examine all those who have wasted their lives with board-games or ball-playing or acquiring a really good sun-tan.”193 For Puritans, indulgence in games and other recreations was believed to lead to idleness (cousin to sloth and melancholy), an affront to the value of time that was a God-given benefit crucial to

189 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 497. Pieter de Hooch’s painting of The Bedroom (c. 1660) shows such tiles on the wall, viewable at the National Gallery of Art website, www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/ Collection/art-object-page.1172.html. 190 In terms of audience, Burke invites us to consider the issue of where such paintings would have been originally displayed and who would have bought or commissioned them; Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 146. In the case of Bruegel, Orrock (“Homo Ludens,” 3–4) suggests that his paintings were probably commissioned by Antwerp’s professional merchant class and displayed within their homes where they served as conversation pieces for like-minded individuals. 191 De Bondt, “Apollo and Hyacinth Tennis Theme,” 130 and n. 37. 192 Burke addresses the notion of games as a means to “pass time” in “Invention of Leisure,” 143. 193 “Persequi singulos longum est, quorum aut latrunculi aut pila aut excoquendi in sole corporis cura consumpsere vitam”; Seneca, De brevitate vitae, 13.1, trans. in Purcell, “Literate games,” 185–86.

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living a productive life.194 In his emblem book of 1552 Barthélemy Aneau depicted tennis as a futile undertaking, the image showing two tennis players accompanied by the motto “great, but useless effort.”195 Years earlier Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools, 1494) had included a woodcut of four players wearing fools’ caps in his chapter “On Gamblers,” a potent assertion of gambling as a foolish enterprise. Even the noble game of chess was not excluded from criticism. James I who was otherwise disposed to game play, described it as a “philosophical follie,” while the Catholic theologian Jean Baptiste Thiers criticized chess for its failure to exercise the body and its propensity to cause excessive fatigue of the mind.196 Cardano cautioned that the losses incurred in gambling might lead to the “lessening of reputation,” while others saw games as the threshold to greater sins.197 In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), one of his characters expressed this concern in no uncertain terms, invoking the Cheat when he opines: “Look at all the crooked games of chance like dice, cards, backgammon, bowling and quoits, in which money slips away so fast. Don’t all these pastimes lead their devotees straight to robbery?”198 Several decades later, Martin Luther was more succinct in labeling gamblers (but not card players) “thieves before God.”199 Luther probably had cheats in mind, but tracts against gambling adopted a more specific moralistic bent, with images of cheaters and swindlers serving a similar admonitory purpose. Although Cardano had advocated for playing games of chance in times of anxiety and grief, others believed that a propensity for game play had a deleterious effect on the human spirit, creating an imbalance of humors that was manifested in melancholy. The clergyman Robert Burton cited a “love of gaming” as one of the causes for this condition in his medical treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy (published in 1621).200 Some years earlier Matthias Gerung had given visual expression to the 194 Ellis discusses the puritanical notion in Games People Play, 21. According to Arcangeli, at the end of the Middle Ages, sloth merged with melancholy and came to be identified with idleness; Recreation in the Renaissance, 15–16. 195 In his Picta poesis; see De Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy, 198. 196 James’s words were contained in his Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gift), which took the form of a letter to his son Henry advising him how to be an effective ruler. Describing chess as being “over-wise and Philosophicke a folly,” James objected to the game for its propensity to fill men’s heads with thoughts of their game plays rather than thinking about more important affairs; quoted in Murray, History of Chess, 839 n. 7. The Basilikon Doron was composed around 1599, when James was still ruling as James VI of Scotland; it was later published during his reign as King James I of England and Scotland. On Thiers, see Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance, 43. 197 “Damna verò iactura existimationis”; Cardano, Liber, 263; and Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 4. 198 Quoted in Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England, 124. 199 Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 189. 200 This appears in his chapter entitled “Causes of Melancholy”; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 171. Burton’s text was revised and expanded f ive times during his lifetime, with eight editions released. Citations in this essay are from his sixth edition (1651–52).

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linkage between games and melancholy in his painting Melancholy in the Garden of Love (1558).201 The image shows the fulsome, oversized title character seated in a verdant landscape surrounded by a host of people engaged in a variety of leisurely activities and playing games including quoits, bearbaiting, jousting, and sports.202 Appropriate to the scenario are two jesters, no doubt included for their time-honored role as a cure to sadness.203 Gerung’s pleasurable tableau belies the fact that game play had the potential to drive men from a melancholic state to outright madness. Cardano acknowledged that “gambling arouses anger and disturbs the mind,” while Burton was more effusive in pronouncing that all gamesters who lose when gambling at tables and cards become “so choleric and testy that no man may speak with them, and break many times into violent passions, oaths, imprecations, and unbeseeming speeches, little differing from mad men for the time.”204 Perhaps no more piquant illustration of the connection between games and madness is that reflected in the Italian “joker” playing card represented in the guise of the fool and referred to as il Matto: the madman. Like melancholy and madness itself, games were also associated with occult activity, especially games dependent on chance.205 The antithesis of Divine Providence, Fortune—the ruling agent in such games—was often linked to the devil. Dice and playing cards had long been condemned by religious leaders such as the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena who in the early fifteenth century had called playing cards the “devil’s breviaries.”206 His ideas were propagated by his fellow Franciscan James of the Marches who portrayed games as the devil’s religion, using imaginative religious metaphors to castigate dice and playing cards and the people who played them.207 Despite allowing that some games were good for the spirits, de Covarrubias nevertheless attached diabolical connotations to games of chance such as cards and dice.208 Astonishingly, in the early sixteenth century, 201 The original name in German is Die Melancholie im Garten des Lebens; see next note. 202 The female personif ication of Melancholy in the garden of love bears on the poetic courtly tradition of “love melancholy” attributed to women; see Bell, Melancholia, 92. The image is viewable at Wikimedia Commons (Die Melancholie im Garten des Lebens), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Matthias_Gerung_Die_Melancholie_im_Garten_des_Lebens.JPG. 203 Jesters are mentioned frequently in Burton’s treatise. 204 Cardano, Liber, 262, “quòd Ludus iram mouet, turbat mentem”; Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 2; and Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 174. 205 Burton addresses this issue in his section entitled “A Digression of the nature of Spirits, bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy”; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 55. Kevin Chovanec examines the connection between occult activity and dice in Chapter 4 of this volume. 206 Dice were censured especially because they were associated with the Crucifixion. On Bernardino, see Depaulis, “Breviari del diavolo so’ le carte e naibi,” 115–34. 207 Ibid., 123–25. 208 Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 145.

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Thomas Murner, who had employed playing cards to teach his students logic, was accused of witchcraft for his success.209 Notwithstanding chess’s noble pedigree, it, too, was aligned with insidious occult activity. In Robert Browne’s Religio medico (The religion of a doctor) of 1643 he writes: “Thus the Devill playd at Chesse with mee, and yeelding a pawne, thought to gaine a Queene of me, taking advantage of my honest endeavors.”210 What moralists put into words, artists expressed in more macabre fashion, with Death playing a major iconographic role. In his woodblock print from around 1524–25 Hans Holbein depicted the fate that lay in store for the hapless gamester, Death strangling the card player as the Devil waits to take his soul. A similar outcome is expressed in Bruegel’s Triumph of Death (1562). Set against a devastated landscape peopled by skeletons and corpses, in the right foreground a backgammon board and playing cards have been knocked to the ground as a jester tries to find refuge under the table, where the coins used for gambling are displayed. Mitelli combined text and image in his engraving of the Giuocatore (see again Figure I.3), adding a caption below the figure in which Death (Morte) cautions the player about the risk of losing his soul at the expense of profiting from game play.211 That the perniciousness of gambling was linked with Death presents a somewhat ironical note to what seems to have been contemporary practice: Cardano informs us that gambling was permitted at funeral banquets.212 Notwithstanding the vehement outcries against games made by religious and moralistic leaders in this period, Luther himself resorted to using game metaphors in his preaching. In a sermon of 1525, he presented God as the ultimate game player (although assuredly not a “gamester”) writing: “If I were rich, I would have myself made a golden chess set and silver playing cards as a remembrance; for God’s chess pieces and cards are great and mighty princes, kings and emperors; for He always trumps or overcomes one through another, that is, lifts him off his feet and throws him down.”213 Luther goes on to refer to contemporary rulers before declaring that 209 Hoffmann, Playing Card, 38. 210 Quoted in Poole, “False Play,” 64. Actually, Browne’s linkage of chess with the devil had been a popular conceit in medieval chess allegories; see Yachnin, “Game at Chess and Chess Allegory,” 323–24; and Juel, “Defeating the Devil at Chess,” 90–92. 211 Mitelli’s engraving is part of a satirical series entitled Le ventiquattr’hore dell’humana felicità (The twenty-four hours of human happiness), which juxtaposed allegorical figures with verses on dialogues with Death. The work was dedicated to Cardinal Giovanni Nicola Conti. See Mitelli, Le ventiquattr’Hore dell’humana felicità. 212 Cardano, Liber, 262, “ut licuerit in epulis mortuorum ludere”; and Cardano, Book on Games of Chance, 1. He also cited a “heading in the law books” entitled “Funeral expenses and games of chance” (Unde titulus est a pud Iurisconsultos de sumptibus funerum, & ludo Aleae); ibid. 213 Translated in Smoller, “Playing Cards and Popular Culture,” 188–89, with German original text supplied in n. 25.

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Fig. I.5  Lubin Bauguin, Still Life with Chessboard, 1630

“[l]astly, our Lord God comes, deals out the cards, and beats the pope with Luther, which is His ace […].”214 Luther himself was an avid chess player and a frequent bowler—he used the pins to represent devils, demons, and papal officials—the latter activity he had in common with his contemporary John Calvin.215 Calvin was to emerge as a substantial voice in the religious battle over games and game playing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Preaching a doctrine of Divine Providence and predestination, he set the stage for his followers who took special issue with games and especially those dependent upon Chance: reliance on Fortune reflected a rejection of God’s will, allowing for the intercession of occult forces.216 While Calvinist subtexts undergird many a Dutch painting in the seventeenth century, a still life by the French artist Lubin Baugin from 1630 presents an overt moralistic message (Figure I.5). Juxtaposing objects including playing cards, a 214 The references are to the pope, the Turk, the emperor, and Ferdinand; ibid. 215 On Luther, see Mansch and Peters, Martin Luther, 140. 216 For example, Fortune ruled over life’s forces on earth, as opposed to Providence, which was an expression of God’s will; Walker, “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen,” 43. In Geneva where Calvin was to preach in the 1540s, his immediate influence is seen in the city prohibiting dice, cards, and ball games in 1546; Selderhuis, John Calvin, 158.

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chessboard, and a purse full of money (alluding to the illicit profits made from gambling on games) with the Eucharistic symbols of bread and a chalice, he neatly articulates the proper course to spiritual redemption.217 Rejection of game play was paramount. *** In the chapters that follow our scholars employ a variety of methodologies—literary and iconographical analyses, connoisseurship, social and feminist history, and permutations thereof—to expand upon several of the games and issues treated in this preliminary overview. While not all European countries are covered (only France, England, Scotland, Italy, and Germany are represented), these studies nevertheless inform us of the various ways in which artists and writers, game makers and collectors, lowborn and aristocratic players, and rulers responded to the vogue for games in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.218 Although almost evenly divided between art and literature, the essays are arranged in “gaming” sections that allow us to better appreciate how games infiltrated all forms of cultural expression, without privileging the discipline over the game leitmotif itself. Five of the chapters are concerned with games and game playing as expressed in painting, prints, sculpture, and collections of game objects. Of the four remaining chapters that treat games in period drama, notably, all deal with the works of English playwrights. While this regional focus speaks to the flourishing theater industry in London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it also illustrates the propensity of dramatists to appeal to their audiences with popular references to the gaming theme. A subtle undercurrent running through several of the visual and literary works treated in these essays is the linkage of games with “madness,” which we might see as an apt metaphor for the period mania for game play. Part I is devoted to chess and luxury playing cards, here grouped together as aristocratic pastimes. In the opening essay Robin O’Bryan adopts a semiotic approach in analyzing a sixteenth-century Italian painting that depicts a chess game in progress. In his Partita a scacchi (The Game of Chess) Giulio Campi showed a knight and a well-dressed woman engaged in chess combat, attended by several other figures and a scowling dwarf jester who commands the woman’s attention. Highlighting the erotic content of the artist’s pictorial plays, O’Bryan demonstrates 217 The inclusion of the chessboard with the cards and money bag alludes to the fact that chess was often played for stakes; on this point, see Murray, History of Chess, 474. 218 It is noteworthy that with the exception of Scotland, these same four countries are those which saw the most production of game texts in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries; Patterson, “Game On: Medieval Players and Their Texts,” 7. This output reflects a deeply rooted game culture which was manifested in art and literature.

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how his iconography was rooted in artistic and literary conventions that treated the game as an allegory of love and sexual conquest. In addition to identifying these prototype works, she goes a step further in envisioning the scene as a game of “living chess,” showing how Campi used directional glances and pointed gestures to set the game in motion. While this method of presentation speaks to the artist’s ingenuity in treating the chess topos, the composition duly betrays his knowledge of contemporary rules of chess play. A change to the game in the late fifteenth century saw the queen becoming the most potent piece on the chessboard, leading to the revised game being dubbed scacchi alla rabiosa, or “mad chess.” Campi alludes to this transformed game through the gestures and attributes of the woman player and her interaction with the dwarf jester whose maniacal expression provides the key for interpreting the enigmatic iconography. The artist’s rendering of chess players reflects the popularity of the topos in this epoch, even as his unique presentation provides subtle insights into gender relations, sexuality, and the rise of feminine power in Renaissance Italy. In Chapter 2, Naomi Lebens examines four sets of didactic playing cards made for the five-year-old French king, Louis XIV, in the mid-seventeenth century. Illustrated by the Italian artist Stefano della Bella, the cards were embellished with textual information by Jean Desmarets, a French writer and dramatist at the royal court. The cards were originally intended to provide Louis with the rudiments of basic knowledge, while offering moralistic lessons on responsible rulership. The Game of French Kings and the Game of Famous Queens assigned numerical values based upon positive or negative character traits, which emphasized the attributes associated with and expected of the most praiseworthy monarchs, and in the case of the queens, also reinforced cultural ideas on virtuous conduct and sexual mores for women. Nationalist pride was stressed, evident in the Game of French Kings and the Game of Geography (which put a high premium on French territorial holdings in the context of the Thirty Years War). Interestingly, some of Della Bella’s imagery was based on the costumes of court ceremonials, another example of the intersection between games and performance. Over the course of fifty years the plates for printing the cards were sold and the cards reissued in the form of books and prints for collection and use by a popular audience. Lebens’s discussion provides a potent illustration of the merging of class boundaries that was often attendant in game play, while also demonstrating the impact of game culture upon commercial enterprise in early modern Europe. Part II is devoted to gambling and games of chance, which includes not only dice and board games, but also wagers. In Chapter 3 Megan Herrold takes up the subject of gambling as a subtext of several of Shakespeare’s plays, with a specific focus on implications of gender. Shakespeare was fully conversant in the rhetoric and imagery of gambling—his dialogues are sprinkled liberally with words such as

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“odds,” “stakes,” “luck,” “adventure,” and the like—and his characters gamble with frequent abandon. However, it is not cards or dice or other games they play here, but rather bets among and between each other. Shakespeare’s gambling plotlines are tied to patriarchal authority, social standing, love, sexual potency, and feigned madness, and bring in the expected acts of cheating, conning, and duping. The stakes are often high, with the outcomes potentially leading to emasculation, social perdition, or the greatest of “odds-levelers”: death. We are introduced to the “stylish” male gamester, who gambles to affirm his masculinity and dominance over rivals and women; when females assume the role of gamester they leave cuckoldry and depleted male identity in their wake. Amid these dramatic conflicts, Shakespeare entertains with puns and playful metaphors on gambling terms. Marriage vows are declared to be as false as dicers’ oaths, and women are compared to loaded dice. Especially piquant are his puns on “stakes,” which allude to the stakes used in bearbaiting, a popular betting activity whose arenas were located near the London playhouses. Considering the traditional relationship between theaters and blood sports, this play on “stakes” is especially pertinent given that Shakespeare’s wagers often result in “a stage littered with bodies.” The gamester reemerges in Chapter 4, but he is now in league with the devil. Kevin Chovanec investigates gambling in English stage productions with a specific focus on dice and their relationship to the occult, a popular subtext of seventeenth-century plays. Seeking to explain the gambling craze, contemporary moralists argued that it was due to possession by occult forces. Dramatists responded in kind, using as their source material puritanical pamphlets which decried games of chance by linking them to the devil, witchcraft, and demons. One pamphleteer asks if the “gamester” invoked enchantment to become a winner, which seems to be the premise of the play by the anonymous writer who frames the courtesan’s bewitchment of a lover in the context of a dice game. Thomas Middleton uses the husband’s addiction to gambling and dice as the portal for demonic possession, which ultimately brings about the downfall of his family and leads him to murder. What is there in three dice he asks, for to hazard a roll of the dice was to risk the devil’s intervention. Thomas Heywood plays to this trope (and invokes Franciscan-like metaphors) when his character refers to Satan as the inventor of the dice. In yet another overlap between games and entertainment, moralists linked gambling to the theater since both exerted an occult pull on players and spectators. Dicing games played especially well to the dramatic context since dice and the theater were rooted in deceit—and, as Chovanec reminds us—there was “inherent theatricality” in the roll of a die. In Chapter 5 Patricia Rocco discusses the game prints produced by the seventeenth-century Bolognese artist Giuseppi Maria Mitelli, which exhibit and use three dice in their play. Tracing the roots of his iconography to parlor games, local proverbs and folklore, and the works of the popular satirist Benedetto Croce

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and the Carracci family painters, Rocco shows how Mitelli’s games asserted the city’s identity while responding to the religious demands imposed by the Counter-Reformation. His game prints functioned as “hybrids” for a high and low audience, which enabled players to temporarily perform the roles of the characters portrayed in his imagery. Although Mitelli was quite prolific in the production of these prints, Rocco focuses on three games operating under the rubric of the world upside down (which we might see as another implicit nod to madness). Two of these two games deal with the theme of food—one with gluttony, the other with deprivation—while offering social commentaries on class differences and the contemporary food shortages brought about by war and famine. The third game is presented as a cautionary tale about two female characters, whose behavior deviates from the pious model expected of Bolognese women. Divided into twenty-four squares, the winning “home” space (achieved only by rolling three 6s) was positioned at the very beginning of the game, thus reinforcing the notion that the woman’s rightful place was in the home. Paradoxically, while virtuous lessons were couched in Mitelli’s games of chance, the only way to achieve moral victory when playing them was by rolling the dice—a clear affront to the Church’s views on gambling. Outdoor and sportive games are the focus of Part III. In Chapter 6, Bethany Packard analyzes the works of English dramatists who used the rhetoric and actions of prisoner’s base, a typical children’s game, for their adult characters. Packard provides a cogent explanation of the mechanics, nuances, and variants of prisoner’s base, highlighting the notion of contingency, where players both pursue and are themselves pursued, which exposes them to sudden turns of fortune. As becomes evident in her analysis, period playwrights were clearly familiar with the rules and language of the game, which they manipulated for optimal effect in plotlines dealing with social class, political machinations, battles, love and sex, madness, and women’s agency. Richard Brome’s noble character prefers the country game of prisoner’s base to hunting with his aristocratic peers, while Christopher Marlowe presented the game as an analogue for an ensuing civil war, the relationship to battle similarly treated by Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, Brome, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare working with John Fletcher, used the game and/or its corollary, barley-break, as metaphors for romance and sexual activity. Henry Chettle invoked both games in the actions and lines for his female protagonist who pursues and is pursued, safeguards her chastity, and cures her temporary madness, all while playing the game. Given its origins as a children’s activity, such titillating adult themes may seem a bit incongruous, but playwrights duly recognized that components of the game—chasing and capturing—were actions mirrored in the game of courtship. Prisoner’s base references were additionally suited for the theatrical venue since children’s games in England were referred to as “plays.”

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In Chapter 7 Mark Kaethler turns the discussion to tennis as reflected in the title of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The World Tossed at Tennis. The drama was originally intended to be performed in London as a masque for King James I and his son Charles, and was no doubt meant to appeal to their advocacy of and interest in tennis. However, apart from the fact that “tennis” appears in the title, the work has actually little to do with the game itself. Rather, the playwrights use tennis metaphors as a moralistic allegory for the differing approaches taken by James and Charles regarding English involvement at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. As Kaethler’s careful analysis shows, the playwrights’ allusive language invokes the two ways of playing the game, that is, both with the racket, or with the hand as in the original French version. The ending of the play thus suggests the importance of taking a twofold team approach—as in tennis—for handling the military crisis, with the work implicitly using the tennis metaphor as an assertion of national identity. Among the cast of characters we find Deceit and the Devil, whose inclusion in this drama “about” tennis suggests the playwrights were tapping into the contemporary moralistic outcries against games and their representation on the stage. That this royal masque ostensibly about tennis was transformed for the popular audience finds an interesting corollary in the period conversion of princely covered tennis courts into public theaters. Games on display are treated literally and figuratively in Part IV. In Chapter 8, Giovanni Guidicini examines the sculptural decorations made for King James’s predecessor James V of Scotland for his castle in Stirling. After establishing the Stewart royals’ strong tradition of game play at their court—both typically outdoor activities such as tennis and bowling, and interior games like chess and playing cards—she proceeds to show how this game culture may be reflected in the statuary that adorns three of the palace facades. Guidicini posits that the imagery of luxury playing cards and Nicolaus Cusanus’s (Nicolò Cusano), treatise on the game of spheres inspired the iconography of the exterior sculptures and was meant to impart edifying and moralizing messages for the king and his courtiers. On one facade, statues of children throwing balls toward a devilish figure associated with Sloth might remind courtiers playing ball in the Bowling Green below not to succumb to idleness, but to instead play the moralistic ball game such as described by Cusanus. This would allow them to demonstrate their own physical virtues while prompting dual reflection on their place in the cosmos. On the other two facades Guidicini argues that the sculptures served as three-dimensional representations of the characters illustrated in Trionfi cards—astrological deities, mythological figures, and members of the courtly household (including the Fool)—and were duly indebted to contemporary triumphal imagery. Thus, this imaginary stone parade of triumphal figures on the castle walls would honor James’s rule as sovereign even as they functioned as a metaphor for his imposing social order, a philosophical claim for controlling his realm as he did in the handling of cards.

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Greger Sundin’s discussion of the game objects assembled by the Augsburg art agent Philipp Hainhofer serves as a fitting conclusion to the essays presented in our volume. A diplomat and entrepreneur, in the seventeenth century Hainhofer created a number of Kunstschränke (art cabinets) which were intended to function as miniature Kunstkammern for a wealthy clientele. Two of his projects—one commissioned by a duke, the other presented by the city as a gift to a visiting royal—serve as the basis for Sundin’s study. Hainhofer included a number of games in these two cabinets, not only the more commonplace games of skill and chance, but also others with obscure pedigrees and inexplicable rules; as well, some of the gaming boards were actually incorporated as pull-out shelves in the cabinets’ design. Notably, although a few of the games in the collections show signs of use, the bulk were meant for display, reminding us again how game objects duly functioned as objects of status and delectation. In his investigation, Sundin proposes an interesting paradox regarding the traditional role of kings and princes as tastemakers, suggesting that with Hainhofer, who assembled these games for his potential clients, the roles were reversed: it was the agent who actually influenced the taste of his noble patrons. Ironically, given the unusual manner in which he operated (spending money on art cabinets before securing a buyer), Hainhofer emerges as an inveterate “gamester.” Although apparently motivated more by aesthetic impulses and personal pleasure than by monetary gain, his obsession with games contributed to his near financial ruin. Hainhofer remains little known in the annals of general history, but he must surely be seen as an important figure in the history of games. As well as leaving us with tangible game objects and detailed records of the games he assembled and had fabricated for his Kunstschränke, he gave accounts in his diaries of the types of games he played during his travels. He was not alone in putting to paper what today might seem to be rather banal activities. Writing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the physicians Thomas and Felix Platter and Hippolytus Guarinonius evidently considered the gaming experience to be noteworthy enough that they recorded in their journals the games they had watched during their travels throughout Europe.219 The London diarist Samuel Pepys was no less informative, recording for a two-year period the fifteen card games he had played or watched, typically after dinner (like Rabelais’s Gargantua).220 After visiting France in 1598, the Englishman Sir Robert Dallington was particularly struck by the French propensity for tennis, later commenting “there be more tennis players in France 219 See various accounts in Katritzky, Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians. 220 The years were 1664–66; Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, 2: 150 passim. He also mentions (ibid., 2: 275) the game of “shovelboard” (shuffleboard) that was played on a table with coins, which sounds similar to tiddlywinks.

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than ale drinkers […] with us.”221 Although clearly speaking in hyperbolic terms, his observation is striking nevertheless since it offers confirmation of how early moderns themselves recognized that the times in which they lived were besotted with games and game play.

Bibliography Primary Sources Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Burton, Robert [and William Otter]. The Anatomy of Melancholy: what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostics, and several cures of it; In three partitions; With their several sections, members, and subsections […] opened and cut up. London: printed for Messrs. Vernor and Hood, 1804. Cardano, Girolamo. The Book on Games of Chance, trans. Sidney Henry Gould. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961. ———. Liber de ludo aleae, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano, www. filosofia.unimi.it/cardano/testi/operaomnia/vol_1_s_10.pdf (accessed 27 September 2018). Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1967. ———. Il cortegiano del conte Baldesar Castiglione, ed. Vittorio Cian. Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1894. Cessolis, Jacobus de. The Book of Chess by Jacob de Cessolis, trans. and ed. H.L. Williams. New York: Ithaca Press, 2008. Cotton, Charles. The Compleat Gamester: Or, 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: printed by A.M. for R. Cutler, 1674. Covarrubias, Pedro de. Remedio de jugadores. Burgos, 1543. Cusano, Nicolò. “De ludo globi.” In Opera Omnia, vol. 1. Paris, 1514. Erasmus, Desiderius. Colloquies, trans. and annot. Craig Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

221 Dallington’s words were contained in his A Method for Travell: Shewed by Taking the View of France; As It Stood in the Year of Our Lord, 1598 (London, c. 1605), quoted in Lecky, “Sports and Games of Ancient France,” 239. In linking ale with tennis, Dallington’s comment reminds us once again of the close relationship between drink and games in the period.

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———, and Samuel Patrick. Colloquiorum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Familiarium Opus Aureum: Cum Scholiis quibusdam perquam eruditis, quae difficiliora passim loca diligenter explicant. London: J. Walthoe, R. Wilkin, J. and J. Bonwicke, S. Birt, T. Ward and E. Wicksteed, 1733. Hoyle, Edmond. Mr. Hoyle’s Games of Whist, Quadrille, Piquet, Chess, and Back-gammon, Complete: In which Are Contained, the Method of Playing and Betting, at Those Games, Upon Equal, or Advantageous Terms; Including also, the Laws of the Several Games. London: printed by assignment from Thomas Osborne for S. Crowder, 1770. Ley, John. Sunday a Sabbath; or, a preparative discourse for discussion of sabbatary doubts, being the first part of a greater worke. London, 1641. Melville, James, and George Scott. The memoirs of Sir James Melvil of Halhill: containing an impartial account of the most remarkable affairs of state during the sixteenth century, not mentioned by other historians. Edinburgh: T. and W. Ruddimans, 1735. Mitelli, Giuseppe Maria. Le ventiquattr’hore dell’humana felicità: incisioni in rame di Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. Bologna: Banca Cooperativa di Bologna, 1977. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry Wheatley. 8 vols. London: George Bell & Sons, 1904. The Port and Trade of Early Elizabethan London: Documents, ed. Brian Dietz. London: London Record Society, 1972. British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/ vol8 (accessed 8 April 2018). Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin Books, 1955. ———. Oeuvres de Rabelais, ed. Charles Esmangart and Éloi Johanneau. 8 vols. Paris: Dalibon, 1823. Sanudo, Marino. Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia LaBalme and Laura Sanguineti White, trans. Linda Carroll. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008. Scaino, Antonio. Trattato del giuoco della palla di messer Antonio Scaino da Salò, diuiso in tre parti: con due tauole, l’vna de’ capitoli, l’altra delle cose piu notabili, che in esso si contengono. 1555. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_RSmAOUiqXFoC. (accessed 13 March 2018). Seneca, Lucio Anneo. La brevità della vita, ed. Alfonso Traina. Milan: RCS Libri, 2010. Shakespeare, William. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ———. King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond. London: Thomas Learning, 2000. ———. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori. Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: T. Nelson, 2000. ———. The Tempest, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. New York: Modern Library, 2008. Tasso, Torquato. Il Gonzaga secondo, overo del giuoco, dialogo del signor Torquato Tasso. Venice: Benardo Giunti e Fratelli, 1582.

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Vives, Juan Luis. Dialogos de Juan Luis Vives: traducidos en lengua castellana, trans. Cristóbal Coret y Peris. Mexico: Imprenta de Galvan á cargo de Mariano Arévalo, 1827. ———.Tudor School-Boy Life: The Dialogues of Juan Luis Vives, trans. Foster Watson. London: J.M. Dent, 1908. Wiggins, Martin. A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Willughby, Francis. Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, ed. David Cram, Jeffrey L. Forgeng, and Dorothy Johnson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Secondary Sources Arcangeli, Alessandro. Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ariès, Philippe, and Jean-Claude Margolin, eds. Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Avedon, Elliot, and Brian Sutton-Smith. The Study of Games. Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1979. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hèléne Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. ———. “The Role of Games in Rabelais.” Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 124–32. Bell, Matthew. Melancholia: The Western Malady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Belmas, Élisabeth. Jouer autrefois: essai sur le jeu dans la France moderne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle). Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2006. Bisceglia, Anna, Matteo Ceriana, and Simona Mammana, eds. Buffoni, villani e giocatori alla corte dei Medici. Livorno: Sillabe, 2016. Bloom, Gina. “Games.” In Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner, pp. 189–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Branden, Jean-Pierre Vanden. “Les jeux d’enfants de Pierre Bruegel.” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 499–524. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Burke, Peter. “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe.” Past and Present 146 (February 1995): 136–50. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash. Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ———. “Unity of Play: Diversity of Games.” Diogenes 19 (1957): 92–121. Carpeggiani, Paolo. “‘Giochi’ nei giardini dei Gonzaga.” Ludica 19–20 (2013–14): 146–65.

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Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Céard, Jean. “Jeu et divination à la Renaissance.” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 405–20. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Chomarat, Jacques. “Les échecs d’après Vida.” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 367–81. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Ciompi, Luigi, and Adrian Seville, eds. Giochi dell’Oca e di percorso, editors’ website, www. giochidelloca.it/index.php (accessed 2 October 2018). Clark, Peter. “Games and Sports in the Long Eighteenth Century: Failures of Transmission.” In Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe, c. 1700–1870: A Transnational Perspective, ed. Peter Borsay and Jan Hein Furnée, pp. 77–89. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. De Bondt, Cees. “The Apollo and Hyacinth Tennis Theme in Baroque Poetry.” Studi ­secenteschi 54, no. 2 (2013): 119–46. ———. Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. De Voogt, Alexander. “Editorial.” Board Game Studies 2 (1999): 6–7. Depaulis, Thierry. “Bingo! A Material History of Modern Gaming.” In Random Riches: Gambling Past & Present, ed. Manfred Zollinger, pp. 36–56. London: Routledge, 2016. ———. “‘Breviari del diavolo so’ le carte e naibi’: How Bernardino of Siena and his Franciscan Followers Saw Playing Cards and Card Games.” In Religiosus Ludens: Das Spiel als kulturelles Phänomen in mittelalterlichen Klöstern und Ordern, ed. Jörg Sonntag, pp. 115–34. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Doidge, Mark. “Il Calcio as a Source of Local and Social Identity in Italy.” In Identity Discourses and Communities in International Events, Festivals and Spectacles, ed. Udo Merkel, pp. 37–53. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Duclow, Donald. “Life and Works.” In Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man, ed. Christopher Bellitto, Thomas Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson, pp. 25–56. New York: Paulist Press, 2004. Dummett, Michael. Il mondo e l’angelo: i tarocchi e la loro storia. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993. Eales, Richard. Chess: The History of a Game. London: Batsford, 1985. Eichberger, Dagmar. “Margaret of Austria’s Treasures: An Early Hapsburg Collection in the Burgundian Netherlands.” In Museo Imperial: el coleccionismo artístico de los Austrias en el siglo XVI, ed. Fernando Checa Cremades et al., pp. 71–80. Madrid: Fernando Villaverde, 2013. Ellis, Robert. The Games People Play: Theology, Religion, and Sport. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014. Fabris, Dinko. “Giochi, spettacoli e società in un trattato del gesuita Claude-François Menestrier del 1682.” Ludica 1 (1995): 37–49.

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Feigenbaum, Gail. “Gamblers, Cheats, and Fortune-Tellers.” In Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee and Jean Pierre Cuzin, pp. 148–81. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1996. Fink, Eugen. “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play.” In “Game, Play, Literature.” Special issue of Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 19–30. ———. Play as Symbol of the World: And Other Writings, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016. Fondazione Benetton di Ricerche. “History of Games.” [blog], www.fbsr.it/en/history-ofgames/ (accessed 19 May 2018). Fortini Brown, Patricia. Private Lives in Renaissance Venice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Gillmeister, Heiner. Tennis: A Cultural History. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Golladay, Sonja Musser. “Los libros de acedrex dados e tablas: Historical, Artistic and Metaphysical Dimensions of Alfonso X’s ‘Book of Games.’” PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2007. Granados, Mayarí. “Reflections on the Role of Baroque Games Tables with Allegories of War in German Courts.” Board Game Studies 6 (2003): 37–45. Gregori, Mina. “The Fortune Teller (La buona ventura).” In The Age of Caravaggio, cat. 67, pp. 215–20. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985. Guerzoni, Guido. “Playing Great Games: the Giuoco in Sixteenth-Century Italian Courts.” Italian History & Culture 1 (1995): 43–63. Guttmann, Allen. Sports: The First Five Millennia. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Haar, James. “On Musical Games in the 16th Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 15, no. 1 (Spring 1962): 22–34. Hall, Mark. “Board Games in Boat Burials: Play in the Performance of Migration and Viking Age Mortuary Practice.” European Journal of Archaeology 19, no. 3 (2016): 439–55. Hargrave, Catherine. A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1966, repr. 2000. Hattaway, Michael. “Playhouses and the Role of Drama.” In A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway, pp. 133–47. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Hayes, E. Bruce. “Games.” In The Rabelais Encyclopedia, ed. Elizabeth Chesney, p. 89. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Hoffmann, Detlef. The Playing Card: An Illustrated History, trans. C.W.V. Salt. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973. Hooper, David, and Kenneth Whyld. The Oxford Companion to Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944.

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Husband, Timothy. The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015. Jones-Davies, Margaret. “The Chess Game and Prospero’s Epilogue in The Tempest.” Notes and Queries 62, no. 1 (2015): 118–20. Juel, Kristin. “Defeating the Devil at Chess: A Struggle between Virtue and Vice in Le Jeu des esches de la dame moralisé.” In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, pp. 87–108. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Katritzky, M.A. The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. ———. Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Kendrick, Christopher. Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Kolve, V.A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Langdon, Gabrielle. Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love, and Betrayal from the Court of Duke Cosimo I. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Lecky, Elizabeth. “Sports and Games of Ancient France.” The Living Age 16, ser. 7 (July– September 1902): 233–42. Leibs, Andrew. Sports and Games of the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Levy, Allison, ed. Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Lhôte, Jean-Marie. Histoire des jeux de société: géométries du désir. Paris: Flammarion, 1994. McClelland, John. Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Sport and Scientific Thinking in the Sixteenth Century: Ruling Out Playfulness.” Ludica 19–20 (2013–14): 134–45. McClelland, John, and Brian Merrilees, eds. Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. McClure, George. The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. ———. Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. ———. “Women and the Politics of Play in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Torquato Tasso’s Theory of Games.” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 750–91. Mansch, Larry, and Curtis Peters. Martin Luther: The Life and Lessons. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi. London: Penguin Classics, 1972.

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Marchetti, Valerio. “Le désir et la règle recherches sur le ‘Dialogo dei Giochi’ de Girolamo Bargagli (1572).” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 162–82. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Mehl, Jean-Michel. Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIe au début du XVIe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Molmenti, Pompeo. The Golden Age. 2 vols. Part 2 of Venice: Its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic, trans. Horatio Brown. London: John Murray, 1906–8. Moyer, Ann E. The Philosopher’s Game: Rithmomachia in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Murray, Harold James Ruthven. A History of Board-games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. ———. A History of Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913; Northampton, MA: Benjamin Press, 1986. Naumann, Otto. “The Chess Players, c. 1679.” In Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting, cat. 126, pp. 358–59. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984. Nederlandse Real Tennis Bond. “Jeu de Paume (France).” RealTennis.nl, www.real-tennis. nl/?page=JeudePaume (accessed 17 April 2017). Netchine, Ève, ed. Jeux de princes, jeux de vilains. Exh. cat. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Le Seuil, 2009, http://expositions.bnf.fr/jeux/index.htm (accessed 17 January 2018). Olivieri, Achille. “Jeu et capitalisme à Venise.” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 151–62. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Orrock, Amy. “Homo Ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 4, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 1–42, www.jhna. org/index.php/past-issues/volume-4-issue-2/157-homo-ludens (accessed 11 August 2017). Ortalli, Gherardo. “Uncertain Thresholds of Tolerance: Games and Crisis in the Middle Ages.” Ludica 1 (1995): 56–68. O’Sullivan, Daniel, ed. Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. ———. “Introduction: ‘Le beau jeu nottable.’” In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, pp. 1–13. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Parlett, David. A History of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. The Oxford History of Board Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Patterson, Serina. “Game On: Medieval Players and their Texts.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2017.

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———. ed. Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ———. “Introduction: Setting up the Board.” In Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature, ed. Serina Patterson, pp. 1–20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pauser, Josef. “The Invention of Educational Card Games in the Renaissance, or: How to Learn Roman Law and Logic with Playing Cards by Thomas Murner.” Ludica 19–20 (2013–14): 117–34. Poole, William, “False Play: Shakespeare and Chess.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 50–70. Purcell, Nicholas, “Literate games: Roman Urban Society and the Game of Alea.” In Studies in Ancient Greek and Roman Society, ed. Robin Osborne, pp. 177–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Renson, Roland. “Le jeu chez Juan Luis Vivès (1492–1540).” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 469–87. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Ruggiero, Guido. Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Selderhuis, Herman. John Calvin: A Pilgrim’s Life, trans. Albert Cootjes. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009. Seville, Adrian. The Royal Game of the Goose: 400 Years of Printed Board Games. New York: Grolier Club, 2016. Slethaug, Gordon. “Game Theory.” In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. and compl. Irena Makaryk, pp. 64–69. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Smoller, Laura. “Playing Cards and Popular Culture in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg.” Sixteenth Century Journal 17, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 183–214. Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005. Tosney, Nicholas. “The Playing Card Trade in Early Modern England.” Historical Research 84, no. 226 (November 2011): 637–56. Vienne-Guerrin, Nathalie. Shakespeare’s Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. von Hilgers, Philipp. War Games: A History of War on Paper, trans. Ross Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Vuillier, Gaston, and Joseph Grego. A History of Dancing from the Earliest Ages to Our Own Times. New York: Appleton, 1898. Walker, Jonathan. “Gambling and Venetian Noblemen, c. 1500–1700.” Past and Present 162 (February 1999): 28–69.

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Wilkins, Sally E.D. Sports and Games of Medieval Cultures. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone Press, 1994. Yachnin, Paul. “A Game at Chess and Chess Allegory.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 317–330. ———. “Playing with Space: Making a Public in Middleton’s Theatre.” In The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Tenley, pp. 32–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Zollinger, Manfred. Bibliographie der Spielbücher des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1: 1473–1700. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1996. ———. “Dealing in Chances: An Introduction.” In Random Riches: Gambling Past & Present, ed. Manfred Zollinger, pp. 1– 26. New York: Routledge, 2016. ———. “Gioco e finanza: scommesse e lotterie.” Ludica 19–20 (2013–14): 87–105. ———. ed. Random Riches: Gambling Past & Present. New York: Routledge, 2016. Zucker, Adam. “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, pp. 65–86. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

About the author Robin O’Bryan (PhD, University of Virginia) is an art historian focusing on issues related to popular culture in Italian Renaissance art. Her essays appear in journals including Art Bulletin, Preternature, Source, SECAC Review, The Medal, and Libri & Documenti, and in an edited anthology recently published by Routledge. She is currently working on an expanded book-length study on dwarfs in Italian Renaissance art and culture.

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Part I Chess and Luxury Playing Cards

1.

“Mad Chess” with a Mad Dwarf Jester Robin O’Bryan Abstract Giulio Campi’s painting The Game of Chess (c. 1530–32) presents us with an interesting rendition of a popular pastime in sixteenth-century Italy. At a table holding the chessboard, a knight and a well-dressed woman are engaged in chess combat, while gathered around them are several onlookers and a scowling dwarf jester who commands the woman’s attention. This essay examines the sources for Campi’s unusual iconography, showing how he based his imagery on artistic and literary conventions fashioning chess as an allegory of love. While erotic fulfillment is thus the subtext of the game in progress, Campi’s composition also betrays his knowledge of new rules of chess play. The queen was assigned increased powers, which led to the revised game being referred to as scacchi alla rabiosa, or “mad chess.” Campi alludes to this transformed game through the gestures and attributes of the female player—and her linkage with the “mad” dwarf jester. Keywords: “mad chess”, scacchi alla rabiosa, dwarf jester, Giulio Campi, Marco Girolamo Vida, “living chess”

In a room filled with several people, a chess game is in play (Figure 1.1). On the table, which occupies a good portion of the space, just a hint of the chessboard is visible, its edge flanked by several game pieces and a rose in full bloom. Two figures seated at the table dominate the composition: with his back to us in the left foreground is a knight wearing black armor and a helmet; at his right and facing outward is an ample-bosomed, well-dressed woman. As she points her finger to the board she looks down to the scowling dwarf jester at her side ostensibly to seek his approval for her move. Five other figures—three men and two young girls—complete the gathering, all exhibiting varying degrees of (dis)interest in the activity before them. More than a simple illustration of a popular pastime in Renaissance Italy, Giulio Campi’s Partita a scacchi (The Game of Chess) presents us with an orchestra of furtive glances, subtle gestures—and underlying madness.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch01

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Fig. 1.1  Giulio Campi, Partita a scacchi (The Game of Chess), c. 1530–32

The painting was executed c. 1530–32 by Campi, a Cremonese artist from a family of painters in the northern region of Lombardy.1 Although Campi was known primarily for his religious paintings and frescoes, with this work he adopted a new mode of expression. This atypical subject matter has led to various interpretations, some seeing the work as a scene from daily life or as a group portrait (with the artist himself represented in one of the male onlookers), possibly even commissioned to commemorate a marriage.2 Whatever implications such readings may have for his creative undertaking, we might consider Campi’s painting foremost within the Unless otherwise specified, translations are mine. 1 The son of the artist Galeazzo Campi, Giulio Campi (1502–72), was both a painter and architect, and worked together with his brother Antonio Campi. The Partita a scacchi was formerly attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) whose 1555 painting depicts her sisters playing chess (see below, note 55). As well as the fact that she painted similar subject matter, part of the confusion in authorship may stem from the fact that in his Lives Giorgio Vasari recorded Giulio Campi as having trained Sofonisba; she actually worked under Bernardino Campi (1522–1591), who was also from Cremona, although of no relation to Giulio. See Vasari, Lives, ed. and trans. de Vere, 2: 466. 2 See discussion in Palazzo Madama, “Il gioco degli scacchi”; Bayer and Gregori, Painters of Reality, 164–65; and as relates to marriage, Bora, “Giulio Campi,” 133–34. Also see note 22 below.

“Mad Chess” with a Mad Dwarf Jester 

tradition of imagery depicting chess players.3 After being introduced into Europe in the eleventh century, chess became the game of aristocratic society, offering opportunities to exhibit tactical skill, while providing an acceptable occasion for men and women to engage in open flirtation. As well as a fashionable topos in medieval and Renaissance art, the game was featured in a number of literary works. Romances included chess-playing characters, while “chess moralities” used the game as a metaphor for battle and rulership—and, when played between members of the opposite sex, as an allegory for the game of love.4 This latter is the subtext of Campi’s chess match. An analysis of his iconography suggests that he was not only acquainted with the artistic and literary conventions devoted to the chess theme, but that he was also equally aware of contemporary rules of chess play. In staging his game, Campi placed two men at the table—a man’s face appears in profile at the extreme left—but the proximity of the knight to the lady leaves little doubt that they are the two players locked in “chess love” combat.5 Although the knight is not seated directly across from his female opponent, this seems not to have been an unusual arrangement as suggested in period paintings of chess players by other Italian artists, including Paris Bordone (c. 1550) and the earlier rendition (c. 1475) attributed to Liberale da Verona (Figure 1.2).6 In Campi’s version, several clues reinforce the knight as the lady’s opponent in the match. Her pointed finger, accorded visual emphasis in the center of the composition, extends in the same direction and angle as his sword, calling to mind the connotations of the sword used as a traditional metaphor for the phallus. The knight’s sword is also inserted in its sheath, an undeniable allusion to sexual congress—the Latin term for sheath is vagina—while directly adjacent, a further nod to female genitalia and an entryway 3 Once chess had made its way to European soil, illustrations of chess players had become a popular theme in art, appearing in mosaics, manuscripts, frescoes, and by the fifteenth century as the subject of individual paintings. 4 Simons provides an excellent discussion of the historical tradition of chess played between men and women used as a metaphor for sexual dalliance in “(Check)Mating the Grand Masters.” Among the notable chess-playing lovers in medieval romances were Tristan and Iseult, and Lancelot and Guinevere. The most influential “chess morality” was Jacobus de Cessolis’s Liber de moribus hominum et de officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scachorum (Book of the morals of men and the duties of nobles and commoners, on the game of chess), written in the late thirteenth century. Functioning as a manual for princely governance and training for battle, it was widely translated and was still being read in the sixteenth century. See also note 39 below. 5 In showing the male player in the guise of a knight, Campi also alludes to the fact that chess was traditionally considered an essential component of the medieval knight’s education. 6 Such arrangements seem often to have been dictated by the table’s elongated proportions, such as appears in Liberale’s rendition. His painting, which was actually part of a panel from a betrothal chest ( forziere da spesa), has also been attributed to Girolamo da Cremona, who collaborated with him on other projects. For a discussion of the iconography of this work, see Christiansen, “Chess Players.” Also see note 12 below.

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Fig. 1.2  Liberale da Verona, The Chess Game, c. 1475

for the sword-phallus is evoked by the slit in his pocket. Similar suggestions of intercourse are created on the back of the knight’s shiny armor, its reflective patterns aimed toward a bright patch evoking a pubic triangle with a clearly demarcated groove—and by the knight’s unseen outstretched leg masking as a metaphorical phallus as it passes into the darkened nether regions of the woman’s gown.7 Even the marotte, the bauble held by the dwarf jester, has phallic connotations, which have been rendered more explicit by the unusual manner in which it is being grasped, the jester’s hand tightly clenched around the bauble’s shaft.8 Notably, several of these same compositional conceits—the lady pointing her finger at the chessboard, the man’s leg extended provocatively toward his feminine opponent, the cleavage in fabric connoting female anatomy, and even the clasping of a phallic shaft—were devices used in earlier chess iconography. As seen in fourteenth-century French 7 In Liberale’s chess game, the male player’s foot, barely visible under the table, has been brought to rest at the lady’s skirts. 8 Jones discusses the phallic associations of the marotte in Secret Middle Ages, 107–9.

“Mad Chess” with a Mad Dwarf Jester 

Fig. 1.3  Knight and a lady playing chess, 1330–40

ivory mirror cases, for example, the imagery functions as an “allegory of desire” with consummation as the hoped-for end result (Figure 1.3).9 In Campi’s chess match the female player assumes a readily receptive role in this erotic courtship.10 She wears golden sleeves and a marten fur, gifts commonly given to women in the hopes of sexual fulfillment; it was by wearing such accouterments that women overtly signaled their intention to accept a suitor’s advances.11 The 9 See Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 124, 13. In this instance, the man grasps the tent pole as a phallic prop. 10 Simons indicates that she is a courtesan and that the men at her side are also of “ill repute”; “(Check) Mating the Grand Masters,” 68. However, see note 12 below. 11 Parmigianino used these same attributes in his contemporaneous painting Antea, of note since his works influenced Campi; see Neilson, “Parmigianino’s Antea.”

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lady’s gloves may have served a similar symbolic purpose, since gloves, which might denote virginity, were traditionally bestowed as betrothal gifts.12 (Here we may note that although marriage is typically not the ultimate goal in the chess scenario, victory in the game would produce the same anticipated outcome: victory in bed!) Interestingly, the female opponent has removed the glove from her “playing” hand, of significance since naked hands were seen to arouse passion or sexual desire in the opposite sex.13 Her action also evokes the “hand in glove” conceit, a Petrarchan metaphor with sexual connotations in which the single glove was used to represent the vulva.14 Further emphasis on the lady’s feminine anatomy is conveyed by her belt whose weighted ends dangle suggestively toward her pubic region, and by the carefully positioned marten fur, whose chain and snout are pointed in the same direction.15 Seemingly innocuous, this pictorial maneuver has special potency given that “snout” was a traditional visual pun on penis.16 In view of these titillating amatory overtones, it is reasonable to assume that Campi took cues from the “chess love” allegories produced during the epoch. One of the earliest was the anonymous poem Échecs amoureux (Amorous chess) composed around 1370 and set in a garden of love; it was followed in 1400 by a prose commentary, Évrart de Conty’s Le livre des échecs amoureux moralisés (The edifying book of erotic chess).17 Functioning as a “manual of seduction” in which the woman played an active role and the male was portrayed as defensive, de Conty’s text used a rose to symbolize the lady’s beauty, which she employed as an “erotic 12 Brown addresses the virginal and marital symbolism associated with gloves in “Picturing the Perfect Marriage,” 241–42. Campi’s lady chess player also displays what appear to be stylized daisies in her hair, daisies (margherite) having been traditionally used to symbolize innocence and chastity. The relationship of his imagery with the subtext of betrothal has interesting implications for Liberale da Verona’s rendering of a chess match which appears on a betrothal chest as indicated in note 6 above. 13 Ibid., 242. 14 See, e.g., Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove,” 127. 15 Belts were also associated with marriage, which may have further bearing on Campi’s iconography; see Krohn, “Rites of Passage,” 62. Yet another sexual allusion to female anatomy is suggested by the bulbous knob protruding from the side of the knight’s chair back, which conjures up images of the breast. 16 This conceit is exemplified in the phallus doubling as a nose in the commedia dell’arte costume of Pantaleone as well as in theatrical and carnival masks in earlier periods. The phallus-nose relationship as an aspect of the carnivalesque grotesque body is addressed by Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 317. 17 O’Sullivan argues that the Échecs amoureux as it is commonly known, should more accurately be referred to as Les Eschéz d’Amours; “Changing the Rules,” 202. The poem and its Latin glosses are contained in Heyworth et al., Les Eschéz d’Amours. The work was constructed as a commentary on the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, which introduced the motif of a rosebud to symbolize a lady and the object of a man’s amorous pursuit; at the end of the poem the man gains possession of the virgin rose and thus the lady; Juel, “Defeating the Devil,” 104. In turn, Évrart’s poem functioned as “an interpretation and extension” of the Échecs amoureux/Les Eschéz d’Amours; O’Sullivan, “Changing the Rules,” 213. For an extensive analysis of the two poems, see Adams, Literature and Politics of Chess, esp. ch. 2.

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charm” to help her win the game.18 This specific conceit may have been Campi’s intended reference with the prominent display of the rose by the lady’s captured chess pieces, its strategic placement between the game board and her body acting as the appropriate symbolic lure for her male opponent. Other pertinent parallels with Campi’s painting and contemporary literary works on chess may be found in a Catalan poem written in the latter part of the fifteenth century.19 Composed of sixty-four stanzas which represent the number of squares on the chessboard, the Scachs d’amor (Love chess) is believed to have been the first work to lead its readers through the actual moves of a game rather than referencing it as static allegory.20 The text describes a match between two players representing Venus and Mars, with a third person in the guise of Mercury acting as arbiter and commentator. On Venus’s side the individual pieces are assigned human attributes including honor, beauty, and “sweet gazes,” while those of Mars resort to reason, desire, and favors to try to win the game.21 It is tempting to see these characters evoked in Campi’s chess match: the armed knight serves as an appropriate allusion to Mars, while his female opponent assumes the predictable counter role of Venus.22 Mercury may be represented by the knight’s male tablemate who looks on as monitor, his beret bearing an emblem of the perpetually chaste huntress Diana and signifying what is presumably at stake with the game’s outcome.23 That Campi—or indeed his unidentified patron—would have known the French and Catalan poems is a distinct possibility given their dissemination into Italy, and the cultural influences filtering into Cremona in the years surrounding the painting’s execution.24 At the same time, the artist and/or patron may have become acquainted 18 See the discussion by Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, 142–43. 19 The authors are Don Francí de Castellví, Narcís Vinyoles, and Mossèn [Bernat de] Fenollar. Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, puts the date at 1470 to 1480, with Westerveld, in Castellví et al., Poem Scachs d’amor, opting for 1475. See note following. 20 For an extended discussion and analysis, see Westerveld, in Castellví et al., Poem Scachs d’amor. The poem is also considered to be the first record of the modern game of chess. As O’Sullivan observes, in this work “game and allegory are seamlessly fused together for perhaps the first time in chess literature”; “Introduction: ‘Le beau jeu nottable,’” 13. Sobrer, “English Translation of Scachs d’amors,” provides a schematic illustrating the various moves. 21 Murray, History of Chess, 781; and O’Sullivan, “Changing the Rules,” 214–20. 22 Bora also assigned these identities to the two chess players, but interpreted their interaction, and hence the painting, within the context of a marriage and Neoplatonic symbolism; Bora, “Giulio Campi,” 133–34. 23 The emblem has also been interpreted as an “armed Venus-Virgo” with additional connotations of sexual enticement; Simons, “(Check)Mating the Grand Masters,” 68–69. 24 Cremona was under the orbit of the Visconti-Sforza dukes in Milan until 1499, when Milan fell briefly to the French; for the next four decades Cremona was variously controlled by France, Venice, and Spain. Notably, as well as in their native Cremona, the Campi painters worked extensively in Milan; see Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 583. Also see note 36 below.

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with the ideas contained in such chess allegories through a putative association with Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566), a Cremonese poet who later patronized the Campi family painters.25 In 1527 Vida had responded to the chess-love vogue with the publication of his Scacchia ludus (The game of chess).26 This mock-heroic poem was based on another Catalan work, Luis de Ramirez Lucena’s Repetición de amores y arte de axedrez (Discourse on love and the art of chess) written 1496–97.27 A compilation of earlier writings on chess including the aforementioned Catalan Scachs d’amor featuring Venus and Mars, Lucena’s offering was significant for setting out the new rules of play that came to dominate the game in the sixteenth century.28 Supplanting the power of the rook and the bishop, the queen became the “most lethal” piece on the board.29 Several years later Vida acknowledged the queen’s new powers in his poem. Using the epithet “Amazon” and describing her as “enraged,” he paid implicit homage to the transformed game, which was now popularly—if not pejoratively, considering its implied commentary on the notion of strong women—referred to as scacchi alla rabiosa, or “Mad Chess.”30 And in fact, 25 In 1547, together with his brother Antonio, Giulio executed a fresco cycle for the church of Santa Maria Margherita in Cremona; the frescoes were commissioned by Vida who served as titular prior (Royal Collection Trust, “Giulio Campi”). Although this project was executed some fifteen years after Giulio is thought to have painted his chess game, given the Cremonese connection it is certainly possible that the Campi brothers had made Vida’s acquaintance well before 1547. Cochrane discusses Vida as patron to the Campi in Italy, 119. 26 According to Chomarat, there were three prior (unpublished) versions, with the f irst composed between 1507 and 1512; “Les échecs d’après Vida,” 367. Murray dated the poem to 1513, observing that when it was printed in 1527, it appeared in a collection of Vida’s poems; Murray, History of Chess, 790. A modern edition of the Latin text, together with the three versions and the translation by Oliver Goldsmith is contained in Vida, Game of Chess, ed. di Cesare. Of note, marriage is also a (small) subtext of Vida’s poem; Goldsmith, “Vida’s ‘Game of Chess,’” e.g., ll. 465–72, p. 129. 27 Vida’s poem achieved wide popularity, with forty editions published between 1525 and 1650, not only in its original Latin, but also in subsequent translations in Italian, French, English, and German; Eales, Chess, 92. Lucena’s work was actually two separate treatises that were bound together; ibid., 72. 28 Ibid., 72–73. 29 O’Sullivan describes the queen in this way in “Changing the Rules,” 201. Westerveld (in Castellví et al.), Calvo, and Yalom have all posited that Lucena’s work was written in commemoration of the reign of Queen Isabella of Spain, although Taylor argues that the queen’s powers were contained in earlier treatises. See especially Westerveld, in Castellví et al., Poem Scachs d’amor, 67ff., as well as Calvo, La evasión en ajedrez; Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, 193–94; and Taylor, “How Did the Queen Go Mad?,” 169–83. Whatever the actual origin, it is interesting nevertheless that Campi showed the knight and the woman wearing gold sleeves imprinted with what appears to be stylized pomegranates. While a popular motif in textile design (especially Milanese silks), the pomegranate had also been adopted as a royal emblem by Isabella and her husband; see Netherton and Owen-Crocker, Medieval Clothing, 4: 196. The pomegranate symbolized fertility, which again may have bearing on the proposed marriage theme. 30 In French, the game was referred to as eschés de la dame enragée. In Italian, “rabbioso” primarily means “angry or furious,” but its def inition extends to “raging” and “rabid.” On the rabbiosa (rabiosa) designation for the transformed chess game, see Eales, Chess, 72; Murray, History of Chess, 776; and

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we may see that it is this very version of the game that is being played in Campi’s chess match. The lady player is obviously essential to this reading, but it is the dwarf jester who actually furnishes the key to deciphering the enigmatic iconography. The character’s association with chess was not without precedent. Dwarfs were presented as chess players in medieval romances, and both dwarfs and jesters were affiliated with the game in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century imagery.31 A Florentine desco da parto (birth tray) fabricated c. 1370 depicts a chessboard on the panel’s back while the front side shows a dwarf among aristocrats in a garden of love—the same setting used for the chess game in the contemporaneous Échecs amoureux.32 In France a mid-fifteenth-century illumination produced by Jean Wauquelin for the Burgundian court depicts a jester with a marotte presiding at a chess match between the male and female players, with “chess love” its predictable subtext.33 As for Campi’s painting, although his inclusion of the dwarf suggests that he was responding to the Italian vogue for dwarf imagery, his specific portrayal of the dwarf as a jester was closely tied to northern conventions.34 Not only has the dwarf been equipped with a marotte, the jester’s traditional prop, but he also has bells and (brown) donkey ears attached to his striped hood. Together with the marotte, stripes, bells, and donkey ears were all common attributes of the fool, the dwarf’s Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, 214, who also discusses the misogynistic backlash emanating from this change to the game evidenced in writings by French and Italian men (219–20). Considering the Amazons’ legendary reputation as female warriors renowned for their strength and rejection of male supremacy, Vida’s metaphor was especially piquant for a game conceived as a war battle between men (although it was played by women). His invocation may also be seen as a direct response to a line in Cessolis’s treatise on chess in which, describing the “Moves of the Queen,” Cessolis asks: “The question arises that since chess is a war game, why the queen is set as though to fight among warriors, women being too weak and inept at such things?”; Cessolis, Book of Chess, 109. Notably, in Torquato Tasso’s game treatise Il Romeo overo del giuoco (1581) he cited Girolamo Vida and his usage of the “Reine Amazoni” (Amazon Queens) in a passage where the female interlocutor poses the question as to why the queen chess piece had so much power at the expense of the king; Il Romeo, 34–35. Also see McClure, Parlour Games, 200 n. 9. 31 A dwarf plays chess with a maiden in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône (The Crown, c. 1300), while in Apollonius von Tyrland by Heinrich von Neustadt ( fl. early fourteenth century) a dwarf king and queen (Piramort and Pliades) play a match against each other; see Classen, “Chess in Medieval German Literature,” 39–41. In the Dutch Roman van Lancelot (early fourteenth century), a dwarf king turns the hero knight Gawain into a dwarf, and it is in this diminutive form that he plays a game of chess at Arthur’s court; see Harward, Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance, 82. 32 The desco da parto is now in the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai, France. 33 The illustration appears in the manuscript Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF Fr 9342). For a synopsis of the chess match in Wauquelin’s text, see Bryant, Medieval Romance of Alexander, 84–85. Also see note 35 below. 34 The seminal work on dwarfs and jesters in art is by Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs and Jesters in Art. For the popularity of dwarfs in Italian princely imagery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see O’Bryan, “Grotesque Bodies.”

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and the jester’s alter ego.35 Additionally, the dwarf in the painting sports warts and wens, facial blemishes used in ancient and northern imagery to emphasize foolishness.36 Alluding to the fool entity was certainly deliberate on Campi’s part since the bishop chess piece (Alfil) had by then come to be referred to as Stultus in Latin and Fou in French—both terms meaning “fool.”37 Let us now imagine that the game has moved from the chessboard to the entire room and that the artist has used the knight, the lady, and the dwarf jester to represent the pieces in a “living chess” match.38 While certainly a novel approach, Campi was not the first to anthropomorphize the game of chess in this way, however. The conceit of people assuming the role of the chess pieces had been introduced in medieval literature, probably about the same time chess pieces themselves began to be fashioned in human form.39 In the legend of Lancelot, Artur, and Gauvain, a knight entering a castle comes upon a grand hall configured as a chessboard, where life-size chessmen move into play after being touched by a magic ring.40 This imaginative vignette may have served as the inspiration for Francesco Colonna’s presentation of a “living chess” game in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Dream of Poliphili, 1499).41 The author describes how the protagonist arrives at a queen’s court where he comes 35 On the interchangeability of dwarfs, jesters, and fools, see Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs and Jesters, 7; and especially the classic study by Welsford, Fool: His Social and Literary History. In the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Giotto portrayed his Fool figure with a marotte and bells (c. 1305). Martial described the fool (morio) as “a creature with pointed head and large ears, which move just as donkeys’ ears are wont”; Martial, Epigrams, 1: 381 (6.39). Notably, donkey ears are also attached the hood of the jester depicted in Wauquelin’s illustration. 36 Mellinkoff discusses such conventions used for dwarfs and fools in Outcasts: Signs of Otherness, 1: 170. Some of the few instances where dwarfs in Italian Renaissance imagery are portrayed with these facial blemishes appear in illuminations produced by Giovan Pietro Birago for the Sforza court in Milan, of note considering the close ties Milan had with the North and that the Campi painters had with Milan (see again note 24 above). On Birago’s depictions of dwarfs, see O’Bryan, “Sly Satires,” esp. 10. 37 See Eales, Chess, 13–15, 73. I discuss the conceit of the dwarf in the guise of the Bishop-Fool chess piece as it appears in Argenta’s (Giacomo Vighi) later portrait of Carlo Emanuele of Savoy and the dwarf Fabio in O’Bryan, “A Duke, a Dwarf.” Also see following note. 38 If, as Yalom reminds us, the chessboard qualif ies as a “sexual space” (Birth of the Chess Queen, 136), then the room itself would equally function as a sexual arena. This notion of a room serving as a mis-en-scène for a “living chess” match is similarly at work in Argenta’s portrait of Carlo Emanuele of Savoy. The princeling and the dwarf are shown standing on a tiled floor which I have argued resembles a chessboard. With the dwarf serving as the Bishop-Fool and the youth symbolizing the King, it would similarly render the portrait as a type of “living chess.” 39 Chess pieces taking the form of people and animals became common in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe; Wilkinson and Dennis, Chess: East and West, xxxi. Cessolis also assigned human attributes to the individual chess pieces in his treatise discussed above in note 4. 40 See Weinberg, “Chess as a Literary Idea,” 322; and Murray, History of Chess, 746–47. 41 This work is also referred to as “The Strife of Love in a Dream”; Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, trans. Godwin.

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to a large hall whose floor is patterned like a chessboard; there he is treated to a chess ballet of nymphs dressed in gold and silver, who act out their plays accompanied to music.42 Related in spirit is the Catalan Scachs d’amor and Vida’s Scacchia ludus which assigned human attributes to the individual pieces on the chessboard. In Campi’s representation of a “living chess” game, the man in black armor would obviously evoke the Knight chess piece, while the dwarf jester-cum-fool would stand for the Bishop; the remaining male figures would represent other chessmen. The lady would symbolize the Queen, the most powerful figure in the game—and in the tableau. Campi has emphasized the importance of her figure through its bulk and lighting, but more importantly he has implicitly invoked her powers as the Queen of “Mad Chess.” In the reformed game, providing there were no obstacles in her path the Queen was able to advance several squares in a gliding motion, not only in a straight line, but also in diagonal fashion. In his poem Vida actually references the Queen’s expanded directional movements: But the fierce Queen, whom dangers ne’er dismay, The strength and terror of the bloody day, In a straight line spreads her destruction wide, To left or right, before, behind, aside. At regina furens animis pars optima belli, In frontem, in terga, ac dextram, laevamque movetur, Itque iter obliquum, sed semper tramite recto Procedit […] (ll. 132–35)43

The trajectory of the Queen’s moves is illustrated in the schematic shown in Figure 1.4. Allowing for a bit of artistic license, it is not difficult to see this clever conceit played out in Campi’s chess match. Placing his Queen by the painting’s edge which functions symbolically as the back row of the chessboard, he connects her to each of the chess men through similar directional lines, both straight and diagonal. At this point we may observe that Campi’s use of diagonals is especially striking. Indeed, the entire composition is comprised of a series of transverse sight lines expressed by the angling of objects and the figures’ gestures and postures: an 42 Weinberg provides a synopsis in “Chess as a Literary Idea,” 324. In turn, Colonna’s account served as the model for François Rabelais who gave a description of a “living chess” ballet in the fifth book of his Gargantua and Pantagruel (in ibid., 325–26), although there is some doubt as to whether Rabelais himself actually composed the section in which this reference appears. He died in 1555 and the work was published posthumously in 1564. 43 Original Latin and Italian in Vida, La scacchiade, 16–17, with English translation in Goldsmith, “Vida’s ‘Game of Chess,’” 121.

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Fig. 1.4  Schematic of Queen’s chess moves

extended arm and leg; the tilting of heads; upward, downward, or sideways glances; and even torsos that lean forward or backward to subvert any semblance of vertical axis.44 In fact, the only clearly vertical elements in the painting are the broad expanse of beige at the very back of the room that acts as a framing device, and to a lesser extent, the chess pieces and a small section of the table support. 45 While the visual emphasis on diagonal direction implicitly speaks to the Queen’s movements, it also invokes the Bishop chess piece, which in the transformed game was only allowed to move on the diagonal.46 Campi cleverly alludes to the Fool-Bishop’s new moves by nestling the dwarf jester in the extreme corner of the canvas. Thus, with the Knight and the Queen blocking his movement on either side, the only visual pathway for his advance is on the diagonal axis toward the playing arena. Unlike other period paintings that provide a snapshot view of the game—a frozen moment if you will—Campi has used his composition to take us on an animated,

44 This pictorial maneuver is consistent with some of the symbolic conceits used by poets in their chess allegories which drew on symbolism associated with white versus dark pieces, forward or retreating actions, etc.; see O’Sullivan, “Changing the Rules,” 207. 45 With this compositional element, Campi may have been alluding to the tree that is often shown above the chessboard in medieval and Renaissance imagery, whose presence denoted the garden of love where chess games were often played. Sofonisba Anguissola used a similar pictorial device in her painting of the chess game, positioning a tree directly behind the sister who faces the audience from the chessboard. 46 On the Bishop’s new move, which doubled his access from 16 to 32 of the possible 64 squares, see O’Sullivan, “Changing the Rules,” 201.

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ocular journey. 47 In this respect, his presentation is similar in tone to the Catalan Scachs d’amor. This work, we may recall, cast the male and female players in the guise of Venus and Mars, while leading readers through the moves of an actual game. In his “living chess” match, Campi uses knowing glances and pointed gestures to set the game in motion. At the far right, the young maiden looks slightly down and past the players to draw us in as spectators, her action reminding that chess and other games were often played in front of an audience.48 At the board, the lady turns her head to gaze down at the dwarf who responds with a scowl and a tight clenching of his marotte. The expression on the marotte’s face gives a backward side eye prompting us to visually proceed to the corner of the table where the lady’s captured chess pieces have been placed. 49 From there our attention shifts to the lady’s extended finger pointing to a spot in the middle of the chessboard—and then upward to the face of the other young girl who lifts her eyes in the direction of the man with the red beret. This pictorial sweep allows us to take in the entire composition even as it brings us back to the middle of the chessboard, where a key move is in progress. The dwarf jester’s symbolic role as Fool-Bishop helps to explain his inclusion in the composition, but less clear is why our lady player looks to him as she tenders her move. Here, her actions call to mind a stanza in the Scachs d’amor in which Mercury says that a piece touched must be played: The first rule you must abide by Is, in this game, that a piece once touched Firmly, admitting neither debate nor confront, By any player, true, must be played. La ley que deu primer esser admesa, es, en tal joch, que la pessa toquada, ab fermetat, sens debat ni contesa, per cascu, cert, hagia d’esser jugada. (ll. 46–49)50 47 In Paris Bordone’s Chess Players, the two male players seem to be more interested in looking out to the audience than in playing the game itself. In Liberale da Verona’s version, the female places her hand on the arm of her male opponent and averts her eyes in the opposite direction of the board. 48 The direction of her gaze to engage the viewer suggests that this painting would have been hung above eye level. 49 Here, Campi seems to be using the dwarf as an Albertian commentator, a figure whose upstaging actions or facial expressions were used to point out deeper meaning in the scene. Mantegna used a female dwarf in this way in his Camera Picta fresco in the Gonzaga palace in Mantua; see O’Bryan, “Grotesque Bodies,” 259. Campi may well have known Mantegna’s work since he had studied in Mantua with Giulio Romano, who served as court artist for the Gonzaga. 50 The dialog is attributed to Fenollar as Mercury; Sobrer, “English Translation of Scachs d’amors.”

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While this stanza may account for the lady’s mannerisms, more puzzling is why the dwarf responds with an angry expression. Contorting his face, he adopts an open-mouthed grimace that suggests an auditory eruption is about to disrupt the stillness of the game at any moment. Indeed, we might even say that the dwarf jester looks a bit crazy, or matto in Italian. While this aspect of demeanor plays on his fool identity—matto is also the Italian term for “fool”—the emphasis on his maniacal state receives subtle endorsement in the unruly flaps of his headdress and in the twisted necklace of the young girl across from the knight.51 In the language of Renaissance dress, such disarray could connote anger and madness.52 The question then to be asked is, why is the dwarf jester so agitated and what does this behavior have to do with the game in play? A look back to the table may provide the answer. Among the pieces the lady has won from her opponent, there is one stubby piece placed prominently on its side. The attention given this piece—the artist has painted a small shadow next to it and the crenellated spokes emanating from its top simulate a crown—suggests that it may be the Queen.53 If so, it does not bode well for Campi’s knight, for as announced in Catalan Scachs d’amor, to lose the queen is to lose the game.”54 At the same time, the placement of this piece with the others in the left-hand corner of the table may have further bearing on the outcome of the match since the Échecs amoureux speaks of the female player vanquishing her male opponent in the lefthand corner of the board.55 In any event, in Campi’s game it appears as if the lady 51 A similar red necklace is worn by the young girl in Sofonisba’s painting, but the necklace is perfectly arranged. 52 According to Sullivan, Bruegel in his 1562 painting of Dulle Griet used such a device, i.e., a necklace carelessly draped around the neck of “Mad Meg” to reinforce her madness and “irrational state of mind.” This iconographical detail was inspired by Seneca’s essay on “Anger,” popular in the Renaissance, which allowed that anger, the “most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions” was manifested by a disordered and an unkempt appearance (De ira, 1.1, 2, 35); Sullivan, “Madness and Folly,” 59. This would explain why depictions of the fool figure sometimes showed him wearing disheveled clothing; see, for example, Giovanna Guidicini’s discussion and illustration of the fool playing card in Chapter 8 of this volume. 53 The queen chess piece was typically short and squat, similar to that displayed in Lucas van Leyden’s contemporaneous painting of a chess game, with which Campi’s work is often compared. 54 Murray, History of Chess, 781. In “The Chesse-Play” of 1593, Nicholas Breton ended his poem “Loose not the Queene, for ten to one,/ If she be lost, the game is gone”; quoted in Poole, “False Play,” 55. 55 O’Sullivan, “Changing the Rules,” 211. Mating in the corner of the board was a popular convention in medieval romances. In the thirteenth-century prose Lancelot, the hero is told by the lady that no matter how well he plays, he will be mated in the angle of the (magical) chessboard (“si bien n’en sauroiz joer que vos n’i soiez mater en l’angle”); MS, Fribourg, fol. 30a, quoted in Murray, History of Chess, 746. In Sofonisba’s painting of the chess game, the older sister on the left has curled her hand around two chess pieces, one of which is shown on its side and the other which remains upright. Close examination (and high-definition imagery) reveals this “standing” piece to be female: it has a low-cut bodice, a necklace, and a headpiece evoking a crown, which suggests it was meant to represent the queen. Although this “queen” has not been positioned exactly by the left-hand corner of the board (so as to give it more visibility), its

“Mad Chess” with a Mad Dwarf Jester 

is the one winning the competition. That is why the young girl looks up to the man who functions as “arbiter” and why the lady Queen looks down to the dwarf jester, whose frenzied expression serves to signal what she does not say: “Scacco matto.” Having a literal meaning of “mad chess,” it is the term in Italian used by a player to announce impending victory—or, as we say in English, “Checkmate”!

Bibliography Primary Sources Castellví, Francesc de, Narcís Vinyoles, and Bernat Fenollar. The Poem Scachs d’amor (1475): First Text of Modern Chess, ed. Govert Westerveld. Blanca (Murcia): Govert Westerveld, 2015. Cessolis, Jacobus de. The Book of Chess by Jacob de Cessolis, trans. and ed. H.L. Williams. New York: Ithaca Press, 2008. Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Goldsmith, Oliver. “Vida’s ‘Game of Chess’ as it has been transcribed in the handwriting of Oliver Goldsmith.” In The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. J.W.M. Gibbs, vol. 2, pp.117–34. London: George Bell & Sons, 1884. Heyworth, Gregory, Daniel E. O’Sullivan, and Frank Coulson, eds. Les Eschéz d’Amours: A Critical Edition of the Poem and its Latin Glosses. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Martial. Epigrams, with an English Translation, trans. Walter C.A. Ker. 2 vols. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1919. Sobrer, Josep Miquel. “The English Translation of Scachs d’amors.” Scachs d’amors, Scachsdamor.org, www.scachsdamor.org/ (accessed 17 January 2018). Tasso, Torquato. Il Romeo overo del giuoco dialogo del Sig. Torquato Tasso. In Del rime, et prose del S. Torquato Tasso, di nuovo con diligenza rivedute corrette e di vaghe Figure adornate, parte prima con privilegio, pp. 31–54. Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1583. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. and trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Vida, Marco Girolamo. The Game of Chess: Marco Girolamo Vida’s Scacchia Ludus, with English Verse Translation and the Texts of the Three Earlier Versions, ed. Mario Di Cesare. Nieuwhoop: Brill, 1975. placement near the corner may point to the older sister’s impending victory, which in turn may be why the younger sibling holds up her hand as if to signal defeat. Of note, Vida was friends with Sofonisba’s father Amilcare and with the artist herself, even citing her as among the most illustrious painters of the time in his Cremonensium orationes (1550).

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———. La scacchiade ovvero il giuoco degli scacchi, trans. Giovanni Chiosi. Cremona: Feraboli, 1829.

Secondary Sources Adams, Jenny. The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hèléne Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bayer, Andrea, and Mina Gregori, eds. Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Bora, Giulio. “Giulio Campi.” In I Campi e la cultura artistica cremonese del Cinquecento, ed. Mina Gregori, pp. 133–34. Milan: Electa, 1985. Brown, Beverly Louise. “Picturing the Perfect Marriage: The Equilibrium of Sense and Sensibility in Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love.’” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrea Bayer, pp. 238–45. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Bryant, Nigel. The Medieval Romance of Alexander: Jehan Wauquelin’s “The Deeds and Conquests of Alexander the Great.” Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012. Calvo, Ricardo. La evasión en ajedrez del converso Calisto. Barcelona: Perea Ediciones, 1997. Camille, Michael. The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Chomarat, Jacques. “Les échecs d’après Vida.” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 367–81. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982. Christiansen, Keith. “The Chess Players.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436884 (accessed 5 May 2018). Classen, Albrecht. “Chess in Medieval German Literature: A Mirror of Social-Historical and Cultural, Religious, Ethical, and Moral Conditions.” In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, pp. 17–44. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Cochrane, Eric. Italy, 1530–1630, ed. Julius Kirshner. New York: Routledge, 2014. Eales, Richard. Chess: The History of a Game. London: Batsford, 1985. Freedberg, Sydney. Painting in Italy, 1500–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Harward, Vernon. The Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance and Celtic Tradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1958. Jones, Malcolm. The Secret Middle Ages: Recovering the Regal Medieval World. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Juel, Kristin. “Defeating the Devil at Chess: A Struggle between Virtue and Vice in Le Jeu des esches de la dame moralisé.” In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age:

“Mad Chess” with a Mad Dwarf Jester 

A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, pp. 87–108. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Krohn, Deborah. “Rites of Passage: Art Objects to Celebrate Betrothal, Marriage, and the Family.” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrea Bayer, pp. 60–67. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. McClure, George. Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Mellinkoff, Ruth. Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Murray, Harold James Ruthven. A History of Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913; ­Northampton, MA: Benjamin Press, 1986. Neilson, Christina. “Parmigianino’s Antea: A Beautiful Artifice.” The Frick Collection, special loan, 29 January–1 May 2008, www.frick.org/exhibitions/past/2008/parmigianino (accessed 5 December 2017). Netherton, Robin, and Gale Owen-Crocker, eds. Medieval Clothing and Textiles. 12 vols. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008. O’Bryan, Robin. “A Duke, a Dwarf, and a Game of Chess.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 34, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 27–33. ———. “Grotesque Bodies, Princely Delight: Dwarfs in Italian Renaissance Court Imagery.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 1, no. 2 (2012): 252–88. ———.“Sly Satires by a Master Miniaturist: Giovan Pietro Birago and the Grammatica del Donato.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 32, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 7–14. O’Sullivan, Daniel. “Changing the Rules in and of Medieval Chess Allegories.” In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, pp. 199–220. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. ———. “Introduction: ‘Le beau jeu nottable.’” In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, pp. 1–13. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Palazzo Madama. “Il gioco degli scacchi.” Palazzo Madama, www.palazzomadamatorino. it/en/node/9531 (accessed 20 August 2017). Poole, William, “False Play: Shakespeare and Chess.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 50–70. Royal Collection Trust. “Giulio Campi (1502–72), The Raising of Lazarus, c. 1547,” The Royal Collection, www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/991118/the-raising-of-lazarus (accessed 2 February 2018). Simons, Patricia. “(Check)Mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered, Sexualized Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy.” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 59–74. Stallybrass, Peter, and Ann Rosalind Jones. “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 114–32.

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Sullivan, Margaret. “Madness and Folly: Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet.” Art Bulletin 59, no. 1 (March 1977): 55–66. Taylor, Mark. “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 O’Sullivan, pp. 169–83. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Tietze-Conrat, Erica. Dwarfs and Jesters in Art, trans. Elizabeth Osborn. New York: Phaidon, 1957. Weinberg, Florence. “Chess as a Literary Idea in Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia and Rabelais’ Cinquiesme Livre.” Romanic Review 70 (1979): 321–35. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1935; repr. 1966. Wilkinson, Charles, and Jessie McNab Dennis. Chess: East and West, Past and Present; A Selection from the Gustavus A. Pfeiffer Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968. Yalom, Marilyn. Birth of the Chess Queen: A History. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

About the author Robin O’Bryan (PhD, University of Virginia) is an art historian focusing on issues related to popular culture in Italian Renaissance art. Her essays appear in journals including Art Bulletin, Preternature, Source, SECAC Review, The Medal, and Libri & Documenti, and in an edited anthology recently published by Routledge. She is currently working on an expanded book-length study on dwarfs in Italian Renaissance art and culture.

2.

Changing Hands Jean Desmarets, Stefano della Bella, and the Jeux de Cartes Naomi Lebens Abstract This essay explores the history of the Jeux de Cartes, four decks of playing cards, produced by Stefano della Bella and Jean Desmarets de Saint Sorlin for the childking Louis XIV beginning in 1644. Ostensibly a didactic tool framed to fulf il the educational needs of a young French king, these printed games changed substantially in form and function as they were published in successive states during the seventeenth century. This essay demonstrates how, at each new stage in their material life, the games were appropriated and developed as sites for social performance. Keywords: Jean Desmarets, Stefano della Bella, Louis XIV, playing cards, game history, print culture, Anne of Austria

A royal privilege dated 9 April 1644 granted the French playwright, author, royal counselor, and military secretary Jean Desmarets (1595–1676) the right to produce and sell a series of didactic playing cards.1 It claimed that he had come up with a novel solution to the problem of making necessary knowledge tasteful to young princes. The target audience for the games was the young King Louis XIV who, at 5½ years old, ruled France under the regency of his mother, Queen Anne of Austria. The death of King Louis XIII the previous May had left a power vacuum surrounding the pressing issue of Louis’s education and, by April 1644, important matters concerning his program of studies had still not been resolved.2 Desmarets entered the debate by outlining plans in his privilege 1 All translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own. When quotations are taken directly from sources, the original spellings have been retained without the addition of modern accents or punctuation. Reprinted in Brianville, Jeu d’armoiries, c̄ – c̄ 4 . 2 Mormiche, Devenir prince, 28–39.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch02

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for educational games on subjects including the history of French kings, famous kings and queens, illustrious men and women, fables, geography, cosmography, morals, politics, logic, and physics. He later explained in the dedication he addressed to the Queen Regent: “I considered that great Princes should never be ignorant, in order to be good & sage, & in order to make everything together amiable & formidable.”3 Only four known decks of playing cards attest to Desmarets’s far-reaching ambitions. Produced in collaboration with the celebrated Florentine printmaker, Stefano della Bella (1610–1664), these are the Cartes des rois de France (Game of French Kings), the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), the Jeu de la géographie (Game of Geography), and the Jeu des fables (Game of Fables). 4 The top halves of the cards are dedicated to Della Bella’s images, while the bottom halves feature Desmarets’s text. Often treated as a distinct quartet, thought to have been commissioned by the First Minister Cardinal Mazarin for the young king’s education, Desmarets’s privilege shows that the games were in fact part of a wider, unrealized scheme. Mazarin’s association with the games is also unclear.5 The project coincided with a shift in Desmarets’s avenues of court patronage following the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642, and his privilege was granted under the authority of his friend, the royal secretary, Valentin Conrart—a figure renowned for furnishing those in his literary circle favorable print privileges full of effusive praise.6 Desmarets’s dedication of the project to Queen Anne of Austria may indicate royal endorsement of the games, but his commercial print privilege places an equal emphasis on how they would be presented to and consumed by a wider audience.7 Charting these two distinct contexts for the four games, the royal and the commercial, will show how the cards were appropriated and developed as sites for social performance, providing an adaptable stage for a wide range of “players” from the princely to the popular.

3 Reprinted in Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, āiiij: “Je consideray que les grands Princes ne devroient rien ignorer, pour estre bons & sages, & pour se rendre tout ensemble aymables & redoubtables[.]” 4 D’Allemagne, Les cartes à jouer du XIVe au XXe siècle, 1: 218–20. 5 The sole evidence for Mazarin’s involvement in the project is a comment made fifty-four years later by the publisher Florent Le Comte in the preface to his 1698 edition of the games. See Desmarets, Jeux historiques, 3. Conversely, the author Paul Pellisson recorded that the games were a commission made by Cardinal Richelieu before his death: cited in Hall, Richelieu’s Desmarets, 230. 6 On Desmarets’s career, see Hall, Richelieu’s Desmarets, 23–25. On Valentin Conrart as royal secretary, see Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres au XVIIe siècle, 98–147. 7 The transactional nature of dedications is well-established in print scholarship; both the dedicator and dedicatee generally expected to gain something from the association and authors usually had to seek permission before dedicating a work to the royal family. See Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 25–42.

Changing Hands 

A Mirror for the Prince Aimed at Louis as a youthful, inexperienced ruler, Desmarets’s games belong to the classical genre of the speculum principis (mirror for princes).8 Revived in the early sixteenth century by the publication of Erasmus’s famous work Institutio principis cristiani (1516), texts belonging to this genre set out ideal models of princely behavior for new rulers to emulate.9 They covered themes such as education, conduct towards subjects and counselors, moral frameworks, the principles of good government and, above all, devotion to God. Desmarets’s dedication to the games immediately situates his project within this tradition.10 His opening paragraph describes Louis as a young plant possessed of beautiful and generous tendencies, but which will produce fruits in which France can rejoice only “if one adds a careful education to the grandeur & the marvel of his birth.”11 Desmarets cautions against “flatterers” who surround the throne and persuade rulers that “everything is allowed to them, that they are above the laws, & that they should only consider their pleasures & leave the pain to their people.”12 With so many enemies “under the faces of friends,” Desmarets warns that great princes often fail to grow into their potential and instead become arrogant, voluptuary, and ignorant monarchs.13 Couched in rhetoric of corruption, Desmarets makes no apology for the restrictions his games look to impose upon the young king. By furnishing him with “the sciences the most necessary to Princes,” his games will fortify Louis’s excellent nature against such external threats.14 8 On this didactic context for the games, see also Spies-Gans, “Princely Education through Print.” 9 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince. Erasmus’s text was widely translated and published in multiple editions across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 10 The dedication does not feature as part the games themselves, but it was very likely published as a separate pamphlet or sheet alongside them. This is supported by its inclusion in a later edition of the games published by Florentin Lambert in book form in 1664. 11 Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, āiij: “[…] si l’on ajouste une soigneuse éducation à la grandeur & à la merveille de sa naissance.” 12 Ibid., āiiij–āiiij(v): “Toutefois que c’estoit un étrange malheur à ceux qui sont nez dans le thrône, & qui n’ont point experimenté les diverses conditions des hommes, de ce que rarement ils deviennent sçavans ; estant le plus souvent environnez des personnes, qui n’aspirans qu’à leurs bonnes graces, n’osent leur proposer aucune chose penible, de peur de leur déplaire. Ainsi ils n’acquierent aucun sçavoir, parce qu’il ne s’acquiert point sans peine ; & au lieu de voir dans les livres qui ne sont point flateurs, les grands exemples des Princes qui par leurs vertus sont parvenus à une grand gloire, & de ceux qui par des mœurs corrompuës sont tombez dans la misere & dans la honte ; ils n’entendent que des Courtisans, qui ne leur parlent que de leur grandeur & de leur puissance, & qui leur persuadent que tout leur est permis, qu’ils sont au dessus des loix, & qu’ils doivent seulement songer à leurs plaisirs, & laisser la peine à leurs peuples. Ainsi bien souvent il arrive qu’ils deviennent orgueilleux, voluptueux, & sans aucun sentiment d’honneur ou de honte […].” 13 Ibid., āiiij(v)–āv: “Après avoir plainte l’estrange condition des jeunes Rois, qui sous le visage d’amis ont tant d’ennemis […].” 14 Ibid., āv: “[…] en forme de jeux les sciences les plus nécessaires aux Princes.”

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Fig. 2.1  Stefano della Bella, fifteen of thirty-nine playing cards (and one title card) from the Cartes des rois de France (Game of French Kings), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644)

The construction of exempla as a guide for the Prince’s self-fashioning was at the heart of the speculum genre. History was presented as a source of exalted and elevating examples, which had the force to inspire virtue in a self-aware ruler. Erasmus, for example, held up the model of the biblical King Solomon for his ideal ruler while, in 1529, the Spanish humanist Antonio de Guevara proposed Marcus Aurelius as the perfect prototype for a young Charles V.15 Desmarets drew this practice into the novel sphere of play and games in the Cartes des rois de France (Figure 2.1). With thirty-nine cards depicting all sixty-five French kings from Pharamond to Louis XIV, only those kings deemed to be worthy examples for the young king appear alone, replete with a half-page portrait by Della Bella above a brief description of their achievements. The others are crowded onto joint cards 15 Hampton, Writing from History, 22.

Changing Hands 

Fig. 2.2  Stefano della Bella, thirteen of fifty-two playing cards (and one title card) from the Jeu de la géographie (Game of Geography), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644)

around a defining character flaw. Five kings were thus termed cruels (cruel); ten fayneants (lazy, split into two cards of five); four sans foy (faithless); four malheureux (unfortunate); three simples (simple-minded); three a meslez de bons et de mauvais (mix of good and bad); and three ny bons ny mauvais (neither good nor bad). The final grouped category was the three regens comptez po.r rois (regents counted as kings) who had a dubious or contested claim to the throne. The Jeu de la géographie spoke to Louis’s need to understand France’s privileged position in the mid-seventeenth-century world order (Figure 2.2). Each of the fifty-two cards features a female personification of a country or continent above a short descriptive text outlining its location, nature, and principal outputs. The game’s four King cards represent the four parts of the world in hierarchical sequence: Europe, Africa, Asia, and America. The twelve remaining cards in each suit feature countries belonging to that part of the world. France occupied the highest possible

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ranking position in the game as Queen of Europe, with its enemy in the ongoing context of the Thirty Years War, Spain, cast beneath it in the appropriately militant role of Jack. In the text of the Spain card, Desmarets reasserted French rights to contested territories in the Roussillon region by stating that the border between the two countries was at the Pyrenees. He also outlined France’s natural borders at the Alps with Italy on the number-10 card and at the Rhine River with Germany on the number-9 card. By instilling Louis with a sense of these countries’ relative status and their natural boundaries with France, Desmarets’s geographical game was framed to heighten his understanding of French territorial claims in the ongoing theater of European war. Those countries chosen for the number-1 or Ace cards had a variable status from a Euro-French perspective, reflecting the card’s unique capacity to change from low to high value depending on the game being played. The Ace of the African suit, the “Pretty and temperate” (Belle et temperée) Barbary Coast, had a sting in its tail as the territory of pirates under the protection of the Turk. Russia’s position as the Asian Ace reflected ongoing uncertainties regarding the country’s continental placement.16 Desmarets’s text presented something of a compromise. Allowing that most of Russia’s “cold and swampy” ( froids et marescageux) lands were in Asia, he acknowledged that some, including the capital Moscow, belonged to Europe. Meanwhile, the European Ace, Sicily, had long been a territory contested by France and Spain. Pro-French sentiment was growing among the Sicilian aristocracy in the 1640s and would help lead to a revolt in 1647.17 Tellingly, Desmarets does not mention Sicily’s Spanish rulers in his text, simply describing it as “an Island separated from Italy” (Isle separée de l’Italie). The factual tone of Desmarets’s text in the Jeu de la géographie contrasts sharply with Della Bella’s figures. Della Bella rejected contemporary ethnographic representations of natives in the creation of his figures, instead adopting the elaborate visual language of court spectacle. As a celebrated maker of festival prints, this was a language with which Della Bella was familiar. His personifications of European countries are all presented with a shield bearing their arms; African countries can be distinguished by their darkly shaded skin, non-European attire, and spears; Asian countries by their tall, turbaned headdresses; and American countries by their elaborate feather ones. These icons eschew “accurate” models of national costumes in favor of emotion-laden fantasies and concepts of the “other” as well as fulfilling a role neglected by most of the texts in the game, which rarely spell out the continent to which the featured countries belong.18 16 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 10. 17 Benigno, “Integration and Conflict in Spanish Sicily.” 18 On the concept of the exotic icon, see Schmidt, “Collecting Global Icons.”

Changing Hands 

If he were not already, Louis would soon become familiar with such emblematic costumes, which echo those worn by the performers in festivities such the ritualized Ballet des nations that exhibited diverse nations before the King and court in a coordinated display of Euro-French superiority.19 In 1626, Louis XIII staged Le grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (The Grand Ballet of the Dowager of Bilbao) in the Hôtel de Ville, a ballet performed around a series of entrées in which representatives of different nations arrived to congratulate the Douairière on the occasion of her marriage.20 A sketchbook of watercolors in the Musée du Louvre by Daniel Rabel (1578–1637), “designer of the King’s ballets,” depicts the costumes worn by the dancers.21 Americans wear wide-fanned skirts and headdresses trimmed with orange feathers,22 Asia is represented by turbaned Turks and Persians,23 and Africa by dark-skinned performers dressed in wide red skirts and collars, clasping spears in one hand.24 The extension of this elite theatrical context to Della Bella’s figures in the Jeu de la géographie is emphasized by the way in which he poses them as dancers, with pointed toes and graceful outstretched arms. Prospective monarchs were also expected to be comfortable with the language of classical myth. As would later become the case with Louis and the Sun-god Apollo, classical mythology represented a major source for royal self-fashioning as well as determining access to a vast array of cultural production, from popular literature to polite conversation. The Jeu des fables sought to introduce the five-year-old Louis to the stories and characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Figure 2.3). The thirty-six pip (number) cards feature narrative episodes from the epic poem, and the sixteen court cards represent the principal deities cast in the leading roles of King (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto), Queen (Juno, Diana, Minerva, Venus), and Jack (Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Bacchus). Short on narrative detail, explanation, and moral commentary, Desmarets’s succinct texts rendered the poem’s most famous episodes and characters distinct, bite-sized, and easy to remember. The card featuring the story of Phaeton from book 2 of the Metamorphoses is an apt 19 Canova-Green, “Dance and Ritual.” 20 Bordier, Grand bal de la douairière de Billebahaut. 21 Album Daniel Rabel, Louvre, Paris, Cabinet des dessins, inv. 32605–32607, 32614–32623, 32625–32629, 32631–32636, 32638–32639, 32641–32645, 32647, 32648, and 32692.6. 22 See “Première entrée des américains, six figures,” Les collections du département des arts graphiques, Louvre, http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/23/209965-Premiere-entree-des-americains-sixfigures-max (accessed 3 October 2018). 23 See “Entrée des ‘docteurs Perciens’: trois figures,” Les collections du département des arts graphiques, Louvre, http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/29/209971-Entree-des-docteurs-Perciens-troisfigures-max (accessed 3 October 2018). 24 See “Entrée des Africaines, cinq figures,” Les collections du département des arts graphiques, Louvre, http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/41/209983-Entree-des-Africaines-cinq-figures (accessed 3 October 2018).

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Fig. 2.3  Stefano della Bella, thirteen of fifty-two playing cards (and one title card) from the Jeu des fables (Game of Fables), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644)

example. The text reads: “Having wanted to drive the chariot of the sun his father, he went too high and too low, and burning the Sky and the earth, [he] was struck down by Jupiter.”25 In the wider vernacular tradition of the Ovide moralisée, the myth of Phaeton was often presented as a cautionary tale. Phaeton drove the Sun’s chariot against his father’s advice, so the tale stressed the importance of deferring to experienced counsel (particularly one’s parents) and the destructive potential of pride, ambition, and uncontrolled desire in positions of leadership.26 In Desmarets’s scheme there is no suggestion of the subject being presented as a source of moral philosophy. Even 25 In French, the inscription reads: “Ayant voulu conduire le char du soleil son Pere, alla trop haut et trop bas, et brulant le Ciel et la terre, fut foudroyé par Jupiter.” 26 Ryer, Les métamorphoses d’Ovide, 32–33.

Changing Hands 

Fig. 2.4  Stefano della Bella, title card and thirteen of fifty-two playing cards from the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), 1698 (fourth state, first state c. 1644)

if he were limited by the space on the cards themselves, he employs no structural devices akin to the defined character categories of the Cartes des rois. Instead, the Jeu des fables appears framed to address a more basic need for familiarity with the stories and characters of Ovid’s poem. Della Bella complemented Desmarets’s concise, unadorned myth narratives with self-consciously derivative images. Quoting of existing models and motifs is rare among Della Bella’s wider oeuvre as a printmaker,27 however his images for the narrative episodes of the Jeu des fables bear a strong resemblance to the existing visual canon associated with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and in particular, the illustrated print series by Antonio Tempesta (c. 1585, 1606) and Johan Wilhelm Baur

27 De Vesme and Massar, Stefano della Bella, 1: 12.

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(c. 1641).28 The court cards present equally iconic images of the principal deities accompanied by their traditional attributes. This heightened the didactic value of Della Bella’s images because it ensured they could be relied upon as representative: having studied them, a viewer might recognize other visual retellings of the same myth or the same deity in another composition. At the French court, for instance, scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses appeared in cycles as noteworthy as Rosso Fiorentino’s scheme for the Galerie François Ier.29 The final game belonging to the series, the Jeu des reynes, featured fifty-two famous queens drawn from both history and mythology (Figure 2.4). Like the Cartes des rois in its moral focus, though not as limited by its dynastic, genealogical, and nationalistic concerns, the game offers Louis a complementary spectrum of models of female royal behavior. Four queens were chosen to represent each one of thirteen character attributes inscribed in the corner of the cards. The queens are categorized as heureuse (happy), malheureuse (unfortunate), capriceuse (capricious), habile (skilful), galante (sociable), impudique (shameless), bonne femme (good woman), cruelle (cruel), sage (wise), pieuse (pious), vaillant (valiant), célèbre (celebrated), or saincte (saintly). The attributes are also numerically ordered from lowest to highest: the “happy” queens are accompanied by the number 1, up to the “pious” queens who are numbered 10.30 The “valiant,” “celebrated,” and “saintly” queens, who represent the court cards of a regular deck, are left unnumbered. As in the Jeu de la géographie, the changeable status of the Ace cards in contemporary games helps to explain the subjects chosen for these cards. All Desmarets’s “happy” queens are described in the text as advancing from relatively low origins to their high final state. Esther, for example, was a mere “Jewish girl” before her marriage to King Ahasuerus, while Roxanne, the “happy” wife of Alexander the Great, was even happier because before “she was nothing but the daughter of a Persian despot.”31

28 See “Antonio Tempesta,” in Ovid Illustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and Text, University of Virginia, http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/tempestabaurnew.html (accessed 3 October 2018). 29 On the decorative cycle for the Galerie François Ier, see Panofsky and Panofsky, “Iconography of the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau.” 30 The bonne femme cards were originally left unnumbered. Other initial mistakes include missing attributes on the célèbre queens, the Queen of Sheba card labeled galante instead of sage, the St. Helen card labeled saincte instead of pieuse, and missing numbers on the Helen of Troy and Queen of Sheba cards. These mistakes were rectified in later states of the game, though not all at once. A surviving deck of the cards in the British Museum shows the célèbre queens with their attributes, but the bonne femme queens still left unnumbered: see “Jeu des fables,” object numbers 1871,0513.481–533. This suggests there may be more than the four states of the game listed by De Vesme; De Vesme and Massar, Stefano della Bella, 1: 105–11. 31 The inscription reads: “[…] Elle fut si heureuse, n’estant fille que d’un Satrape Persien, que d’espouser par sa beauté cet admirable Conquerant.”

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The most negative appellations in the Jeu des reynes, like “shameful” and “cruel,” were applied to those queens deemed to have worst violated their ideal roles as wives and mothers. The “shameful” Faustina was thus denounced for her desire to commit adultery with a lowly gladiator, while the “cruel” Clytemnestra reportedly murdered her husband King Agamemnon, and would have murdered her own son if his sister had not stepped in. Slightly less blameworthy on the scale, but still far from ideal, were the powerful and manipulative “sociable” queens, like Cleopatra and Poppeae Sabina, who employed sexual influence over their royal partners to achieve their desired ends. A sheet of studies in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle gives insight into Della Bella’s preparatory process behind the Jeu des reynes (Figure 2.5). It depicts nine queens in drawn borders mimicking the full-sized cards and bears a series of inscriptions around the figures written in Della Bella’s hand. Under the figure labeled Elizabeth, there is the note: “Elizabeth, wise queen of England, don’t make the robe so wide,” while under the figure labeled Joanna of Naples he comments “She must have her throat uncovered and a feather or plume on her head.”32 Two types of inscription are present, in chalk and in pen, suggesting that Della Bella returned to the sheet a second time to make corrections. Using ink, he reallocated a number of the figures: the study that was labeled Elizabeth in chalk became Mary of Scotland in ink and the labels identifying Julia Mamaea and Faustina were also switched. Della Bella also experimented with the figure of Isabella of Spain, adding an ink study of a figure facing the other way with no veil, shorter sleeves, and a high collar. The distinct characters Della Bella created for Faustina and Julia Mamaea are based on the specific qualities each figure is associated with in the game. Faustina is “shameful,” a willing adulteress, and thus well suited to the sumptuous dress, low neckline, and beckoning gesture with which Della Bella presents her. Julia Mamaea, a “wise” queen that instructed her son well, provides an appropriate visual contrast to her brazen neighbor. Dressing her modestly in a cloak, Della Bella emphasizes her self-effacing character by presenting her turned completely away from the viewer. Described as a pleasure-seeking husband-killer in Desmarets’s text, the “sociable” Joanna of Naples was deemed by Della Bella to be too demure in his initial sketch. His instructions specify more plumage and décolletage, attributes which feature heavily in his other illustrations of “sociable” and “shameful” queens, two categories associated with illicit sexual behavior. The opposite is indicated by the nun’s habits in which Della Bella presented three out of four of the game’s “pious” queens. Many of the queens featured in Desmarets’s game lacked pervasive visual 32 The inscription reads: “[…] Janne de Naples. Il faut qu’elle ayt la gorge descouverte, et une plume ou aygrette sur las teste […] Elizabeth sage Reyne d’Angleterre. ne faittes pas la robe si large.”

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Fig. 2.5  Stefano della Bella, nine studies for the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), c. 1644

traditions surrounding their representation. In their place, Della Bella transformed his queen figures in the Jeu des reynes into symbols for the qualities they are intended to represent. Desmarets used his dedication of the game project to Queen Anne of Austria to present his “invention” as a tool of her royal authority. Anne’s leading role in the King’s education is at the center of his dedicatory rhetoric and he explained that the “regents most worthy of respect & the most secure” were those who used the authority given to them by nature to take their sons “captive” and keep them safe from malign influences.33 The Queen also featured twice in the games themselves: she appeared alongside the infant Louis XIV, driving his chariot in the Cartes des rois, and was presented as a “saintly” French queen at the pinnacle of the Jeu des 33 Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, āiiij(v): “Les Regentes le plus dignes de respect, & le plus seueres, ont beau quelquefois interposer l’autorité que la Nature leur donne, pour les captiver un moment […].”

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reynes’ model of female rule. In the face of the haunting and all too recent specter of Marie de’ Medici as queen regent, the game satisfied Anne’s immediate need for a representational strategy that legitimized her authority by stressing that she wielded royal power appropriately in her roles as mother and protector.34 Harnessed within the form of a game, the cards were also an ideal way to be seen to be teaching Louis about correct gender roles in the performance of royal power. By addressing both parties, Desmarets’s games struck a difficult note in the representational balance between queen as regent and king as child.

Shuffling the Deck: Chez Henri Le Gras to Chez Florentin Lambert In his dedication, Desmarets did not make it clear exactly which games he was presenting to Anne. The only game he described in any detail was the Cartes des rois and he expressed the hope that he would have the honor of offering Anne the other games “as they are engraved.”35 This suggests a staggered trajectory of publication for the four decks of cards and indicates that Desmarets was looking to garner royal backing for the wider game project on the basis of the Cartes des rois alone.36 However, the young French king and his mother were not the only audience that Desmarets envisioned for his cards. This was made clear by the incredibly favorable commercial terms granted to Desmarets in the privilege signed by his friend, the royal secretary Valentin Conrart. The privilege that Desmarets received for his games was truly exceptional in several respects. Normal print privileges in France during this period granted fixed-term monopolies, usually for the sale of single, completed works.37 They could be freely transferred between parties and, as such, did not operate as expressions of intellectual property. Not only did Desmarets’s cover a speculative series of card games on a wide range of specified subjects, but it also protected “in general all other games of whatever Art, Science, History or Fable they may be, that he has invented, or that he will invent hereafter.”38 Even if Desmarets were to transfer his 34 Crawford, Perilous Performances, 98–136. 35 Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, āv(v): “à mesure qu’ils seront gravez.” 36 A staggered trajectory of publication is also indicated by the 1645 correspondence included as front matter to the 1664 volume of the games published by Florentin Lambert, in which they discuss what the next game in the series will be after the Cartes des rois and Jeu des reynes. Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, 1–60. 37 On the print privilege system in France, see Armstrong, Before Copyright; and Pfister, “Author and Work in the French Print Privilege System.” 38 Brianville, Jeu d’armoiries, c̄ 2: “& generalement tous les autres jeux de quelque Art, Science, Histoire ou Fable que ce soit. qu’il a inventez, ou qu’il inventera cy-apres […].”

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privilege for any one game or series to a particular seller, he was still able to hold a claim to any future set of educational playing cards that followed a similar model. This is illustrated by the Lyon bookseller Benoist Coral’s application to Desmarets in 1659 before publishing Oronce Finé de Brianville’s hugely successful heraldic playing cards, the Jeu d’armoires.39 Desmarets’s privilege protected his association with the “invention” of didactic playing cards as the genre developed. More than anything, it resembled the brevets d’invention (patents of invention) associated with new industrial techniques or devices. 40 These contracts were intended to allow inventors to carry out their new designs without fear of disturbance from the guilds and other regulated trades. The production and sale of playing cards was a heavily regulated trade in seventeenth-century Europe.41 Organized into a tight-knit corporation, card makers in France could only ply their trade within a limited number of cities. The cards they produced had to follow accepted models and they had to be wrapped in an envelope bearing the maker’s mark and place of business and indicating whether they were intended for use in France or for export. These regulations, which were subject to frequent reform throughout the century, were related to the heavy duties leveled on playing cards as a commodity. By 1661 in Paris, these had reached 2 sols 6 deniers per deck or 18 livres gross (a not inconsequential sum). Claiming Desmarets’s playing cards as a new “invention” justified his freedom from such restrictions. 42 His privilege stipulated that he could present his games “in such form & grandeur” as he deemed appropriate and have them “printed, sold & delivered by such persons as he would choose.”43 The privilege also defended his games against “all farmers and associates of the taxes on Cards & dice” who are directed “to require nothing on the said Cards which will be made under virtue of the present [privilege] […] 39 Desmarets’s privilege was reprinted at the beginning of the bound volume of Brianville’s cards with a note that stated “the aforesaid sieur Desmarets liberally ceded & transported his said privilege, for the Cartes des Blason to Benoist Coral Bookseller at Lyon.” Brianville, Jeu d’armoiries, c̄ 4 . On the history of Brianville’s game and its reception, see Palasi, Jeux de cartes et de l’oie héraldiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. 40 The term brevet d’invention was not in general use until 1791 but the consensus is that it designated a patent system already in use with regard to inventors who applied for privileges; Isoré, “De l’existence des brevets d’invention en droit Français avant 1791.” 41 Belmas, Jouer autrefois, 243–86. 42 Earlier models for didactic games, such as the Franciscan Thomas Murner’s logical playing cards of 1509 (republished in Paris in 1629), were ignored. See Ranum, “Jeux de cartes”; and Cinq siècles de cartes à jouer en France, cat. 450. 43 Brianville, Jeu d’armoiries, c̄ 2(r)–c̄ 2(v): “Nous luy avons permis & permettons par ces presentes, de fair tailler ou graver, soit en bois ou en cuivre, au burin ou à l’eau forte […] en telle forme & de telle grandeur qu’il conviendra […] Nous luy permettrons des les faire imprimer, vendre & debiter par telles personnes qu’il voudra choisir […].”

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considering that their usage will not be to do with the challenge of winning, but [with] study and the love of virtue.”44 Desmarets chose the bookseller Henri Le Gras to distribute his games at his shop in the arcades of the Palais de Justice on Paris’s Île de la Cité, a fashionable marketplace renowned for luxury goods.45 They were to be sold alongside Desmarets’s other literary works, comprising of light romance novels, plays, and poetry, for which he had an existing publishing relationship with Le Gras. 46 Some early purchasers of the games may well have been lovers of virtue, purchasing the games as collector’s items if not for study. Surviving impressions of the Jeu des fables as uncut sheets “avant la lettre” (before lettering) suggest that at least a certain amount were sold and preserved in this manner as limited-edition Della Bella prints. 47 Out of all of Della Bella’s images for the game project, it was only those belonging to the Jeu des fables that carry his maker’s mark other than on the title cards, which could speak to their significance as his contribution to the visual canon associated with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As deluxe illustrated works were a speciality of Palais booksellers, this elite function for and appeal of the games is easy to envisage. Once the lettering had been added, the suggestion that Le Gras sold the games as decks for play is supported by two rare letterpress sheets bearing his details that accompany early states of the Jeu de la géographie and Jeu de reynes in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.48 In lieu of the traditional symbols (which were applied to the decks in later states), they describe how the cards were colored to divide them visually into suits. In the Jeu de la géographie, gold was for Europe, reddish-purple (colombin) for Asia, green for America, and the African countries were marked out by the black skin of Della Bella’s figures. In the Jeu des reynes, gold represented hearts, silver diamonds, colombin spades, and green clubs. On the sheet accompanying the Jeu des reynes, rules are provided for the tricktaking game of Hoc, a game said to have been favored at the French court by the Cardinal Mazarin.49 The rules were slightly modified to reflect the didactic content of the cards, with additional penalties applied for players who played “capricious,” 44 Brianville, Jeu d’armoiries, c̄ 3: “Defendons aussi à tous Fermiers & Partisans de l’impost des Cartes & dez, our leurs Commis, d’exiger aucune chose sur lesdites Cartes qui seront faites en présentes, duquel impost nous le déclarons exemptes, & de tout autre impost à venir, attendu que leur usage ne regardera pas le defit du gain, mais l’étude et l’amour de la vertu.” 45 Martin and Gerard, Print, Power, and People, 227. 46 Hall, Richelieu’s Desmarets, 360–64. 47 “Jeu des fables”; see object numbers 1871,0513.534–535, 1871,0513.536–538, 1871,0513.539–550, 1871,0513.551–562, 1871,0513.563–574, and 1871,0513.575–586. 48 Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE PET FOL-KH-34 (B, 26); RESERVE PET FOL-KH-34 (B, 24). 49 Parlett, History of Card Games, pp. 79, 117. It is interesting to note that a rule book to Hoc entitled Le royal jeu du hoc was published in Paris by Jean Promé in 1644, and republished in a second edition the

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“shameful,” and “cruel” queens. These cards were prohibited from being “Hoc” (the term applied to cards which allowed players to break a sequence during play or which could not be followed by any other player), and whoever played them had to pay a penalty to the last player to play a valid “Hoc” card. This penalty amounted to one stake for “capricious” queens, two stakes for “shameful” queens, and three stakes for “cruel” queens. Desmarets also noted that cards could be used for any other type of card game. This was the only instruction that he provided on the sheet accompanying the Jeu de la géographie, which directed players to read the rules for the Jeu des reynes if they wanted to play Hoc and to apply penalties to the same cards (3s, 6s, and 8s) despite no clear didactic reason for doing so. Late seventeenth-century copies of the games sold in Amsterdam by the prolific map seller, Pierre Mortier, show how Della Bella’s title cards might have been intended to function as wrappers for the sale of the cut decks, stuck onto a separate piece of wrapping paper or casing (Figure 2.6). In a letter dated May 1644, the French court resident of the Medici grand duke, J.B. Barducci, also claimed to have sent a “book that explains the manner in which one plays” to Florence alongside a set of the cards, likely the Cartes des rois.50 Given that the Cartes des rois was composed of thirty-nine cards rather than the traditional fifty-two, it is possible that Desmarets devised a booklet of rules for this set, which is now lost. His change to the more traditional format of the fifty-two-card deck for the later games in the series also indicates a development towards making the cards more useful for traditional game play, a factor stressed in the surviving letterpress rule sheets accompanying the Jeu des reynes and Jeu de la géographie sold by Le Gras. Separately to Desmarets’s plans, a second edition of his games was published in Paris in 1664. Two years after his death, Le Gras’s privilege for the four games was transferred to the bookseller Florentin Lambert who sold them from his shop “at the sign of St. Paul” on the rue St. Jacques, the traditional epicenter of Parisian book publishing. As a bookseller, Lambert could not offer a sharper contrast to Le Gras. An agent of the Jesuits, he specialized almost exclusively in devotional works and operated a second shop in the precincts of their Professed House.51 A lavish set of outdated educational games, whose religious instruction was limited to a run-of-the-mill approbation of piety in kings and queens, was an odd fit among his stock.52

same year as Le jeu du hoc, augmenté, comme il se jouë en plusieurs endroictz signalez. Both are listed in Depaulis, Les loix du jeu. 50 De Vesme and Massar, Stefano della Bella, 1: 37. 51 Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires, cat. 2963. 52 For a list of works published by Lambert, see “Lambert, Florentin (16..–1693),” IDref (Identifiants et Réfééntiel pour l’enseignement supérieur et la recherché), www.idref.fr/030991897 (accessed 3 October 2018).

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Fig. 2.6  Stefano della Bella (after) and Pierre Mortier (published by), wrapper and booklet of explanatory text for the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), c. 1721 (1st ed. c. 1692)

A clue to Lambert’s intention exists in the de novo shape he gave the games. Lambert published Desmarets’s cards as a book and, to do so, he cut down the plates so that each card could be printed on a separate page. This decision also Other works by Desmarets among Lambert’s stock tended to those with spiritual subjects published in the 1650s and 1660s.

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allowed Lambert to set up a specif ic entry point for the reader. The opening eight pages of his volume featured a reprint of Desmarets’s original dedication to the games, addressed to Queen Anne as Regent. This was followed by a 60-page correspondence containing a playful critique of the Jeu des reynes supposedly penned by a noble Breton woman. Likely published as a separate pamphlet prior to its appearance in Lambert’s volume, it assimilates the game of queens into an elite culture of adult game play by describing its transformation into an oral parlor game of the kind described in Renaissance handbooks like Innocentio Ringhieri’s Cento giuochi liberali e d’ingegno (One hundred liberal and ingenious games, 1551) and Girolamo Bargagli’s Dialogo dei giuochi (Dialogue on games, 1572). In the context of Lambert’s volume of the games, however, the essential factor is that all his repurposed front matter shares one central theme, its focus is on queens. Despite stepping down as regent, Queen Anne was still an influential figure in the 1660s. A fervent Catholic, she was renowned as a supporter of dévot (devout) and Jesuit interests at court. In May 1664, Anne was widely credited for helping to secure a ban against the public performance of Molière’s incendiary play Tartuffe.53 This was performed during the Enchanted Isle festivities at Versailles and had aroused devout consternation due to its presentation of Tartuffe as a religious hypocrite; concerns were raised that it might cast unwarranted public suspicion on those devout believers who preached their religion in earnest. The exact date when Lambert brought out his edition of the games in 1664 is unknown. However, it is possible that his interest in them may have been motivated by the immediate context of Anne’s triumph in the matter of Tartuffe. In any case, his decision to republish a series of games framed for Louis as a powerless child, which celebrated the leadership of the “saintly” Anne of Austria, can be read as an endorsement of her guiding influence.54 It has been possible to locate two surviving volumes of Lambert’s games complete with cards.55 Despite the four games outlined on the title-page, only the Jeu des reynes is contained within both volumes. Reflecting Lambert’s emphasis on queens in his prefatory material, this illustrates how changing contexts of sale could have an impact upon the games’ reception and use. However, the paucity of surviving volumes of Lambert’s games also shows just how few copies 53 On Anne and the debate surrounding Molière’s Tartuffe, see Chill, “Tartuffe, Religion and Courtly Culture,” 151–83; and Prest, Controversy in French Drama, 32–33, 141–42. 54 The only other nonreligious work by Desmarets that Lambert republished, La verité des fables (1648, republished 1661), had also previously been dedicated to Anne. 55 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département estampes et photographie, RESERVE KH-32 (A); Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LCCN 05039482. A volume at the British Museum contains Lambert’s title-page and front matter in a modern binding: 1982, U.4603.

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were preserved as books. This might be because print collectors instead chose to “restore” the cards to their original condition, disguising plate marks around individual cards by cutting down the prints.56 Alternatively, consumers of Lambert’s edition may have decided to use the cards in another manner altogether, such as for play.

“Laying all his cards on the table”: Chez Florent Le Comte Making the cards easier for play was the explicit concern of their third publisher, the Parisian bookseller-cum-painter and -sculptor, Florent Le Comte, who brought out another new edition of Desmarets’s games in 1698. We have seen that earlier states of the games sold by Le Gras were colored to indicate their suits, but it was not until Le Comte owned the plates that he claimed suit marks were added to all of the decks (hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs) along with the initials R. (Roi), D. (Dame), and V. (Valet) to identify the court cards.57 Numbers, which already appeared on the other decks, were also added to the pip cards of the Cartes des rois. Le Comte felt that leaving players to organize the decks based on color and image alone was “a lot to ask from youths” who he thought were the most likely candidates to play games with the cards.58 The attention Le Comte paid to the play of the games is best illustrated by his treatment of the Cartes des rois. Composed of thirty-nine cards, this set held little in common structurally to a traditional playing-card deck. Yet by leaving out the pip cards from 3 to 6 in each suit, but adding numbers and suit signs to the other cards, Le Comte managed to transform it into a special thirty-six-card deck for use in Piquet, one of the most popular card games in France during this period.59 He even preserved some of the logic of Desmarets’s original game by selecting praiseworthy kings for Piquet’s key scoring cards of King, Queen, and Ace (including Louis XIV as the King of Hearts). However, for the high-scoring Jack cards, Le Comte chose the negative characteristics malheureux, simples, fayneants, and cruels. In his new deck, Le Comte appears to have sought a balance between maintaining the structure of the suits’ internal hierarchies and the desire to include a range of Della Bella’s different designs from the Cartes des rois.

56 This practice makes the states of many impressions of the games hard to determine. 57 A surviving impression of the Jeu des fables shows that the uncut plate bore suit signs prior to initialing, suggesting that they already appeared on this game before Le Comte acquired the plates: see Massar, “States of Della Bella,” 411, 414–15. 58 Desmarets, Jeux historiques, 6: “ce qui étoit beucoup demander à la Jeunesse.” 59 Parlett, History of Card Games, 175–81.

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It seems Le Comte’s overriding concern was less with the act of play itself than with ensuring his edition of the games appealed to the widest possible audience. For this reason, he sold the games both separately as cards and bound together in a volume. He explained in his preface to the volume that he was also hoping to attract those who liked to store books as ornaments in their studies and take them on pleasant walks, as well as print collectors who valued the work of Della Bella.60 Le Comte’s focus on Della Bella ties into the wider context of his production as an author/bookseller-publisher. In 1699–1700, he published his magnum opus, a three-volume guide to the fine arts entitled the Cabinet des singularitez. Print was a principal focus across the work and Della Bella featured in the second volume with fourteen pages dedicated to a catalogue of his works.61 The games appear in the Cabinet with the note that “[t]hey are sold as a book or as playing-cards, chez le Sieur le Comte.” Inside the bound volume of the games, a corresponding advertisement announced that Le Comte soon hoped to bring out a “Treatise on Painting & Engraving.” These two books are the only surviving works to bear Le Comte’s address “near the fountain of St. Benedict, at the Royal Monogram” on the rue St. Jacques. Given his professional identity as a painter-sculptor, Le Comte’s premises are more likely to have been a private room or suite of rooms than an actual shopfront, which perhaps also explains why he sold the games together with Nicolas Le Clerc, another bookseller based on the rue St. Jacques. In the “Advertisement” to the Cabinet, a hodgepodge collection of merchandise is described as being available at Le Comte’s demeure (residence).62 This included catalogs, a selection of handmade frames (with paintings or without), prints glued onto canvases, and “generally all manner of things concerning painting, sculpture and gilding.” He also bought, sold, and exchanged prints, drawings, paintings, and curiosities.63 The image of Le Comte as a connoisseur of prints contrasts with the decision he took to interfere with Della Bella’s designs by adding suit signs, initials, and even replacing one of the original cards. In the Cartes des rois, Le Comte swapped the original card etched by Della Bella, which showed an infant Louis XIV riding in a chariot driven by his mother, for an anonymous card showing the adult king in the guise of Martin Desjardins’s statue at the Place des Victoires,

60 Desmarets, Jeux historiques, 3–6. 61 Le Comte, Cabinet des singularitez, 2: 396–413: “Il se vendent en livres ou en cartes a joüer.” 62 Le Comte, Cabinet des singularitez, 1: avertissement. 63 Ibid.: “Il fait & vend aussi les bordures des toutes les grandures, ovals, ronds ou carèes, dorées ou non, garnies de leurs Tableaux, ou Separèment, il colle Estampes sur toile, & entreprend generalement ce qui concerne la Peintre, la Sculpture & la Dorure. Il achete, vend ou échange des Estampes, Desseins, Tableaux, & autres curiositez.”

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crowned by victory and standing triumphant over vanquished nations.64 The updated Louis XIV card spoke of the King’s solid achievements rather than childish hopes, dreams, and auspices, possibly indicating that this was another method through which Le Comte looked to balance the game’s practicality and usefulness as a didactic tool against its appeal to print collectors. The original card may also have been lost, or too badly worn to reprint.65 Le Comte failed to mention this central substitution in his preface to the games, instead claiming that his additions to the cards avoided “those places that would render them less interesting to people who love prints, [while] also rendering them more pleasant to play.”66

Conclusion By the time Le Comte published the four games in 1698, the fifty-four-year wear in the plates etched by Della Bella would have diminished their appeal to all but the least knowledgeable of print amateurs. In his guide, the eighteenth-century print collector Charles Antoine Jombert was quick to warn others against buying his late, modified impressions.67 Attitudes have not shifted a great deal in modern collections. Impressions of the four games are typically catalogued under Della Bella according to their state, and early states are those most valued by connoisseurs and art historians primarily concerned with the artist’s hand.68 It is important to recognize that much of the material evidence with which we are left is the result of the games’ assimilation into a pervasive culture of print collecting, where Della Bella’s authorship is of central importance. However, by moving from Desmarets’s “invention” of didactic playing cards as a mirror for the young king Louis XIV and through the successive presentations of the four games to a commercial audience, this essay has addressed their broader history as seventeenth-century playthings. The games changed substantially in form and function across the century as they changed hands between different authors and publishers looking to frame and reframe them for ideal and imagined audiences.

64 “Jeux historiques des Rois de France.” 65 Surviving impressions of the original Louis XIV card show the text partially worn off the plate. 66 Desmarets, Jeux historiques, 6: “en évitant quelque endroit qui le rendoit même moins curieux aux personnes qui aiment l’estampe, le rendre aussi plus agreable à jouer.” 67 Jombert, Essai d’un catalogue, 117. 68 Massar characterized the addition of suit marks and numbers to the Jeu des fables as “crude” and suggested the addition of lettering to the court cards was unnecessary; Massar, “States of Della Bella.”

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Bibliography Primary Sources Bordier, René. Grand bal de la douairière de Billebahaut. Paris: Louvre, 1626. Brianville, Oronce Finé de. Jeu d’armoiries de l’Europe pour apprendre le blason, la géographie et l’histoire curieuse, dédié à Monsieur d’Hozier. Lyon: Benoist Coral, 1659. Desmarets, Jean. Jeux historiques des rois de France, reines renommées, géographie et métamorphoses, par feu Mr J. Desmarets Conseiller, Secrétaire & Contrôleur General de l’Extraordinaire des Guerres, et gravez par Do La Bella. Paris: Florent Le Comte and Nicolas Le Clerc, 1698. ———. Les jeux de cartes des roys de France, des reines renommées, de la géographie et des fables. Paris: Florentin Lambert, 1664. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. Lisa Jardine, trans. Neil Cheshire and Michael Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Jombert, Charles-Antoine. Essai d’un catalogue de l’œuvre d’Etienne de la Belle, peintre et graveur Florentin. Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1772. Le Comte, Florent. Cabinet des singularitez d’architecture, peintre, sculpture et graveure. 3 vols. Paris: Florent Le Comte, 1699–1702. Ryer, Antoine. Les métamorphoses d’Ovide. Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1666.

Secondary Sources Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: The French Book-Privilege System, 1498–1526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Belmas, Élisabeth. Jouer autrefois: essai sur le jeu dans la France moderne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle). Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2006. Benigno, Francesco. “Integration and Conflict in Spanish Sicily.” In Spain in Italy: Politics, Society and Religion 1500–1700, ed. Thomas Dandelet and John Marino, pp. 23–44. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Canova-Green, Marie Claude. “Dance and Ritual: The Ballet des Nations at the Court of Louis XIII.” Renaissance Studies 9, no. 4 (1995): 395–403. Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Milad Doueihi, and David Hall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Chill, Emanuel. “Tartuffe, Religion and Courtly Culture.” French Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1963): 151–83. Cinq siècles de cartes à jouer en France, ed. Jean-Pierre Seguin and Cécile de Jandin. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1963.

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Crawford, Katherine. Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. D’Allemagne, Henry-René. Les cartes à jouer du XIVe au XXe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1906. De Vesme, Alexandre, and Phyllis Dearborn Massar. Stefano della Bella: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New York: Collectors Editions, 1971. Depaulis, Thierry. Les loix du jeu: bibliographie de la littérature technique des jeux de cartes en français avant 1800. Paris: Cymbalum Mundi, 1994. Hall, Hugh Gaston. Richelieu’s Desmarets and the Century of Louis XIV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hampton, Timothy. Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Isoré, Jacques. “De l’existence des brevets d’invention en droit Français avant 1791.” Revue Historique de Droit Français et Étranger 16, no. 4 (1937): 94–130. “Jeu des fables.” The British Museum Collection Online, www.britishmuseum.org/research/ collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1494851&partId=1&museu mno=1871,0513.563-574&page=1. “Jeux historiques des Rois de France, Reines Renommées, Geographie et Metamorphose.” The British Museum Collection Online, www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/ collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=154655300 1&objectid=1517906. Martin, Henri-Jean, and David Gerard. Print, Power, and People in 17th-Century France. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. Massar, Phyllis Dearborn. “States of Della Bella’s Jeu de la mythologie.” Print Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1987): 411–16. Mormiche, Pascale. Devenir prince: l’école du pouvoir en France XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2009. Palasi, Philippe. Jeux de cartes et de l’oie héraldiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: une pédagogie ludique en France sous l’Ancien régime. Paris: Picard, 2000. Panofsky, Dora, and Erwin Panofsky. “The Iconography of the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 52 (1958): 113–90. Parlett, David. A History of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pfister, Laurent. “Author and Work in the French Print Privilege System: Some Milestones.” In Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright, ed. Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer, and Lionel Bently, pp. 115–36. Cambridge: Open Books Publisher, 2010. Prest, Julia. Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ranum, Orest. “Jeux de cartes, pédagogie et enfance de Louis XIV.” In Les jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes; Tours, Juillet 1980, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, pp. 553–62. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982.

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Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires (vers 1500–vers 1810), ed. Jean-Dominique Mellot and Élisabeth Queval. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2004. Schapira, Nicolas. Un professionnel des lettres au XVIIe siècle: Valentin Conrart, une histoire sociale. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003. Schmidt, Benjamin. “Collecting Global Icons: The Case of the Exotic Parasol.” In Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchange in the Early Modern World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, pp. 31–57. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Spies-Gans, Paris. “A Princely Education through Print: The Didactic History of Stefano della Bella’s 1644 Jeux de Cartes Etched for Louis XIV.” MA thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2010. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

About the author Naomi Lebens completed her PhD as part of a collaborative project undertaken between the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum. Her thesis considered why games were the site of such invention in early modern print. Naomi has subsequently held positions as a Curatorial Assistant in the Western Art Department at the Ashmolean Museum and Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She now holds the position of Curator of Art Collections at the University of Reading.

Part II Gambling and Games of Chance

3.

“A game played home” The Gendered Stakes of Gambling in Shakespeare’s Plays Megan Herrold Abstract This essay focuses on Shakespeare’s development of the Gamester figure throughout his canon. I demonstrate that, from The Taming of the Shrew to Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra to The Winter’s Tale, the facade of a friendly wager requires the Gamester’s concomitant denigration and control of the women around him—often to disastrous results. When the Gamester calls Fortune a “whore” and stakes the reputations and lives of women in bets, he not only attempts to absorb the emasculating risks of determining “odds” and “stakes” between men, but he also risks societal perdition. My focus on the specifically gendered implications of Shakespearean wagers thus elucidates why so many of Shakespeare’s plays begin with a game but often end with a stage littered with bodies. Keywords: Shakespeare, gender, gambling, gamester, dupe, odds, wagers

In a direct address to gold, the eponymous hero of William Shakespeare’s The Life of Timon of Athens (1623) derides the ability of money to invert natural hierarchies.1 According to Timon, gold makes “black white, foul fair,/ Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant” and thus unduly influences men (4.3.29–30). Indeed, by act 4 of the play, the greed of his fellow Athenians has rendered the wealthy and generous Timon misanthropic and broke. Timon concludes his tirade with a vow concerning gold and its source, the earth: Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that puts odds Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare. 1 There is no definitive evidence that Timon was performed, its only source being the 1623 folio.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch03

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Among the rout of nations; I will make thee Do thy right nature. (4.3.42–45; my italics)

Through “odds,” Timon invokes gambling in a speech that asserts his superiority to his fellows. Other Athenians might succumb to money’s unnatural influence, but Timon can use money to restore the natural order. Timon’s pose is in line with the ways gambling in the early modern period has been shown to serve the construction of a masculine self.2 By fashioning himself a “Gamester”—a figure that gained prominence from the Stuart period onward and may be defined as a “dedicated, habitual gambler”—Timon can associate himself with lower class people and pastimes while maintaining and even reaffirming his superior status.3 To place too great a focus on a gamester’s socioeconomic motivations for gambling, however, neglects the extent of the gendered stakes of gambling in Shakespeare’s plays. His gamesters gamble for a variety of specific reasons,4 but they do so in part to distill the broader social order into a microcosm of society populated solely by winners and losers, cons, and dupes. They in effect reframe the preservation of the patriarchal status quo as the triumph of one individual over another. But Timon’s avowed rationale for gambling is to better control that “common whore of mankind.” He thus aligns the restoration of “right nature” with not only positioning himself among men but also asserting his literal and figurative control over women, an act with heightened stakes in a play in which all of the female characters are in fact sex workers.5 Timon is fairly typical among Shakespeare’s gamesters; while gambling provides a style and vocabulary through which the gamester identity might be fashioned, that fashioning for men often occurs alongside their indifference or even outright hostility to the gendered implications of gambling—particularly its effect upon women.6 So while Shakespeare’s plays frequently revel in the gamester’s drives 2 For discussions of the use of play in the construction of the early modern self, see Nardo, Ludic Self. Also see Zucker, “Social Stakes,” 67–86, and Bloom, “Manly Drunkenness,” 21–44, for discussions of masculine self-construction through wagers involving money and drink, respectively. 3 Zucker, “Social Stakes,” 76. He also discusses the ways in which the archetype figured on the English stage into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ibid., 75–82. Marked by the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the beginning reign of King James VI of Scotland who assumed the crown as James I of England, the Stuart period lasted until 1714. 4 For a discussion of gambling in Antony and Cleopatra, see Woodbridge, “He beats thee ’gainst the odds.” Novy, “Patriarchy and Play,” locates the centrality of play to The Taming of the Shrew. For a study of economic value and play throughout Shakespeare’s works, see Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics. 5 Karras, Common Women, argues that medieval patriarchy controls all women by potentially associating them with “common women” or prostitutes. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s heroines in relation to his use of “whore,” see Stanton, Shakespeare’s “Whores.” 6 On the concept of “self-fashioning” during this period, see especially Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

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towards dominance, oppression, and hierarchical ordering, they also demonstrate the irrational and dangerous limitations of those drives. We shall see that it is no coincidence that a Shakespearean wager often results in a stage littered with bodies. This essay argues that Shakespeare invokes gambling over and over in his works because its gendered implications most effectively juxtapose conflicting theories of social organization to dramatic effect, demonstrating the potential for societal perdition under the guise of play.7 Because women so often provide the occasion for thinking through the implications of typically masculine hierarchical drives,8 our focus will be on the ways women complicate scenes of gambling and catalyze plots by putting pressure on the terms and stakes of play. This exploration will begin through an examination of the ways women disrupt the ethos behind the need to determine “odds” in a wager. A historicized understanding of the term “odds” speaks to the ways emasculation is conceptually tied to compromised subjectivity. In Antony and Cleopatra, this phenomenon structures the rivalry between Antony and Caesar through reference to gambling. When Cleopatra steps in and starts gambling herself, her example goes against type in its refusal to associate the emasculation potential inherent in “odds” with women. We see the more typical misogynistic response in Hamlet, where women are portrayed as performing the emasculating work of gambling even when not participating in the wager at hand. And when they do actively participate in gambling, women are often associated with the “stakes” of a given wager. The gendered implications of “stakes” are elucidated through the juxtaposition of an early and later play, The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter’s Tale. At issue in both works is the facility with which women become the stakes of play rather than players themselves. In these and Shakespeare’s other plays that invoke gambling, the ambiguity of women’s roles in wagers that affect them puts pressure on dramatic conclusions that seemingly uphold patriarchal order. Shakespeare suggests that when women serve as subjects staking rather than mere objects being staked in a

7 Colon-Semenza in Sport, Politics, and Literature argues that “sport” was a contested category in the Renaissance relating to disagreements over the proper function of the individual body and its place in the body politic. In positing that “sport” was just as often central to conceptions of social order as disorder, Colon-Semenza positions himself against theorists who group sport together with Carnival, that is, as the controlled and time-bound releasing of antisocial energies. 8 See Dolan, Marriage and Violence, 3–7, 23–24, 75, for a discussion of the violence tied to hierarchical drives within marriage. She argues that the drive for dominance can enact a “zero-sum game” between the partners, by which she means one partner’s gain in power necessarily determines the other partner’s loss. Shepherd, Meanings of Manhood, 2–3, discusses how hierarchies of age, social status, marital status, and gender affect power relations in English society. Also see Schwarz, What You Will, 3, for a discussion of the ways femininity coalesces with the “intra- and intersubjective systems of alliance” that society depends upon and that subtend hierarchical drives.

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wager, they belie the socioeconomic conservatism associated with gambling, and instead reveal its radical potential.

“Making odds even”: Death as an Emasculating Force When Shakespeare invokes gambling, references to “odds” and/or “stakes” of play often signal the potential for literal and theoretical social clashes that undermine the theoretical presumption of equivalent rivals in a wager. The denotations of “odds” speak to this paradox. Early uses of “odds” refer to “odd or uneven things” or “inequalities.”9 The determination of odds aims to correct for any differences between the players and therefore create equal stakes in a wager. The conventional phrase “to make odds even” brings these threads together through the image of scales balancing, the traditional symbol of justice.10 Shakespeare dramatizes the failure to balance “odds” in The Merchant of Venice (1594–98), a play in which the central transaction approximates a gambling wager that is deemed illegitimate in a court of law.11 When the Christian Antonio cannot repay the loan he borrows from Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Venice, Shylock demands Antonio’s compliance with the terms to which they both previously agreed. Antonio is to give Shylock a “pound/ Of [Antonio’s] fair flesh” to absolve his debt (1.3.145–46). Although their agreement initially rendered the two men equivalent participants in their transaction, the play reveals that a Jew and a Christian cannot be equally matched in Shakespeare’s Venice. Shylock’s stakes in the transaction are coded: his charging compound interest and demanding Antonio’s pound of flesh are understood economically and socially through his Jewishness. That association between Shylock as an economic actor and his stakes is later used to undermine the legitimacy of his legal, economic, and social position in Venice. Shylock’s attempt to seek justice in court nearly results in his ruin. The court ultimately deems the men’s initial contract illegitimate on a technicality—Shylock is told he can exact Antonio’s “flesh” in payment for the breached loan, but his doing so would mean conspiring against the life of a Venetian citizen. Obtaining his due justice would therefore bring about the confiscation of Shylock’s lands and goods by the state. Shylock instead reneges all claims against Antonio and is granted mercy by the court. In short, Shylock’s presumption that he and Antonio were equivalent economic 9 OED Online, s.v. “odds, n.” 10 For a discussion of the conceptual links between justice, fairness, and gambling in the medieval and early modern imagination, see Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, 106–26. 11 See Wilson, “Drama and Marine Insurance,” 127–42. Zucker, “Social Stakes,” 83 n. 11, observes that the merchant Gerard Malynes views commerce in relation to gambling in his 1622 work, Consuetude.

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and legal actors in Venice resulted not only in the loss of his initial loan (not to mention his dignity), but very nearly also in the loss of his estate and livelihood. In addition to conjuring the image of justice rendered through balanced scales, the phrase “to make odds even” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century also spoke to the promise of social-status leveling by a cosmic agent. When the reverend Richard Greenham seeks to console his Christian readers, for example, he counsels them to make the Sabbath “a counting day to make oddes euen with all men, but euen things odde with God.”12 His reference to leveled distinctions implies granting forgiveness to fellow men and seeking forgiveness from God. Shakespeare on the other hand incorporates a less soothing iteration of the phrase in Measure for Measure (1604), where it is “death […]/ That makes these odds all even” (3.1.41).13 Whether attributing “evened odds” to God or to death, the equality and justice between men that results depends on the erasure of any individuality and exceptionality. While debtors, sinners, and social inferiors might rejoice at this leveling, creditors and social superiors likely would not. For those with greater stakes in their individual and exceptional status, equality tends to be regarded as threatening and, in a patriarchal society, emasculating. Hints of this emasculation by the cosmic leveling of distinctions can be found in the determination of “odds” in Shakespeare’s scenes of gambling. The gamblingspecific definition of odds is “the ratio between the amounts staked by the parties in a bet, based on the expected probability either way.”14 As we saw above in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare often dramatizes the former part of that definition. The social and economic standing of the rivals in the bet often determine their stakes of play. But Shakespeare also dramatizes the latter aspect of the definition of odds. Although the mathematical principles upon which gambling is based are relatively straightforward—if one knows the odds in play, it is possible to place strategic bets on the chance of particular outcomes—Shakespeare complicates matters by blurring the line between player and chance. If the leveling of status between players of different social standing could be emasculating, we find that when a gamester no longer plays against a fellow mortal but one whose power approximates that of God or Death, that threat is imminently greater. In Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07), the potential emasculation associated with odds is manifest. Mark Antony is Shakespeare’s most consummate aristocratic gamester, placing bets on fishing, sea voyages, battles, and his friends’ behavior.15 Although Antony is skilled at gaming, the Soothsayer warns that Caesar is luckier: 12 Greenham, Workes, 170. 13 Measure for Measure was performed in 1604. 14 OED Online, s.v. “odds, n.” 15 See Woodbridge’s discussion of Antony in English Revenge Drama, 119, and “He beats thee ’gainst the odds,” 193, 200.

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If thou dost play with him at any game Thou art sure to lose; and of that natural luck He beats thee ’gainst the odds. Thy lustre thickens When he shines by. (2.3.23–26)

In portraying men as metaphorical coins and thus seemingly equivalent rivals, the soothsayer imbeds an inverse proportion between the men: Caesar’s shining is linked to Antony’s luster clouding over. He claims this inverse relationship exists even when the odds are in Antony’s favor, a situation that should give us pause. While luck may best skill in any particular gamble, Caesar’s destined win removes the very possibility of luck, suggesting the source of his fated victory stems from something beyond the agency of either man or chance itself. As the agent of such a force, Caesar approximates the role of death in the cosmic sense of the term: like death triumphs over life, Caesar must triumph over Antony in their wager. As in the implication of the term “odds,” Caesar’s deathlike triumph over Antony hints of emasculation. Antony himself concedes the truth of the Soothsayer’s prophecy in an image of his sexual submission to Caesar: “The very dice obey him,/ And in our sports my better cunning faints/ Under his chance” (2.3.31-3). As his words here indicate, gendered expectations for manly behavior inflect Antony’s particular case of circumscribed action: hindered from winning by forces outside his control, Antony envisions himself dominated by Caesar, his “cunning” fainting under Caesar’s “chance.” Where Timon of Athens might associate this emasculation with a damning view of women, Antony and Cleopatra refuses to do so. When Antony succumbs to Caesar and death, Cleopatra turns to gambling language to mourn the unjust and emasculating universalism of death. She laments: [Mark Antony dies] O see, my women, The crown o’th’earth doth melt. My lord! O, withered is the garland of the war. The soldier’s pole is fall’n. Young boys and girls Are level now with men. The odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon. (4.16.64–70)

As opposed to the inversely proportional relationship between Antony and Caesar, a fellow man, Cleopatra’s characterization of her relationship with Antony suggests a direct proportionality between them: his loss is also hers. His death renders “the odds […] gone.” With no more distinctions to be made, the symbols of earthly value also waste away: crowns melt, garlands wither, and soldiers lose their sexual and military potency as their poles fall. Like Antony before her, Cleopatra marks this

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leveling of distinction with a pun: with no more Mark in the world, nothing is “remarkable,” a word that registers her particular loss but also the loss of any further distinction-making. Antony’s diminishing diminishes her because it symbolizes the death of their relationship as much as the death of his individuality. And like Antony, Cleopatra experiences his death as (a metaphorical) sexual emasculation. Her assertion that there is “nothing left remarkable” also puns on female genitalia, the “no-thing” that doubly registers her lack of penis. Without Mark to “remark” her “nothing,” Cleopatra suffers a loss of sexual potency alongside his. In presenting the joint emasculation of the unit through the loss of one individual, Antony and Cleopatra refuses the tendency to associate women with the emasculating connotations of “odds.” In fact, Cleopatra does her utmost to restore Antony’s distinction and theirs as a couple by reframing her death as a triumph. In preparation for her suicide, she orders the restoration of the physical trappings of distinction: “Give me my robe. Put on my crown” (5.2.271). With these, Antony also returns: she “see[s] him rouse himself/ To praise [her] noble act” and hears him “mock/ The luck of Caesar,” actions tantamount to mocking the inevitability of death (5.2.275–77). With Antony’s restoration, she embodies the manlier elements and becomes greater than she could as an individual: “I am fire and air; my other elements/ I give to baser life” (5.2.280-1). Her suicide, therefore, should be read as an insistence on masculine distinction, her individual death the triumph of the couple over death. Through their reconstituted bond, they both achieve masculine exceptionality and thus “mock the luck of Caesar,” and odds-leveling death.

“Marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths”: Women and Cons We also witness the threatening gender implications that stem from the idealized theoretical ground of gambling odds in Hamlet (1600–04). Resisting the reciprocal exceptionality achieved by the couple in Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet pins the emasculation resulting from leveled distinctions upon women—specifically his mother, Queen Gertrude. Hamlet views Gertrude as guilty from the beginning of Hamlet, owing to her hasty marriage to his uncle Claudius, whom Hamlet suspects of murdering his father and usurping the throne of Denmark. In pitting the blame on Gertrude, however, Hamlet is characteristically oblique—we never quite know the odds or stakes of his gambles. His wager in act 5 functions similarly to his other machinations in the play, like his “feigned” madness and staged play within a play; these three “plays” grant him a facade of levity, obscuring his motivations and allowing him to manipulate others.16 16 The justification of Hamlet’s duplicity is discussed by Nardo, Ludic Self, 15.

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Through the wager, the various gamesters’ desire to “win” at all costs results in the perdition of the court of Denmark. This perdition occurs largely because each man—Hamlet, King Claudius, and the noblemen Laertes—refuses to acknowledge the stakes for which he plays. Ostensibly, Hamlet and Laertes agree to fence each other, and Laertes and King Claudius place bets on the match. But serious motivations for revenge actualize the sword fight and the wager upon it: Laertes wishes to avenge his father’s murder at Hamlet’s hands; Hamlet wishes to avenge his father’s murder at Claudius’s hands; and Claudius wishes to prevent Hamlet’s revenge. To even the playing field in the athletic competition, Hamlet and Laertes have been assigned odds based on their skill as swordsmen. But the attempt to even the match between the men falls apart in the face of a rigged game in this notoriously difficult passage. Although invested in Hamlet’s death at Laertes’s hands, Claudius bets on Hamlet’s victory in the fencing match. Complicating this duplicity, both Hamlet and Claudius seem to agree that Claudius “hath laid the odds o’th’ weaker side,” implying Laertes is the “bettered [i.e., favored]” rival (5.2.199, 201). Critics disagree as to whether Claudius understands Hamlet or Laertes as “the weaker side,” which can mean either the poorer swordsman or the worse ranked swordsman. Either Claudius knowingly makes a bad bet on Hamlet, the worse fighter, or he manipulates the odds to favor his wager on Hamlet, the better fighter.17 Similarly, although warned by his friend Horatio that he “will lose this wager,” Hamlet expects victory, stating, “I do not think so. Since he went into France, I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds” (5.2.147–9). This assertion renders the arena of Hamlet’s victory ambiguous—does he mean he is the more practiced swordsman and will defeat Laertes at fencing? Or, is he claiming to be a practiced gamester, assured of his victory in the bet if not the sword match? Or, is this, like so many other words out of Hamlet’s mouth, an oblique reference to something else? Regardless of his or Claudius’s true meaning, both expect a victory over someone or something. The confusing terms of the match correspond to the confused stakes between the gamesters themselves. In both the fencing match and wager upon it, each man attempts to assert an impossible level of control over the other men involved, all the while maintaining emotional distance from the stakes for which he is playing. Ostensibly, Laertes’s wager upon his match with Hamlet stakes his six French rapiers and poniards against Claudius’s six Barbary horses (5.2.108–110).18 But the match for Laertes is also a front: it allows him to avenge his father’s death without outright 17 Scholarly interpretation of these odds varies widely. Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, 116–17, sees Hamlet as the poorer swordsman on whom Claudius bets. A statistician, Sprinchorn, in “Odds on Hamlet,” 14–17, claims Claudius puts the odds on Laertes although he knows Hamlet is the better swordsman. Nardo, Ludic Self, 31, sees the odds of winning always against Hamlet: he will die by winning (and toasting with the poisoned cup) or losing (stabbed by the poisoned sword). 18 Zucker, “Social Stakes,” 71, also points out the stakes of the wager transcend its avowed terms.

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murdering the Prince of Denmark. And similarly, subtext animates the match for the other players. Claudius stakes Laertes’s life to ensure Hamlet’s death by his poisoned sword; he stacks the deck in this regard with the poisoned cup should Hamlet win. And Hamlet pits himself against Claudius, as he has throughout the drama, in an attempt to best the man who has murdered and supplanted his father as king. Hamlet terms his match with Laertes a “brothers’ wager,” and vows to “frankly play” it, and he purports to understand his wager with Claudius similarly—as an intimate but playful game, to be played honestly (5.2.190). But his action in both matches belies any degree of either brotherhood or frankness. The gambling between Hamlet, Laertes, and Claudius may seem superficially lighthearted, but the odds and stakes of play could not be more significant. Though perhaps embarked upon to bolster each man’s conception of the proper social order in Denmark, the gambles in act 5 of Hamlet bring about social ruin through the mechanisms and implications of each man’s drive to dominate the others at all costs. And at the end of the ostensibly playful match and wager, the stage is lined with corpses as all the odds between the players are evened. As in Timon’s use of gambling, Hamlet obscures his drive to dominate others by aligning hierarchical sorting with women and his mother Gertrude in particular. Although Gertrude is not knowingly involved in the men’s wager in act 5, Hamlet has always viewed her sexual involvement with Claudius as evidence of her implication in his crimes. Hamlet’s terming his game a “brothers’ wager” may obliquely allude to his mother’s sexual relationship with a pair of brothers, duly suggesting that her sexuality metaphorically associates her with nefarious gambling. He states as much earlier in the play, when he terms her second marriage a gambling con, or “Such an act/ That […] makes marriage vows / As false as dicers’ oaths” (3.4.39–44). Despite Gertrude’s ignorance of the stakes of the wager in act 5, Hamlet holds her accountable to uphold the purity and “frank play” of his “brothers’ wager.” Thus, and as we saw with Timon, Hamlet associates the negative aspects of gambling with women to obscure the hierarchical drives that contradict his avowed commitment to universal brotherhood.

“A game played home”: Women Staking or Staking Women The action of the wager in Hamlet demonstrates the tendency for gambling invocations to stack the decks, so to speak, against women. As the leveling of distinctions between men is ascribed to the female sex, the leveling of distinctions between men and women is reframed as women’s dominance over men. This phenomenon contributes to the radically different stakes of play that tend to align with different genders. As in the definition of “odds,” the definition of “stake/stakes” reveals this gendered difference through the implications of “stakes” in practice. Where the

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definition of “odds” acknowledges differences between agents with the goal of leveling those differences, the definition of “stakes” more explicitly speaks to what distinguishes between the agents of a bet. Throughout his works, Shakespeare uses several words to encapsulate our modern idea of gambling stakes, as both a noun—“that which is placed at hazard”—and a verb—“to wager [or] hazard money on an event of a game or contest.”19 Informing the denotation of the word, “either by misapprehension or conscious word-play” as the OED suggests, is its associations with the definition of “stake” as the scene of execution, as in “burned at the stake,” or the stake a bear is tied to in bearbaiting, a popular activity in Shakespeare’s day that included a gambling component.20 Shakespeare uses this sense of “stake” when the harried Olivia of Twelfth Night (1623) queries, “Have you not set mine honour at the stake/ And baited it with all th’unmuzzled thoughts/ That tyrannous heart can think?” (3.1.110–12).21 Indeed, the denotations of “stake” are linked conceptually, since to stake something in a bet is to willingly risk its death, either literal or symbolic, through its loss. When certain values are staked, as in Olivia’s expression above, this sense of total loss or symbolic death is more likely. Feminine virtues like chastity and obedience function similarly to all-or-nothing gaming principles: if compromised at all, those virtues are lost. And moreover, since feminine virtues are tied so closely to status markers like social class, women are less able to rely on the detached pose of a stylish gamester. Where risking one’s masculine reputation through gambling can itself be a masculine act, risking a woman’s reputation often results in its ruin. In The Taming of the Shrew (1592), we see this gendered difference in Kate’s using her husband’s bet to artfully obscure her own drives. The last act and scene of the play contains one of Shakespeare’s quintessential wagers: each newlywed husband, Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio, bets on the superior obedience of his wife, Kate, Bianca, and the Widow, respectively. Petruchio wins the bet, an event that suggests the conflation of the play’s comedic ending, his wife’s superior obedience, and his superior skills as wife-tamer and gamester.22 To untangle 19 OED Online, s.v. “stakes, n. 2, and v. 3,” and “hazard, n. and adj., and v.” The earliest form of the modern sense of “stake” is the word “hazard,” originally referring to a dice game. By Shakespeare’s day “hazard” also functioned as a verb meaning “to risk, chance, or venture.” 20 For more on the resonance between blood sports like bearbaiting and drama, see Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens.” In the Bankside area of London (outside the city limits), bearbaiting arenas operated next to the playhouses. 21 Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night c. 1601. For the role of animal baiting in Twelfth Night, see ScottWarren, 65–67; Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy”; and Berry, “Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience.” 22 See Novy’s query in “Patriarchy and Play,” 264–65: “Why this ambiguous coalescence between Petruchio the dominant husband and Petruchio the game-player, between a farce assuming patriarchy and a comedy about playing at patriarchy?”

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this coalescence, we would do well to recognize that another wager precedes the husbands’ more memorable wager on wifely obedience. The last scene of the play begins with a heated disagreement between Kate and the Widow. Newly married to the nobleman Hortensio, the Widow is convinced Kate is still the shrew of the play’s title despite her newfound docility. Before the women resolve the conflict on their own, however, it is relegated to the stakes of a gentleman’s wager upon it.23 The husbands, Petruchio and Hortensio, initially root for their respective wives as they argue, but then Petruchio turns spectatorship into his active play: he wagers “A hundred marks [that] my Kate does put her down” (5.2.36). To which Hortensio replies, “That’s my office,” a statement that serves both as his acceptance of the terms of Petruchio’s bet and as an objection to Kate’s supplanting his sexual primacy over the Widow (5.2.37). Hortensio’s assertion yokes the sportive and social aspects of his performance of masculinity to its sexual aspects that are threatened as assertive women act outside the purview of their husbands. This succession of events—women subjects relegated to objects through a manly wager upon their interaction—participates in the typically Shakespearean move that reinscribes patriarchal order at the first threat of an alternative social structure. No longer the primary actors in their own drama, the women exit the stage, making way for the men to wholly control the terms and stakes of a new wager. That the monetary amount of the husbands’ bet—100 crowns—is substantially less than the bet they placed on Kate and the Widow’s initial conflict speaks to greater stakes of emasculation at play when the wives were players rather than the stakes of play.24 Under the purview of the wager on wifely obedience, the women serve primarily as its stakes, their subjectivity obscured and made ambiguous in the face of the men’s more active gamble. However, Kate’s performance of obedience to her husband also grants her room for her own display of agency. It not only allows Petruchio to win his bet, but it also allows Kate to “win” her previous interaction with the Widow. In a grand speech extolling the virtues of obedience, Kate demonstrates that she is no longer a shrew and thus proves the Widow wrong. Moreover, by performing her acceptance and furtherance of patriarchal norms, Kate also is in the position to chastise the Widow, to channel her activity to an end deemed socially legitimate in Shakespeare’s Padua. By using patriarchal norms to her own ends, Kate finds a way to productively use the heightened stakes to which her reputation is subject.

23 Crocker, “Engendering Shrews,” 48, makes a similar point: Petruchio “recasts the wives’ countering as a friendly homosocial competition between men.” 24 According to the editorial gloss on the line from The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, 195 n. 7), Petruchio’s 100-mark bet on Kate’s besting the Widow far exceeds the 100-crown bet on wifely obedience staked forty lines later. One mark equals 13 shillings and 4 pence, while 1 crown equals 5 shillings.

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The Taming of the Shrew ends felicitously with Kate reframing her actions within the terms set by her husband in his wager. Although the play arguably affirms women’s power and influence, that activity must necessarily be ambiguously coded and inscribed within patriarchal norms. However, it is not always wise or possible for a woman to reframe her actions in terms dictated by a patriarch. Women’s tendency towards heightened stakes in gambling grows more acute as the implications of those stakes mount. In his late play, The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610), Shakespeare takes the dangerous and gendered potential inherent in the word “stake” to its logical conclusions when applied to female chastity, a virtue that inherently relates a husband’s patriarchal status to his wife’s sexual activity. Capitalizing on the ability of “stakes” to function as both noun and verb, Shakespeare dramatizes how easily those willing to stake values in bets find the persons attached to those values likewise at stake. The fantastic romance plot of The Winter’s Tale is saturated with gambling language and imagery.25 In fact, its major plot points organize around the term “adventure,” a term with gambling resonance in its denotations of “chance, fortune, luck” and “chance of danger or loss; risk, jeopardy, peril. Frequently in to put in adventure (and variants): to put in jeopardy, to risk, to stake.”26 At the beginning of the play, we meet Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, as he is about to end his nine-month-long visit to Sicilia, the home of his best friend, King Leontes, and Leontes’s nine-months-pregnant wife, Queen Hermione. Hermione begins the gambling innocently enough: when Polixenes declines the invitation to remain a guest past his planned date of departure, Hermione playfully “adventure[s]” the length of her husband’s future stay in Bohemia against his friend’s present visit to Sicilia. Although the move ensures that Polixenes remains, it also ignites Leones’s otherwise irrational jealousy (1.2.38). Convinced his friend has impregnated his wife, Leontes plots to kill Polixenes, tries Hermione for treason, and later “adventure[s]” the life of the newborn Perdita, all against the objections of his court, especially his female servant, Paulina. Since Perdita is Leontes’s child, this adventure risks the perdition of his kingdom and alludes to the suitability of her name—“Perdita” meaning “she who must be lost” (2.3.162). Exposing the infant “to some place/ Where chance may nurse or end it” (2.3.182–3) results in Hermione’s apparent death of grief and the death of Leontes’s acknowledged heir, Mamillius (Hermione’s son and Perdita’s brother). In the play’s second half, sixteen years later, the lovely Perdita herself “adventure[s]” a cross-class marriage in her relationship with Florizell, the prince of Bohemia and Polixenes’s son (4.4.446). And when Perdita returns to Sicilia via sea voyage, an event that Leontes terms “th’adventure of her person,” 25 For discussion of the centrality of economic thought and language in the play, see Parker, “Temporal Gestation,” 25–49. 26 OED Online, s.v. “adventure, n.”

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she brings with her the fulfillment of a Delphian prophecy and the restoration of Leontes’s kingdom (5.1.154). Gendered stakes are in play amid all of this adventuring. 27 As we have seen in Shakespeare’s other plays, The Winter’s Tale begins with a patriarch pinning gambling’s emasculating potential on a woman. Hermione’s initial “adventure” to ensure that Polixenes remains a guest in Sicilia is made to satisfy Leontes. Where Leontes could not convince his friend to stay, Hermione playfully ensures Polixenes’s compliance. In what she calls an “adventure,” she essentially trades a week with Polixenes in Sicilia against the promise of Leontes’s staying an extra month on his next visit to Bohemia.28 Through her action, which literally “puts odds” between the men, she activates the emasculation potential of gambling and, at least in her husband’s mind, the conflation of women’s playfulness in general with sexual play. After she convinces Polixenes to remain in Sicilia, Leontes alludes to this conflation of women’s play in an aside to Mamillius: “Thy mother plays, and I/ Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue/ Will hiss me to my grave” (1.2.188–90). In response to her “winning” his friend where he could not—Leontes even asks her, “is he won yet?” (1.2.88)—Leontes extrapolates from her gambling “play” to suggest her extramarital sexuality, implying that Hermione’s “play” includes both deceit and licentiousness.29 Leontes also sexualizes his passivity in Hermione’s gamble: her superior gambling ability, now sexually charged in Leontes’s mind, renders Leontes an emasculated and “disgraced” cuckold. Leontes thus takes Hamlet’s move a step further, not only suggesting a woman’s complicity in the emasculation potential of gambling, but also actively accusing her of what amounts to a conspiracy. He accuses Hermione of using the levity of play as a blind for her gambling con, which because of her position as Queen of Sicilia will affect the very legitimacy of Leontes’s kingdom.30 When contemplating his son’s legitimacy, Leontes suggests that women lie when they cite the physical resemblance of a father to his child as a sign of female sexual fidelity: that “women say so” may not be enough proof if they are “false […]/As dice are to be wished by one that fixes/ No bourn ’twixt his and mine” (1.2.132-6). Leontes compares women 27 Bloom, “Boy Eternal,” 329–56, argues that Leontes’s emphasis on games is a response to his age in addition to his desire to differentiate himself from women. 28 The line is: “I’ll adventure/ the borrow of a week. When at Bohemia/ You take my lord, I’ll give him my commission/ To let him there a month behind the gest/ Prefixed for’s parting” (1.2.38–42). 29 See Elk, “Urban Misidentification,” 323–46, for a discussion of the ways in which gender informs conning and play in The Comedy of Errors and “cony-catching” pamphlets, popular stories about “cony-catchers,” or con men who trick unsuspecting “conies,” or dupes. 30 See Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics, 59–60, who terms paternity a “risk in that dark and oceanic passage” of reproductive sex with a woman. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 224–26, roots Leontes’s anger in his necessary dependence on women.

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to loaded dice colluding with Polixenes in a fixed game. His implication is that women are the means by which a con performs a cheat; in this particular case, Leontes blames Hermione and women in general for delegitimizing his kingdom. Viewing Polixenes as a cheat and Hermione as loaded dice casts Leontes in the role of dupe. As he tells his worthy subject, Camillo, it is “a fool that seest a game played home, the rich stake drawn,/ And tak’st it all for jest” (1.2.249–51). Refusing to be such a “fool” in Polixenes’s and Hermione’s “game played home,” he then actualizes all the systems of justice and control at his dispensation as king against them. He sends a servant to murder Polixenes and then focuses his attention on Hermione. Like Timon, Hamlet, and Petruchio before him, Leontes attempts to wrangle the threatening potential of women’s activity to preserve the existing social order. And he does so by invoking gambling: trying Hermione for treason in Sicilia’s law court and “adventuring” the life of the infant Perdita should be read as all-or-nothing games that ensure the death of the “loser.” Through these coded games, Leontes obscures his hierarchical and tyrannical impulses behind the facade of justice.31 In doing so, he trades the relational and interpersonal values of trust, coexistence, and reciprocity that should and do undergird his kingdom for his sense of domination and control. He understands this gambling project in individualistic terms, of which “The matter,/ The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all/ Properly ours” (2.1.170–72).32 However, nothing Leontes refers to in his list concerns him alone: Hermione’s chastity, his heirs’ legitimacy and lives, and the status of his kingdom are part and parcel to the matter, loss, gain, and ordering of his invocation of gambling. Like Petruchio in Taming, Leontes occupies the privileged position under patriarchy wherein his winning at gambling should coalesce and reaffirm his other patriarchal positions. But unlike Petruchio, he is not only a husband; he is also a father, a king, and the figure of justice in Sicilia. Furthermore, his levity in the treatment of those roles he occupies is not read as sportive, but tyrannical; his indifference to implications of gambling is not stylish, but foolish.33 Leontes’s conflation of roles stacks the decks against Hermione and his kingdom. On hearing of Leontes’s suspicions and his determination to pursue them, a servant warns him to: “Be certain what you do, sir, lest your justice/ Prove violence, in the which three great ones suffer—/ Yourself, your queen, your son” (2.1.129–31). Hermione’s infidelity would be tantamount to her treason; if her children are illegitimate, so, too, is Sicilia’s monarchy. But Leontes runs towards this convergence of suffering. 31 Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, 106–26. 32 See Cormack, “Shakespeare’s Other Sovereignty,” 485–513, for a discussion of Leontes’s attempts to reign through extreme individualism. 33 The play posits a more appropriate gamester figure in Autolycus, the lower class gambler and con who delights more than tyrannizes his audiences in acts 4 and 5.

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In contrast to the comedic reaffirmation of patriarchy in Shrew, we see in The Winter’s Tale the full-scale destruction patriarchal norms can wreak when they alone determine the stakes of play. By the time he acknowledges his mistakes, Leontes sees that his actions have brought about the deaths of his son and wife (although Hermione is not really dead), and the presumed deaths of a loyal subject, his best friend, and his daughter. The near collapse of Sicilia is destined to persist if Leontes fails to fulfill the Delphian prophecy: “The King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found” (3.2.133–34). To find “that which is lost,” Leontes must acknowledge Perdita as his heir, an act that would also absolve Hermione, Polixenes, and all of Sicilia of their supposed crimes against Leontes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the play stages Leontes’s redemption through reference to gambling. Sixteen years later, when Florizell, Polixenes’s heir, brings Perdita to Sicilia in order to convince Leontes to advocate for their marriage, Leontes greets the young couple as if he knows them. He says, “I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth/ Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as/ You, gracious couple, do,” but it is unclear which lost companions he sees in the couple (5.1.131–33). Florizell so reminds Leontes of Polixenes that Leontes states “I should call you brother,/ As I did him,” but the couple also reminds him of his own lost children, Mamillius and Perdita, who would of course be the same age as the couple before him (5.1.127-8). His conflation of the generations might not simply speak to familial resemblance and the passage of time; it also suggests an alternative way of viewing the social order, as composed of subjects not discreetly individualized and autonomous but informed by relationship ties between and among those present and absent. Like the Delphian prophecy promised, Leontes is beginning to find again those many relationships he previously was willing to lose. Leontes’s conflation of the generations continues, putting the veiled incest threat that The Winter’s Tale inherits from its source material to a surprising and socially affirming use through reference to gambling.34 The incest hint also registers Leontes’s newfound repudiation of gambling. At first glance, however, Leontes seems to make a pass at his daughter. When Florizell implores Leontes’s aid in promoting the match to Polixenes, he pleads, “At your request/ My father will grant precious things as trifles” (5.1.220–21). Leontes answers by inverting Florizell’s meaning with his line, “Would he do so, I’d beg your precious mistress,/ Which he counts but a trifle” (5.1.222–23). In this line, Leontes puns on the possible referent of “precious things”: where Florizell’s usage presents the “precious things” as Polixenes’s desire for his son’s class-appropriate match, Leontes’s usage refers to Perdita herself, 34 In Shakespeare’s source text, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the king marries and procreates with his daughter. By invoking gambling at the very moment Leontes might pursue the incest plot, Shakespeare emphasizes the social harms the cavalier gamester persona might enact.

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unfairly counted by Polixenes as a trifle. Leontes’s words certainly hint of incest; he is cautioned to think of Hermione immediately after he utters them. But the line also registers the drastically altered position Leontes now occupies in terms of valuing the worth of human lives. Indeed, Leontes’s most recent use of “adventure” speaks to this disparity. Where he initially adventured his daughter’s life, this time he balks at the premise of adventuring lives, even the life of a stranger. Upon the arrival of Florizell and Perdita in Bohemia, Leontes admonishes Polixenes for risking his children’s lives in a sea voyage, and particularly Perdita’s: And hath he too Exposed this paragon to th’fearful usage— At least ungentle—of the dreadful Neptune To greet a man not worth her pains, much less Th’adventure of her person? (5.1.151–54)

Echoing the earlier “adventure” of Perdita when Leontes banished her as an infant, Leontes’s words warn against collapsing a person into the stakes of a wager. Here, Leontes implies that persons are “worth” too much to “adventure.” His references to “her pains” and “her person” even suggest a newfound understanding of the implications that gambling especially associates with women. The takeaway of this encounter is that even before he knows Perdita is his daughter returned, Leontes shows that he will no longer treat “precious things” as “trifles” to adventure. What is radical about Perdita’s return is that it restages the potentially emasculating social order to which Hermione’s initial wager brought focus. That The Winter’s Tale ends happily amid so blatant a restitution of not only the status quo but also that which catalyzed Leontes’s jealousy occurs through Leontes’s transformative rejection of his former gambling ways. The play aligns the patriarch’s restoration with his commitment to valuing as “precious” what he formerly considered “trifles”—namely, women, literally and symbolically. We have already seen that Leontes’s new commitment to valuing women has restored his daughter to him. Similarly, when Leontes puts his total trust in Paulina, the female servant he formerly derides as “a mankind witch,” she restores his wife to him: through “magic” Paulina brings a statue of Hermione to life (2.3.68, 5.3.110).35 Leontes’s refusal to see the world in all-or-nothing terms is that which brings about the Delphian prophecy: 35 After father and daughter are reconciled, Paulina invites the court to view a statue of Hermione, so that Perdita can see her mother and Leontes his wife. Paulina then “miraculously” brings the statue to life. Presumably, Hermione has been hiding for sixteen years while Leontes mourns and atones for the various harms he causes. And in terms of the prophecy, Hermione’s hiding away for the whole of her childbearing years ensures that Sicilia’s restoration depends entirely on Perdita’s return.

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where he previously opposed “loss” to “win,” his various losses—Hermione, Perdita, and Polixenes—are all “found” or restored to him. Of course, Mamillius remains lost; as the figure who most belies men’s dependence upon women, Mamillius is a sacrificial victim to dangerous ramifications of the gamester persona.36 Paulina emphasizes the new order wrought by Leontes’s transformation when she calls everyone assembled on stage “precious winners all,” an oxymoron that emphasizes the limitations of Leontes’s prior urge to dominate, control, and win above all others (5.3.133). Paulina’s line casts the phonetically similar title of the play in a different light—what could be rendered “the winner’s tale” is reframed as “the winners’ tale.”37 In Shakespeare’s invocations of gambling, the association of women with the conceptual threats implied in “odds” and “stakes” elucidates the nefarious underpinnings of the patriarchal order. But with the help of female gamesters like Cleopatra, Paulina, Hermione, and Perdita, we envision a social order that may not be as superficially compelling as the radically utopic promise inherent in Hamlet’s “brothers’ wager,” but neither is it so hypocritical, nor its ramifications so damaging. Antony and Cleopatra demonstrates the possibility of the couple to triumph over death where the individual could only succumb to emasculation by it. And in The Winter’s Tale, we see what it takes for that triumph to be managed before death evens all odds. To achieve “precious winners all” as Paulina promises, the “winners’ tale” must supplant the “winner’s tale.” Although the grammatical and phonetic alteration is slight, its implications are vast.

Bibliography Primary Sources Greenham, Richard. The Workes of the reuerend and faithfull seruant af Iesus Christ. London, 1612. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

36 See Snyder, “Mamillius and Gender Polarization,” 2, for a discussion of Mamillius as symbolic of the maternal world. Significantly, as Howard observes, “Mamillia is the word for the nipple on a breast or a diminutive of mamma, the Latin word for breast itself”; Howard, “Introduction to The Winter’s Tale,” 2877. 37 I am in debt to Caroline Bicks for pointing out this phonetic equivalence to me at the 2015 conference of the Shakespeare Association of America.

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Secondary Sources Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Berry, Ralph. “Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience.” Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 111–19. Bloom, Gina. “‘Boy Eternal’: Aging, Games, and Masculinity in The Winter’s Tale.” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 3 (2010): 329–56. ———. “Manly Drunkenness: Binge Drinking as Disciplined Play.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschel, pp. 21–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Colon-Semenza, Gregory M. Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Cormack, Bradin. “Shakespeare’s Other Sovereignty: On Particularity and Violence in The Winter’s Tale and the Sonnets.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2011): 485–513. Crocker, Holly A. “Engendering Shrews: Medieval to Early Modern.” In Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700, ed. David Wootton and Graham Holderness, pp. 48–69. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Dickey, Stephen. “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1991): 255–75. Dolan, Frances E. Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Elk, Martine van. “Urban Misidentification in ‘The Comedy of Errors’ and the Cony-Catching Pamphlets.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43, no. 2 (2003): 323–46. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Howard, Jean E. “Introduction to The Winter’s Tale.” In The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, pp. 2873–81. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. Karras, Ruth Mazo. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Nardo, Anna K. The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991. Novy, Marianne L. “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew.” English Literary Renaissance 9, no. 2 (1979): 264–80. OED Online (Oxford English Dictionary Online). Oxford University Press, www.oed.com (accessed 15 August 2018). Parker, Patricia. “Temporal Gestation, Legal Contracts, and the Promissory Economies of The Winter’s Tale.” In Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern

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England, ed. Nancy C. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and A.R. Buck, pp. 25–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Schwarz, Kathryn. What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Scott-Warren, Jason. “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2003): 63–82. Shepherd, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Snyder, Susan. “Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1999): 1–8. Sprinchorn, Evert. “The Odds on Hamlet.” American Statistician 24, no. 5 (1970): 14–17. Stanton, Kay. Shakespeare’s “Whores”: Erotics, Politics, and Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Turner, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wilson, Luke. “Drama and Marine Insurance in Shakespeare’s London.” In The Law in Shakespeare, ed. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, pp. 127–42. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Woodbridge, Linda. English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. “‘He beats thee ’gainst the odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra.” In Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Sara Munson Deats, pp. 193–212. New York: Routledge, 2005. Zucker, Adam. “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschel, pp. 65–86. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

About the author Megan Herrold recently earned her PhD from the University of Southern California. A USC Provost’s Fellow and a Fellow at the Early Modern Studies Institute at the Huntington Library, she specializes in medieval and early modern literature, book history, political and gender theory, and early musical performance practice. She is currently working on a book project entitled Transformative Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Gender, Justice, and Social Order.

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4. “Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” Dice Games on the English Stage in the Seventeenth Century Kevin Chovanec

Abstract Dice play was one of the most common, and also the most lamented, games in early modern England. While the game of dice was easy and inexpensive enough that almost anyone could play, moralists and preachers singled it out as particularly pernicious. Even cards, another game of chance, at least demanded a kind of skill (though too often a devious and dishonest skill), and might therefore at some time be permissible: “Dice be wholly evil, because they wholly depend on Chance […]. Tables and cards be somewhat evil, because they somewhat depend upon chance.” When one rolled the dice, he or she put the outcome beyond the scope of human causality, and many early moderns suspected this invoked the supernatural. Someone—or something—it seemed, surely had to decide the roll. In this period before the development of a mathematical theory of probability, this placed pure games of chance like dice f irmly contiguous with the occult. In this chapter, I explore the staging of dice games on the seventeenth-century English stage and demonstrate the importance of demons and demonology for contemporary understanding of the allure of these games and interpretation of their results. Keywords: Thomas Middleton, Thomas Heywood, dice, demonology, gambling

According to many moralists, dice-play was all but ubiquitous in early modern England. Avarice, pleasure, and superficial honor, claims one anonymous pamphleteer (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically), all ensured the universal popularity of the vice: “Behold the three-forked trident wherewith this domineering practice, like Neptune in the ocean, commands the waters of all nations, mastering, and subduing most powerfull, both rich and poore, both Court and Countrie, both

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch04

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Nobles and Commons.”1 Indeed, dice-play was one of the most common, and also one of the most frequently denounced, games in the period. While dice games were easy and inexpensive enough to allow everyone access, they appealed especially to the nobility, as young men eagerly gambled away their fortunes, and moralists and preachers singled out dice as particularly pernicious to social stability. And yet, while domestic and economic fears certainly influenced discussion of unlawful gaming, they never fully explain the dice-player, especially as seen on the stage and in pamphlets condemning the practice. For many early moderns, dice’s bare reliance on chance hinted at something more sinister: “Dice be wholly evil, because they wholly depend on Chance […] Tables and cards be somewhat evil, because they somewhat depend upon chance.”2 To understand the wide-ranging associations of dicing when it was staged, I would like to suggest, we need to look into the occult and even demonic subtext that the game raised for contemporaries. When one rolled the dice, he or she put the outcome beyond the scope of human causality, and many early moderns suspected this invoked the supernatural. Someone—or something—it seemed, surely had to decide the roll. In this period before the development of a mathematical theory of probability, this placed pure games of chance like dice firmly contiguous with the occult. In this chapter, I will explore the staging of dice games in the seventeenth-century English theater and demonstrate the importance of demons and demonology for contemporary understanding of the allure of these games and interpretation of their results. Reflecting their popularity, dice appeared on the early modern stage quite often; nearly 15 percent of surviving early modern plays (167 of 1,116) mention dicing.3 The game had a special affinity with the theater, and indeed dice and theatricality, as we will see, were often linked. Games of chance were especially popular in the urban center of London, and thus game play naturally proliferated in city comedy. In part, this stemmed from a growing interest in gaming generally, as the moralists’ fear of dicing responded to a very real cultural obsession with games; historians have tracked, for example, massive increases in the production of cards and other paraphernalia of gaming.4 Often, however, this association with the city led to discussion of the 1 Timely Advice, sig. A7v. 2 Balmford, Short and Plaine Dialogve, A4. 3 Zucker, “Social Stakes of Gambling,” 70. Dicing seems to have been much more popular in England than on the Continent, where cards were the game of choice. In comparison, cards appear slightly less often in English print texts than dice. A simple search on the EEBO N-Gram Browser, designed by Anupam Basu, shows dice outpacing cards significantly in the early and mid-sixteenth century; cards close the gap and they follow a similar patter from about 1580 to 1640, after which they appear with very nearly the same relative frequency; Basu, “EEBO N-Gram Browser.” 4 See Tosney, “Playing Card Trade,” 637, 652–56. Tosney points to both the increased production of cards and increased legislation against dice games as evidence of the growing popularity of gaming.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

seedier elements of gaming, those thieves and swindlers looking to capitalize on the unsuspecting honest opponent. As most early moderns knew well, neither dice nor dicers could be trusted.5 We see this expressed continually on the stage, as, for example, in John Cooke’s Greenes Tu Quoquo, or The Cittie Gallant (1614), a city comedy that features many of the most lamented city vices. In the play, one of the heroes employs false dice to rob foolish and upstart spendthrifts. Yet in many ways, this connection to duplicity was the least threatening aspect of dicing; it was better far to be cheated than to invoke the more dangerous aspects of the game. Cheating ensured that someone decided the result—that, in fact, dice was a game of skill rather than chance. Perhaps more curiously, dice on the stage almost always involved the demonic—whether literally or metaphorically. Both dice and cards, according to John Northbrooke, were in fact inventions of the devil, meant to ensnare the sinful gamer and ensure his damnation.6 Where there were gamesters on stage, curses, sorcery, possession, and even devils almost always followed. In scholarship on both dicing and probability more generally, there has been much interest in vice and addiction, but little attention has been given to the role of the supernatural. Even the connection between dice and divination is generally dismissed, since “there were plenty of impious people gambling like mad.”7 This kind of anachronistic skepticism, however, misrepresents how early modern thinkers began approaching probability, rather like “new philosophy” more generally. The complex demonic associations that tainted games of chance were more than superstitious relics preventing smart and profitable gambling; instead, the demonic presence stems from nearly ubiquitous habits of thought—shared even by the impious—that reveal something of the early modern conceptualization of probability and dice-play. Rather than mere superstition, demonology provides a window into early modern thought.8 The occult, as we will see, explained several facets of gambling for early moderns: the addiction that drove men to waste away their savings and lives; the use of lots in prophecy; the association with oaths and cursing; and the inherent theatricality of rolling a die. In the last decade and a half, since Stuart Clark’s foundational Thinking with Demons, historians have begun to take the devil more seriously in any consideration of early modern epistemologies. Clark makes perhaps the most succinct case for this in his location of the demonic as part of the natural world: In early modern Europe it was virtually the unanimous opinion of the educated that devils, and, a fortiori, witches, not merely existed in nature but acted according 5 Frenk, “Games,” 230. 6 Northbrooke, Spiritus est, 87, 111. 7 Hacking, Emergence of Probability, 3. 8 Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, 16.

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to its laws. They were thought to do so reluctantly and with a good many unusual, or “preternatural” manipulations of phenomena, yet they were always regarded as being inside the general category of the natural.9

Any attempt to explain the roll of a dice had to account for this demonic ability to manipulate nature in subtle ways, to work within natural laws to undermine human good. The connection between gambling and the demonic predates early modernity, of course, and has roots at least as far back as the second century CE. A pamphlet wrongly ascribed to St. Cyprian, De aleatoribus, linked gaming to the devil, and this, in fact, served as an indirect source for early modern writers.10 The association was appropriated by San Bernardino of Siena in his sermons “against gambling,” freely translated into French and, shortly after, into English by Henry Watson as The chirche of the evyll men and women (1511), a robust work condemning “playnge at the dyce and caredes, and other deuyllysshe playes.”11 But as the devil took a different role—an arguably more active role, for Protestant divines—in the post-Reformation period, this connection seems to have been both intensified and more closely scrutinized. The devil stars frequently in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets warning about the dangers of gaming—as, to be fair, he does in condemnations of most pernicious sin. John Kelsall’s Testemony against Gaming, Musick, Danceing, Singing, and Swearing (1681), a kind of Puritan greatest-hits of demonic temptation, claims that all games of chance (“cards, dice, tables, shuffleboard”) displease the Lord.12 Kelsall fears gaming particularly because of the mysterious, occult attraction, the way it irrationally draws men to their own destruction. According to Kelsall, this can best be understood in terms of the diabolical: gaming is “as it were a piece of witchcraft, for when men’s hearts and minds are exercised in it, they are even overcome by the same, and so are serving the enemy of their own immortal souls with all their strength.”13 Gaming has a spell-like effect; it turns men irresistibly against themselves. The comparison to witchcraft surfaces frequently in these pamphlets, as the two sins demonstrate marked similarities: blaspheming, superstitious beliefs and practices, the magical creation of something (money) from nothing (or at least, no labor). Charles Cotton’s Leathermore: or Advice concerning Gaming (1668), for example, claims similarly that “Gaming is enchanting Witchery, begot betwixt Idleness and Avarice; which has this ill property above all other Vices, that 9 Clark, Thinking with Demons, 152. 10 See Pseudo-Cyprian, Il gioco dei dadi. 11 Bernardinus of Siena, Chirche of the Evyll Men and Women, B1V. 12 Kelsall, Testimony, 1. 13 Ibid.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

it renders a man incapable of prosecuting any serious Action.”14 And the unknown author of A Timely Advice (1612) fleshes out the comparison: “Doe not the Gamesters also sometimes seek the help of Enchantments to becom winners? Do they not give credit to many superstitious perswasions in their game? Doe they not sometimes blesse themselves backwards, observe the time and place of the Moon, and wish good lucke, they care not from what spirit?”15 Notably, Kelsall and the others focus not only on the action itself, the roll of the die, but on how that action sympathetically tugs on the gamer; a kind of natural magic seems to exist embedded in the game. Thus, while some scholars have posited that gambling was outlawed because of attendant evils rather than the evil of the game itself, this overlooks much of how early moderns conceived dice-play.16 Even if moralists could not formulate the exact law broken by rolling dice, chance itself is often seen as a dangerous evil, an activity that opens the gamer to external and uncontrollable influences, and the admonitory pamphlets do not permit such a clean and complete break between gaming and its results.

Love, Possession, and Dice While the meaning of dice began to be debated in the period, the lingering occult associations enabled dice to assume a potent symbolic force on stage. The anonymous play, The Costlie Whore (1633), for example, draws on German history to interrogate the overlap between love and demonic possession.17 It stages the story of the Duke of Saxony, brother of the famed evil Bishop of Mentz who was devoured by rats. The Duke falls for and marries a Venetian courtesan, Valentia. This marriage provokes his scandalized son into rebellion, and encourages his daughter to marry her own low-born beloved. Treacherously, after losing in war against his son, the Duke has both his children imprisoned and sentenced to death, but the trickery of Valentia forces him to remember his love for them and repent of his sentence, and all parties are reconciled. Though the play becomes a comedy, however, there are several apparent deaths and disasters, brought about by the Duke’s “unnatural” attachment to Valentia. From her first appearance, Valentia possesses a kind of magic: “They talke of circles and of powerfull spells,/ Heres heavenly art, that all blacke art excells,” she notes of her own enchantments during her first scene (2.218–19). The play figures 14 Cotton, Leathermore, 3. 15 Timely Advice, 37. 16 Franklin, Science of Conjecture, 291. 17 Costlie Whore (1994 edition).

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Valentia as a witch (though sympathetically) and the Duke’s love as a kind of demonic possession, blinding his reason and placing him completely in Valentia’s control. Their first interaction, as Valentia establishes her hold, consists entirely of two games of dice. Two female servants come in, dance with Valentia, and, according to the stage directions, “whisper to have her play at dice.” After the first roll, which Valentia of course wins, the metaphorical stakes of the game are made clear: Valentia: More gold, for this is mine, I thanke yee dice Duke: And so are all that doe behold thy beautie, Were she as chaste as she is outward bright, Earth would be heaven, and heaven eternall night, The more I drinke of her delicious eye, The more I plunge into captivitie. (2.239–44)

The Duke’s “And so” has no clear antecedent: does he respond to Valentia’s thankfulness? Does it ignore her line and merely imply, “And this loss happens to all who see her beauty”? Or, as the grammatical structure implies, does it refer back to dice, her last word, and mean something like, “All who behold her beauty become like dice”? By paralleling the dice and the Duke, the play suggests that understanding Valentia’s pull on the Duke might be similar to understanding the dice’s pull on the gamester. To understand the “And so,” one must untangle the symbolic meaning of the dice and why they are foregrounded in Valentia’s enchantment. While at first, from a modern perspective, they seem to invoke chance and randomness, it seems in the scene that fate is much more determined. The dice have their own kind of power. Valentia, at least, thanks the dice, as if they had some agency themselves, and while this may be merely a common expression, its very commonness is worth noting. The assumption that the materials of gambling themselves possess an animism has remained a staple of gambling.18 Each roll of the dice represents a kind of experiment into this hidden nature, or more properly, into providence, and the play similarly leaves open whether the resulting roll stemmed from the materials themselves (the dice), the charisma of Valentia, or external, spiritual influences. The dice, therefore, invoke common belief in wider networks of sympathies and antipathies imbedded in all objects, proper knowledge of which, early moderns believed, might allow them to control nature.19 Exploration of these occult characteristics, however, always bordered on the supernatural. In fact, these experimental implications of dicing roused the objections of conservative theologians. For Calvinists who allowed no room for chance in a 18 Reith, Age of Chance, 164–65. 19 Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 2.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

providential universe, each roll forced God to decide on a trivial matter. Northbrooke, for example, in listing reasons why the game is so dangerous and unlawful, first turns to the third commandment: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lorde thy God in vaine. So that whosoeuer vseth this chaunce of lottes in ydle and trifling things, taketh the name and prouidence of God in vaine. For the lot is one of the principall witnesses of Gods power (as Salomon recordeth) that it is ruled and gouerned immediately by his hande, power, and prouidence. And therefore we maye not vse lottes so triflinglye, as it were to tempt God, and to trie what care hee hath of the worlde, but onely in matters of great importaunce, and where his diuine will shoulde be extraordinarilye knowne and vnderstoode.20

Contrary to expectations, gamesters break the commandment not with oaths and swears—though Northbrooke certainly sees those as among the concomitant evils of dicing—but by forcing God’s hand in a trivial matter. Someone must decide every roll of the dice, and it falls to God to determine who will win. In this providential view, it appears the outcome is part of a determined world, all subject to God’s complete control. Part of the symbolic import of the dice in The Costlie Whore certainly relates to this sense that they invoked and even tested Fate—that they were looking into God’s providence. Indeed, the scene capitalizes on the long use of dice in lots and divination, though divination itself opened up a more complex mix of possible causes. Valentia’s connections to divination are made explicit in her first speech: Mine eye consists of numbers like the soule, And if there be a soule, tis in mine ey, For of the harmonie these bright starres make, I comprehend the formes of all the world, The story of the Syrens in my voyce, Is onely verified, for Millions stand In chanted, when I speake, and catch my words, As they were orient pearle to adorne their eares, Circe is but a fable, I transforme The vertuous, valiant, and the most precise, Into what forme of minde my fancie please. (2.173–83)

20 Northbrooke, Spiritus est, 107.

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Valentia associates herself with key elements of fortune telling—especially the stars—and claims an ability to see into the hidden “forms” of nature, explaining her kinship with the dice. At the same time, the connection to Circe and magic also raises the darker connotations of divination, the thought, shared by many, that other spirits might be involved in determining the roll. The physician and natural philosopher Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) hypothesized the connection between dice and spirits directly in his discussion of divination: Whatsoever kinde of presage therefore these kinde of Lots portend, must of necessity not be by chance or fortune, but from a spiritual cause, by vertue whereof the Phantasie, or hand of him that cast the Lot is moved, whether that power proceed from the soul of the Operator through the great excess of his affection, or from a Celestial influence, and opportunity, or from a certain Diety [sic] or spirit assisting, or moving from on high, whether these Lots are placed in casting of Cockalls,21 or throwing of Dice.22

The power is uncertain and the possible sources manifold, and of course not every roll of the dice prophesies; but it does pose a certain invitation for spiritual assistance—it does use the tools of the occult. Agrippa distinguishes between pure chance and demonic assistance; still, by gambling, you put your fate in the hands of demons. In the The Costlie Whore, dice invoke this network of connections and associations, divination, magic, sympathies and antipathies, shaping how an audience should respond to both the Duke’s love and Valentia’s enchantment.

“What is there in three dice?” While dicing simply works as a symbol in The Costlie Whore, Thomas Middleton offers a much fuller exploration of the meaning and dangers of chance in his The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). In fact, the play has sometimes been misread because scholars have typically neglected Middleton’s interest in gaming in The Yorkshire Tragedy (despite the fact that scholars have explored “games” in his popular plays on chess and tennis).23 Critics have often situated this play in the context of other Jacobean domestic tragedies and diagnosed primarily a growing gentry fear of economic strain.24 Certainly, the play stages a social disruption: the Husband attempts—and very nearly manages—the 21 Of ancient origin, cockalls was a game played with sheep’s knucklebones, equivalent to jacks. 22 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 325. 23 Mark Kaethler’s essay on Middleton’s game of tennis appears in Chapter 7 of this volume. 24 Berek, “Follow the Money,” 180.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

murder of his entire progeny.25 And money, too, is important, since he justifies the murders by claiming he does not want his children to be beggars. But money alone is never the Husband’s primary concern just as money, in itself, is never the gambler’s primary concern.26 When his wife’s uncle offers him a position at court, the Husband, rather than tightening his hold on his social position, becomes furious. He has no interest in the position, because pleasure and pride hold prior claims: “Shall I, that dedicated myself to pleasure, be now confined in service to crouch and stand like an old man i’th’hams [as a beggar], my hat off, I that never could abide to uncover my head i’th’ church?” (3.51–54). The family could have retained their social position with relative ease, considering the Wife’s powerful and apparently well-connected uncle, who had also been the Husband’s guardian. Instead, the cause of this eventual social disruption takes precedence. The foremost moral failing of the Husband in Middleton’s play is his proclivity for gaming; the play implies, in fact, that he leans toward dice, the riskier game of pure chance. The wife fronts her Husband’s problem near the opening of her first scene: “dice, and voluptuous meetings, midnight revels” (2.7). And the Husband, too, notes his fondness for dice: “A bawd to dice?/ I’ll shake the drabs myself/ and make them yield” (2.101–2). Gaming’s destruction of the family unit appears, literally and symbolically, in what the Husband asks of the Wife: “Thy dowry shall be sold,” he demands, “to give new life/ unto those pleasures which I most affect” (2.91–92). His pleasures parasitically eat away at her security, and, as she points out, consume the money that she should rightfully allocate to the protection of her children. Not only the social disintegration but all the various attendant evils of gambling haunt the Husband: he blasphemes frequently, is apparently a bit of a drunkard and whoremonger, and is truculently quarrelsome, twice fighting on stage when other characters presume to offer advice or attempt his reformation. Additionally, of course, he murders two of his children, which outstrips even the direst warning of the moralists. The play confirms what the pamphlets threaten: gambling is a gateway to myriad sins. Considering all this took place on stage, it is worth noting how closely the demonic was connected to social disruption in the history of the English theater. Staged demons, in both medieval and early modern drama, serve primarily to undermine or fragment the community.27 In some ways, staging the pernicious social effects of gambling in the Renaissance necessarily evokes at least a memory of the demonic. Scholars have discussed the social and class fears that seem to provoke many early 25 After despairing over his insolvency, the Husband kills two of his children in his home, stabbing one infant in the arms of his wife. He flees to attempt to kill his third child, a baby who is being nursed nearby, but is thrown from his horse before he reaches his final destination. 26 Reith insists instead that money is a necessary means to, but never the end of gambling; Age of Chance, 145–50. 27 Cox, Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 42.

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modern laws prohibiting gaming, and social rank was often used as a criterion by which to determine the legality or legitimacy of gambling.28 Authorities feared the potential instability these games might incite by attracting non-aristocratic players and encouraging the kind of violence and sloth often concomitant with the activity. In this way, the demonic and gambling were inevitably tied in the imagination of a culture that displays an endemic fear of ensuing social disintegration. Middleton, in The Yorkshire Tragedy, capitalizes on this by foregrounding the demonic.29 In the short play, Middleton’s main addition to his source for the narrative—a pamphlet entitled Two Most Unnatural and Bloody Murthers—is his use of demonic possession to explain the otherwise incomprehensible evil of the Husband.30 The Wife notices and suspects something near the beginning, shortly after she laments his proclivity for gambling. It seems to the Wife “as if some vexed spirit had got his form upon him” (2.38). The Husband himself drives home his possession most forcefully during his final repentance, as his wife’s unwavering kindness and forgiveness cures his demonic infection: Now glides the devil from me, Departs at every joint Let him not rise To make men act unnatural tragedies, To spread into a father and, in fury, Make him his children’s executioners. (8.18–25)31

The exact mechanics of possession in the play, however, are somewhat confused, as they were in the period, and competing ideas exist about the ontology of the possessing devils.32 Multiple characters ascribe demonic intervention to the Husband’s 28 Davenport, “Elizabethan England’s Other Reformation of Manners,” 263. See also Martinez-Lajous, “Playing for Profit,” 71–130. 29 Middleton, Yorkshire Tragedy. 30 The play’s editors for the Revels edition clearly adumbrate this departure from the pamphlet. Cawley and Gaines, “Introduction,” 11–13. See also Cawley, English Domestic Drama, 12–14. 31 Lisa Hopkins has noted that Middleton’s play “takes the idea of diabolical possession very seriously,” but she claims that this is “directly at odds with militant Protestant doctrine as currently being loudly and clearly propagated by the influential divine Samuel Harsnett”; see Hopkins, “Yorkshire Tragedy and Middleton’s Tragic Aesthetic,” 13. Possession itself was not, however, contested, but rather the “superstitious” Catholic practices of exorcism, which had, according to Protestant divines, no power over the devil. John Darryl, the Protestant exorcist whom Harsnett attacked, held a view that demonic possession was real, and could best be combated by prayer and fasting (a view which Johnstone claims was widely shared); see Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, 103. 32 Cawley and others have read this possession as a specifically Protestant version of the demonic; see Cawley, English Domestic Drama, 12. I would argue, however, that not all characters in the play share this spiritualized, Protestant view.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

fall—he used to be an auspicious young man: “the springtime of [his] youth did fairly promise/ Such a most fruitful summer to [his] friends” (2.145–46)—but they never seem sure exactly how the devil acts. An Old Gentleman, critiquing the Husband, suggests a dual agency: “Thou and the devil has deceived the world” (150–51). As we have seen, tradition associates both the devil and dicers with deceit, and the kind of collaboration claimed in the line suggests an intellectual rather than physical demonic influence. Even here, though, the verb collapses the two—the devil and the gambler—into one deceiver. Other characters, however, imagine the demonic possession along more traditional lines. A Servingman who tries to protect a child against the murderous Husband—lower in class and presumably learning—continues to imagine a physical and spatial relation between the devil and the possessed: “I should think the devil himself kept open house in him” (3.25–26). For the Servingman, the Husband’s relation to the devil manifests itself somatically in his superhuman strength and immunity to pain. He has a “devilish weight” and is by “hell’s power supplied” (3.54). All characters, however, agree that the devil participates in the Husband’s evil. Though Middleton did not derive the possession narrative from his source pamphlet, the possession in the Yorkshire Tragedy does follow the general schema of possession in pamphlets described by Nathan Johnstone.33 Like so many other cautionary tales in this pamphlet literature, the Husband allows his corruption to be inflamed by demonic influence until it culminates in murder. Middleton appropriates this pattern to explain the tragedy, even imbuing the Husband with the common characteristics of demonic possession: “an hysterical, murderous frenzy and unnatural strength.”34 While scholars have explored the importance of the demonic for explaining the murders in the play, however, it has not been noted how fully this possession stems from the Husband’s gambling. Just as moralists feared dabbling in chance might open an unsuspecting gamer to demonic influence, Middleton’s play suggests that dice and cards have led to the Husband’s possession. His addiction to chance is the foothold enabling the devil to take control. The Husband intimates this himself through a series of puns on “angels” (a type of coin) in his first scene: “Pox on the last throw/ it made five hundred Angels vanish from my sight/ I’m damned. I’m damned” (2.25–27). His damnation is, of course, his insolvency, the vanished angels, coins; but considering many of the play’s spectators knew of the sensational murders, it probably at least hinted at his theological damnation. Like 33 According to Johnstone, in these pamphlets “the Devil entered the conscience and took hold of the corruption already present, blowing it up until it exploded into violence or murder. Time and time again the authors of murder and witchcraft narratives bewailed the fact that in pursuing a life of sin men laid themselves open to the assaults of the Devil, should they come into his path”; Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, 155. 34 Ibid., 163.

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the moralists, the play, and even the Husband cannot understand the lure of the dice. Something escapes his comprehension and remains mysterious—a hidden force. “What is there in three dice,” asks the Husband, “to make a man/ draw thrice three thousand acres into the compass of a round little table, and with the gentleman’s palsey in hand shake out his posterity” (4.65–68).35 For the Husband, the urge to gamble is like a sickness, perhaps contagious, somehow physically changing the gamer’s body. In the play, as in the pamphlets, the drive toward games of chance is fundamentally irrational; it always results in loss, in shaking away one’s patrimony. Yet, even with an expectation of loss, the Husband finds the urge irresistible.36 This irrationality dominates the play’s and the pamphlets’ interest in dicing: the primary question they ask is not what are the odds determining who wins a game of chance, but what natural or physiological quirk explains the attraction? For this, the demonic offers an explanation. While the early modern understanding of addiction differs markedly from our own, in discussions of sin and the devil, writers discussed addiction as a kind of bondage or compulsion.37 Tobacco and alcohol, for example, were commonly attacked in religious writing as the vehicles of demonic invasion, and the substances, perhaps, explain this anxiety as much as the mere fact of ingestion.38 Of course, the language available to discuss an experience has a mutually constitutive effect on the experience, and the Husband in Middleton’s play, at least, seems to feel his gambling as a kind of possession. The “in” in the Husband’s lament, then (“What is there in three dice”), is particularly significant because it foregrounds the lingering occult quality in the die itself. It suggests a relationship between matter and gamer, a hidden network of associations emanating from the natural properties in the materials of gaming.

35 The Husband’s focus on “three dice” gives us some insight into his game of choice. Many games in the period—and many early attempts at calculating odds—involved three dice. Backgammon, which remained popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, was often played using three dice. Also, according to a late seventeenth-century canting dictionary, “Passage” was “a Camp-Game, with three Dice, Doublets, making up Ten or more, to Pass or Win, any other Chances lose”; E., New Dictionary, sig. I3. 36 Irrationality continues to dominate modern discussions of chance and gambling across the disciplines. Harvie Ferguson, for example, claims that “we cannot understand gambling on the basis of a ‘rational expectation’ on the part of the gambler. Gamblers lose; they lose repeatedly, so that any view of gambling which focuses directly on its outcomes confronts an essential contradiction”; Ferguson, “Preface,” xiii. 37 For an overview of the Renaissance view of addiction, see Willis, “Doctor Faustus and the Early Modern Language of Addiction,” 135–40. As Willis, ibid., 135, notes, the Renaissance is generally neglected in recent histories of addiction, since scholars see the modern, medicalized view originating in the nineteenth century. 38 Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, 77.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

The Role of Dice on the Stage While the materials of gaming often contained occult properties, the hidden effects help us further understand the relationship between dicing and theater—two popular forms of play—in the early modern period; staged dice-play could both parallel and heighten the uncontrollable, largely unforeseeable effects of theatricality, and they were obviously connected in the contemporary imagination. As I have already noted, dice-play was staged often, but moralists also noted a similar kind of danger in both dicing and attending plays. Most of the major anti-theatrical writing includes an attack on dicing. William Prynne, for example, in his famous Histrio-mastix: The Players Scourge (1633), adds in his title that his work lambastes not only playwrights and actors but also includes “sundry other particulars concerning dancing, dicing, health-drinking, etc.”39 Dice-play, according to Prynne, is a most pernicious, infamous game; condemned in all ages, all places, not onely by Councels, Fathers, Divines, Civilians, Canonists, Politicians, and other Christian Writers; by divers Pagan Authors of all sorts, and by Mahomet himselfe; but likewise by sundry Heathen, yea Christian Magistrates Edicts, and by the Statutes of our Kingdome; as the occasions of much idlenesse, prodigality, cursing, swearing, forswearing, lying, cheating, mispence of money and time, theft, rapine, usurie, malice, envie, fretting, discontents, quarrels, duels, murthers, covetousness, acquaintance with ill company, povertie, ruine of many young Gentlemens, yea & Tradesmens fortunes and estates. 40

Prynne’s voluminous work again and again groups dicing and acting together as forbidden and unlawful acts. The question, then, becomes what about the two activities—dicing and theater— seemed so interrelated to early modern moralists? At perhaps the most basic level, theater, like dicing, could be read as frivolous entertainment that distracted from proper moral activity; this is perhaps the most common assumption made by scholars. 41 The physical space of playing, as others have pointed out, could often be the same, and both theater and dice were associated with deceit. More subtly, however, we might also find the kind of parallel Prynne sees between dice and the theater in hidden influences both activities exert on their audiences. Just as we have seen a quality “in” the dice that draws 39 Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. A1r. 40 Ibid., 4. 41 Zucker draws out this connection as he also notes how pervasive the overlap between anti-theatrical writing and anti-dicing sentiment was; Zucker, “Social Stakes of Gambling,” 69.

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dicers to their damnation, the theater, according to Prynne and others, exerted an occult influence on spectators, moving them in irresistible and sometimes dangerous ways. 42 Prynne fears dicing similarly because it opens up the player to external—and perhaps uncontrollable—forces. One of Thomas Heywood’s most popular plays offers an example of this overlap. Heywood’s The Wise-Woman of Hogsden (1638) weaves multiple plots of romance, and the action is centered on the disreputable house of the Wise-Woman. 43 Chartley, a rakish young gamester, plans two marriages during the short action of the play, first to Luce, a virtuous but poor citizen, and then to Gratiana, a wealthy and beautiful daughter of a nobleman. We hear, also, that he had fled the night before his intended marriage to another woman in his home town, Luce 2, who pursues him to the city. Through the machinations of the Wise-Woman and the theatrical skill of Luce 2, Chartley is reformed and returned to his first partner, and the other women end up with sufficiently clever and virtuous suitors. Scholars have noted the importance of theatricality and performance in Heywood’s play.44 The Wise-Woman, along with Luce 2, organizes and “stages” scenes that unmask Charley’s corruption and ameliorate the injustices of a legal and cultural system that cannot adequately handle noble dishonesty and cruelty. Luce 2’s skill as an actress grants her the power to restore to herself Chartley’s original promise of marriage. We might add that Luce 2’s theatrical skill affects a change in Chartley against his will, transforming him into a willing and suitable husband (at least in the logic of the play). The meditation on theatricality, however, opens with a scene of dicing that links the two forms of play while questioning the actor’s control over both fate and even her/his own body. In The Wise-Woman, the act of dicing is very clearly a performance, like so much else in the play. Each player adopts a role bestowed upon them by the dice: “Then once I’ll play the frank gamester” (1.1.60). Their own performative skill can help determine the role, as, for example, when Sencer, a gentleman friend of the protagonist, declares his desire to “out-brave this gamester with a throw” (1.1.58). Bets “set” the players rather than the players setting bets. Similarly, the game time is a space for linguistic aplomb. The players do swear occasionally (“Damn’d dice”), as moralists predicted, but cursing occurs less often than clever wordplay (1.1.69). Indeed, Chartley twice bars swearing from their game and interrupts the oaths of his fellow gamesters. Puns, on the other hand, are a constant, part of the contest of play. These often involve the occult nature of the dice or conflate religion and 42 Floyd-Wilson, Knowledge, Science, and Gender, 20. 43 Heywood’s play is a city comedy that has drawn frequent comparisons to The Alchemist (performed in 1610, printed in 1612), one of Ben Jonson’s earliest and most successful comedies, which revolves around Captain Face, a charlatan servant cheating foolish Londoners out of their money by feigning skill in the occult. 44 Gibbons, “Thomas Heywood in the House of the Wise-Woman,” 392.

“Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” 

materialism—“I will not leave myself one cross [the general name for any coin stamped with a cross] to bless me” (1.1.64). Despite the discussions of chance and fortune, the scene leaves a clear impression that the most dominant personality and performance can control the roll, just as in the play, Luce 2, by her dominant performance, overcomes Chartley’s scheming and sets everything right according to her desires. Not fortune, but theatrical skill determines the outcome. Still, the play also recognizes the occult influences of the dice on the players, how quickly the results spiral out of their own control, thus rendering the exact power of theatricality ambiguous. If the players can influence the dice, the dice can equally affect the players. From the first line, the devil is a shadowy presence around the game: “Price of my life!” Chartley exclaims, “Now if the devil have bones,/ These dice are made of his” (1.1.1–2). Chartley references the common assumption that Satan invented the game of dice, and the lament that the first dice were made from the devil’s bones was almost proverbial. Northbrooke, for example, seems to take the myth seriously, at least for its ability to capture some truth about the game: “But certainly those that write of the inuentions of things, haue good cause to suppose Lucifer the Prince of Deuilles, to be the first inuenter thereof, and hell (no doubte) was the place where it was firste founded. For what better alectiue, coulde Satan deuise to allure and bring men pleasantly into damnable seruitude, than to purpose to them a forme of Play.”45 These dice, too, have a hidden, dangerous quality, as Boyster, another gamester, yells in a fit of success, “I think ‘tis quicksilver:/ It goes and comes so fast. There’s life in this” (1.1.52–53). As Chartley explains, the dice themselves manipulate one’s perception of the world: “My losing had took away my senses, both of seeing and feeling, but better luck hath brought them to their right temper” (1.1.80–81). While social competition and performative skill structure the dice game in the scene, the game clearly impacts the players in more complicated ways. If these occult influences tie dicing to the theater, they also hint that the kind of theatrical influence exerted by Luce 2 is never perfectly safe and controllable. In the seventeenth century, staged dice games thus almost always invoked the occult. The materials of gaming, the process of gaming, produced a chain of sympathies, of addictions, deceits, and theatricality, which was most often explained by the demonic. Though this assumption was in flux during the early and mid-seventeenth century, the occult network of connections in the materials of gaming seem to retain a strong hold on the staged gamer. Renaissance gamblers still experienced the animistic links with the environs and material of gaming, but they seemingly felt and understood this connection in demonic terms. For a culture in which the belief in demons was nearly universal, the devil’s ability to entice gamesters into—and intervene in—the realm of contingency seems to 45 Northbrooke, Spiritus est, 88.

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have constituted an important part of the experience of gaming. Demons become central in this network of relations, in some ways the foremost forces in the world of chance. Like the intimately related field of magic, to hazard the roll of a dice was to risk the company of the devil.

Bibliography Primary Sources Agrippa, Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy Written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim: Translated out of the Latin into the English tongue by J.F. London: printed by R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651. Balmford, James. A Short and Plaine Dialogve Concerning the Unlawfulnes of Playing at Cards or Tables, or Any Other Game Consisting in Chance. London: published for Richard Boile, 1593. Bernardinus of Siena, Saint. The chirche of the evyll men and women whereof Lusyfer is the heed and the membres is all dyssolute and synners reproved, trans. Henry Watson. London: Wynken de Worde, 1949. Cooke, John. Greenes Tu Quoque or The Cittie Gallant. London: for John Trundle, 1614. The Costlie Whore: A Comical History, Acted by the Companie of the Revels. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994. Cotton, Charles. Leathermore: or Advice Concerning Gaming. London, 1668. E., B. A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew. London, printed for W. Hawes, 1699. Kelsall, John. A Testimony against Gaming, Musick, Danceing, Singing, Swearing. London: printed for Andrew Sowle, 1681. Middleton, Thomas. A Yorkshire Tragedy. In The Collected Works, ed. Macd. P. Jackson, John Jowett, Valerie Wayne, and Adrian Weiss, pp. 452–66. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Northbrooke, John. Spiritus est vicarious Christi in terra: A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes or Enterluds with Other Idle Pastimes [et]c. Commonly Used on the Sabboth Day, are Reproved by the Authoritie of the Word of God and Auntient Writers; Made Dialoguewise by Iohn Northbrooke Minister and Preacher of the Word of God. London: imprinted by H. Bynneman for George Byshop, 1577. Prynne, William. Histrio-mastix: The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragaedie. London: printed by E.A., Augustine Mathewes, Thomas Cotes, and W.I., 1633. Pseudo-Cyprian. Il gioco dei dadi [“De aleatoribus”], ed. and trans. Chiara Nucci. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2006. A Timely Advice; or, A Treatise of Play, and Gaming. London, printed by Th. Harper for Richard Stevenson, 1640.

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Secondary Sources Basu, Anupam. “EEBO N-Gram Browser,” Early Modern Print: Text Mining Early Printed English, https://earlyprint.wustl.edu/tooleebospellingbrowserv2.html (accessed 17 January 2018). Berek, Peter. “‘Follow the Money’: Sex, Murder, Print, and Domestic Tragedy.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews 21 (2008): 170–88. Cawley, A.C. English Domestic Drama: A Yorkshire Tragedy. Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1966. ———, and Barry Gaines. “Introduction.” In A Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. A.C. Cawley and Barry Gaines, pp. 1–48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cox, John. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Davenport, Edwin. “Elizabethan England’s Other Reformation of Manners.” English Literary History 63, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 255–78. Ferguson, Harvie. “Preface: Gambling, Chance, and the Suspension of Reality.” In Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture, pp. xiv–xix. New York: Routledge, 1999. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Franklin, James. The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Frenk, Joachim. “Games.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock, and Abigail Shinn, pp. 221–34. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Gibbons, Daniel R. “Thomas Heywood in the House of the Wise-Woman.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 49, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 391–416. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hopkins, Lisa. “A Yorkshire Tragedy and Middleton’s Tragic Aesthetic.” Early Modern Literary Studies 8, no. 3 (January 2003): 1–15. Johnstone, Nathan. The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Martinez-Lajous, Lisa. “Playing for Profit: The Legitimacy of Gaming and the Early Modern Theater.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007. Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Tosney, Nicholas. “The Playing Card Trade in Early Modern England.” Historical Research 84, no. 226 (November 2011): 637–56. Willis, Deborah. “Doctor Faustus and the Early Modern Language of Addiction.” In Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan, pp. 135–48. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Zucker, Adam. “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, pp. 65–86. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

About the author Kevin Chovanec (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is Assistant Professor in the department of Languages and Literatures at Christian Brothers University. His research focuses on early modern cultural exchange, particularly religious transnationalism, and the technologies that facilitated that exchange. Recent work has appeared in Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Drama, Religion and Literature, and Studies in Philology.

5.

The World Upside Down Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Games and the Performance of Identity in the Early Modern World Patricia Rocco Abstract Games of chance have a long history across different cultures in the early modern period, yet in Bologna they take on specific visual formats that are closely tied to the city and its politics, as well as Counter-Reformation proverbs of the day. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli makes use of the broadsheet format to create games that participate in the performance of local identity, blending elements of both high and low culture. These games create a type of site-specific visual poetry of the piazza, similar to the popular verses of Giulio Cesare Croce, where role reversals and change of fortunes are common. While gambling was prohibited by the Catholic Church, these prints survive as part of a culture deeply rooted in the visual display and performance of piety and popular folklore. In the end, Mitelli’s games always present us with a moral; ironically, while in the very midst of play. Keywords: popular prints, games, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Counter-Reformation, Giulio Cesare Croce, Cockaigne

Games of chance have a long history across different cultures in the early modern period, yet in Bologna they take on specific visual formats that are closely tied to the city and its politics, as well as to the Counter-Reformation morality of the day, illustrated via humorous satire.1 The seventeenth-century artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1638–1718) makes use of the broadsheet format to create games that blend All Italian translations throughout the essay are my own. 1 For a classic study on the ludic in the early modern world see Huizinga, Homo Ludens. See McClure’s more recent study on Parlour Games for his theories on games as a mode of performance and how parlor games allowed women more agency, and thus the ability to perform in the larger world outside of the ludic. His ideas concur with my own research on the topic.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch05

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elements of both high and low culture, confirming the complex multivalent nature of both the games and their reception by the Bolognese audience. These games create a type of theater of the world and a microcosm of the piazza, where role reversals and changes of fortune are common across all classes and professions.2 This essay will focus on the meaning and use of certain key themes that weave throughout Mitelli’s games: these include aspects of the world upside down (a familiar trope in the early modern world), the importance of food and the sin of gluttony (one of the seven deadly sins), and the morals of women, all contributing factors/facets of a local identity as expressed in the popular verses of the day and set against a backdrop of Church reform. In a Papal State such as Bologna, these game prints can serve as testimony of a culture deeply rooted in the visual display of both popular folklore and religion.3 Mitelli’s games thus participate in an everyday practice where meaning is derived from the game board and from the players themselves, both of which are subject to the rules of chance. In the final analysis, his games often illustrate the moral of the story while in the very midst of game play, as for example, the ruinous end awaiting a gambler or prostitute. Although the games involve an obvious comical aspect, beneath the surface runs an undercurrent of Counter-Reformation morality, an important source of the satire and ever-present even while being made fun of in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. This leaves the viewer with a complex message which they can then decipher for themselves. 4

Setting the Gaming Scene: The Artist, the City, and High/Low Notions of the “Popular” A prolific artist from Bologna, Mitelli created etchings of paintings by famous Bolognese artists such as the Carracci family of painters, as well as illustrations for various festival prints and scientific manuals. In addition to his work on “high art” forms such as copies of Annibale Carracci’s images of itinerant tradesmen of the piazza, his own version of the French Cri de Paris (The cries of Paris, a series of depictions of the vendors that roamed the streets of Paris hawking their wares), he is best known for his myriad representations of the human condition in late seventeenth-century Bologna, where social commentary, religion, and local culture

2 For a complete treatment of this trope across European cultures see Cocchiara, Il mondo. 3 Ibid., 6, 7, 20. 4 Additional examples from the rest of Mitelli’s work that reinforce this interpretation include his series of Le ventiquattr’hore dell’humana felicità (The twenty-four hours of human happiness), where each figure is shown in dialogue with death; these clearly reference a somber religiosity and a type of memento mori, despite/alongside the humor. On examples such as these see Rocco, “Virtuous Vices,” 167–90.

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all come together.5 One subcategory of these images is in the format of printed game boards. These so-called “popular” games actually involve multiple audiences often fragmented by gender, class, and religious affiliation, etc., but which are also unified by a series of practices and representations.6 For example, the games not only rely on images, but also incorporate text, the reading of which links the games with orality and the performative aspect.7 In addition, despite being cheap and portable in format, the printed game boards contained a range of topics that were meant to appeal to all classes: some popular, some courtly, some universal, and some, like tavern sites, specific to the city. In terms of reception and audience, these games were most probably played in different places and under different conditions, from the public venue of the piazza or tavern to the private and more intimate setting of the parlor. In general, the thematic focus of Mitelli’s games varied; some games utilized moralistic/misogynistic proverbs with elements of folk wisdom that addressed how women should behave according to the standards of patriarchal authority. Certain examples were caricatures of Turks in line with the ideas of the Catholic Church, which saw them as forever the infidel to be both feared and vanquished; some games were more personal condemnations of hunger, war, and violence and still others were examples of Mitelli’s own site-specific humor of the piazza and 5 On Mitelli’s version of the Cri de Paris (the Arti per via), and the everyday worker types in Carracci’s Arti di Bologna, see also McTighe, “Perfect Deformity,” 75–91. Early Cris de Paris images date to sixteenth-century France and Germany, although they were widely diffused and found in various cultures and periods. Annibale Carracci’s rendition of the tradespeople was related to his great interest in naturalism; however, they are still given a type of classical dignity of form when compared to Mitelli’s more popular versions with all their overtones of comedy and pathos. Overall, my research into popular prints is grounded in Chartier’s work on print culture, as well as in cultural anthropology. I use the term “popular” to describe some of the material conditions of my images since the format of these game prints was cheap and thus produced in multiples. However, the original concept of popular culture as based purely on economic reasons can also be called into question in terms of a neat division between the masses versus the elites; see Chartier, “Texts, Prints, Readings,” 169–70. Also see Burke, Popular Culture, 5, and for ideas on the concept of the popular and Carnival, Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 20. Mitelli also collaborated with the women artists of Bologna; on this topic see Rocco, Devout Hand, 156–72. 6 Chartier, “Texts, Prints, Readings,” 161–66, 169–72. For the division between high and low imagery and points of crossing in between, see also Camporesi, Bread of Dreams; Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms; and Burke, Popular Culture, 13–14. Thus, in this case, an object such as a relic, book, or a game print can be shared among different classes, resulting in a varied response. For example, regarding the high/low dichotomy of form and content in the Bibliothèque bleu series (a series of canonical literary works printed for a popular audience in cheaper and abridged versions, beginning in the sixteenth century), it was the printer who turned them into a popular press by shortening the texts. 7 See McClure’s introduction in Parlour Games on games, agency, and performativity; he makes a link between the act of reading texts and playing board games in the early modern period. On the idea of a reader’s participation in and appropriation of a text, as well as reception theory, see Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life; Elias, Civilizing Process; and Chartier, “Texts, Prints, Readings,” 154–66, 174–75. Chartier’s approach also presents the act of reading texts from a phenomenological point of view.

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quotidian life.8 Mitelli’s games display some unique features of their particular environment and period and underscore the importance of the material culture of games as related to larger social issues.9 The examples considered here will revolve specifically around the topic of food, the sin of gluttony, and the role of women. We will end with a fourth image of the world upside down that, although not a game, reiterates the importance of the reversals of fortune that often accompany gambling.

Popular Predecessors Predecessors to Mitelli’s popular games include more familiar versions such as the Gioco dell’oca (Game of the Goose) and Pela il chiu (Skin the Owl) game, yet Mitelli’s games were somewhat unique. For example, the Game of the Goose was played with a traditional oval game board and dice, leading the player to the center by way of passes or setbacks.10 Mitelli’s versions created a hybrid form of game sheet with a moralistic twist and an expanded visual format. Encoded in his games are proverbs and archetypes of folk wisdom, which often contain messages in concert with the Church’s position, yet need to be arrived at with a roll of the dice, which religious authorities would have condemned as gambling. The irony and humor of this situation is part of the satire, made more ironical yet since Mitelli himself was a gambler and his brother a priest. The format of these games is usually a broadsheet but can also be a single image, and all are played with a number of dice ranging from one to three. The artist uses P for pagare (payment), and T for tirare (take from the pot). In the games’ directions, Mitelli often suggests un quattrino (about a penny) as a forfeit, with three 6s (being the highest possible numerical combination) usually the winning number. Mitelli’s games also contain verses in Bolognese dialect, which reinforce the moralistic message of his games via site-specific language while creating a complex interweaving of image, text, and moral satire through the use of repetition. For example, in the Game of the Glutton (Figure 5.2) to be discussed 8 See Chartier, “General Introduction,” 4–5, 8. For example, the defeat of the Ottoman inf idel was taken extremely seriously in Papal States like Bologna in the early modern period, during the time of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and the later Great Turkish War (1683–99). The papacy had aligned itself on the side of the Holy Roman Emperor in military conflicts with the Ottomans who fought on the side of the Protestants of Bohemia (contesting Catholic Hapsburg claims) and French troops contesting the Holy Roman Emperor’s political power. See also note 31 below. For more information on the Ottoman-Christian conflict, part of the Thirty Years War, see Wheatcroft, Enemy at the Gate. 9 Cocchiara, Il mondo, 7: 254, who admits that it is difficult to pin down where a theme was borrowed from, used first, etc. On the ambiguous nature of the “popular” see Burke, Popular Culture, 14. For a classic and encyclopedic study on early games in Italy, see Crane, Italian Social Customs, and for parlor games in Siena, McClure, Parlour Games. 10 Crane discusses early games in Italian Social Customs.

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below, we see the image of a gross female, and this characterization is reinforced by her name Signora Golosa (Mrs. Glutton) printed beneath her figure, underlining the humorous satire, even as it implicitly condemns the sin of gluttony.

High Gaming for the Courtly Scene In addition to their roots in popular culture and folklore, Mitelli’s games also descend from the history of games as genteel pastimes as expressed in courtly literature.11 From mentions in period literature to behavioral treatises such as Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (Book of the Courtier), the pedigree of courtly games is long and well-established.12 Overall, most of these games can also be considered performative in the sense that they were related to the self-fashioning of identity at court, as well as at times in the literal sense since players performed or acted out the roles they were assigned in the game. The textual volumes dedicated to these games usually contained no images but were based instead on riddles, stories, charades, and philosophical questions with the inclusion of token forfeits as the symbolic link to the aspect of gambling. By appropriating courtly themes for gambling, Mitelli’s games became the gambler’s version of philosophical questions involving concepts such as love and beauty as well as sites of knowledge.13 Associated with the courtly concept of leisure were the academies such as the Accademia degli Intronati (Academy of the Bewildered) of Siena, whose partial function was to create absorbing games for the nobility.14 Out of these institutions would come the published parlor games of the Bargagli brothers of Siena, and the Cento giuochi (One hundred games) from their Bolognese counterpart, Innocentio Ringhieri. In 1551, Ringhieri, a member of the Accademia di Ritrouvati (Academy of Rediscovered Ones), published his Cento giuochi liberali e d’ingegno (One hundred games of learning and wit) in Bologna.15 He was followed by Girolamo Bargagli, who published his Dialogo dei giuochi che nelle veghe sanesi si usino di fare (Dialogue of the games that are played during the evenings in Siena) in Venice in 1581.16 Girolamo’s 11 This aspect is more evident in certain examples than others; see Rocco, “Virtuous Vices,” 173–77. 12 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 263. To Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano, should be added the treatises by Bargagli (Dialogo de’ giuochi) and Ringhieri (Cento giuochi liberali). 13 Chartier, “Texts, Prints, Readings,” 161. For more examples of courtly games see Rocco, “Virtuous Vices,” 173–77. 14 Burke, “Invention of Leisure,” 142. The Academy of the Intronati began in Siena in 1525 as a society and meeting place for aristocrats and the production of light and witty theater. Intronati derives from the word rintronato (dazed), from the society’s desire to withdraw from the cacophony of the outside world. 15 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 285. 16 See McClure, Parlour Games, 55–81; and Crane, Italian Social Customs, 263.

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Fig. 5.1  Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Gioco importantissimo del fornaro, banco che mai falisce (The most important game of the baker—the bank which never fails) [Game of the Baker], 1692

brother Scipione also wrote a treatise on games, I trattenimenti di Scipion Bargagli; dove da vaghe donne e da giovani huomini rappresentati sono honesti, e dilettevol giuochi: narrate novelle; e cantate alcune amorose canzonette (The entertainments of Scipione Bargagli; where various women and young men represented are honest and playful games: narrated stories; and some small love songs sung), published in Venice in 1587.17 The performative aspect of these parlor games can be seen in their descriptions for use. A master of revels is elected and must wear a laurel upon his head to signify his status; a mestola (pestle) is used as a prop for the game as a type of comical scepter for his acting role. There is also a prescriptive section on the etiquette involved in playing these games. For example, in Girolamo Bargagli’s treatise the author clearly states that the Game of Weights is to be avoided as it puts undue physical discomfort upon a player by piling heavy objects onto the player’s back; 17 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 297.

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however, this directive underlines the otherwise physical acting out of the game. Role playing and performance is a tacit part of the courtly aspect of these parlor games, as we see in the Game of Wild Beasts where each player is assigned an animal and a characteristic trait. When the name of the animal is called, the person must present its trait and then respond to a question regarding, for example, the habits of the animal.18 This game combines encyclopedic knowledge with the performative aspect of role playing in front of the other participants of the game. An echo of these parlor games can be found in Mitelli’s Game of the Baker, to be discussed below, when the player may momentarily identify with the profession that he lands on, which in turn depends on the element of chance and a toss of the dice. This game is surely influenced by his copying of the “high” images of trades in Annibale Carracci’s Arti per via mentioned earlier.19 However, Mitelli’s modified version definitely depicts the less poetic/“low” side of those trades, such as the irony and pathos of the shoe seller not only too poor to wear his own shoes, but also with an amputated leg to boot (pun intended)!20

The Hunger Games The first game to be considered is the Gioco importantissimo del fornaro, banco che mai falisce (The most important game of the baker—the bank which never fails) [Game of the Baker], 1692 (Figure 5.1).21 This game revolves around the subject of bread—that most basic of staples—while representing all professions and stations of life, both high and low and everything in between. There are not only bricklayers and bankers but also artists and aristocrats, and each profession is shown with its appropriate costume and attributes so as to be easily recognizable. Mitelli depicts some as rustic caricatures with exaggerated expressions such as the villano (boorish person). One of the figures is the brentadori (one who carries wine, water, or grain in barrels on his back), based on Carracci’s Arti per via.22 The images of Mitelli’s game are divided into twenty numbered squares, with the baker occupying the slightly larger square in the center; he is shown standing behind a counter surrounded by loaves of bread as he serves customers in his shop. In this square Mitelli has added 18 Ibid., 290. 19 See note 5 above and note 20 next. 20 On Mitelli’s Arti per via and the everyday worker types in Carracci’s Arti di Bologna, see McTighe, “Perfect Deformity,” 75–91; see also note 5 above and note 21. 21 On the importance of bread in the early modern world, see Camporesi, Bread of Dreams. This image and the others treated in this essay are illustrated and discussed in Varignana, Le collezioni d’arte. 22 Dempsey discusses Annibale Carracci and his school, in Annibale Carracci. Also see notes 5 and 20 above.

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the phrase “chi ha robba da mangiare sempre ha moneta” (he who has [bread] to eat always has money). In playing the game, the player agrees to put down a certain amount of money and casts three dice; s/he then moves to the square corresponding to the number on the dice. Some squares contain directions to pay a certain sum of money as a penalty, while others tell the player to take a specific amount from the pot. If one lands on the figure of the baker (number 18, obtained by rolling three 6s), the player wins, and according to Mitelli’s directions—“chiappa tutt” (take all)—takes all of the money from the pot. The cast of characters on the game board represents the panoply of everyday life in Bologna, and are arranged in a non-sequential order as a visual encyclopedia of professions. They are as follows, reading from left to right: 1. mastro di casa (the well-to-do master of the house) 2. beccharo (from the word for “beak,” one who pecks, bickers, or catches, here shown holding a piece of meat) 3. villano (a boorish person) 4. muratore (the bricklayer) 5. laldarolo (the butcher, seller of animal fat) 6. pescatore (the fisherman) 7. cantatrice (the singer) 8. pittore (the painter) 9. banchiere (the banker) 10. la Simona (a lower-class female, as in one of Croce’s characters)23 11. ms. hom da ben (the man of means, whose big nose makes him look like a character in the commedia dell’arte) 12. burattino (the young hoodlum; the term burattino in Italian also refers to both a “puppet” and a character in the commedia dell’arte) 13. messer paga poc (the cheap master of the house) 14. brentadori (the water carrier) 15. speziale (the seller of water and spices) 16. messer cava denti (the dentist) 17. signora madonna Tintinaga (an aristocratic lady named after an old street in Bologna) 18. sonatore (the musician, who is also a player) 19. tripparo (the cook, seller of tripe, large and round).

23 Simona is a character in Croce’s work, La Simona dalla Sambuca, la quale va cercando da filare in Bologna, from one of his comical verses in dialect that sings the praises of a list of fifty women who seek work in weaving in Bologna.

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Characters such as these are also derived from early modern Italian folklore and popular verses, including the work of the Bolognese writer Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1606).24 Croce was known as the sixteenth-century cantastorie, or poet of the piazza, one who literally “sings the story” of daily life in the city; his songs were both satirical and comical. Elements of folklore, proverb wisdom, and performativity are a strong part of Croce’s repertoire, as seen, for example, with the main characters from his Le piacevoli e ridicolose semplicita di Bertoldino (The pleasing and ridiculous simplicity of Bertoldino), a story in which Bertoldo and Bertoldino are depicted as the rustic peasants who rather incongruously appear at court but without any of the refined manners necessary to succeed.25 However, the key to Croce’s Bertoldo is that, although a common man of the piazza, there is much more to him behind the mask, as there was to Croce himself.26 In Bertoldo, the aspect of the world upside down and the time of Carnival contain a reversal that is unreal and impossible, akin to the idea of the fairy tale, which we also find in Mitelli’s Land of Cockaigne to be discussed further in this essay. Bertoldo aspires to more than his humble origins; this logic of opposites and reversals, from peasant to courtier, is part of the invention of folklore and proverbs.27 These opposites include hunger and gluttony, as well as the CounterReformation’s polarizing view of women as either fickle and in need of restraint or as saintly and pious.28 Mitelli’s games, influenced as they were by Croce and local folklore tropes, were thus also related to the idea of the Carnival festival with its atmosphere of carousing and gambling, reversals and indulgences.29 His games required the player to gamble while simultaneously communicating the evils of gambling. In the Game of the Baker, notably, if not appropriately given its theme, the professions involved with food are those that seem to always collect money: the baker, the butcher, the water carrier, and the cook; they are also the ones shown with dice. Landing on the fisherman sends you to Lady Tintinaga, who gives you a flower, her heart, and some money. The bricklayer gets nothing, and the poor man of the house is told to come back the next day. Ironically, the dentist will take out your teeth in lieu of paying you, and the painter states that he can only paint your portrait. It is not the first time Mitelli ridicules his own profession; in his Game of Professions, 24 See Casali and Capaci, La festa, 9. 25 Ibid., 10. 26 Ibid., 11. 27 Ibid., 15, 12. This is partially autobiographical, since Croce himself always awaited a reversal of fortune that apparently never arrived; he was poor yet educated, but never succeeded to material wealth and status. The rich life of those at court and their courtiers remained a mirage to him only reachable via literary description and virtual role play; he died a poor man. 28 The gender discourse of women as “other” is an important trope in Mitelli’s work, influenced by both misogynistic Church doctrine and humorous popular folklore. For more examples of his prints on women, see Rocco, Devout Hand, 178–97. 29 Casali and Capaci, La festa, 20–22.

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Fig. 5.2  Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Signora gola tira tutto (Mrs. Glutton takes all) [Game of Gluttony], 1699

for example, he tells the audience that things go very badly for artists, while they go very well for musicians!30 While the Game of the Baker is a mix of upper- and lower-class citizenry, it is the baker who is represented as the richest, because he will always have food. The bakery is described as a bank, but one which never fails. This implicit social comment on hunger was extremely important, since there were frequent outbreaks of famine and poverty in Mitelli’s day.31 It bears remembering that both Croce and Mitelli would have also been familiar with Carracci’s visual experimentation in depicting the daily life of the lower classes with a type of rustic Bolognese naturalism necessary for the portrayal of these characters, as mentioned at the beginning of this section.32 A fitting example of Mitelli’s interest in the local 30 For a discussion of the Game of Professions, see Rocco, “Virtuous Vices,” 186. 31 Mitelli’s games and prints often commented on the disasters of war in the city. The results of the Thirty Years War in Europe included an increase in poverty, famine, and disease, which lasted well into the late seventeenth century and included later conflicts. Refugee soldiers were thought to be responsible for renewed bouts of plague in the cities of northern Italy such as Milan, due in part to the wars of Mantuan Succession, considered part of the Thirty Years War. This situation, along with the plague that struck Milan as a result, is described in detail by Manzoni in his work of 1827, I Promessi Sposi, ch. 31 (see also chs. 27 and 28), and blamed on the German soldiers. See also Parrott, “Mantuan Succession,” and note 8 above. 32 Cremonini, “Giulio Cesare Croce,” 139, 146. Most artists of Bologna would have been familiar with the great fame of the Carracci school in their city.

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life of the piazza and everyday types, the people in his games are also similar to Croce’s characters from Banchetto de’ Malcibati (The Banquet of Malcibati), where the figures serve as the literal embodiment of hunger, represented by their names Signor e Signora Fame (Mr. and Mrs. Hunger).33 Mitelli’s Game of the Baker also speaks to the element of chance, which is visually reinforced by the prominent display of the dice in several of the squares. In this respect the player can temporarily take on any of the professions s/he lands on, changing his or her identity and fortune as s/he goes along while embodying a temporary role, either for better or worse—all dependent upon the roll of the dice. The game represents the true and harsh reality of the lower classes, where bread is king, the staple of life, as opposed to the privilege of the richer classes who have the option of eating expensive meat and other fine foodstuffs. Similar messages regarding the vagaries of hunger are represented in Croce’s aforementioned character, the peasant Bertoldino, who asserts, “chi non pensa a mangiare, non pensa a vivere” (“he who does not think to eat, does not think to live”).34 A ubiquitous topos in visual and literary expression, the theme of hunger was also staple of contemporary street theater.35

The Game of Gluttony Continuing the theme of games related to food, we come to the Signora gola tira tutto (Mrs. Glutton takes all) [Game of Gluttony], 1699 (Figure 5.2). Literally meaning “throat,” gola is used here to signify “gluttony.” This game speaks once again to the importance of food in seventeenth-century Bolognese culture, this time presenting the sin of gluttony and excess, using stinging satire with stock comic and grotesque figure types in the method of Croce. In order to fully appreciate this game, we need to consider that an important part of Mitelli’s Bologna in the seventeenth century and a great influence upon all the artists of the day was the religious climate engendered by the Counter-Reformation. The Counter-Reformation mentality was often seen as repressive to the arts; part of the task after the split within the Church by the Protestants had been to reform images, so that the goal of imagery was to illustrate biblical stories as simply and with as much decorum as possible. Bologna was somewhat of a contradiction since, despite the presence of an active university teeming with scientists, scholars, 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Croce, Le piacevoli e ridicolose, 51; and Rouch, “Tradizione carnevalesca,” 90–93. 35 For example, Croce’s characters in act 3 of his Banchetto cry: “pan, pan vorrei e vin, carne e sapore, pur senza sapor anco mangerei” (“bread, bread and wine, meat and flavor, even without flavor I would eat”). See Cremonini, “Giulio Cesare Croce,” 147; and Rouch, “Tradizione carnevalesca,” 93–94.

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and prolific artists, those most likely to challenge religious authority, a spirit of the Counter-Reformation mentality still reigned. In the mid-sixteenth century, the city had served as a site for meetings of the Council of Trent, and was home to the reforming cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, whose work Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (Discourse surrounding sacred and profane imagery) was a landmark of visual reform addressed to artists, scholars, and clerics.36 Paleotti understood that print was the key vehicle for the dissemination of information in both the Reformation (used by Protestants for anti-papal propaganda) and for Counter-Reformation initiatives. Due to this all-encompassing program of visual reform in the Papal State of Bologna, specifically aimed at artists, it is reasonable to presume that at least on some level, in addition to the humor, Mitelli’s games served as visual reminders of Counter-Reformation morals/codes of behavior as prescribed by the Church. In this environment, Mitelli’s printed game boards with their didactic images functioned as evidence for the virtual encounter between sometimes conflicting audiences, such as the moral authority of the Church versus that of the everyman/woman of the piazza, where gambling with dice games was a part of daily life. Surviving games and prints bear witness to this clash of ideas: on one hand, the papal bandi (posters) from as early as 1588 banning the use of dice as an evil habit—the need for which, ironically, was a sure sign that gambling continued—and on the other, an extant healthy collection of Mitelli’s engravings for printed game sheets to be played with dice (by various publics, not just an elite wit for upper classes).37 However, in Mitelli’s particular games, Counter-Reformation morals could be absorbed while in the very act of gambling, thus also perhaps shielding the artist from any direct Church reprisals. In the Game of Gluttony, the principal characters are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Ze Cnes (Aunt Cnes) Pulpetona (Miss Meatloaf) Madam Luvazza (Mrs. Wino) Madam Sbrudona (Mrs. Dribbler) Ze Loffia (Aunt Lazy) Msier Muscatel (Mr. Moscato wine) Cumpar Buili (The Godfather) Signora Golosa (Mrs. Glutton/throat) Barba Brislon (Beard Brislon)

36 The definitive biography of Paleotti is by Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, who also discusses Paleotti’s reform of the city’s visual culture. 37 On the bandi see Costume e società, 74–75.

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The game print shows eight people seated at the table, attended by one figure serving alcohol and another serving food; lying below the table is the figure identified as Barba Brislon. The other characters include Aunt Cnes who licks the plate, and Miss Meatloaf who wears a comical headpiece that imitates a fancy headdress. They are joined by Mrs. Wino and Mrs. Dribbler munching on chicken legs, and Aunt Lazy who uses a kind of mini-pitchfork to stuff meat into her mouth. For the Godfather the wine is being poured directly into a funnel in his mouth in a bold representation of the excess of drinking associated with gluttony. Occupying the center of the table and the largest figure in the grouping is Mrs. Glutton. She is shown with an extended neck, which enables her to stuff vast quantities of food down her throat more efficiently, and she holds a giant chicken leg with its claw foot still attached, a prop that serves to emphasize the sense of grotesqueness associated with gluttony. To play the game, the player rolls three dice and then moves to the figure associated with the number on the game sheet. The directions state: The game of Mrs. Gola and her friends. It is played with three dice and the sum of 18 [in three 6s] takes all the money and the others take three quattrini; where there is a T, take one quattrino; where there is a P, pay one quattrino, which is then added to the game [the money pot]. Numbers 9, 11, 14 and 17 neither take nor pay anything. The first toss is by the hand.38

The text and image accompanying the figures assigns ambiguous values for each character: the Dribbler pays for her messiness, while the Wino takes from the pot; the servant only gets to lick the plate, which underscores his subservient role. Landing on Barba Brislon (perhaps passed out drunk) means one neither takes from the pot nor pays. In order to win the game, the player must roll three 6s, which, ironically, then lands them on the space for Mrs. Glutton; her humorous headpiece is comprised of three dice bearing 6s, above which is the caption Signora Gola Tira Tutt’ (Mrs. Glutton takes all). With its origins in biblical times, the Glutton was a key figure in early modern satire, both visual and verbal. In Mitelli’s game, the winning number lands on Mrs. Glutton, who gets all the food and drink that she requires. Emphasizing her grotesque extended neck, the artist uses her to invoke the opposite of hunger, providing us with a behavioral example of the “don’t.” Although her fancy dress shows her to be of a higher class than the baker depicted in the previous game, her 38 The Italian reads: “Gioco della Signora Gola, e suoi compagni. Si gioca con tre dadi, e la raffa di dicidotto tira tutti li quattrini, e l’altre raffe tre quattrini, nei punti dove è il T. si tira un quattrino, e nelli punti, dove è il P. si paga un quattrino, che si aggiunge sul gioco; li punti 9-11-14 e 17, non tirano, ne pagano cosa alcuna. Si tira prima per la mano.”

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Fig. 5.3  Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Gioco gustoso della Simona e Filippa, compagne fedeli (The tasteful game of Simona and Filippa, faithful companions) [Game of Simona and Filippa], 1695

gluttonous conduct makes her socially repulsive, and she emerges as the epitome of a grotesque figure, the antithesis of the classic bodily ideal.39 Here, this visualized link between food and the grotesque brings the Carnival body in focus, since Carnival is a time of gluttony and is intimately related to the austerity of the Lenten time that follows it. 40 That this homage to gluttony appears in a game based on gambling is appropriate given the traditional linkage between the two: gambling signified “gluttony for wealth.”41 39 Rouch, “Tradizione carnevalesca,” 90–91. 40 On the contrast between the classical body and the Carnival grotesque, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 24–25. 41 Writing in 1478, the Pavian jurist Stefano Costa, observed that “play/gambling is born out of gluttony”; see Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance, 79. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the pardoner describes gambling as a type of gluttony for wealth. There are also biblical origins to this connection: Matthew 5:34, Jeremiah 4:2, and the Second Commandment in Exodus 20.

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I would like to suggest that as Mitelli’s game centers on the idea of the grotesque, there are interesting links to the aesthetic of the anticlassical in the city. Although space restrictions do not allow for a full treatment of this theme here, as elsewhere in early modern Europe, in Bologna the study of the natural world and all its curiosities was well underway and particularly vibrant due to some of the city’s university scholars. In the sixteenth century, the famous collection of the naturalist Ulysses Aldrovandi contained thousands of specimens, including representations of the hirsute Gonzales family as part of a study on the grotesque aspects of nature, which certainly also influenced the artists of the city. 42 This collection would live on in the seventeenth-century wunderkammer of Ferdinando Cospi, where wonder (meraviglia) was the focus, eliding the difference between the unusual creations of art and those of nature. Mitelli himself created the frontispiece illustration of Cospi’s collection for the published volume.43

Gender Games: The Performance of the Feminine Other Gender and identity are important themes in many of Mitelli’s games. The Gioco gustoso della Simona e Filippa, compagne fedeli (The tasteful game of Simona and Filippa, faithful companions) [Game of Simon and Filippa], 1695 (Figure 5.3) is a satire on women’s behavior, a moralizing comment on the opposite of the courtly aspect of women’s lives, and a warning of what might happen to women if they are not vigilant against the loss of female virtue. We were already introduced to Simona in the Game of the Baker above, and here Mitelli uses narrative to describe the negative aspects of women’s personalities, including the idea of gambling as a weakness, a type of gluttony born of greed and sloth. The game is in broadsheet format divided into twenty-four squares, with each square containing a corresponding dice number as well as an image and a caption below it. Starting at the first square, players roll the dice and then progress along the route that illustrates the slow moral and physical ruin of the rebellious female epitomized by Simona and by Filippa, the two principal characters who also appear in Croce’s work. 44 42 On the hirsute girl and Bolognese artists, see Rocco, Devout Hand, 39. 43 See Rocco, Devout Hand, ch. 5, for a discussion of Mitelli’s illustration of the Cospi collection. For further connections between the bizarre and the mannerist art of the late sixteenth century, as well as the wunderkammer, see Shearman, Mannerism, 121–31. Findlen discusses the scientific collections of Aldrovandi and Cospi in Possessing Nature, 26–28, 122–24, 306–9, 360–64. It is worth noting that despite the religious view of gluttony as a sin, a taste for the bizarre in games was concomitant with the great interest in the grotesque in the early modern city, also partly reflected in the fame and size of these particular collections. For the connections between the grotesque and Croce’s work, see Anselmi, “Le voci,” 27; and Battistini, “Spunti intertestuali,” 64. 44 The lower economic conditions and roughness of the female cast of characters from the tasteful Game of Simona and Filippa is reminiscent of the title and world of Croce’s literary work, La gloria delle donne

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Encapsulating the feminine aspect of the downtrodden “Other,” this game engages in Counter-Reformation discourses on gender which advocated that the woman’s place be in the controlled environment of the home, lest she venture outside the borders of respectable society. 45 In Mitelli’s game print, the full progression of the sad story unfolds in twenty-four vignettes. Simona and Filippa participate in all sorts of adventures inappropriate for the pious woman, and they ultimately suffer the consequences. The sequence proceeds as follows: Simona sleeps, wakes up, and then performs her elaborate toilette, spending hours in front of the mirror, a clear sign of vanity. She wants a husband, but has not found a suitable mate, so she stays at the window and sighs; she then leaves her house, walks alone in the street, and goes to a party at night, a harbinger of ensuing danger. She appears with her companion Filippa, who cries often and needs flowers to cover up her unsavory smell, the implication being that she has probably caught a sexually transmitted illness. Simona wants to gamble but has no money, having squandered it all away. Eventually she finds a husband but must weave to make ends meet—which adds an element of irony to the image since weaving is associated with piety for women. In the end, Simona and Filippa must eat from the same pot, and Simona is reduced to carrying an infirm Filippa around because Simona’s husband has left her. In various scenes the payment or penalty is ingeniously matched to the activity. In scene 8, for example, where Simona is in love at the window, the payment is to take in a “sigh” instead of money. When she finds a husband in scene 21, cryptically no payment or penalty is asked. However, in the last scene, 24, where she is reduced to carrying her ill friend Filippa around in a carriage, she can only “take” the carriage, not any money. Ironically, the winning square—which one can reach by rolling the three 6s displayed by Simona’s bed and where the player takes all—is actually the first scene where Simona is sleeping and does not wish to be disturbed (as indicated by the text above the image). This expounds on the Counter-Reformation message that the woman’s place is in the safety of the home or in the marital procreative bed; thus the player literally can’t win, since they must move, yet they can delay losing by not reaching the end first—a win by default. Again, Mitelli has used dice on the game board to underscore the element of chance in the game and in life. The dice also signify the evil sin of gambling, an ironic statement since the players in this game are already in the midst of gambling. (The glory of women, 1608). There is a reversal in the relationship of the author’s language to his stated title: Croce claims to use rozzi accenti (crude accents) when discussing women in his work although in actuality he addresses his work to noblewomen. 45 On the performance of gender see Butler’s discussion of gender as a construct, Bodies that Matter, 12. The topic of feminist literature in the early modern world is vast and can only be hinted at here, but a good source is in Broude and Garrard, Feminism and Art History, and the introduction in Rocco, Devout Hand. See also note 1.

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Fig. 5.4  Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, La cucagna nuova, trovato nella porcolandria l’anno 1703 da seigoffo quale raconta esservi tutte le delitie e chi dessidera andarvi gli ariva prestissimo con il pensiere con tutta facilita e finalmente qui chi sempre vive mai more (The Game of the new cockaigne—the new cockaigne found in Piglandia in the year 1703 by “you are clumsy,” who recounts having all the delights there, and he who wishes to go there will arrive there quickly and easily by thinking, and finally here, he who always lives never dies) [Game of the New Cockaigne], 1703

The progression of the game underlines the harsh fate that awaits women who dare to deviate from the only two approved possibilities as set by the male establishment: motherhood or the convent. Simona is portrayed as lazy, cruel, fussy when it comes to picking a husband, promiscuous, and overly fun loving, all attributes which in the Counter-Reformation climate she must pay for, and indeed she does. After a loveless marriage, she comes to a bad end. In playing the game, women or men of all classes could roll the dice and witness the slow ruin of Simona and Filippa; however there is no redemption in this game, for the end is an unhappy one, unless Simona remains in bed. 46 As in life, one does not know what cards one 46 For a larger discussion of Carnival see Casali and Capaci, La festa, 16, and Rouch, “Tradizione carnevalesca,” 106.

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will be dealt or where the dice will land. Here the winner is s/he who does not finish first. The player who finishes first comes to a bad end all the sooner and loses, a perfect reversal of typical game rules—and a succinct example of the world upside down, a theme we will explore further below.

Mapping the World Upside Down in the Comical Land of Cockaigne The final image here, although not a game itself, can serve as a paradigm through which to view Mitelli’s games , since it contains a compendium of the themes present in the previous three games—food, gluttony, and women’s roles—and underscores the issues that were of concern to the artist himself. 47 Representing a site for the reversal of the natural order of things, the theme of the Land of Cockaigne, the mythical land of luxury and excess, was diffused throughout early modern Europe, and was of central importance to the imagery of artists and writers such as Mitelli and Croce. 48 The relation of this theme to games lies precisely in this principle of reversals: gambling too represents a reversal of fortune, where one who is poor can suddenly become rich, and one who is rich, may end up losing all of his wealth in a toss of the dice. The image is entitled La cucagna nuova, trovato nella porcolandria l’anno 1703 da seigoffo quale raconta esservi tutte le delitie e chi dessidera andarvi gli ariva prestissimo con il pensiere con tutta facilita e finalmente qui chi sempre vive mai more (the game of the new cockaigne—the new cockaigne found in Piglandia in the year 1703 by “you are clumsy,” who recounts having all the delights there, and he who wishes to go there will arrive there quickly and easily by thinking, and finally here, he who always lives never dies) [Game of the New Cockaigne], 1703 (Figure 5.4). Mitelli’s version of the Land of Cockaigne as an actual map has a strong ludic sense due to the comic use of the principle of oxymoron. In the center of the image we find a castle, the locus of many delights, a place where rivers flow with wine instead of water, alluding to drunkenness and gluttony, as well as to the world upside down, where things are not as one expects them to be. Nature is performing all manner of absurd reversals here that are comical but also serious, especially involving food and identity: mountains are filled with cheese, and trees grow clothes instead of leaves. The putting on of new clothes is also a key trope in the performance of an identity reversal in this game. The clothes are a metaphor for a costume, as in the folk saying “the clothes make the man”; if a poor man dons fine clothes, he may feel like a rich aristocrat. All manner of anthropomorphic, unnatural changes are present: birds 47 Mitelli’s other example, the “Game of the land of Cockaigne,” is a site-specif ic game using local mortadella as its winning number; see Rocco, “Virtuous Vices,” 184. 48 On the importance of Cockaigne see Cocchiara, Il mondo, 18.

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and fish leap into the hands of hunters, hens lay an unnatural number of eggs a day, and even storms rain down candy and confetti instead of wind and rain. The image also references women’s behavior and gender roles, since in this land, women let their husbands sleep in cribs and tend to them as to little babes, an ironic version of the “women on top” and in charge.49 Women give birth while dancing instead of undergoing pain as the Bible dictates (thus cleansed of Eve’s original sin), and children are born with all their physical and cognitive skills fully developed.50 Most importantly, we see the age-old trope of the fountain of youth, a universal utopian and literary image regardless of gender, where the most dramatic reversal is enacted: humans can turn back the clock of time and return to a younger state, a truly miraculous transformation which could only happen in the Land of Cockaigne. In a further connection to our three games, the link with Croce’s popular imagery remains strong in the Land of Cockaigne as well, for Mitelli utilizes language in similar creative ways as the writer. Both invent nicknames to construct appropriate new, witty, and often grotesque identities for their characters. For example, in the Land of Cockaigne, Re Seigoffo (King Clumsy) and Porcolandia (Piglandia) are used as satires on the king and his land, since normally a king is someone who is wise and respected and rules over a noble land, not an awkward man who rules over a land of pigs, normally a sign of gluttony.51 However, there are no extremely violent images such as pigs butchering the butcher found in some Flemish and French examples of this theme, for example.52 Mitelli’s Cockaigne includes only the positive utopian aspects of those reversals. The idea of a table constantly filled with food that never ends is a response to the very real threat of hunger during the seventeenth century due to wars and conflicts touched upon earlier.53 The world upside down is an entreaty to treat life as a game, as well as a microcosm of all the hopes and frustrations of mankind. The poor man fears hunger, but even the rich will fear aging; thus Mitelli’s Piglandia, with its fountain of youth, represents a desired and winning utopia for all.54 Finally, we should note that the reversals of Cockaigne are also closely related to the theme of Carnival, whose temporality is further echoed in the activity of 49 On the “woman on top” phenomenon and gender and power struggles in early modern Italy, see the essays in Johnson and Grieco, Picturing Women. 50 This image of the “woman on top” as caretaker to an infantilized male figure is a very unusual version of the theme that I have thus far not seen in other games. 51 Battistini, “Spunti intertestuali,” 62. 52 Cocchiara, Il mondo, 232, 241. 53 Cremonini, “Giulio Cesare Croce,” 149. Carnival itself is also tied to the parable of excess vs. austerity. See note 31. 54 Mitelli’s land of Cockaigne includes positive examples of the world upside down, whereas his cage of fools includes all the “don’ts” of society, representing a type of anti-utopia.

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gambling, where fortunes can change momentarily with a toss of the dice. As a condensed form of life’s historic process, during Carnival, players are briefly freed from the bounds of everyday life and liberated from the laws of nature due to temporary role reversals.55 The time of Carnival was used by authorities as a social safety valve, where members of society could temporarily exceed their station in life by dressing up as their social betters (and vice-versa). However, this world upside down and its relation to Chance (as opposed to Faith) would have troubled the Church, since religious authority dictated that the faithful should believe in the natural order of things. This order had religious faith squarely at the center of everyone’s universe. As a consequence, gambling was still seen by religious authorities to be an evil activity, something to be controlled and eliminated despite its constant resurgence, except perhaps during Carnival, a time when such a social upheaval would be briefly tolerated.56

In Conclusion: The Game Is Afoot As we have seen, Mitelli’s games were a complex mix of high and low humor, satire, and performativity where, with the help of the dice, one might land on the winning number. In the Game of the Baker, for example, one might be fortunate enough to “never go hungry”—at least in a virtual sense—by landing on the lucky Baker himself. In other games, players had the opportunity of mocking those above them in social class or even their peers; all could play the game, but one needed to gamble to receive the message. As multivalent objects, these games allowed players to participate in multiple virtual identities, involved in performing both rebellion and obedience to the social mores and cultural impulses of the day; they operated between center and periphery, Church and piazza.57 In this context we can posit the use of games as active objects, not static images, but ones that crossed boundaries of high and low, of visual, literary and oral, in a shared meaning of the grand game of life.

55 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 129. On the idea of Carnival as a temporary release from the rules of normal society, see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, and Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 35. 56 See Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 20. For discussion on the idea of control and surveillance of the public by the establishment in the early modern period, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 57 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 27.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Bargagli, Girolamo. Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie Sanesi si usano di fare. Venice, 1581. Castiglione, Baldassare. Il libro del cortegiano. Rome: Bulzoni, 1986. Croce, Giulio Cesare. Banchetto de’ Malcibati (sulla carestia del 1590). Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini, 1601. ———. La gloria delle donne di Giulio Cesare Croce. Bologna: Per l’erede del Cochi, 1590. ———. La Simona dalla Sambuca, la quale và cercando da filare in Bologna: doue si sentono le gagliardisie di cinquanta filiere, con i loro nomi, & cognomi; in lingua rustica di montagna. Bologna: Gli eredi del Cochi, 1639. ———. Le piacevoli e ridicolose semplicita di Bertoldino. Bologna, 1608. Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi. London: Penguin Classics, 1972. Ringhieri, Innocentio. Cento giuochi liberali et d’ingegno. Bologna, 1551.

Secondary Sources Anselmi, Gian Mario. “Le voci della saggezza nel Bertoldo.” In La Festa del mondo rovesciato: Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco, ed. Elide Casali and Bruno Capaci, pp. 25–34. Bologna: Mulino, 2002. Arcangeli, Alessandro. Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hèléne Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. Battistini, Andrea. “Spunti intertestuali in Giulio Cesare Croce.” In La Festa del mondo rovesciato: Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco, ed. Elide Casali and Bruno Capaci, pp. 51–70. Bologna: Mulino, 2002. Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard, eds. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Burke, Peter. “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe.” Past and Present 146 (February 1995): 136–50. ———. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Camporesi, Piero. Bread of Dreams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Casali, Elide, and Bruno Capaci, ed. La festa del mondo rovesciato: Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco. Bologna: Mulino, 2002. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

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Chartier, Roger. “General Introduction: Print Culture.” In The Culture of Print, ed. Roger Chartier, pp. 1–10. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. ———. “Texts, Prints, Readings.” In The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, pp. 154–75. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Cocchiara, Giuseppe. Il mondo alla rovescia. Turin: Editore Borghieri, 1981. Costume e società nei giochi a stampa di Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. Exhibition catalog. Perugia: Electa Editori Umbri Associati, 1988. Crane, Thomas F. Italian Social Customs in the Sixteenth Century and their Influence on the Literatures of Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920. Cremonini, Katia. “Giulio Cesare Croce: un danzatore di linguaggi.” In La festa del mondo rovesciato: Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalescom, ed. Elide Casali and Bruno Capaci, pp. 139–56. Bologna: Mulino, 2002. Dempsey, Charles. Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style. Gluckstadt: Augustin, 1977. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process, ed. Eric Danning. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1977. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944. Johnson, Geraldine H., and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, eds. Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McClure, George. Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. McTighe, Sheila. “Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the ‘Imaginaire’ of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci’s ‘Arti di Bologna’ in 1646.” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 75–91. Parrott, David. “The Mantuan Succession, 1627–31: A Sovereignty Dispute in Early Modern Europe.” English Historical Review 112, no. 445 (1995): 20–65. Prodi, Paolo. Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959. Rocco, Patricia. The Devout Hand: Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. ———. “Virtuous Vices: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Gambling Prints and the Social Mapping of Leisure and Gender in Post-Tridentine Bologna.” In Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, ed. Allison Levy, pp. 167–90. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017.

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Rouch, Monique. “Tradizione carnevalesca e mondo contadino nel teatro in dialetto di Giulio Cesare Croce.” In La Festa del mondo rovesciato: Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco, ed. Elide Casali and Bruno Capaci, pp. 89–108. Bologna: Mulino, 2002. Shearman, John. Mannerism: Style and Civilization. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allison White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Varignana, Franca, ed. Le collezioni d’arte della Cassa di risparmio in Bologna: le incisioni. Bologna: Alfa, 1978. Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

About the author Patricia Rocco received her PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Hunter College. She has published articles on women artists, gender, and material culture, especially women’s work with textiles. Her book The Devout Hand: Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy has recently been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Part III Outdoor and Sportive Games

6. “To catch the fellow, and come back again” Games of Prisoner’s Base in Early Modern English Drama Bethany Packard Abstract For centuries, prisoner’s base was one the most popular team capturing games and was played by children and adults. Although the rules vary, the game consistently requires that every player on the field target one specific member of the opposing team for capture while being chased by another individual adversary. Every player is simultaneously pursuer and pursued. This unique feature enables dramatic references to the game to evoke vital issues of contingency and risk. Prisoner’s base appears in works by playwrights including Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, and its rules and variations figuratively and physically inform interpretation of their works. Taking into account the specificities of games like prisoner’s base produces useful interpretive inroads, as is evidenced by the final example of Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman. Keywords: prisoner’s base, barley-break, Brome, Chettle, Jonson, Marlow, Shakespeare

I Ye lovers of pleasure, give ear and attend, Unto these few lines which here I have penned, I sing not of sea fights, of battles nor wars, But of a fine game, which is called “Prison Bars.”1

David Studley, poet laureate of Ellesmere, Shropshire, wrote the ballad excerpted throughout this chapter about a game played 8 August 1764 between teams of local married men and bachelors. Studley’s term, “Prison Bars,” was a common alternate 1

Poem reproduced in Gomme, Traditional Games, 2: 82–83.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch06

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name for prisoner’s base, and this game certainly had time to develop variants, as it was one of the most popular catching games in England from the fourteenth century until its decline in the twentieth.2 It was played by two teams, each with their own safe base and designated prison for captured opponents. The goal was to capture as many prisoners as possible in order to empty and eventually occupy the other team’s base. Distinctively, each player left base in order to chase one specific adversary and was, in turn, targeted by someone else from the opposing team. All the players were simultaneously pursuer and pursued. In the eighteenth century, as Studley’s poem testifies, prisoner’s base could be a formalized match between adult men, but in the seventeenth century it was often characterized as a boys’ country game. However, over generations it engaged a wide range of participants: children, youth, and adults; male and female; rural and urban. The game is referenced in a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays, sometimes in lists of country and children’s pastimes but also in the context of political machinations, military conflicts, and romantic courtship. Playwrights including Christopher Marlowe, Henry Chettle, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Richard Brome deploy prisoner’s base references to highlight moments of contingency and unexpected agency, when multiple different outcomes are possible and characters and events are in flux. Accessing the specifics and ambiguities of games like prisoner’s base through the work of folklorists and historians enables those particulars to serve as productive means of literary analysis.3 The dual position of all players in prisoner’s base, and the abrupt reversals of fortune this dual role invites, makes pursuing this game especially fruitful. Taking into account the interpretive avenues opened by games also highlights the productive affinity between games and stage plays. Their connection is apparent in early modern word usage, as during the period children’s games and dramatic performance were both referred to as “plays.” They fell into the wider category of pastime, amusement, and recreation. 4 For example, Randle Holme includes a section on “Country games” in his seventeenth-century book on heraldry, The Academy of Armory, which is encyclopedic in its coverage of period life on the basis that almost any aspect of it might appear on someone’s coat of arms. Both “Stage plays” and “Prison Barres” appear in his list of “recreations and sports […] used by 2 Variations include: bars, base, prison base, prison bar, prisoners’ bars, prison birds, chevy chase, chevy, and chivy. See Brewster, “Games and Sports in Shakespeare,” 35; Burne, Shropshire Folk-Lore, 524; Opie and Opie, Children’s Games, 143–45; and Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, 67–68. 3 In addition to those noted above, see also Endrei and Zolnay, Fun and Games, 86–87; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 137–38; Holme, Academy of Armory, 81; Orme, Medieval Children, 178–79; Underdown, State of Play, 81–82; and Willughby, Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, 166 n. 153. 4 On the connection between game play and stage play, see, for example, Olson, “Plays as Play,” 197; and Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” 66.

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

our countrey Boys and Girls, and some of them by people of riper yeares.”5 This is not to argue that prisoner’s base is somehow equivalent to the plays in which it appears, but rather to note that they profitably overlap, enabling games to inform dramatic performance and interpretation. Richard Brome establishes a parallel between game play and stage play early in his comedy, The Antipodes (1638). Lord Letoy is an eccentric nobleman with a flair for the dramatic who eschews the typical pastimes of his peers. He uses theater to cure a mad young man, Peregrine, whose desire to travel has been thwarted by his aptly named father, Joyless. Letoy orchestrates a play within a play performed by his servants and set in the Antipodes, on the other side of the world. While Letoy’s other guests watch the play, Peregrine wanders into it and believes himself to be experiencing a very different society. During Letoy’s introduction, Brome differentiates him from other nobles through the games he plays: They hunt the deer, the hare, the fox, the otter, Polecats or harlots, what they please, whilst I And my mad grigs, my men, can run at base, And breathe our selves at barley-break and dancing. (1.2, speech 112)6

“Base” appears as one of the rural, lower status games that Letoy plays with his attendants, and he positions them as better fun than the various forms of hunting in which his coevals indulge. However, Letoy is visiting London for the duration of The Antipodes, so he needs comparably idiosyncratic town pursuits: “Stage plays and masques are nightly my pastimes” (1.2, speech 116, l. 4). Letoy, whose very name alludes to the connection between game play and performance, plays games with his guests in many ways, for instance setting up subplots for characters other than Peregrine, and only hiring servants who can perform in his plays. He manipulates others as a kind of chief dramatist. Brome thus pairs prisoner’s base and related rural games with the many types of performance. While Brome and Holme may differ on the geography of these pastimes, they similarly attest to links between them. References to prisoner’s base in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, among others, illustrate the conventions of the game and in turn are illuminated by them. By exploring the rules and variations of prisoner’s base through the plays in which it appears, I demonstrate that the game figuratively and physically informs our interpretation of the drama. I build on these connections through an extended example from Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602). Prisoner’s base offers a point of entry into a neglected play that has proved off-putting to scholars, 5 Holme, Academy of Armory, 81. 6 The Antipodes, in Brome, Richard Brome Online, ed. Cave.

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although it was apparently popular in its day.7 The titular revenger, Hoffman, is enraged by his father’s execution for piracy before the start of the play, and he wreaks destruction on the multiple Dukes he finds responsible for the sentence and on their children. One of these children is Lucibella. Her beloved and her father die because of Hoffman’s plotting, and she very nearly dies, herself. After all of this suffering, Lucibella seems to go mad and declares that she is playing a game of prisoner’s base. In the final two acts of the play Chettle incorporates multiple features of the game in connection with her character. Tracking those elements of prisoner’s base reveals that she is not simply Hoffman’s prey. In prisoner’s base each player is both pursuer and pursued, and Lucibella is also the adversary who hunts the revenger down.

II Proper stations being fixed, each party advance, And lead one another a many fine dance. There’s Gleaves after Ellis, and Platt after he, Such running before I never did see.

Let’s fix our proper stations. To play prisoner’s base, two teams designate their respective bases on the same side of the playing area. Prisons for captured players are located diagonally across the field from those players’ respective home bases (see schematic at Figure 6.1). The bases and prisons may be pieces of ground within which the team members stand, or landmarks such as corners, trees, or posts.8 In the latter variation, a player holds onto base and takes the hand of a teammate. That teammate joins hands with another player, and so on, so that each team is stretched out in a line holding hands and facing the opposing team. This is the version described by Francis Willughby and depicted in his diagram (Figure 6.2).9 The game begins when one side sends a player into the center of the field to taunt their adversaries. Called “bidding a base,” this could involve random name-calling or a set chant.10 When utilized in literature, invoking this moment before players sprint into action often highlights building tension in anticipation of enfolding 7 On past and present reception see, for example, Hyland, “Theater of Anatomy,” 35–46; Dunne, Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law, 120–37; and Jowett, “Notes on Henry Chettle,” pt. 2, 517–22. 8 For descriptions of the playing ground, see Opie and Opie, Children’s Games, 143–44; Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, 68–69; Gomme, Traditional Games, 2: 81; and Endrei and Zolnay, Fun and Games, 86–87. 9 Willughby, Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, 166 n. 153. 10 For one such chant see Gomme, Traditional Games, 2: 81.

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“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 



✣ ▥✠ Prison for Captured Team B Players

Team A Base

✣ chasing ↘

✣ Bidding a base ↗ chasing

↑ chasing

✠

✠

Team B Base

✠









Fig. 6.1  Schematic of prisoner’s base playing ground











Prison for Captured Team A Players

▥✣

Figure 6.1

events.11 For instance, in a conversation at the beginning of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590), Lucetta, Julia’s waiting woman, teases her about the contents of a letter from Proteus that Julia refuses to read. Lucetta provokes Julia by promoting Proteus’s romantic interest and implying Julia’s potential, unspoken reciprocation. Julia: You, minion, are too saucy. Lucetta: Nay, now you are too flat, And mar the concord with too harsh descant. There wanteth but a mean to fill your song. Julia: The mean is drowned with your unruly bass. Lucetta: Indeed, I bid the base for Proteus. (1.2.93–98)12 11 For example, Shakespeare also uses “bidding a base” in his poem Venus and Adonis (ll. 303–4), in Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Orgel and Braunmuller, 11–24. 12 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Orgel and Braunmuller, 111–42.



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Fig. 6.2  Francis Willughby’s depiction of a prisoner’s base playing ground. A to C is a post or bar serving as base for one team. B to D serves as base for the other. The chains of connected Os represent teams of players holding hands. M is the prison for captured players from team A. N is the prison for captured players from team B. E marks the direction in which the players run.

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

Beyond the musical repartee and pun linking Julia’s mocking assertion of her companion’s “bass” singing voice and the game’s base, Lucetta’s prisoner’s base line declares her alliance with Proteus’s cause. It also characterizes the risk they want Julia to take. Bidding the base not only urges someone to give chase but also tempts that person into danger. That first player may be caught by the opponent who eventually gives chase, but the opponent is also immediately in danger and will be chased by another. In the context of a crush, revealing romantic feelings is a potentially embarrassing moment of exposure. Proteus has made a first move and Lucetta is teasing Julia to respond, if only by accepting the letter. If she does Proteus may capture her heart or reject her, both potentially forms of emotional imprisonment. Christopher Marlowe invites exposure of a different kind with his reference to the beginning of prisoner’s base in Edward II (c. 1592). Queen Isabella and her son Prince Edward have fled England for Isabella’s native France, but have been rejected by her brother, the king. They are offered shelter and financial support by Sir John of Hainault, and Isabella and her allies plan a military invasion to unseat Edward II. Sir John uses prisoner’s base to convey this goal to the boy: “We will find comfort, money, men and friends/ Ere long, to bid the English king a base./ How say, young prince? What think you of the match?” (4.2.65–67).13 On the face of it this seems like an adult condescending to a child and aiming to engage young Edward’s confidence. However, Marlowe also uses prisoner’s base as an analog for the coming civil war. Sir John implies that they will taunt King Edward into a response that will endanger him to their benefit. However, the taunting team risks just as much as the team that responds. As I have argued elsewhere, instead of belittling the prince and his father as inept players of childish games, the inclusive “we” in Sir John’s lines makes all of the characters players in a dangerous conflict during which both sides experience precipitous moments of ascendancy and collapse.14 Indeed, the side that initiates the conflict may be in greater danger. In the game, the player who bids a base is the only one who simply runs away, never toward a goal. In the play, Prince Edward, still loyal to his flawed father, answers: “I think King Edward will outrun us all” (68). In the most obvious sense the prince is wrong; Edward II is eventually captured and killed. However, the child becomes King Edward III and after multiple reversals of fortune he abruptly takes power and defeats his father’s enemies, effectively outrunning them. Thus in contexts ranging from courtship to civil conflict, the opening move of prisoner’s base highlights building anxiety about the uncertain actions to follow.

13 Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. Forker. 14 Packard, “Playing Prisoner’s Base in Marlowe’s Edward II.”

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The tension created by bidding a base breaks as a player from the other side races after the goading adversary. The game begins in earnest and the antagonists take on their dual status as imperiled and perilous. Team captains may select the players who form the chain of pursuers. Alternately, the sequence of pursuit may be determined by the order in which team members hold hands, with the player at the end of the line rushing after the opening antagonist, and so on. As emphasized previously, each player can only capture their assigned target and can only be imprisoned by one particular opponent. If a player catches their target, that player is safe from capture and may return to base. Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic poem The Faerie Queene (1596), uses a prisoner’s base reference to helpfully underscore how central players’ simultaneous status as pursuer and pursued was to early modern understandings of the game. In book 5 of the poem, Artegall spots a distinctive chain of riders on horseback: “So ran they all, as they had bene at bace/ They being chased, that did others chase” (8.5.4–5).15 Two Paynim knights chase the lady Samient and are chased by Arthur, who aims to rescue her. Samient later explains that she was on a peaceful embassy to an enemy castle but was thrown out and then chased by knights attempting to catch and rape her. Artegall joins Arthur in turning on the pursuing knights, and the lady’s assailants fall as their prey. Prisoner’s base enables such sudden shifts of fortune and the redefining of players’ roles in contingent circumstances. Such a shift, when the apparent victors become the vanquished, is at the heart of another Shakespeare reference to prisoner’s base. Cymbeline (c. 1611) takes place early in the Common Era, as Britain falls under the yoke of Rome, and events circle around the titular king who refuses to pay the Romans tribute. Cymbeline’s family is also in disarray. His two sons were kidnapped in infancy by a banished lord, Belarius. He is also estranged from his daughter, Imogen, as he disapproves of her marriage to Posthumous. The king’s second wife is manipulative and schemes throughout to make her own son heir to the kingdom. During the climactic battle between the Britons and Romans, Cymbeline’s long lost sons and the man who raised them intervene to save the day. Audiences first see them stop the rout of British fighters and lead the responding charge against the Romans, and then Posthumus reports the events of the battle. The lost princes and their foster father block the narrow lane along which the Romans pursue the retreating troops: He with two striplings—lads more like to run The country base than to commit such slaughter; With faces fit for masks, or rather fairer Than those for preservation cased or shame— 15 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton.

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

Made good the passage, cried to those that fled, “Our Britain’s harts die flying, not our men. To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards. Stand, Or we are Romans and will give you that Like beasts which you shun beastly, and may save But to look back in frown. Stand, stand!” (5.3.19–28)16

The lost princes, Guiderius and Arviragus, are the kind of “country lads,” as Holme tells us, likely to play prisoner’s base. They have been raised under the pastoral shepherd names of Polydore and Cadwal, and although both are in their twenties their foster father, Belarius, and Posthumus describe them as quite young. Despite years of demanding labor in the harsh elements their faces remain fresh and innocent. However, they prove capable of great martial feats and human “slaughter.” The lost princes know nothing of their true origins. Therefore, Belarius views their eagerness to do great deeds and thirst for glory in battle as signs of their innate nobility showing through the rustic innocence inculcated via their isolated upbringing.17 Their double names underscore their dual identities as simple shepherds and heroic princes. This multiplicity recalls the dual roles simultaneously assumed by players of prisoner’s base. The cry Guiderius and Arviragus direct at the British troops further reinforces their duality. Running away would make the fleeing soldiers something other than British, something “beastly,” and it will also turn the very sons of the king into their enemies, the foreign, attacking Romans. Considering Posthumus’s lines in the context of the game’s distinctive features, prisoner’s base helps to link the lost princes’ immediate success in war and their ability to change the performance of the armies around them with their own dual identities. Rather than serving as the moment when their rustic selves drop away and their true inheritances shine through, the reversal of the battle confirms their multiplicity. Guiderius and Arviragus still look like country striplings apt to run at “base,” not like warriors, and after their victory they retain qualities emphasized in their upbringing, like humility and blunt honesty. Another instance of the contingency integral to prisoner’s base and the rapid change it enables is the rescue of prisoners. Players can leave base on a rescue mission instead of chasing an opponent. Rescues are risky because the prisons for each team are located diagonally across from their bases.18 Since the other side’s base is closer to the prison, a pursuer has a good chance to cut off a rescuer (see 16 Cymbeline, in Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Orgel and Braunmuller, 641–88. 17 For example, Belarius makes claims about the princes’ innate nobility in act 3, scene 3, and act 4, scene 2. 18 Strutt particularly emphasizes this difficulty in Sports and Pastimes, 68.

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again Figure 6.1). If the rescuer reaches the prison, the teammates can return safely to base. The possibility of rescue in the game is echoed in the events of Marlowe’s Edward II. In act 5, scene 3, the Earl of Kent makes an ill-conceived attempt to rescue his brother, King Edward, from prison. When viewed through the lens of prisoner’s base, this single-handed effort resembles the game’s precarious tactic for staving off defeat. As is common in prisoner’s base, Kent is captured and imprisoned (and, as is common in history plays, he is summarily executed). To win a game of prisoner’s base a team must imprison most, if not all, of their antagonists. With all of their opponents imprisoned or occupied on the f ield, team members can claim the empty base. Ben Jonson devises a rather different conclusion to a match in his unfinished pastoral play The Sad Shepherd (c. 1637), which features a feast hosted by Robin Hood and Maid Marian. The playwright uses prisoner’s base and other country games to evoke a politically tinged nostalgia for merry old England, but he also associates it with dalliance and sexuality.19 The shepherds envision prisoner’s base as a kind of foreplay: Lionell: The dextrous Shepherd then would try his sling, Then dart his Hooke at Daysies, then would sing, Sometimes would wrastle. Clarion: I, and with a Lasse: And give her a new garment on the grasse; After a course at Barley-breake, or Base. (1.4.48–52)

While Lionell may stress innocent fun, the grass-stained clothes of Clarion’s imagination propose a more explicit tumble. Prisoner’s base is one of several pastimes in Clarion’s flirtatious fantasy, and Jonson’s pairing of prisoner’s base with barley-break as similar country games is not uncommon.20 While they have distinct differences, these catching games are often linked in literature and folklore.21 The variant game prison birds even seems to combine features of both.22 Literary critics have recognized barley-break as sometimes conveying suggestive implications, but 19 Jonson, Sad Shepherd, ed. Herford and Simpson, 1–49. 20 For example, prisoner’s base and barley-break are among Letoy’s favorite country pastimes in Brome’s The Antipodes (1.2, speech 112), in Brome, Richard Brome Online, ed. Cave, and Chettle includes both in Tragedy of Hoffman (4.1.80–82), ed. Smith. 21 Jowett asserts that Jonson and Chettle use the games “interchangeably” in his editorial notes on Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. Jowett, n. 1355. Gomme claims, incorrectly, that prison bars is the modern name for barley-break; Traditional Games, 1: 21. While such claims emphasize the connection between the two games, they also create confusion. 22 In this variation a single catcher aims to capture pairs of players before they can join hands over a designated object; see Burne, Shropshire Folk-Lore, 524.

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

have not explicitly extended this recognition to prisoner’s base.23 Barley-break was probably played by three couples holding hands, often in opposite-sex pairs. One couple, in a central space designated “hell,” would attempt to catch the other players who would “break”—that is, drop each others’ hands and try to change partners across that central area.24 These features enable the game to analogize suggestive situations. Although it lacks the switching partners and potential implications of promiscuity, the catching, imprisoning, and hand-holding of prisoner’s base allow for similar implications. The common association of prisoner’s base with barley-break helps to make these potential connotations evident, but prisoner’s base acquires suggestive connotations beyond this pairing. The association of prisoner’s base with sex is not playful, but sinister in Brome’s comedy The Court Beggar (c. 1640). In one strand of the plot, Ferdinand, a prominent courtier, has supposedly been driven mad by Lady Strangelove’s rejection of his advances. She is convinced by his Doctor to admit Ferdinand to her home as a means of curing him. As soon as he gets a moment alone with her, he tries to rape her. She cries out and others characters rescue her by breaking down the room’s locked door. Later, as Ferdinand waits in the garden hoping that Lady Strangelove will appear, prisoner’s base is on his list of activities for whiling away the time: We will have jovial pastime. Shall we run At base, or leapfrog, or dance naked To entertain her, or what do you think Of downright drink and singing? (4.2, speech 708)25

The mention of “danc[ing] naked” reaffirms his sexual desire for Lady Strangelove, and its inclusion in the same category as drinking and “base” lends all these activities a similar tenor. Given the preceding assault, all take on a predatory cast. Ferdinand’s view of “jovial pastime” and his linking of games and sexuality become even darker and more deliberative when he is unmasked as feigning madness to contrive time alone with Lady Strangelove. He later admits planning to assault her.26 The victim 23 For example, Potter states: “Like other games of this kind, it was also used metaphorically for sexual coupling”; in Fletcher and Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Potter, 283 n. 31. 24 The rules of barley-break are more uncertain than those for prisoner’s base. For descriptions of barley-break, see Gomme, Traditional Games, 1: 21–23; Holme, Academy of Armory, 81; Opie and Opie, Children’s Games, 128–30; Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, 302; and Willughby, Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, 162 n. 148. 25 The Court Beggar, ed. O’Connor, in Brome, Richard Brome Online, ed. Cave. 26 Lady Strangelove suspects Ferdinand’s deception, and in act 4, scene 2, she has his Doctor, who is in on the lie, threatened with castration to force confirmation of their plot. In the following scene, act 4, scene 3, Ferdinand admits his intention to assault Lady Strangelove and to manipulate and seduce Charissa to

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purportedly driven mad by his beloved’s cruelty is a predator and she becomes his target, a shift in roles that recalls the dual status of prisoner’s base players. While many facets of prisoner’s base appear in early modern drama, this duality and the uncertainty it enables emerge as the most prominent and distinctive feature. When playwrights reference prisoner’s base, the circumstances are often contingent; characters change positions and outcomes hang in the balance.

III Jacob Hitchen the weaver commands the whole round, Looks this way, and that way, all over the ground, Gives proper directions, and set out his men, So far go, my lads, and return back again.

Having worked through key facets of prisoner’s base in conjunction with moments when they are referenced in early modern texts, this section proceeds to an extended example. While Henry Chettle directly references prisoner’s base only once in The Tragedy of Hoffman, aspects of the game appear across the final two acts. Tracing prisoner’s base through this revenge tragedy reveals that Lucibella is not simply a victim of Hoffman’s boundless malice, but also an active agent who contributes substantively to his demise. Hoffman spends most of the play disguised as his first murder victim, Prince Otho of Lunningberg, and together with his henchman, Lorrique, he spreads death and destruction through the Prussian court. In act 3, scene 1, Lucibella seems to be murdered in her sleep alongside her beloved, Lodowick. Hoffman tricks Lodowick’s own brother, Matthias, into attacking the lovers by convincing him that Lucibella is running away with another man. In fact, the couple were running away together because Hoffman convinced them another man desired Lucibella and was plotting to kill her beloved. Lucibella’s father, the Duke of Austria, and the Duke of Saxony, father of the two young men, arrive soon after the attack. Austria believes his daughter is dead and in his grief he challenges Saxony to a duel. In the confusion of their fight, Hoffman takes the opportunity to stab Austria. Lucibella’s beloved and father are dead and other characters presume that she is dead as well. Both of Hoffman’s lies turn on Lucibella and emphasize her objectification and helplessness. She figures in the revenger’s imagination as an appendage of the men around her, particularly her father and fiancé, a weakness, a source of desire, and shame for others but not an actor herself. Frederick, Charissa’s beloved. Strangely enough, at the end of the play Lady Strangelove agrees to marry Ferdinand.

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

The woman who returns to the stage in act 4 as the noblemen mourn before the tomb of her loved ones may seem to fit this mold. Lucibella is maddened by suffering; and, no longer a daughter or a bride, severed from her normative position in the world, she speaks repeatedly about joining Lodowick. However, when Ferdinand, the Duke of Prussia, worries that she may be suicidal Lucibella interjects: O, never fear me, there is somewhat cries Within me “no”: tells me there’s knaves abroad, Bids me be quiet, lay me down and sleep. Good night good gentlefolks; brother, your hand, And yours, good father—you are my father now. Do but stand here: I’ll run a little course At base, or barley-brake, or some such toy, To catch the fellow, and come back again. Nay, look thee now: let go, or by my troth I’ll tell my Lodowick how ye use his love. (4.1.75–84)27

Lucibella feels an internal resistance to death and emphasizes an associated sense of enemies nearby. Her speech is confused and contradictory, but focusing on the prisoner’s base reference highlights coherent elements. The men around Lucibella try to restrain her, but when she offers her hands to Mathias and Saxony she positions them for the game to follow. Changing partners during barley-break might echo her recent losses and the grasping for a new family. The three holding hands also evoke prisoner’s base teammates in a line. Chettle’s word choice underlines Lucibella’s pursuit of a specific adversary, another feature of prisoner’s base; there are “knaves abroad,” Lorrique and his master, the “fellow” Hoffman. “Knave” particularly indicates Hoffman here because, in a speech just preceding this one, Lucibella becomes the first character who begins to penetrate his disguise. She notes, “a knave may kill one by a trick,/ Or lay a plot, or foe, or cog, or prate” (56–57), and pointedly directs this observation to Hoffman, whose vengeance encompasses all these tactics. The playwright’s emphasis on “com[ing] back again” after a successful capture resembles the similar emphasis in David Studley’s eighteenth-century poem quoted at the beginning of this section: “So far go, my lads, and return back again.” Lucibella’s speech, with its reference to prisoner’s base, enables us to recognize that she asserts a goal, capturing a particular adversary, and by the end of the play she accomplishes it. Chettle includes both barley-break and prisoner’s base in Lucibella’s lines, and, as Jonson’s and Brome’s plays demonstrate, the connotations of these games in 27 Chettle, Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. Smith, 243–324.

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literature can be sexual. Lucibella’s suffering was precipitated by a false accusation of infidelity, and so we might look for something suggestive in Chettle’s pairing of prisoner’s base and barely-break. However, Chettle goes out of his way to emphasize Lucibella’s chastity throughout. Other characters speak emphatically of her purity and her on-stage actions fulfill these expectations. In this context, the catching games underline the baselessness of Mathias’s assumptions, the ease with which Hoffman convinced him, and the larger cultural attitudes about female chastity that enabled the lie. The prisoner’s base and barley-break references might invoke sexual frustration stemming from the loss of Lodowick and of a fulfilling marriage. Sexual frustration was a source of feminine madness among maidens on the early modern stage.28 An example of this phenomenon is the Jailer’s Daughter from John Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613). Her father, the Jailer, oversees the imprisonment of the titular kinsmen and best friends, Palamon and Arcite. They are both in love with the same woman, Emily, but the Jailer’s Daughter loves Palamon and helps him to escape. He ultimately rejects her, precipitating madness instigated by unrequited love: […] we maids that have our livers perished, cracked to pieces with love, we shall come there and do nothing all day long but pick flowers with Proserpine […] Faith, I’ll tell you, sometimes we go to barley-break, we of the blessed. Alas, ’tis a sore life they have i’ th’ other place—such burning, frying, boiling, hissing, howling, chat’ring, cursing […]. (4.3.22–24, 30–33)29

The Jailer’s Daughter emphasizes thwarted love as the source of her pain. Her reference to barley-break can be interpreted as sexual intercourse, and “th’ other place” recalls hell in the game, the area from which the losing couple must try to catch other players. It also alludes to the pain of being denied romantic and physical fulfillment and to negative aspects and consequences of sexual activity. The Jailer and his daughter’s rejected suitor plan to cure her by tricking her into shifting her affections, and her physical desire, to another man. Her rejected Wooer pretends to be Palamon and she enthusiastically looks forward to their physical relationship.30 The Jailer and Wooer’s cure echoes barley-break, as they try to defeat the illness 28 As noted by Neely, “Documents in Madness,” 79–84, this source of madness is sometimes ascribed to Ophelia. Chettle draws liberally on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and other revenge tragedies, and Lucibella resembles her counterpart, Ophelia, in many respects. On this similarity see Benson, “Ophelia Versions,” ch. 3. 29 Fletcher and Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Potter. 30 The Jailer and the Wooer describe their plan to cure the Jailer’s Daughter in act 4, scene 3, and act 5, scene 2.

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

by tricking the Jailer’s Daughter into a “break” with Palamon and a change to a different partner. However, Lucibella’s game references do not indicate madness born of the need for a consummated marriage. Rather than beginning a search for sexual fulfillment, or a search for another romantic partner, her prisoner’s base line emphasizes pursuit of an enemy: Hoffman. Instead of needing a man to cure her, she can attain safety and sanity by accomplishing her own goal. By “catch[ing] the fellow” she can “come back again” (4.1.82). The chain of pursuers characteristic of prisoner’s base soon forms. Lucibella races off stage and Saxony sends his son, Mathias, then his brother, Rodorick, after her. Finally Saxony sets off in pursuit himself. Rodorick reports: “But Lucibella, like a chased hind/ Flies through the thickets, and neglects the briars./ After her runs your princely son, Mathias” (4.1.216–18). This is one of many occasions when the men misinterpret Lucibella. Rodorick sees her as frightened prey fleeing danger. Mathias runs “[v]owing to follow her, and if he can,/ Defend her from despairing actions” (4.1.220–21), when he has threatened suicide himself and despite what Lucibella tells them all about her reason for living. Recognition of the prisoner’s base reference, however, emphasizes that Lucibella is not running away from them or from life; she runs toward a goal. As a player of “base” she is a danger to the revenger even though she is endangered herself. Lucibella proves impossible to catch, as Saxony, Rodorick, and Matthias admit at the start of act 5. Mathias again misinterprets her and presumes she has accidentally or even deliberately drowned. He bases this assumption on seeing her from a distance: “Clambering upon the steepness of the rock” (5.1.9) along the Baltic coast. Keeping prisoner’s base in mind, such climbing seems less like evidence of a death wish and more like resilience. Her route also invokes another pastoral reference to prisoner’s base, barley-break, and other catching games. In the thirtieth song of Michael Drayton’s sprawling topographical poem, Poly-Olbion (1622), “Mountaine Nymphs”: By Moone-shine many a night, doe give each other chase, At Hoode-winke, Barley-breake, at Tick, or Prison-base, With tricks, and antique toys, that one another mocke, That skip from Crag to Crag, and leape from Rocke to Rocke. (30.133–36)31

Far from being games played only by country lads, here they are feminine, supernatural activities at home in spectacular scenery. Lucibella’s preternaturally accurate pursuit of the disguised Hoffman seems akin to Drayton’s moonlit magic.

31 Drayton, Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Hebel et al., 4: 574.

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Although presumed dead, Lucibella reappears, and Mathias, Saxony, and Rodorick move to encircle her. However, she outflanks them yet again by revealing Hoffman’s hideout and providing the noblemen with leadership and evidence. Throughout act 5 the men repeatedly try and fail to restrain Lucibella. Meanwhile, she maintains a single-minded focus on catching knaves—that is, on catching Hoffman. In terms of the game begun by her prisoner’s base reference, she eludes her pursuers and continues to chase her quarry. Lucibella reveals the skeletons of Hoffman’s father, which the revenger stole from the execution scaffold, and of Prince Otho, his original victim, hanging at the mouth of the cave Hoffman uses as a lair. The skeletons wear crowns, and the men know Hoffman Senior was executed via a burning crown that essentially boiled his brains. Hoffman used the same method to kill Otho. This enables the nobles to identify the probable denizen of the gloomy clearing. However, they still rely on Lucibella, as Rodorick asks her to lead them into Hoffman’s cave: “Come, lady, guide us in, you know the way” (5.1.61). As they take cover, Lorrique enters, leading Otho’s mother Martha. She, too, is being deceived by Hoffman and his crony. As the noblemen eavesdrop, Lucibella identifies Lorrique as an enemy: “Nay tarry, you shall hear all the knavery anon” (99). Chettle’s repeated use of this word recalls the speech containing Lucibella’s prisoner’s base reference. In act 4, scene 1, Chettle prominently uses “knave” to indicate that Hoffman is the focus of her pursuit. The repetition emphasizes her ongoing chase. She immediately discerns Lorrique’s dishonesty, “I think he lies./ Now by my troth, that gentleman smells knave” (118–19), and her accurate assessment continues.32 When other characters accept his claim that he became Hoffman’s henchman under duress, in fear for his own life, only Lucibella is rightly skeptical: “what if/ This knave that has been, play the knave still,/ And tells tales out of school, how then?” (316–18).33 With its schoolboy reference, the “play” in these lines calls to mind her ongoing, deadly game. After enabling the definitive identification of Hoffman as the hidden enemy in their midst and precipitating a plan for counter-revenge, Lucibella regains her sanity. Indeed, I argue that through her active and successful pursuit she affects her own cure. Lucibella remains alone on stage at the end of the scene and declares: “Nay, I’ll come: my wits are mine again,/ Now faith grows firm to punish faithless men” (5.1.332–33). She identifies the prospect of punishing Hoffman for his crimes as a causal factor in her return to self-possession. In contrast to the madness of the Jailer’s Daughter, which requires outside intervention to provide her with a cure in the form of a romantic and sexual partner, Lucibella leads and evades the men around her. Instead of barley-break, which requires a partner, she heals herself by 32 For example, Chettle again gives Lucibella prominent emphasis on the word “knave” at 5.1.165–66. 33 In fact, Lorrique pledges himself to helping Hoffman exact revenge, including killing Lorrique’s original master, Otho, on their first meeting because “Villainy is my only patrimony” (1.1.85–86).

“ To catch the fellow, and come back again” 

playing her own game. As a player of prisoner’s base, she remains focused on her goal, and that very focus enables her to articulate a sense of self. Lucibella’s game of prisoner’s base continues, since Hoffman remains at large. Her actions here recall another feature of the game, the rescue of a captured ally. She tracks Lorrique back to the Prussian court, where Hoffman has grown suspicious of his turncoat henchman and stabs him. Although Lucibella does not explicitly appear during their conference, she must be nearby. Act 5, scene 3, opens with Saxony and Mathias wondering again how they could have lost Lucibella but assuring themselves that Rodorick must be with her. They are not entirely wrong, but she continues to evade their assumptions and their chain of pursuit. Lucibella then enters supporting the mortally wounded Lorrique with Rodorick’s help. While Lorrique is stabbed, rather than imprisoned, the revenger assumes he is removed from action. Lucibella brings him back to the conference of Hoffman’s enemies, as she explains: “You marveled why I went,/ Why this man drew me unto him: can you help/ Him now? Hoffman has houghed him too” (5.3.10–12). This risky maneuver highlights Lucibella’s skill as a player. Although Lorrique dies of his wounds, the allies acquire additional information about Hoffman. Further, the counter-revengers now meet at Hoffman’s own den. Again recalling a feature of prisoner’s base, they have occupied his home base, left empty while he was busy chasing other targets. They turn it into their base of operations and plot to lure him there. Lucibella participates in this collective vengeance, culminating in Hoffman’s death by burning crown, just like his father and Otho. Tracking prisoner’s base in Chettle’s play, from the original reference through the subsequent appearance of the game’s elements, reveals Lucibella to be both pursuer and pursued. It highlights her contribution to Hoffman’s downfall and qualifies her position as his victim. Lucibella outruns the men who feel entitled to restrain her and enables them to identify and defeat the revenger. In doing so it could be argued that she bolsters the very society that caused her suffering. The men around Lucibella easily believe misogynistic assumptions about her and accept that if she had been unfaithful to Lodowick then murder would have been a suitable response. In tracking down Hoffman, Lucibella roots out the infestation attacking this existing power structure.34 However, Lucibella actively resists those restraining forces. I assert that forcibly breaking from their hands, avoiding them until times of her choosing, and cornering her target are factors indicative of a winning match. Chettle’s inclusion of prisoner’s base and subsequent allusions to the game highlight her substantial contribution to the counter-revenge plot.

34 Benson, “Ophelia Versions,” 236–56, interprets Lucibella as a recuperative figure contained by the paternalistic power brokers of her world and acting on their behalf.

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Although the noblemen repeatedly assume death is her primary option, Lucibella lives to challenge their authority and Hoffman’s. In his seventeenth-century diary, Roger Lowe describes prisoner’s base as a pointless activity. He comes across a match while walking: “upon Latchford Heath there ware a great company of persons, with 2 drums amongst them. The young men were playing att prison barrs, where I stayd awhile to see them, but concluded it was but vanitie.”35 The Tragedy of Hoffman, Cymbeline, Edward II, and an array of other works demonstrate that, in the context of critical analysis, watching for prisoner’s base and other games is far from unprofitable. In particular, the dual status of players, as both pursuer and pursued, is a telling feature, relevant to the interpretation of many of the plays in which prisoner’s base appears. There are numerous other games whose details would also offer useful interpretive angles. Bringing stage play and game play into conversation offers engaging opportunities for further exploration: bring on the drums and go far.

Bibliography Primary Sources Brome, Richard. Richard Brome Online, ed. Richard Cave. Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield University, www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome (accessed 18 May 2016). Chettle, Henry. The Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. John Jowett. Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1983. ———. The Tragedy of Hoffman. In Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle, Middleton: Five Revenge Tragedies, ed. Emma Smith, pp. 243–324. London: Penguin Classics, 2012. Drayton, Michael. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, and Bernard Newdigate. 5 vols. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press for Basil Blackwell, 1961. Fletcher, John, and William Shakespeare. The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter. 3rd ed. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1997. Holme, Randle, The Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon […] Second Volume (1688), ed. I.H. Jeayes. London: printed for the Roxburghe Club by J.B. Nichols & Sons, 1905. Jonson, Ben. The Sad Shepherd. In Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970 [1952]. Lowe, Roger. The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, 1663–1674, ed. William Sachse. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938.

35 Lowe, Diary of Roger Lowe, 25. At the time of this entry Lowe was a mercer’s apprentice.

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Marlowe, Christopher. Edward the Second, ed. Charles Forker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. New York: Penguin Group, 2002. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 2001. Willughby, Francis. Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, ed. David Cram, Jeffrey L. Forgeng, and Dorothy Johnson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Secondary Sources Benson, Fiona. “The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type 1600–1633.” PhD diss., St. Andrews University, 2008. Bishop, Tom. “Shakespeare’s Theater Games.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 65–88. Brewster, Paul G. “Games and Sports in Shakespeare.” In The Study of Games, ed. Elliott M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith, pp. 27–47. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. Burne, Charlotte Sophia. Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings; Edited by C. S. Burne from the Collections of Georgina F. Jackson. London: Trübner & Co., 1883. Dunne, Derek, Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law: Vindictive Justice. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Endrei, Walter, and László Zolnay. Fun and Games in Old Europe, trans. Károly Ravasz. Budapest: Corvina, 1986. Gomme, Alice Bertha. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 2 vols. London: D. Nutt, 1894–98. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1964. Griffiths, Paul. Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hyland, Peter. “Theater of Anatomy: The Tragedy of Hoffman.” In Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter, ed. Darlene Farabee, Mark Netzloff, and Bradley D. Ryner, pp. 35–46. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Jowett, John. “Notes on Henry Chettle,” pt. 2. Review of English Studies 45, no. 180 (November 1994): 517–22. Neely, Carol Thomas. “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture.” In Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, pp. 75–104. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996. Olson, Glending. “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.” Viator 26 (1995): 195–221. Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. Children’s Games in Street and Playground. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

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Packard, Bethany. “Playing Prisoner’s Base in Marlowe’s Edward II.” Marlowe Studies 4 (2014): 5–28. Strutt, Joseph. The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May-games, Mummeries, Shows, Processions, Pageants, and Pompous Spectacles, corr. and enl. J. Charles Fox. London: Methuen & Co., 1903. Reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970. Underdown, David. State of Play: Cricket and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Allen Lane, 2000.

About the author Bethany Packard is an Associate Professor of English at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Her research focuses on representation of children and childhood in early modern literature, with a developing interest in intersections between child figures and game play and their ramifications for theorizing children’s agency. Recent publications on these topics include “Richard III’s Baby Teeth,” in Renaissance Drama, and “Playing Prisoner’s Base in Marlowe’s Edward II,” in Marlowe Studies.

7.

Against Opposition (at Home) Middleton and Rowley’s The World Tossed at Tennis as Tennis Mark Kaethler Abstract Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s bizarre masque turned playhouse drama, The World Tossed at Tennis (1620), has received no attention for its depiction or use of tennis as a game to frame its portrayal of topical political matters concerning the outset of the Thirty Years War. Turning to earlier accounts and understandings of tennis, this chapter investigates the implications of staging these political issues as a royal game for the courtly audience it was intended for and the theatergoers for whom it was later performed. Keywords: tennis, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, James I, The World Tossed at Tennis, Thirty Years War

Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The World Tossed at Tennis has a nebulous reputation. As the printed book of 1620 indicates, the dramatic text was intended for a royal night, but there is no extant evidence to suggest that it ever was performed at the London Denmark House for King James I, his son Prince Charles, and others, as intended.1 Despite this unexplained cancellation, or perhaps as a result of it, the playwrights took their masque and transmuted it into something resembling a play, which was ostensibly performed at the Swan Theatre for public audiences. This later version likely omitted portions of the printed text. For instance, the induction scene in which the buildings St. James’s, Richmond, and Denmark House (three buildings bequeathed to Charles, and represented onstage by actors) converse among each other as a preamble to the masque, addressing and flattering their 1 Originally constructed in 1548–51 by the Duke of Somerset (Lord Protector of Edward VI) and known as Somerset House, in the early seventeenth century the palace was assigned to King James I’s wife Anne, who renamed it Denmark House in honor of her Danish heritage. She held it until her death in 1619, and it passed on to her son Charles.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch07

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intended royal audience at the conclusion of this scene, would make little sense to the playgoers who actually witnessed the performance. As a result, this prolonged introduction of the dramatic action to the royal audience by an actor representing the space in which the masque was to be performed would have been removed. In its place Middleton and Rowley added other portions to satisfy the conventions of the theater, such as the prologue and epilogue (commonplace methods of preparing an audience for a play’s content and requesting their applause to signal satisfaction with the events that had transpired), whereas other extant parts of the text as we have it adhere to the criteria of a printed book.2 These bizarre plots in the printed book add to the conundrum that is The World Tossed at Tennis. In addition to this opening dialogue in which the Denmark House greets its intended royal audience, we have an initial plot and then a secondary plot that is a masque within a masque (or later, as a play within a play). With the secondary narrative contained within the former, the characters from the initial dramatic action witness the events of the other performance play out within the play world. In the first narrative, a Scholar and a Soldier lament the neglect their vocations have faced in recent years. The binary that the playwrights establish between these two characters is commonly attributed to the oppositional views of King James I (r. 1603–25) and Prince Charles (r. 1625–49), who advocated, respectively, for informed peacekeeping and for militant action in response to the outbreak of war in Bohemia in 1618 (later known as the Thirty Years War).3 The mythological goddess Pallas descends to establish a middle ground between the two parties, and then later the figures of Time and Jupiter arrive to continue the instruction of the two men. Part of this lesson entails the spirits Jupiter concocts to recount the history of the world for the Scholar and the Soldier. In this final portion of the text, which the Scholar and Soldier remain onstage to watch, the world is passed from Simplicity to the King to the Land Captain to the Sea Captain, etc., with the assistance of other characters. As the narrative progresses, the character of Deceit makes continual efforts to ensnare the world from these authorities, and eventually at the end of the dramatic text, his superior, the Devil, arrives, as the world is tossed among the various persons. This final portion of the text is the most evident portrayal of tennis in the entire work. At the end of both the play within a play and the play itself, unity is restored while differences are acknowledged. As a result of both this complicated performance history and these unusual story lines, critics do not know whether to approach the work as a masque, a play, or a printed book. More odd still is the fact that no one has ever treated The World 2 These include the epistle, dedication, and title page. 3 James ruled as King James VI of Scotland from 1567 until 1603 when Scotland and England were united; at that point he became King James I of England and Scotland.

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Tossed at Tennis as tennis. This dearth in scholarly thought is likely explained by the fact that tennis is rarely mentioned in the dramatic text—despite its inclusion in the title—and it is primarily metaphorical in nature, even though the playwrights do make subtle allusions to tennis, particularly in the final portion of the text. These references have implications for the topical start of the war in Bohemia and utilize tennis as a metaphor to communicate how this royal game of war should play out, regardless of whether it is staged for the intended audience at court or for playgoers at the Swan Theatre.

Historical Development of Tennis as Metaphor One of the most famous early English references to tennis from a contemporary standpoint is in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), which, like Middleton and Rowley’s piece correlates the sport with military conflict. In Shakespeare’s opening act, the Dauphin of France has his messenger give Henry the gift of tennis balls instead of the treasure the messenger indicates that he has delivered on his prince’s behalf. In accordance with this mock present, Henry responds with aggression: When we have matched our rackets to these balls, We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard. Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler That all the courts of France will be disturbed With chases. 4

Shakespeare has Henry use the language of a tennis match to foreshadow the warfare that is to unfold in the conquests that the play depicts: the “hazard” is an “aperture in the back walls of a tennis court; a ball stuck into it became unplayable”; the “chases” refer to the second striking of “a ball which the opponent has failed or declined to return”; and “crown” likely puns on both the crown of France and the fact that gambling was the method by which the royal game was played, namely for crowns or coin.5 Shakespeare’s representation of the game is also anachronistic. By referring to rackets, he applies a development that did not take place in England until the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509), at the earliest.6 Before this change to the way the game was played, tennis was played by hand, commonly referred to 4 Shakespeare, Henry V, 1.2.261–66. 5 Ibid., 115. 6 Aberdare, “Origins of Tennis,” 9.

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in French as jeu de paume, or “game of the palm.”7 References to tennis in early modern literature were not necessarily accurate depictions of the game’s history or conventions and tended to be metaphorical in nature.8 They were also quite common, as Shakespeare makes references in several of his other works.9 In the final act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example, the Princess of France exclaims “[w]ell bandied both” after having witnessed Rosaline and Katharine sparring with their wits rather than with rackets.10 Although there were certainly precedents for the symbolic treatment of tennis, Shakespeare’s influences for Henry V probably derive from France; it is also worth noting that these roots are artistic as well as literary. Guillaume de la Perrière’s Thèatre des bons engins (1540) deploys emblematic representations of tennis to communicate moral messages, such as: “Insult will provoke the return of insult.”11 Originally emblem books were preoccupied with representing those things that God had initially created, so tennis was not considered suitable material for these works until the epigrammatist was at liberty to devise his or her moral in any practice or thing that could communicate the intended message.12 Tennis also became more socially accepted after the end of Henry VII’s reign. Although he did not approve of the sport, his successor, Henry VIII (1509–1547) was an avid tennis player.13 Following French precedent, Henry VIII’s popularizing of the sport likely led to it being commonly referred to in England as the “royal game.” James I supported tennis wholeheartedly, recommending it to his heir, Henry, in his Basilicon Doron;14 both Henry and later his brother Charles, for whom Middleton and Rowley’s piece was also performed, played the game extensively. James’s commendation of tennis continued well into his rule of England. In 1618 he made a declaration to his subjects concerning lawful sports to be used, challenging the attitudes of Puritans who zealously assert that sports should not be played on Sundays. James’s statement counters this view by advising subjects otherwise, so long as they attend their mandatory church service in the morning. His moral reasoning is particularly pertinent with respect to Middleton and Rowley’s work: “this prohibition [of the Puritans] barreth the common and meaner sort of people from vsing such exercises 7 Ibid. 8 For a comprehensive history of the game, see Gillmeister’s Tennis: A Cultural History. 9 Butler, “Tennis in English Literature,” 70–71. 10 Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.29. 11 Bath, “Tennis in the Emblem Books,” 46–52. 12 Ibid., 45. 13 Frenk, “Games,” 225. 14 James writes to his son(s) that of the proper “exercises that [he] would haue” the prince(s) perform is “the caitch or tennise,” implying that James would have been familiar with tennis as a game played by throwing and catching with the hand as well as a racket; James I, Basilicon Doron, 56.

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Fig. 7.1 Title page of A Courtly Masque: the Device called, The World Tossed at Tennis, 1620 .

as may make their bodies more able for Warre, when Wee or Our Successors shall haue occasion to vse them.”15 James’s reinstatement that plays (interludes) are still to be banned on Sundays—along with bear- and bullbaiting and for some reason 15 James I, Kings Maiesties, sig. A4v.

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bowling—can also be said to influence Middleton and Rowley’s invention given that The World Tossed at Tennis presents itself as a legitimate and useful game.16 The dramatists’ work, therefore, not only builds upon and inserts itself within the moral and metaphorical traditions of tennis, but it also uses this game in order to substantiate the suitability and value of their dramatic offering. For the printed book, Middleton and Rowley also build upon the emblematic tradition of tennis literature to represent and communicate their moral message. In the woodcut from the title page for The World Tossed at Tennis, we see that the world is imagined as a globe grasped by the various characters in the entertainment (Figure 7.1). Although their narrative takes place in an unspecified past, anachronistic depictions were common in the theater, as previously exemplified with Shakespeare’s mention of rackets in Henry V. However, in actual practice it seems as though the game continued to be played both in the original French tradition—by hand (likely because not everyone could afford rackets)—and with rackets. This fact is evident in Gervase Markham’s tract on the proper habits of an English husbandman, Countrey contentments (1615). He describes tennis as “a pastime in close or open courts, striking a [sic] little round balls two or fro, either with the palm of the hand, or with racket.”17 Aside from being one of the most chronologically proximate writings to Middleton and Rowley’s work, Markham’s book can also be accounted as influential for its melding of tennis with a game called “balloon,” which resembled tennis but was played with a much larger ball in an open field—much like the world in the image.18 Also as Markham asserts, like drama the game’s “actions must bee learnt by the eye and practice, not by the eare or reading.”19 His description provides a rationale, then, for Middleton and Rowley’s loose representation of tennis. The woodcut communicates morality as well through representations of the Devil and Deceit in contrast to the other men. The six men on the right-hand side of the image hold the world with their hands in joint harmony. Given the presence of the Devil in the illustration, it is commonly presumed that this title page is meant to represent a variation of the final volley or dance that takes place at the end when the Devil enters onstage, at the conclusion of which the various governing authorities hand the world to the King.20 While not an entirely accurate depiction of the stage 16 Ibid., sig. B2r. 17 Markham, Countrey contentments, sig. P3r. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 It is worth mentioning that this theatrical representation of the world seems to have bounded across Europe, which is likely a result of revised understandings of the world as a globe rather than flat, courtesy of Galileo. Giovanni Ferro’s Teatro d’impresse (1623), for instance, depicts gods instead of men playing with a globular ball representing a planet; see De Bondt, “Apollo and Hyacinth Tennis Theme,” 125, 128–29.

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direction, the title page does nevertheless emphasize the harmonious sharing of responsibility formed around the world between these characters.21 The focus on hands speaks to the aforementioned French origins of the game. While this shared and mutual governance between men is upheld in the image, Deceit’s hand play can be said to contrast this moral depiction. The parallelism established between the common iconographical conceit of the Devil’s phallus and Deceit’s hand in tandem with the angle and direction by which Deceit’s hand is directed (toward the buttocks of the Land Captain) suggests a use of hands that corresponds with sodomy, regarded as a vice by the religious ideologies of the era. In this respect, we might see that Middleton and Rowley’s title page characterizes moral and immoral hand play by communicating that the Devil and Deceit are playing a corrupt game, given the sodomitic way Deceit’s hand is portrayed in the image, whereas the game play amongst the other characters is adroit, as their hands secure the world. The game also frequently functions as a literary device in Middleton’s earlier works. In The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), Middleton has Lucrece describe her rapist Tarquin as: “the night-owl: in whose flaming eyes/ Lust and desire bandied their balls of blood,/ Chasing my spirit with fiery mysteries/ Unto the hazard where destruction stood/ Ready to strike my soul into a cloud.”22 Employing the terminology of tennis, the game here is utilized to describe religious and sexual assault.23 This initial example shows that, as in the emblematic tradition, the game takes on a moral significance in a literary context. In his mock almanac Plato’s Cap (1604), Middleton reflects on the sinful habits that the game can breed if gambling intertwines with its play: “riotous elder brothers […] will shake all the money out of their hands that comes into them […] in […] tennis-courts.”24 In the same work, he also associates other lewd behaviors, specifically lust, with the French. Speaking of rich widows, Middleton’s speaker states that their “hot lovers will sweat out at dice in ordinaries, or in French balls at the tennis course.”25 The reference here alludes simultaneously to the fact that sweating was perceived as a cure for syphilis, but also other ailments. For instance, Prince Henry, James’s son, repeatedly played tennis during his final bouts of illness in an effort to remedy them prior to his death. In Middleton’s No Wit, No Help like a Woman’s (1613), Savourwit conceives of himself as a tennis ball in an aside concerning Sir Oliver’s scrutiny of his character: “An you take me so near the net again,/ I’ll give you leave to squat me. I have scaped fairly!”26 He reflects upon the way in which he 21 As Astington, “Visual Texts,” 235–36, suggests, the title page is not an entirely accurate representation of the action we read inside the book as intended to unfold onstage. 22 Middleton, Ghost of Lucrece, 206–10. 23 Williams, Dictionary of Sexual Language, 3: 1373. 24 Middleton, Plato’s Cap, 332–34. 25 Ibid., 237–38. 26 Middleton, No Wit/Help like a Woman’s, 3.204–5.

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has dodged a powerful strike, or “squat.” For Middleton, as it was for Shakespeare and others, the game is repeatedly used as a metaphor for various purposes. Although tennis had been used as a metaphor for some time, the symbolic applications of tennis as a metaphor in English literary texts in the late Elizabethan and Stuart eras is in part the result of George Puttenham’s definition of a “rebound” in his rhetorical manual The Art of English Poesie (1589): “Ye have another figure which by his nature we may call the Rebound, alluding to the tennis ball which, being smitten with the racket, re-bounds again, and where the last figure before played with two words somewhat like, this playeth with one word written all alike but carrying divers senses.”27 Middleton is clearly aware of this device as well since he uses it in his play A Trick to Catch the Old One (1606). Offering a rebuttal to the miser Hoard’s dismissal of him, Witgood performs a rebound: Witgood: Are not words promises, and are not promises debts, sir? Hoard: He plays at back-racket with me.28

The example illuminates that audiences and readers would have been familiar with the rhetorical tradition that Puttenham had established seventeen years prior or at least with the sport itself. In this manner, audiences regularly heard tennis being “played” in Middleton’s theater and were prompted to visualize the game metaphorically through various sparring social activities and discourses that could take shape out of animosity or friendly competition.

The World Tossed at Tennis as Tennis Given this extensive use of the tennis metaphor in Middleton’s canon, what is particularly strange about The World Tossed at Tennis is the general absence of tennis language in the text. It is possible that the work was Middleton’s “plot,” meaning that he might have conceived of the masque and Rowley wrote the entire work or portions of it; however, the title page indicates that it is their collective invention, thereby identifying that they both at least came up with the initial idea.29 Given the fact that the majority of tennis references come from the portion of the text 27 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 292. 28 Middleton, Trick to Catch the Old One, 4.4.200–3. 29 Stern, Documents of Performance, 11, identifies a plotter as someone who devises the general story of the dramatic work and may or may not have contributed a hand in the composition of the text. It is generally agreed upon that what follows after the entry of the Starches (a group of dancers who perform near the end of the Soldier and Scholar story line) is Middleton’s and what precedes it is Rowley’s; McGee, “Works Included in this Edition,” 408.

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attributed to Middleton, it would make sense that the title of the masque stems from his contribution to the invention. That being said, there is little extant textual evidence in the surviving book that points to a consistent or overarching tennis metaphor, beyond the title. Although the motion of the game might in some ways correlate with the playwrights’ definition of ironia, wherein “one eye looks two ways at once,”30 the rhetorical device as delineated does not readily translate to the game’s dynamics.31 An eye looking multiple ways communicates that attention is divided, but not necessarily oscillation. However, the playwrights’ depiction of the game does not necessarily correlate well with early modern (or modern) understandings of the game either. Although the world represents the ball that is handed off to other players onstage, the figures holding it in the image all represent English interests. Much like today, tennis involved competitive sparring between two opponents, even if they were not adversaries. Technically the only oppositional members depicted in the dramatic piece are Deceit and the Devil, but neither of these villains ever manages to possess the ball. Indeed, unlike Middleton’s A Game at Chess, wherein the Black House, or Spanish monarchy associated with the Jesuit sect, play against the Protestant English royalty, or White House, the other side does not seem to enter into the match whatsoever. The latter half of this essay thus examines the ways in which Middleton and Rowley stage healthy competition at home as a necessary energy in order to evade the clutches of sin. In this manner, the performance sets two different games in motion. The title page is indicative of the moral game that is being played, for the image reinforces a visual opposition wherein the Devil and his minions spar against humanity for world domination.32 This struggle is one of the games that takes place, but it is more akin to the modern game of “keep away,” to borrow a colloquialism. The playwrights also communicate this oppositional play through the dialogue. Jupiter, for instance, gives the following instructions to Pallas regarding her instruction of the Soldier and Scholar: Strike by white art, a theomantic power, Magic divine, not the devil’s horror But the delicious music of the spheres.33

30 Middleton and Rowley, World Tossed at Tennis, 125. 31 For the implications of the playwrights’ political use of ironia, see Kaethler, “Thomas Middleton’s Middle Way,” 5–8, 124–37. 32 Astington, “Visual Texts,” 226. 33 Middleton and Rowley, World Tossed at Tennis, 258–60.

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Although “strike” here points to musical performance, given the reference to the “music of the spheres” and the previous mention of striking a note, its double meaning with regard to tennis play imbues the command with further significance. The notion that a hand can command holy power or do the devil’s work plays into the contemporary method of playing tennis by hand, especially when the masque revolves around the world being handled by multiple persons. In this manner, Middleton and Rowley set up the play in their middle performance piece with the Scholar and Soldier so that the audience is prepared for the moral match that will be staged shortly after this speech is delivered. Although the Devil does not appear to have arrived onstage until the elaborate stage direction near the end, Deceit repeatedly attempts to gain an advantage in the game and possess the world. He expresses displeasure when he is foiled for a third time as the world passes from the King to the Land Captain: Can I yet set no footing in the world? I’m angry, but not weary. I’ll hunt out still, For, being Deceit, I bear the devil’s name, And he’s known seldom to give o’er his game.34

The aspiration for world dominance here is likened to a “game” that is played between the Devil and ostensibly holy forces, or at least those that have the propensity to do good rather than evil. In this game, Deceit’s inability to find “footing” could also speak to his inability to regulate his body adequately in order to establish an advantage—indeed as one does in volleying for the ball in tennis. Despite it being the Devil’s game, the Devil and Deceit do not appear to be playing it beyond a series of unsuccessful efforts to tempt their opponents into letting them play. The implication seems to be that so long as the ball is kept out of sinful hands, victory is possible. The virtuous outcome, however, is not that simple. As the world passes from the King to the Land Captain, Simplicity offers us cautionary words about the way in which the world will now be handled: “now the world begins to be in hucksters’ handling.”35 Although Simplicity suggests that risk has been initiated through royalty losing grip over the world, we do not witness the world ever falling into Deceit’s or the Devil’s hands, indicating that even though it is not as well-handled, the world remains safe with these lesser authorities. Deceit, on the other hand, remains characterized as a malevolent force. Middleton and Rowley’s virtuous lawyer describes Deceit, who is disguised as a pettifogger, as having a “double-handed 34 Ibid., 605–8. 35 Ibid., 609–10.

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grip.”36 In addition to the way in which one holds the racket, it is possible that this description indicates an unfair manipulation of tennis rules, but it certainly alludes to the manipulative tradition of medieval Vices to deceive audiences through the “double-speak” of ambivalent rhetoric.37 In any case, the playwrights use the notion of mishandling again in order to advance a moral metaphor for tennis play in which virtuous handling leads to virtuous outcomes and double-handling correlates with deceitful practices. One can play the Devil’s game or God’s game. The way to maintain play in God’s game appears to be with a firm grip. The Flamen, representing religious authority in the masque, advises his fellow players that “no indulgent hand the world should hold,/ But a strict grasp.”38 This counsel suggests that a divine player should have a tenacious sense of their moral condition in order to volley the world successfully. Even though the world never makes it into the spiritual opposition’s hands, the playwrights nevertheless assert that it is in need of some remedy. The Lawyer asks the following rhetorical question of his peers: […] Can the sick world then, Tossed up and down from time to time, repose itself In a physician’s hand better improved?39

We can infer that the answer is yes, but the implication is that even without falling into the hands of corruption, the world is tainted by its motion from one party to the next, suggesting that some degree of mishap is inevitable. The ideal handling, however, is regal, as evidenced when all voice the following words prior to the final substantive action of the masque: “Fair love is [in the] motion, kingly love.”40 Although this appears to indicate that the world ought to stay with the King, the stage direction that follows implies that, despite this being the best resting place, it must oscillate nevertheless: In this last dance, as an ease to memory, all the former removes come close together: the Devil and Deceit aiming at the world, but the world remaining now in the Lawyer’s possession. [He], expressing his reverend and noble acknowledgement to the absolute power of Majesty, resigns it loyally to its royal government, Majesty to Valour, Valour

36 Ibid., 805. 37 As Hayes, Rhetorical Subversion in Early English Drama, 57, identifies, the figure of Ambidexter in Thomas Preston’s play Cambises uses this double play, and his name puns on the ability to use both hands. 38 Middleton and Rowley, World Tossed at Tennis, 706–7. 39 Ibid., 767–69. 40 Ibid., 813.

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to Law again, Law to Religion, Religion to Sovereignty, where it firmly and fairly settles; the Law confounding Deceit, and the Church the Devil [.]41

The moral game of tennis—or “keep away”—converges in this final dance with another metaphorical representation of the game as an amicable and mutual game between various authorities. Although “Majesty” and “Sovereignty” are praised as the righteous authorities who ought to wield the world or command the ball, it is only able to rest there as a result of circulation among various parties beforehand and wilful obeisance to that supreme authority. The mention of “kingly love” possibly adds to this reading since in tennis terminology love is zero. The circular congregation of the various players on the title page complements the shape of a zero and makes sense of its connection with the governing structure advanced, but also with the commercial theater, commonly referred to as a wooden “O” due to its shape. The collaborative energies of the game and the playhouse are thus unified to emphasize the political ideal. Moreover, the world is only protected as a result of the Flamen and the Lawyer, who ostensibly represent “Religion” and “Law,” keeping the Devil and Deceit at bay. In Middleton and Rowley’s game the world must move and success is dependent upon teamwork. The cooperative model of governance that Middleton and Rowley advance, then, stages tennis as a friendly game between competitors for primary rule of the world. The playwrights’ two-game model in which a moral battle for virtuous handling of the world overlaps with a game played in the spirit of camaraderie, wherein the world is tossed between its various players, shifts its audience’s perspective from civil conflict at home to the broader conflict in Bohemia. The playwrights imply that current debates over whether to take military action or retain a pacifist stance should not be oppositional when the common battle is the religious war between Protestant Bohemia and Catholic forces. 42 Although the playwrights certainly establish this oppositional energy with the Scholar and the Soldier in the prelude to the main masque, they dissuade their intended royal audience from perceiving this competition as oppositional. Therefore, when we view The World Tossed at Tennis as two variations of the game of tennis, we arrive at a better understanding of Middleton and Rowley’s message, which is to encourage opposition overseas rather than at home.

41 Ibid. 42 This outlook tempers recent interpretations of the masque or play as championing Charles’s militant Protestantism and critiquing James’s pacifism. McGee argues that the work was engineered by Charles in order to prompt his father into relinquishing his adamant role as peacemaker and instead venture into war, a reading recently supported by Nicol; see McGee’s “Introduction to The World Tossed at Tennis,” 1407, and Nicol, Middleton and Rowley, 134–36.

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This underlying meaning is emphasized at the conclusion of the masque. After the spirits that Jupiter has summoned vanish and Pallas and Jupiter have ascended back to the heavens, the Scholar and the Soldier reflect upon their lesson: Soldier: Give me thy hand; Prosperity keep with thee. Scholar: And the glory Of noble action bring white hairs upon thee. Present our wish with reverence to this place, For here’t must be confirmed or ’tas no grace. 43

The emphasis here is again on hands, with the suggestion that unity rather than opposition is the way forward. The insistence on this “wish” being “confirmed” in “this place” communicates that the lesson is not merely for the Scholar and the Soldier but also for the king and prince who were intended to view this performance. The efforts to resolve the slight conflict at home, of course, never took shape, given that the masque was not performed at Denmark House for a royal audience; however, like the audience at the Swan, we can still glimpse Middleton’s and Rowley’s purpose, which remains a provisional one. For as the Soldier states, “The world’s in a good hand now, if it hold, brother.”44 While “a good hand” might be playing the game, the Scholar’s qualification of “if it hold” is conditional rather than absolute.

Conclusion It remains bizarre that Middleton’s one piece of literature that proclaims to be about tennis has little to no references to the game, but as we have discovered, the dramatic piece is indebted to a moral tradition of tennis that was established in emblematic literary traditions as well as the metaphorical devices employed in early modern rhetorical manuals. The modern predisposition of literary scholars to regard tennis as a game played with rackets between two persons may be partially to blame for the dearth in scholarship on this masque as game, but it is more likely the case that the masque’s general lack of concrete references to tennis is the primary culprit. Once we understand some of the differences between modern and early modern tennis, however, the repeated references to hands with respect to possessing the world lend greater clarity to why the work is titled as it is. With this background in mind, this essay has deciphered the playwrights’ aim 43 Middleton and Rowley, World Tossed at Tennis, 884–88. 44 Ibid., 876.

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to comment on the oppositional approaches to the outbreak of war in Bohemia through deploying traditional moral emblematic symbolism in order to comment upon topical matters of state. This analysis of The World Tossed at Tennis as tennis augments and clarifies previous scholarship’s inclination to regard the extant text as favoring Charles’s ambitions over James’s.45 It also provides a more complex vision of the work by distinguishing between the two games in play over the course of the already textured dramatic action. It is no accident that a theme of cooperation goes hand in hand with a celebration of diverse courses of action to combat sin, given that the dramatic piece is written by what is arguably “the best doubles team in the history of English drama.”46

Bibliography Primary Sources James I. Basilicon Doron. In Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville, pp. 1–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The Kings Maiesties declaration to his subiects, concerning lawfull sports to be vsed. London: Bonham Norton, 1618. Markham, Gervase. Countrey contentments […]. London: John Beale, 1615. Middleton, Thomas. The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. G.B. Shand. In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 1985–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. No Wit/Help like a Woman’s, ed. John Jowett. In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 779–832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Plato’s Cap cast at this year 1904, being a leap year, ed. Paul Yachnin. In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 195–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. A Trick to Catch the Old One, ed. Paul Mulholland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley. The World Tossed at Tennis, ed. C.E. McGee. In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 1405–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 45 See note 42. 46 Taylor, “Thomas Middleton,” 44.

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Shakespeare, William. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ———. Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H.R. Woudhuysen. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998.

Secondary Sources Aberdare, Morys. “The Origins of Tennis.” In The Royal Game, ed. Lance St. John Butler and Peter Wordie, pp. 9–17. Kippen: Falkland Palace Real Tennis Club, 1989. Astington, John H. “Visual Texts: Thomas Middleton and Prints.” In Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 226–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Bath, Michael. “Tennis in the Emblem Books.” In The Royal Game, ed. Lance St. John Butler and Peter Wordie, pp. 44–67. Kippen: Falkland Palace Real Tennis Club, 1989. Butler, Lance St. John. “Tennis in English Literature.” In The Royal Game, edited by Lance St. John Butler and Peter Wordie, pp. 68–74. Kippen: Falkland Palace Real Tennis Club, 1989. De Bondt, Cees. “The Apollo and Hyacinth Tennis Theme in Baroque Poetry.” Studi secenteschi 54, no. 2 (2013): 119–46. Frenk, Joachim. “Games.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock, and Abigail Shinn, pp. 221–34. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Gillmeister, Heiner. Tennis: A Cultural History. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Hayes, Douglas W. Rhetorical Subversion in Early English Drama. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Kaethler, Mark. “Thomas Middleton’s Middle Way: Political Irony and Jacobean Drama.” PhD diss., University of Guelph, 2016. McGee, C.E. “Introduction to The World Tossed at Tennis.” In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 1405–8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “Works Included in this Edition: Canon and Chronology.” In Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 408–9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Nicol, David. Middleton and Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Taylor, Gary. “Thomas Middleton: Lives and Afterlives.” In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, pp. 25–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone Press, 1994.

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About the author Mark Kaethler (PhD, University of Guelph) teaches early English literature at Medicine Hat College and serves as the Assistant Project Director of mayoral shows for the Map of Early Modern London. He is the co-editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge 2018), and his work on Middleton’s A Game at Chess received the honorable mention for the 2016 Gaetano Cozzi Prize for studies on the history of games.

Part IV Games on Display

8. Ordering the World Games in the Architectural Iconography of Stirling Castle, Scotland Giovanna Guidicini Abstract This essay explores the iconography of the facades of King James V’s palace at Stirling Castle in Scotland in relation to the imagery of educational games and contemporary games literature. The south facade is discussed in light of the architectural and iconographic evidence of courtly engagement with active pastimes such as ball games and hunting, as both educational and entertaining activities. In turn, the analysis argues that the culture of Trionfi in its interrelated expressions of card decks, Petrarchan literature, and urban triumphal celebrations may have been permanently displayed in the north, east, and south facades through the medium of stone decoration. By engaging with moralizing pastimes and allegorical games in courtly settings, I suggest that the Scottish king was demonstrating a remarkable willingness to engage with, and symbolically claim back control upon, the complex and powerful forces governing the early modern world. Keywords: James V of Scotland, Stirling Castle, tarot cards, tarocchi, Cusanus, triumphal entries

In the late medieval period, Scotland was a geographically isolated and comparatively poor country, plagued by internal unrest and by frequent squabbles with England. From the late fifteenth century, forward-thinking if short-lived Stewart monarchs James IV (1473–1513) and James V (1512–1542) established Scotland as a culturally well-connected player on the European political scene, particularly through the construction, extension, and refurbishment of their residences.1 Game 1 I use the traditional spelling of the Scottish royal house of Stewart, rather than the later “Frenchification” of Stuart used by Mary Queen of Scots and her successors.

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch08

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culture profoundly shaped these new Scottish royal residences, from the setting up of spaces for outdoor pursuits like jousting and hunting, to the construction of dedicated buildings like tennis courts and bowling alleys, to the upgrading of their private apartments with game-related pieces of furniture such as billiard tables and card tables.2 At Stirling Castle in particular, the facades of James V’s lodgings embody this new relaxed culture based on courtly games and entertainments and well represent the role of games in the transformation of an old-fashioned, martial Stewart castle into a refined and carefree residence for a more modern, pleasure-loving Renaissance court. This investigation aims at providing imaginative interpretative answers for the king’s unusual choice of sculptural embellishments, which I posit find a common source in game texts and the iconography of game imagery.3

Outdoor and Indoor Games at the Scottish Court The Stewart monarchs were keen on both outdoor and indoor games, to be enjoyed at Stirling Castle and in their many other royal dwellings. Scottish kings were enthusiastic hunters and hawkers, activities that could be done in the vicinities of the palaces equipped with stables, kennels, and space for cages. 4 The royal palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh—one of James V’s favorite residences—benefited by the presence of a medieval hunting park, which by the end of his reign was carefully enclosed by a stone wall.5 In Stirling, James IV revived the Old Park for hunting, and James V kept it well stocked and in good repair until his own death in 1542.6 Shooting with crossbows, longbows, and with firearms was also a game appreciated in Scotland for its military potential, with competitions being held outdoors and, in the latter case, indoors in the ample great halls.7 Games such as tilting and jousting were also encouraged as both martial exercises and entertainments. Temporary 2 For a discussion of purpose-built structures for games and entertainments in Scottish royal palaces, see Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 201–9. 3 This investigation of the Stirling Castle embellishments must remain speculative, for as Gallagher and Ewart, Stirling Castle Palace, 1, observe, the “documentary sources as well as the results of archaeological excavations are rarely straightforward and more usually highly ambiguous.” 4 Courtly hunting is discussed in Gallagher and Ewart, Stirling Castle Palace, 201–2; and in Collins et al., Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports, 237. 5 On the vast hunting park of Holyrood and its relation to the palace see Jamieson, “Royal Gardens,” 18, 21. On the management of the royal park at Holyrood, see Jamieson, ibid., 30; and Meikle, Scottish People, 369. 6 Gallagher and Ewart, Stirling Castle Palaces, 20. 7 Shooting at the Scottish court is discussed in Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 204. For the military potential of such games, see Leibs, Sports and Games, 63–64.

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tilting grounds could be set up when and where needed; for example, the area in the gardens below the Castle of Stirling was mentioned and used very often between the early 1400s and the end of James V’s reign.8 The outer edges of gardens attached to Stirling Castle and other royal residences were also the setting for another courtly and royal favorite: the game of golf.9 Popular with the lower classes in the f ifteenth century, it had been off icially condemned by the Scottish Parliament as detrimental competition for archery practice.10 The ban was lifted in the early 1500s when the peace with England made martial training less relevant, and when James IV and his successors took up the game. James V played golf in East Lothian,11 while his daughter Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1587) and her son (his grandson) James VI/I (1566–1625) played at a variety of both private and civic courses.12 Tennis was another activity favored by Scottish royalty, played as early as 1437 by the first Stewart king James I. Probably played with both the hand and with a racket, Scottish tennis was known as “cache,” hence the name of the court, the “cachepell.” At the Scottish royal palaces the standard court was oblong, with a roofed corridor (penthouse), and a net stretched across the middle.13 Later, most Scottish royal residences had purpose-built tennis courts competing in size and comfort with their French and English counterparts.14 There is no trace of a tennis court at Stirling Castle during the reign of James V; space was at a premium and this castle still had a partially defensive use, but both he and James IV are known to have played the game in private lodgings set up for the sport within the nearby burgh of Stirling.15 James V’s keen interest in the game is duly testified by the construction of an unroofed, very large tennis court with covered adjoining corridors he had built at Falkland Palace between 1539 and 1541, which still survives today.16

8 On the construction and use of tilting grounds in Scottish royal palaces, see Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 202–4. 9 As discussed in ibid., 204. 10 Golf probably originated in Fife, on the eastern coast of Scotland; see discussion by Leibs, Sports and Games, 68–69; and Meikle, Scottish People, 369. 11 On James V playing golf, Meikle, Scottish People, 370. 12 See Geddes, Swing through Time, 9–13. James VI of Scotland became James I of England after the Union of the Crowns in 1603; in this chapter he is consistently referred to as James VI/I. 13 On the evolution of the game of tennis, see Butler and Wordie, Royal Game; and Leibs, Sports and Games, 78–81. 14 Tudor tennis courts are discussed in Thurley, Royal Palaces of Tudor England, 182–88. 15 Some permanent facilities for playing tennis at Stirling Castle were possibly established from 1576 onwards when James VI/I took up the game; Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 206. 16 Cachepells also existed at royal residences at Linlithgow, Dunfermline, and Holyrood Palace; see discussion by Dunbar, ibid., 205–9.

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Fig. 8.1  View of the south facade of James V’s Palace and Bowling Green at Stirling Castle

Attached to this structure was an auxiliary roofed building dating from shortly after his reign, which probably provided space for extra recreational facilities such as billiards and bowling, also popular with the Scottish monarchs.17 Both James IV and James V played at bowls.18 Court records provide evidence of James IV’s betting expenses for playing “lang bowlis” (a game involving skittles), “row bowlis” (more similar to modern bowling), and a third game called “kyles,” which was played in edifices called “kylspell”—a name which will be of importance later on

17 On the added-on facilities at Falkland court, see Butler and Wordie, Royal Game, 39–40. James IV was an avid player of billiards, as was James V’s daughter Mary Queen of Scots and his grandson James VI/I; MacGregor, Pastimes and Players, 113. Lawns were laid out for bowling in Scotland as early as the late twelfth century, but ordinary people were discouraged from playing the game; see Frenk,“Games,” 118–19. 18 MacGregor, Pastimes and Players, 113.

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in this chapter.19 At Stirling Castle, the Bowling Green just to the south of the royal lodgings (Figure 8.1) is named as such in the representation of the castle in John Slezer’s engraving from 1680, suggesting a well-established use as a leisure meadow for outdoor ball games and the open-air entertainments of courtiers within the security of the outer castle walls.20 Quieter indoor games were similarly in vogue at the Scottish court. The treasurer’s accounts include the purchase of chess tables provided with chess men for the chamber of James IV, and a later inventory of 1539 indicates that James V owned a chess set of jasper, crystal, and precious metals.21 Playing cards was also a wellknown pastime in Scotland and at the Stewart court, particularly after the move from the hand-painted decks of the first half of the fifteenth century to the use of stencil, woodblock printing, and later, engraved plates made the practice more affordable and widespread. James IV was an avid card player, and regularly spent money on bets and debts related to playing cards.22 His wife Queen Margaret (daughter of the English king Henry VII) seems to have carried along her own playing cards when she came to Scotland for her marriage as we know from the report of a chronicler writing in 1503.23 And James V himself may have brought cards back with him in 1537 after spending time at the court of Francis I, where cards were in special favor.24 It is not known what type of cards were in the Stewarts’ holdings, but given their elite royal status and demonstrated interest in game paraphernalia, we can assume they were familiar with some of the ornamented playing cards to be found in the collections of the European nobility. One notable engraved set produced in Stuttgart (1430) contains beautifully rendered naturalistic representations of 19 One such “kylspell” was at Dunfermline royal palace, probably constructed no later—and most probably earlier—than the late 1580s; see Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 205. Tudor examples of contemporary bowling facilities are discussed in Thurley, Royal Palaces of Tudor England, 188–90. 20 As stated in RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 191–92, and illustrated in plate 56. See also Burnett, “Bowling,” 39–40. Theatrum Scotiae, published in 1693 by military surveyor John Slezer, was the first ever pictorial survey of Scottish towns and buildings. 21 The Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer contained the records of revenues and expenses of the Scottish royal household covering roughly the years 1473–1635. Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, 6: 464, mentioned in Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 173. Also see Murray, History of Chess, 450. 22 Some of James IV’s expenses at playing cards are discussed in Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, 2: 388, and 6: 464, cited in Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 134. For the period 1488–98 there are no less than twenty-one records of such expenses; Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, vol. 1, passim. 23 The English chronicler writes that she was playing cards privately before her first encounter with James IV; see Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, 1: 26. 24 James was a guest at the court in 1536–37 for his (first) wedding to Madeleine of Valois, daughter of King Francis I. James may even have played cards with the king, who was apparently addicted to the card game referred to as Le Flux (similar to flush). On this latter point see Taylor, History of Playing Cards, 267, and for playing cards in France, Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 31–48.

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Fig. 8.2 Ornamented playing cards. Top row, from left to right: Le Diable (the Devil); Le Fou (the Fool), both from Jean Noblet’s deck; The Fool from the Visconti-Sforza deck. Bottom row, right to left: The King of Falcons, from the Stuttgart Playing Cards; The Cook, from the Courtly Household Cards; Fameio, from the Mantegna deck

courtly hunting scenes, decorated with the suits of Falcons, Ducks, Hounds, and Stags (Figure 8.2, bottom row, right).25 Another set, the Courtly Household Cards (c. 1450) followed the hierarchy of rank among court functionaries from the king and queen down to the cupbearer, fool, and cook (Figure 8.2, bottom row, center).26 In apparent special favor with the northern Italian courts were Trionfi (Triumphs) cards, such as those that were part of the decorated Visconti-Sforza deck, produced 25 The Stuttgart set is extensively discussed in Husband, World in Play, 15–26. 26 Originally called Das Hofämterspiel, the set is analyzed in Husband, World in Play, 49–72.

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in Milan c. 1440–60. The Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck displays four traditional suits plus a number of higher value Trionfi cards illustrated with characters such as the lovers, the tower, the devil, and the fool (Figure 8.2, top row, right), and virtues such as strength and temperance.27 Another very influential deck of playing cards is the improperly named Tarocchi del Mantegna, a copper-engraved set produced for the Este ducal court in Ferrara (1460s–70s).28 Played as a type of “improving and educational game,” this deck does not include the four suits, but only illustrated cards showing a variety of human and allegorical figures grouped together both hierarchically (from more to less powerful) and thematically (by occupations and characteristics).29 It includes a series on men’s situation in life ranging from pope and emperor to the servant (Figure 8.2, bottom row, left) and the beggar, a series of virtues, one of muses, and another on planetary deities.30 Although it is not clear exactly what kind of cards were actually played at the Stewart court, it seems possible that Italian Trionfi cards were at the very least known by, and possibly in possession of, the Scottish monarchs. Such cards may have been brought in as diplomatic gifts by the Italian and other European dignitaries who were frequent guests at the Scottish court.31 That the Stewarts were to maintain a continuing interest in decorated cards is evidenced by a suggestive entry in the treasurer’s accounts in 1573 which mention—with a casual breeziness that suggests familiarity—the purchase of “a pair of terres cairtis,” which may well mean Tarot cards.32 27 See Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, 1: 60–107; and Dummett, Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards, 1–15. In this chapter I follow Dummett’s usage whereby the Tarot cards refer to the deck composed of the four numbered suits plus the illustrated Trionfi cards; Dummett, Il mondo e l’angelo, 20. In this context, Tarot cards are not to be confused with modern-day Tarot cards used for divination and occult purposes. 28 According to Dummett, Game of Tarot, 83, the name of Tarocchi for this deck is improper, as is its attribution to Italian artist Andrea Mantegna. This name is however so commonly used in scholarly literature, often as the so-called Tarocchi del Mantegna, that it will be maintained in this chapter. 29 Seznec describes the cards in this way in Survival of the Pagan Gods, 138. 30 Extensive descriptions of this set of cards can be found in Cieri Via, “I Tarocchi,” 49–75; Skopalová, “Mantegna Tarocchi,” 502–5; and Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, 1: 35–48. 31 Certainly, considering the vogue for playing cards that was sweeping the Continent, it seems difficult to believe that the elite diplomatic visitors and guests who came regularly to the royal court would not have brought playing cards with them, even if for their own enjoyment. For example, Thomas de Averencia, a servant of the Duke of Milan, Maximilian Sforza, then residing in Paris, spent the winter of 1529/30 at James’s court, and may have brought with him one or more of the decks of Tarots in use at the Milanese or the Parisian courts. On Averencia, see Thomas, Princelie Majestie, 100–1. Another potential conduit could have been the Italian scholar Giovanni Ferrerio, who was an important agent for the transmission of humanist ideas and values from the Continent, particularly from Italy. Ferrerio was at James V’s courts in Edinburgh and Perth between 1528 and 1531, before taking up residency at Kinloss Abbey (Moray, Scotland); in 1537 he left for Paris, returning again to Scotland 1541–45. See Bath, “Lighter Style of Painting,” pars. 1–2, and note 81 below. 32 See Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, 12: 367, 520; and the proposed identification of “terres cairtis” as “tarot cards” in Dictionary of the Scots Language, entry under “terres cairtis.” Although Dummett, Game

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The Iconography of James V’s Facades Situated on a high rock dominating open planes and forested hills, Stirling Castle was the military stronghold of the early Stewart monarchs located near the royal burgh of the same name. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, James IV began making improvements to the castle compound, and between 1538 and 1541, James V undertook a series of his own renovations, creating a quadrangular pavilion containing modern separate lodgings on the piano nobile for himself and his wife, Queen Mary.33 The impressive decorative program devised for their apartments— internally and externally—helped transform the castle into the perfect stage for the Stewarts’s politicized ceremonies.34 Internally, the ceiling decorations of James V’s palace included the “Stirling Heads,” large roundels containing busts of an eclectic and colorful group of Scottish monarchs and courtiers, classical divinities, and mythological characters.35 Externally, the north, east, and south facades of James V’s royal palace also present an equally rich but less-studied decorative

of Tarot, xxiv, disputes the notion that Tarot decks were known in Britain at this time, the documentary evidence seems to suggest otherwise. In John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary A Worlde of Wordes published in 1598 and 1611, he translates tarocchi as “teristriall triumphs.” Florio also published an Italian-English conversation booklet, Second Frutes (1591), in which tarocchi/teristriall triumphs appeared in matching lists of well-known pastimes such as tennis, chess, and dice, indicating a degree of popularity and visibility in the British Isles. Florio’s translation of the word tarocchi for an English audience is discussed in Dummett, Game of Tarot, 100, and extensively in Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, 2: 10. French Tarot cards may have also filtered in from Rouen, a major center of card production in the later sixteenth century with exports to England as discussed by Dummett, Il mondo e l’angelo, 352–53. Delamothe’s French-English conversation booklet The French Alphabeth, published in 1592, included a section listing common games including Tarots, the operative passage translating “Voulez vous iouer aux Dames, aux Dez, aux Tarots, aux Eschets,” as “What game will you play at? Will you play at tables, at Dyce, at Tarots, at Chesses”; see Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, 2: 10. Their diffusion north of the Channel seems further confirmed by Tarot cards being mentioned by John Cleland’s Institution of a Young Nobleman as played in Britain during the reign of James VI/I, and as acceptable to the monarch himself. In Ηρω-Παιδεια, or the Institution of a Young Nobleman, published in Oxford in 1607 (bk. 5, ch. 24, 9), Cleland writes “His Majesties permission of honest house games, as Cardes, French Cardes, called Taraux, Tables and such like plaies, is sufficient to protect you from the blame of those learned men, who think them hazards”; on this point see discussion by Singer, Playing Cards, 240. 33 In addition to defensive gateways, curtain walls, and towers (constructed 1500–8), James IV’s projects included a Great Hall (1497–1501) and a Royal Chapel (1494–1502). The extensive architectural works done by James IV and James V at Stirling Castle are discussed in Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces, 39–55; Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 314–19, 327–30; and McKean, Scottish Chateau, 88–91. 34 These include such activities as the coronations of James V in 1513 and Mary Queen of Scots in 1543, and the baptisms of Prince James in 1566. 35 On the Stirling Heads, see Shire, “King in his House,” 84–96; and Dunbar, Stirling Heads. Dr. Sally Rush’s forthcoming publications on the Stirling Heads and the facade decorations will provide new insights on the topic.

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apparatus.36 The iconographical interpretation I propose for the facades matches the internal decoration in creating a merry and carefree courtly atmosphere, and relates particularly to moralizing ball games and the card game of Trionfi as vehicles for the lasting affirmation of the monarch’s ability to understand and reinvent the increasingly complex modern world in which he lived.37 The north, east, and south facades are organized as an alternation of large windows protected by iron grids and tall recessed bays with cusped arches.38 Each bay has a central statue on a tall pedestal, with a human bust as column base, and two smaller figures—either human or animal—on each side of the bay; a now incomplete lineup of figures appears near the roofline.39 Some statues and busts are damaged, at times beyond recognition, but in the majority of cases the general outline of the figure is still recognizable (see schematic at Figure 8.3). 40 In my interpretation, I suggest a closer connection between the east and north facades based on the similarity of the shape of the supports for the statues. 41 This theory is also supported by considerations regarding the way the three facades were to be seen by those coming onto the site. The best view of the south facade could be had by outsiders—either those approaching the castle as visitors or perusing its defenses as attackers, or those enjoying themselves in the aforementioned Bowling Green. On the contrary, the east and north facades could be seen best by insiders, courtiers, ambassadors, and guests proceeding towards the entrance of James V’s apartments, and are ideally placed for the delivery of important political messages. The facades actually worked as a sequence: after entering through the gate and taking in the east facade as a whole, the impressed visitor would have walked alongside it to reach the second courtyard, then walked alongside the north facade on the way to the entrance to the royal apartments, and enjoyed an overall view 36 A full description of the facades can be found in RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 220–3, and in Ewart et al., Stirling Castle Palace, 248–62. For a general overview, see Thomas, Glory and Honour, 32–33. The facades are also discussed by McKean, Scottish Chateau, 89–91, who provides an iconographic interpretation in “Sir James Hamilton,” 159–63. An alternative interpretation is given in Shire, “King in his House,” 72–84. 37 On a preliminary investigation of the connections between ball games, card games, and the Stirling facades see Guidicini, “Scotland Triumphant,” 167–208. 38 Any decoration on the West facade was lost due to collapse and significant alteration; see Shire, “King in his House,” 73; and RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 197–99. 39 An interpretative analysis of the layout of the facades is discussed by Gallagher and Ewart, Stirling Castle Palace, 23–34. 40 The numbering of the bays follows that of the RCAHMS publication, calling “bay 1” the first bay to the left of the south facade, and proceeding from there in an anticlockwise direction. 41 These consist of double superimposed columns with a simplified capital, as opposed to the single column with a twisted motif on the shaft that serves as the support for the statues on the south side. Individual interpretations of the three facades as separate tableaux are suggested by McKean, “Sir James Hamilton,” 159, with Shire proposing an overall design in “King in his House,” 72–84.

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Fig. 8.3  Schematic of the south, east, and north facades of the royal apartments at Stirling Castle

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of the facade while heading towards the Great Hall or the Chapel in the opposite corner of the courtyard.

The Bowling Green, Outdoor Sports, and the South Facade On the main level of the south facade, three of the four statues—a cheerful girl in bay 1 and two smiling boys in bays 2 and 4 (Figure 8.4, top row, center)—seem to be caught in the act of playfully throwing a ball. Although one of the boys is missing an arm, as he is almost a mirror-image of his companion, it can be assumed that he also was holding a ball. The boys carry shields decorated with a lion mask and a sun mask, and are turning towards the figure in bay 3—a winged and horned devil smiling grimly (Figure 8.4, top row, left)—as if throwing their balls at him. 42 This diabolical character has been identified as the demonio meridiano (noonday devil) mentioned in Psalm 90 and identified with the mortal sin of Sloth, which according to the medieval tradition would tempt those who lay down idly in the warmth of midday, leading them astray and making them vulnerable to encounters with deceitful creatures.43 The figure supporting the column on the base of the devil’s bay is of a bearded man with open mouth and lolling tongue—possibly yawning after having placed himself (symbolically and physically) “under” the devil’s power. The game between the ball-throwers and the devil could then represent the fight of the virtuous against Sloth, meant to inspire those in the Bowling Green below to also play edifying ball games as a way to reach virtue and to not succumb to idleness. Such a game is described in Nicolaus Cusanus’s treatise De ludo globi (The Game of Spheres, 1463). The players throw weighted balls onto a flat space pre-prepared through the tracing of nine concentric circles, and to which different scores are assigned. Each circle has a symbolic meaning linked to social roles and astrological beliefs, and identified with levels of human life, choirs of angels, and with planets encircling the sun-Christ. The unpredictable behavior of the weighted ball thus stimulates reflections on the conflicting influence of chance and reasoning upon the morality of human actions, paralleling the players’ aiming at the central target to their attempts to lead a balanced life striving to achieve Christlike perfect virtue.44 42 Analysis by RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 220–21. The statue of St. Michael trampling on the dragon on the east facade also holds a shield with a lion mask, a detail which adds to the symbolism of battling against vice; ibid., 221, and see below. 43 “Non timebis a timore nocturno: a sagitta volante in die: a negotio perambulante in tenebris: ab incursu et demonio meridiano” (Psalm 90:5–6). Shire identifies this statue with the noonday devil in “King in his House,” 76–77. Examples of encounters at midday with mysterious creatures can be found in Harf-Lancner, Morgana e Melusina, 136–37, 148. 44 See Albertson, Mathematical Theologies, 261–64, for an interpretation of the game.

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Fig. 8.4 Sculptures from James V’s Palace at Stirling Castle. Reading clockwise: top row, left to right: Devil in bay 3, south facade; Boy throwing a ball in bay 4, south facade; Lady with floating scarf in bay 15, north facade. Bottom row, right to left: Man with marguerite at roof level above bay 4, south facade; Cook in bay 5, east facade.

Cusanus’s reflection on the theory of impetus—how and why a thrown ball loses or retains its original motion—was a metaphor for the limitations empirically experienced by a player trying to imitate God’s creative gesture, setting the cosmos and movement of planets into motion. Playing prompted reflections on man’s own place within a Universe ordained according to mathematical and geometrical rules, and was thus potentially understandable by the educated and ethical player. 45 In playing bowling and tennis at their royal residences, Scottish monarchs like James V would have tried to achieve more than superficial entertainments. The 45 Ibid., 268–69. Also see Sarnowsky, “Impetus,” 267–68.

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most modern ideas about court life and noble education celebrated open-air exercise and competition among courtiers as highly beneficial to both health and social standing. 46 In Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, 1528), tennis is presented as a sport demonstrating a courtier’s agility, strength, and gracefulness. 47 Similarly, Antonio Scaino’s later Trattato del giuoco della palla (Treatise on the game of the ball, 1555) endorses ball games and particularly tennis to keep the body of young male courtiers healthy and strong, chasing away idleness as Virtue’s mortal enemy. 48 It is intriguing to think that the workings of Cusanus’s own moralizing game—inspired by a ball game similar to English bowling called Kugelspiel—would have been familiar to a Scottish audience used to playing bowling (kylspell) in courtly settings. 49 Cusanus’s game would not have been out of place in the Bowling Green of James’s castle, directly overlooked by the playing figures of the south facade. While entertaining themselves with ball games, courtiers would then have the opportunity to reflect upon their own position within God’s complex design while showing off their physical prowess as they resisted vicious idleness. The statues at roof level represented an opportunity to show the brave Scottish courtiers engaging with the more physical and aggressive royal sport of hunting, not only wild animals, but also, metaphorically speaking, English invaders. This lineup of figures represents, from left to right, a man holding the hilt of a large sword above bay 1, another loading a crossbow on bay 2, a man aiming with a gun on bay 3, and one holding a bizarre, flower-shaped shield enriched with a masque above bay 4 (Figure 8.4, bottom row, right).50 The south facade faces unpredictable England, from where danger usually comes, and this sense of defensive alertness (but not yet openly hostile menace) is a fair representation of the strained Scottish-Anglo relationship in the late 1530s.51 Taking into account the suggestion of a courtly rather than overtly bellicose atmosphere, I argue that these statues could represent a more strategic interpretation of defense.52 They might also memorialize James’s recent hunting expeditions at the court of Francis I, which served as occasions to advance

46 The tradition of treatises addressing the qualities of perfect courtiers is discussed in Gosman, “Obedience and Social Identity.” 47 See Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 63. 48 Scaino, Trattato del giuoco, trans. Kershaw, 1: 10–11. 49 The connection between English Kugelspiel and Cusanus’s game is discussed in Haug, “Das Kugelspiel des Nicolaus Cusanus,” 357. 50 According to the description in RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 220–21. See also McKean, “Sir James Hamilton,” 161. 51 The equation of the south-facing facade and English aggression is observed by Shire, “King in his House,” 75. 52 The courtly atmosphere is noted by McKean, “Sir James Hamilton,” 161–62.

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anti-English political alliances.53 A keen sportsman and astute politician, Francis I used his outings as occasions for private consultations and exchanges of information with his inner circle, which James frequently joined during his stay.54 The memory of these both entertaining and politically significant experiences may have stayed with James when, on his return to Scotland and facing increasingly tense relationships with his southern neighbor, he undertook the renovations of Stirling Castle.55 The giant marguerite, or daisy, displayed on the arm of the statues at roof level above bay 4 (Figure 8.4; bottom row, right), may have been meant to pay homage to Marguerite of Navarre, whose emblem of the marguerite was well known; if so, the statue may have served to represent her husband, Henry II of Navarre.56 On the same row above bay 1, the statue of an older man holding a sword may be that of another member of James’s French hunting companions, perhaps King Francis I himself. The similarities in appearance and attire to James’s own effigy on the north facade would evoke a similarity in role and personal tastes, and advertise their family proximity, paying appropriate tribute to his new father-in-law and their mutual role as kings.57 With this imagery, James V could be trying to intimidate potential assailants by boasting both his family connections and his military readiness, a powerful declaration just above the site of one of the most glorious battles against the English in Scottish history, Bannockburn (1314). Although a departure from the playful mood of the other statues, this serious message cloaked in the allusive imagery of royal hunting games would be nevertheless well-suited to the iconography of the castle decorative program. The identification of this group as a princely hunting party engaged in both antiEnglish political scheming and outdoorsy pursuits is strengthened by the presence of boars’ heads employed as gargoyles in this facade.58 Consistent with the defensive 53 The Franco-Scottish marriage agreed upon by Francis I and James V when he wed Francis’s daughter Madeleine de Valois in 1537—and then renewed when, after her death, he married his second wife Mary of Guise in 1538—was a strong anti-English statement, following the Treaty of Rouen between France and Scotland in 1517, and reviving the anti-English Auld Alliance between the two countries in act since 1295. 54 On Francis’s politicized use of hunting expeditions, see Hollingsworth, Cardinal’s Hat, 104–9. In November 1536 James went boar hunting with Francis, the Dauphin, Cardinal Ippolito of Este, and King Henry II of Navarre, the husband of Francis’s influential elder sister and adviser Marguerite of Angoulême (1533–1615), a powerful figure in her own right at the French court; see the account in Richardson, “Hunting at the Courts of Francis I and Henry VIII,” 130. 55 James’s architectural taste was also much influenced by his French experience. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 320, discusses how James brought back to Scotland and employed a number of French and Flemish masons; two French masons were also recruited and sent to him by his Guise in-laws in 1539. 56 The daisy as Marguerite of Navarre’s emblem is discussed by Paradin, Devises heroïques, 41–42. For the Scottish connections of this device, see Bath, Emblems for a Queen, 7–8. 57 McKean explains the resemblance by proposing that this statue was meant to represent the King’s cousin, the architect Sir James Hamilton; “Sir James Hamilton,” 161–62. 58 The statues are identified as boars in Ewart et al., Stirling Castle Palace, 281.

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feel of the facade, wild boars are often part of the iconography of god of war Mars and appeared on the helmets of soldiers described in the Old English epics.59 The royal hunt depicted in the Stuttgart cards set represented the subjugation of wilderness through the educating influence of an idealized courtly setting (Figure 8.2; bottom row, right).60 Similarly, at Stirling Castle the dangers imposed by the untamed Scottish wilderness and faced by courtiers during the hunt could be symbolically conquered and controlled through the inclusion of both chasers and prey in the safe regularity of the courtly environment. In relation to the edifying and moralizing aspect of this facade, it is important to note that in medieval and Renaissance imagery the hunting of the boar represented the vanquishing of sin. The boar was the companion animal to Sloth in medieval illustrations of matching sins and virtue where it would be paired with the virtue of Diligence, and in processions of the Seven Deadly Sins.61 Boars also frequently appeared in illustrated card sets such as in the Acorn set in the satirical deck illustrated by Peter Flötner (c. 1540), where pigs play for, cook, and consume their own filth in a display of vicious—if rather entertaining—conduct.62 Moreover, Nicolaus Cusanus, the author of the treatise on the spheres also wrote De venatione sapientiae (The hunt for wisdom, 1463), which proposes a serious take on hunting prey by paralleling it to the quest to obtain wisdom.63 The highly valued Scottish pastime of hunting boars as a particularly appreciated and royal activity could then mirror the ball game below in signifying the symbolic overcoming of sin, and particularly of Sloth, of which the boar was companion animal.64

The Game of Trionfi and the East and North Facades The four partially incomplete statues in the north and east facades have been identified as deriving from a set of engravings, produced in the 1510s by the German painter and woodcutter Hans Burgkmair, and among the substantial body of prints that were imported into Scotland in the early sixteenth century.65 Burgkmair’s engravings reproduced in the Stirling Castle statuary represent the planetary 59 On traditional medieval interpretations of boars, see Rowland, Animals with Human Faces, 39–40. 60 Ibid., 26. 61 The moralizing interpretation of the boar iconography is discussed by Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art, 220–21. 62 See Husband, World in Play, 109–10. More on Peter Flötner as versatile artist and card maker, and on this cards deck in particular, is discussed in note 85 below. 63 Watts, Nicolaus Cusanus, 208–9, explores the signif icance of hunting as moralizing activity in Cusanus’s philosophy. 64 On the symbolism of the boar in a specifically Scottish context, see Thompson, Scottish Bestiary, 18. 65 On the importation of engraving and prints in Scotland from the Continent at the beginning of the sixteenth century, see Stevenson, “Harley 6919,” 42–43. Also see note 81 below.

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divinities of Venus Armata (bay 13), the Sun (bay 6), Jupiter (bay 8), and Saturn (bay 14).66 These gods have been traditionally identified as cosmic deities that use their astral powers and stellar influence to guard the castle—a theory I will expand and build upon.67 The scantily dressed lady in bay 15—wrapped in a floating scarf, wearing a kind of turban and holding a tripartite flower in her hand (Figure 8.4, top row, right)—could be a representation of Fortuna, as represented in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving entitled Das kleine Glück (The small Fortune, 1495), shown with those very attributes. Besides being an important element in game play, Dürer’s Fortuna has been interpreted as Luck in Love as she is holding the plant eryngium, used as an aphrodisiac in Renaissance medicine, and so very appropriate to a facade built shortly after James’s (second) marriage.68 The lady in bay 10 covering herself could be a Venus pudica, also a very suitable goddesses to evoke on a facade celebrating a marriage alliance.69 This parade of classical figures seem to promenade on these two facades, headed by the two statues at the key corner locations, atop two eye-catching superimposed square columns. James V is easily identifiable as the well-dressed figure in bay 11 thanks to the “I5” (standing for James V) carved above the statue.70 The other distinctive column in bay 5 currently supports a headless statue of St. Michael holding a sword and stomping on a dragon,71 which is thought to have been a later replacement for the original statue of James V’s wife, Queen Mary.72 This would make much sense spatially as both statues would stand at the corner of their own respective apartments, with the king and queen leading a merry procession of allegorical figures on their respective facades.73 Based upon this imagery, I would then argue that these facades could also represent in three-dimensional form the card game of Trionfi, and be inspired by the urban celebrations of the same name. Some assumptions can be made on the moralistic pastimes enjoyed with Tarot decks such as the Mantegna and Visconti-Sforza ones, and possibly with the terres cairtis mentioned in the Stewart kings’ records. Cards of this kind were meant more for artistic enjoyment, reflection, and instructional purposes than for use in card games as they are now commonly understood. The Stuttgart playing cards, 66 RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 221–22. The identifications of the Sun and particularly of Saturn have been questioned by Ewart et al., Stirling Castle Palace, 249, 258. 67 Shire explains this theory in “King in his House,” 81–84. 68 Strauss, Complete Engravings, Etchings and Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer, 14, 65. 69 Description from RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 222. 70 Ibid. 71 On the traditional connections of this saint with the royal house of Stewart, see Shire, “King in his House,” 77–78. 72 McKean discusses the statue of Queen Mary in “Sir James Hamilton,” 162–63. 73 According to Dunbar’s reconstruction of the plans of the apartments; Scottish Royal Palaces, 51.

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for example, are worn out evenly and only very slightly, and thus do not present the expected signs of handling at the lower edges.74 Similarly, the Mantegna deck was printed on paper too thin for the cards to have been shuffled or dealt.75 Rather than actually “playing” with the cards, arranging and rearranging them according to their symbolic imagery would have created innumerable riddle-filled narratives and would have prompted allegorical discussions among educated courtiers who would have been familiar with such cards.76 These decks could reflect the status of mankind as hierarchically organized within God’s creation, representing comparable orderly human activities and worldly hierarchies—within a household, a court, a town, or even a nation—as ways to metaphorically experience and influence such predetermined order on a manageable scale.77 By reorganizing the cards according to their value, by making symbolic associations between human potentates, virtues, and planetary influences, or by creating a new order by making the lower cards the most powerful ones, the Scottish rulers playing with terres cairtis were symbolically granted control upon the world’s order, and could evoke the world’s planetary gods and force them to submit to their royal authority. An implicit link exists between the iconography of the Stirling facade and aspects of the Mantegna deck in particular, as the set of engravings by Burgkmair which served as the inspiration for some of the statues on the Stirling facade contains a figure of Mercury derived from the Tarocchi del Mantegna. While there is no proof that James V was aware that the engravings were derived from the cards, the representation of this 74 Observations made in Husband, World in Play, 17. 75 See Hargrave, History of Playing Cards, 225. 76 The potential of Tarot cards to create endless combinations of visual riddles in a courtly setting, elevating the level of courtly festive conversations, is discussed in Hoffmann and Dietrich, Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte, 63. They argue that the meaning of Tarot cards would have been clear to the viewer through its allegorical and emblematic visual language. Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods, 138–39, presents the Tarocchi del Mantegna as one of the educational games of the times with “combinations of images designed to instruct or to convey moral lessons,” and worthy of occupying the leisure of the highest strata of society. 77 In Survival of the Pagan Gods, 139–40, Seznec argues that by placing the cards of the Tarocchi del Mantegna edge to edge the player created a “symbolic ladder leading from Heaven to heart,” displaying the transmission of divine power and the spiritual elevation of mankind. Each image could then be seen as “a piece from the divine chessboard,” representing the forces of the world with whom the player engages directly in a godlike manner. Considering Seznec’s argument, other decks of cards could also represent an investigation of, and possible challenge to, the world organization and potentates. In World in Play, 59–61, Husband suggests that the four suits of the Courtly Household Cards deck, standing for the kingdoms of Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, and France, “reflect the political and dynastic relationships in Central Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century.” In this respect, I would argue that the player—and/or the holder of the cards—would have been offered the illusion to display and even symbolically intervene in this worldly scenario. In fact, as Husband, “Hunt and House,” suggests, in the Courtly Household Cards deck the topsy-turvy order in which pip cards—representing individuals of varying social ranks—trumped one another, would represent an ongoing challenge and an alternative to the structured order of society.

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imagery in the Stirling imagery would at the very least suggest his and his court’s awareness of a widespread, related trend of facade decoration.78 For example, imagery derived from Burgkmair’s set of deities and the Mantegna deck appears as part of large decorative programs, and as both painted and statuary decoration for public buildings in central and southern Europe, in modern day Germany, Austria, Italy, and Croatia.79 Significantly, as Stanko Kokole has demonstrated, the unusual sculptural relief of Fortitude that adorned a governmental building in Dubrovnik around 1490 derived from the figure of Fortitude appearing on a sheet illustrating the Tarocchi del Mantegna.80 What this indicates is that imagery from playing cards reproduced in prints could be and was indeed used as artistic motifs, even if the cards themselves were not known to be circulating in decks for game play.81 The Mantegna deck also has points in common with the iconography of the frescoes in the Sala dei Mesi (1468–70) in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, which represents a sequence of classical triumphs illustrating the benign planetary influences on the monthly activities of Duke Borso d’Este court.82 Similarly Borso was honored with lavish urban triumphs, such as the entry organized for him into Reggio in 1453 with an accompaniment of allegorical and mythological figures.83 By 78 The iconography of the planetary gods in the Mantegna deck was popularized across Europe via Burgkmair’s woodcuts, the influential Nyge Kalender, and the drawings by Dürer and Michael Wolgemut. This calendar was printed in Lubeck in 1519 by Steffen Arndes, and includes woodcuts of sets of mythological and allegorical figures, among which are the planetary deities matching those in the Burgkmair set and in the Tarocchi del Mantegna; see Warburg, “On Images of Planetary Deities,” 593–96. On Mercury as the most influential figure of the set, see Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” 259. On the relationship between the Tarocchi del Mantegna, Dürer, and Burgkmair, see Skopalová, “Mantegna Tarocchi,” 513–14; Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 92–94; and Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, 1: 47. 79 The use of this set of deities to decorate building facades in central Europe is discussed in Warburg, “On Images of Planetary Deities,” 596. On the relationship between the Mantegna Tarocchi and the statuary decorations of public buildings, churches, and tombs in Croatia and Italy, see Kokole, “Relief of Fortitude,” 25–26 and n. 15. 80 For an example of playing cards imprinted on sheets, see Stefano della Bella, Mythological Playing Cards, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-objectpage.51020.html. 81 Such as is the case with the importation of prints into Scotland, noted above and discussed in Stevenson, “Harley 6919,” 42–43. In this respect, we might again consider the possible contributions of the Italian humanist Giovanni Ferrerio, who was at James’s court and then at Kinloss Abbey in the years surrounding the Stirling Castle refurbishments, of note given his interest in and knowledge of painting and the visual arts. In fact, Bath postulates that the painted decorations for the abbot’s lodgings at Kinloss reflect the influence of imported prints of grotesques and other all’antica designs, of significance since they were executed during the time Ferrerio was in residence—and also coincide with the Stirling statuary, which was itself based on imported prints. See discussion in Bath, “Lighter Style of Painting,” and note 31 above. 82 The connection between the iconography of Palazzo Schifanoia and the Mantegna deck is analyzed in Bertozzi, “Gli affreschi di Palazzo Schifanoia,” 44–47. 83 See Zaho, Imago Triumphalis, 99–100.

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employing classical figures and planetary deities in courtly decorations and urban celebrations, and through engaging with decks such as the Tarocchi del Mantegna, Renaissance rulers such as Borso and James V could attempt to understand the mysterious rules that governed the divine machine, visually emphasizing their own godlike ability as Christian rulers to evoke and control the natural forces these pagan divinities represented.84 Iconographically, these programs display many similarities, as demonstrated by the involvement of artists such as Peter Flötner, who did designs for both luxury playing cards (such as the deck mentioned above) and for a triumphal arch for urban celebrations.85 Another element which suggests a level of awareness of Triumph culture and the iconography of Trionfi cards at the Scottish court is the familiarity of the Stewart sovereigns with the themes and imagery of triumphal entries and Petrarchan culture, to which Triumph cards are strictly related. In Francesco Petrarch’s Trionfi (1340–74), Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity in turn are hailed triumphators, riding chariots surrounded by suitable allegorical figures and supporters.86 A connection between the imagery of the Stirling facades and Petrarchan triumphal culture is not far-fetched, as only a few years before the facades’ completion a 1561 inventory of goods belonging to James V’s daughter Mary Queen of Scots details a “triumph of truth” among the tapestries “of all sorts.”87 Mary also owned a copy of Petrarch’s Trionfi, which was later given to her son James VI/I, and a spectacle entitled “Triumph of Love, Chastity, and Time” was part of the Shrovetide masque organized by the queen in 1564.88 Triumphal entries and their iconographic and political potential were well known in Scotland. They were organized for James IV’s wife Margaret Tudor in Edinburgh in 1503 and in Aberdeen in 1511, and James V was the recipient of one in Paris for his first wedding in 1537 to Madeleine of Valois.89 When he remarried shortly after her death later that year, his new wife Mary of Guise was welcomed with triumphs in St. Andrews and in Edinburgh in 1538. For such triumphal entries, the hosting city was transformed into an extension of the court, an idealized version of itself 84 On the inclusion of a pagan iconographic language into the celebrative vocabulary of Christian rulers and in relation to the Tarocchi del Mantegna, see Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods, 137–43. 85 Flötner’s set of illustrated cards (produced around 1540) included the arms of the Este family in the decoration. These cards were probably made for Francesco d’Este (1516–1578), who was present in 1541 at the triumphal entry of Emperor Charles V in Nuremberg, the site of Flötner’s triumphal arch. Flötner’s involvement with both artistic productions is discussed in Husband, World in Play, 103–25. 86 Similarities between Roman triumphs and Petrarchan triumphs are elaborated upon in Baran’ski, “Triumphi,” 74–84; and Zaho, Imago Triumphalis, 33–45, 100–19. 87 Kemp discusses the appearance of Petrarchan-related themes at the Scottish court in “Humanism in the Visual Arts,” 38. 88 On this masque see Jack, “Petrarch in English and Scottish Renaissance Literature,” 482–83. 89 For an overview on Scottish triumphal entries, see Gray, “Royal Entry in Sixteenth Century Scotland.”

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inhabited by classical deities, mythological and allegorical figures, and local heroes of the past, accompanying and hailing the rulers’ progress, and celebrating them as the ones for whom and by whom the world was recreated.90 The Petrarchan-inspired urban ceremonies—not only triumphs, but also carnivals and festivals—granted to Visconti, Sforza, and Este rulers as well-documented Trionfi players, have been interpreted as larger visual representations of the portable Trionfi game.91 Through reflective contemplation and the shuffling and reordering of the cards, Trionfi made possible a self-satisfying if temporary reconstruction of the world according to personal beliefs, fears, and desires. Either by playing a game of Trionfi or by taking part in a triumph himself, James V could also strategically summon the world’s potentates in the three-dimensional space of a city street, and in the two-dimensional space of a side table. For his castle at Stirling, he may have wanted to make this procession of benevolent mythological and allegorical figures permanent in stone. Thus, the north and east facades of the castle would essentially function as triumphal facades, inspired by the iconography and the symbolical meaning of both Trionfi cards and triumphal entries, and representing the same powers over allegorical figures and classical divinities that the ruler had ephemerally demonstrated during a civic triumph. In this respect he was no different from other rulers. Borso d’Este had tried to overcome the temporary element of Trionfi by creating triumphal settings in the painted decorations at the Palazzo Schifanoia. Similarly, Emperor Maximilian I’s “paper triumph” (1512–22) designed by Dürer and Burgkmair represented the arch and procession of an imaginary celebration which had never actually taken place.92 James’s world of stone figures was populated by other characters that appear to have points in common with the iconography of figures from Trionfi.93 As in other examples of statuary derived from Tarot decks, the strong similarities in appearance suggest visual borrowing even in the absence of clear indications regarding motivations, intentionality, or access to specific decks.94 As shown in figure 8.5, bay 7 features a statue representing a laughing, disheveled youth, who wears what may be a fool’s cap. As he looks upward, he exposes his leggings by raising his cloak with 90 The use of classical gods in this context is discussed by Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods, 206–7, 122–47. 91 Parallels between the game of Tarots and court festivals, carnivals, and triumphal entries are discussed in Moakley, Tarot Cards, 43–53, and in more detail in Moakley, “Tarot Trumps and Petrarch’s Trionfi.” 92 Silver discusses the significance of Maximilian I’s paper triumph in “Paper Pageants.” 93 The deck used for comparison is the Noblet deck of Tarots created in Paris by card maker Jean Noblet between 1659 and 1664. For the tradition of Marseille Tarots of which the Noblet deck is an early example, see Dummett, Il mondo e l’angelo, 307–18. On the organization of this deck and its connections with the iconography of earlier Italian cards, see Place, Fool’s Journey, 22–23. 94 See discussion by Kokole, “Relief of Fortitude,” 25–26.

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Fig. 8.5  Statue of the Fool in bay 7, east facade of James V’s Palace at Stirling Castle

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one hand, while using his other hand as a cache-sexe (a covering for his genitals) as a small dog scratches at his left leg.95 Aspects of his playful manner and appearance suggest a relationship to the fool figure appearing in the Trionfi cards. The Trionfi fools are frequently portrayed with a sexually allusive and lighthearted posture, engaged in carefree activities (Figure 8.2, top row, center and right); they display bare legs under an ample cloak and are often accompanied by a scratching dog or other playful companions, jumping up by their feet.96 In bay 12, another member of a courtly household appears: a young man in a short tunic, holding a covered cup and probably representing the king’s cupbearer. The cupbearer is also a figure represented in the Trionfi cards. In the Mantegna deck he is referred to as a Fameio ( famiglio, or servant) (Figure 8.2, bottom row, left), and as the “page of cups” in the Visconti-Sforza Triumphs deck. On the south side of the castle, the demonio meridiano in bay 3 also has a counterpart in Trionfi cards. That figure represents a winged devil with feminine breasts, and what appears to be a tail with a human face peeking from under his feet; the devil’s hands and feet end in claws, and he also has a grinning human mask on his belly (Figure 8.4, top row, left). These largely correspond with the element regularly appearing in the iconography of the devil in Tarot decks (Figure 8.2, top row, left).97 If the full-size f igures on top of the columns on the east and north facades represented the most noteworthy members of the triumphal procession, the busts acting as supports to the columns have been identified as members of the royal household—such as a cook with a spoon and meat cleaver in bay 5 (difficult to discern, but illustrated in Figure 8.4, bottom row, left).98 This again has a parallel in decorated card decks like the Stuttgart cards set and the Courtly Household Cards (Figure 8.2, bottom row, center), representing the members of a hierarchically organized royal household performing their allocated activities; likewise a similar variety of characters also appeared during triumphal celebrations, when costumed courtiers played the roles of both performers and spectators. The atmosphere of busy merriment is enhanced by the presence of protruding gargoyle-like statues situated to the left and right of each figure; they generally represent fabulous beasts, animals, and strongly characterized human busts, but otherwise are too worn for precise identification. The statues at roof level are mostly missing, but the remaining ones are gaily playing pipes and holding scrolls, possibly celebrating courtly pastimes of singing, reciting, and making music. The animal heads supporting the columns of 95 As described in RCAHMS, Stirlingshire, 221; and Ewart et al., Stirling Castle Palace, 258. See also, for comparison, Shire, “King in his House,” 78. 96 See Cieri Via, “L’Iconografia degli arcani maggiori,” 161–62. 97 On the iconography of this card, see ibid.,175–76; and Moakley, Tarot Cards, 98. 98 This lower set of statues is identified as courtiers of various ranks, including the cook; Shire, “King in his House,” 79–80.

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the putti are griffins (symbol of learning, valor, and protection) on the east facade, and on the north, lions representing power and magnanimity and the Stewarts’s own heraldic animal.99 Like the boars in the south facade, their presence enriches the narrative of dignified entertainment and engaging stateliness at James V’s court.

Conclusions The culture of games at court was instrumental in transforming Scottish royal residences from inward-looking, defensive strongholds into the modern residences of Renaissance sovereigns providing diversion and entertainment. Game-related iconography could represent in a visually engaging way the ambitions of the Stewart dynasty regarding their own role in the European landscape of power, and their responsibilities as worthy and dignified rulers. As I have hypothesized, the iconography of the facades at Stirling Castle could be a permanent representation of the practicing of virtues through playing moralizing and allegorical games conceptually similar—if not directly related—to Cusanus’s De ludo globi, and to the culture of Trionfi in its interrelated expressions of visually inspiring card decks, Petrarchan literature, and urban triumphal celebrations. Through daily interactions with and exploration of this imagery, the viewer would be given the chance not only to be diverted and entertained, but to approach and understand a complex world, whose cosmologic structure was now visually and intellectually understandable to the noninitiated.100 Reality is broken down into manageable concepts, into the individual cards and the separate sections of the playing field, and then recomposed through the action of engaging with a layered and controllable environment, purged of possible sources of danger.101 In the south facade, the courtier’s outdoorsy pursuits would counteract sinful apathy, and the courtier’s ball throw would negotiate the player’s own place not only on the playing field, but also in God’s sun-centered creation and within the courtly world shaped by, and centered upon, the monarch. In the east and north facades the rulers would confront their own fears of obliteration of fame and 99 See Rowland, Animals with Human Faces, 87–88 (griffins) and 118–23 (lion). 100 This is discussed in Skopalová, “Mantegna Tarocchi,” 505, where she argues that both the Tarocchi del Mantegna and Cusanus’s De ludo globi were attempts to address the intriguing issue of “describing the world as it is” through the means of games, with some overlaps through the shared concept of thematic, concentrically organized spheres. An explanation for the similarities in concept between the Mantegna deck and Cusanus’s De ludo globi is offered by Hind, Early Italian Engravings, 1: 222–23, who proposes Cusanus’s dual involvement in the devising and creation of the Mantegna cards. Hind further expands on Heinrich Brockhaus’s theory that the Mantegna deck may have been invented by Cusanus and his learned friends Enea Silvio Piccolomini and Cardinal Bessarion at the Council of Mantua (1459–60); ibid. 101 On Tarot games as a means to comprehend reality, see Huson, Mystical Origins of the Tarot, 49–50.

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insignificance, brought over by human caducity and the passing of time. Edifying ball games and Trionfi games offered redemption and resolution by granting the Stewart kings a degree of authority and creative power in the face of the world’s uncertainties. By permanently creating a Petrarchan-style celebration through characters inspired by Trionfi cards on his facade, James V would be claiming back control upon the powers governing an increasingly complicated and nuanced world, bringing it back to simple, cardinal forces which could be visualized, understood, and tamed.

Bibliography Primary Sources Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, ed. Thomas Dickson, Charles Thorpe McInnes et al. 13 vols. Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1877–1978. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1967. Paradin, Claude. Devises heroïques. Lyons: Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau, 1557. Scaino, Antonio. Trattato del giuoco della palla di Messer Antonio Scaino. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1555; trans. W.W. Kershaw. London: Strangeways Press, 1951.

Secondary Sources Albertson, David. Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Baran’ski, Zygmunt G. “The Triumphi.” In The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn Falkeid, pp. 74–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bath, Michael. “Andrew Bairhum, Giovanni Ferrerio and the ‘Lighter Style of Painting.’” Journal of the Northern Renaissance [online journal] 2 (2010), www.northernrenaissance. org/andrew-bairhum-giovanni-ferrerio-and-the-lighter-style-of-painting/ (accessed 1 August 2018). ———. Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots. London: Archetype Publications, 2008. Bertozzi, Marco. “Gli affreschi di Palazzo Schifanoia e i tarocchi del Mantegna: ancora un Enigma.” In I Tarocchi: le carte di corte; gioco e magia alla corte degli Estensi, ed. Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali, pp. 44–47. Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987. Burnett, John. “Bowling.” In Sport, Scotland and the Scots, ed. Grant Jarvie and John Burnett, pp. 39–53. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000. Butler, Lance St. John, and Peter Wordie, eds. The Royal Game. Edinburgh: Bookworm Typesetting, 1989.

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Cieri Via, Claudia. “I Tarocchi cosiddetti del ‘Mantegna’: origine, significato e fortuna di un ciclo di immagini.” In I Tarocchi: le carte di corte; gioco e magia alla corte degli Estensi, ed. Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali, pp. 49–77. Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987. ———. “L’Iconografia degli arcani maggiori.” In I Tarocchi: le carte di corte; gioco e magia alla corte degli Estensi, ed. Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali, pp. 158–83. Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987. Cohen, Simona. Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Collins, Tony, John Martin, and Wray Vamplew. Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports. London: Routledge, 2005. Dictionary of the Scots Language. 2004. Scottish Language Dictionaries, www.dsl.ac.uk/ entry/dost/terres_cairtis (accessed 4 October 2018). Dummett, Michael. The Game of Tarot from Ferrara to Salt Lake City. London: Duckworth, 1980. ———. Il mondo e l’angelo: i tarocchi e la loro storia. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993. ———. The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards. New York: George Braziller, 1986. Dunbar, John G. Scottish Royal Palaces: The Architecture of the Royal Residences during the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Periods. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999. ———. The Stirling Heads. Edinburgh: HMSO for Royal Commission of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1975. Ewart, Gordon, Dave Murray, and Sarah Hogg. Stirling Castle Palace: Archaeological and Historical Research, 2004–2008, Interior and Exterior Elevations. Historic Scotland, Edinburgh, http://sparc.scran.ac.uk/publications/pdfs/L3%20palace%20interiors%20 and%20exteriors.pdf (accessed 18 July 2018). Fawcett, Richard. Scottish Architecture: From the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation, 1371–1560. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press in association with Historic Scotland, 1994. Frenk, Joachim. “Games.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock, and Abigail Shinn, pp. 221–34. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Gallagher, Dennis, and Gordon Ewart. Stirling Castle Palace: Archaeological and Historical Research, 2004–2008; The History and Archaeology of Stirling Castle Palace. Historic Scotland, http://sparc.scran.ac.uk/publications/pdfs/L4%20the%20history%20and%20 archaeology%20of%20stirling%20castle%20palace.pdf (accessed 3 November 2017). Geddes, Olive M. A Swing through Time: Golf in Scotland, 1457–1743. Edinburgh: HMSO, 1992. Gosman, Martin. “Obedience and Social Identity: Some Treatises on the Perfect Courtier (ca. 1530–ca. 1630).” In The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West: Selected Proceedings of the International Conference, Groningen 20–23 November 1996, ed. Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra, pp. 35–63. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997.

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Gray, Douglas. “The Royal Entry in Sixteenth Century Scotland.” In The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood, pp. 10–37. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998. Guidicini, Giovanna. “Scotland Triumphant: The Relevance of Stewart Triumphal Celebrations in Shaping Scottish Renaissance Architecture.” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2009. Harf-Lancner, Laurence. Morgana e Melusina: la nascita delle fate nel medioevo. Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Hargrave, Catherine. A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000 [1966]. Haug, Walter. “Das Kugelspiel des Nicolaus Cusanus und die Poetik der Renaissance.” Daphnis 15, no. 2 (1986): 357–74. Hind, Arthur M. Early Italian Engravings: A Critical Catalogue with Complete Reproduction of All the Prints Described. 12 vols. New York: Knowdler & Company, 1938–48. Hoffmann, Detlef, and Margot Dietrich. Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte der Spielkarte. Marburg: Jonas, 1995. Hollingsworth, Mary. The Cardinal’s Hat: Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince. New York: Overlook Press, 2005. Husband, Timothy. “Hunt and House: Depictions of Medieval Life in German Playing Cards.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/blogs/in-season/2016/ hunt-and-house (accessed March 2016). ———. The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015. Huson, Paul. Mystical Origins of the Tarot: From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2004. Jack, R.D.S. “Petrarch in English and Scottish Renaissance Literature.” Modern Language Review 71, no. 4 (October 1976): 801–11. Jamieson, Fiona. “The Royal Gardens of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, 1500–1603.” Garden History 22, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 18–36. Kaplan, Stuart R. The Encyclopedia of Tarot. 2 vols. New York: US Games Systems, 1979. Kemp, Martin. “Humanism in the Visual Arts, c.1530–c.1630.” In Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, ed. John MacQueen, pp. 32–47. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Kokole, Stanko. “A Relief of Fortitude and the ‘Tarocchi of Mantegna’ in Dubrovnik.” History of Art in Dalmatia 33, no. 1 (October 1992): 21–30. Leibs, Andrew. Sports and Games of the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. MacGregor, Robert. Pastimes and Players. London: Chatto and Windus, 1881. McKean, Charles. The Scottish Chateau: The Country House of Renaissance Scotland. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001. ———. “Sir James Hamilton of Finnart: A Renaissance Courtier-Architect.” Architectural History 42 (1999): 141–72. Meikle, Maureen M. The Scottish People, 1490–1625. Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2013.

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Moakley, Gertrude. The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo: An Iconographic and Historical Study. New York: New York Public Library, 1966. ———. “The Tarot Trumps and Petrarch’s Trionfi: Some Suggestions on their Relationship.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 60 (February 1956): 55–69. Murray, Harold James Ruthven. A History of Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913; Northampton, MA: Benjamin Press, 1986. Panofsky, Erwin, and Fritz Saxl. “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art.” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, no. 2 (March 1933): 228–80. Place, Robert M. The Fool’s Journey: The History, Art, and Symbolism of the Tarot. New York: Talarius Publications, 2010. RCAHMS (Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland). Stirlingshire, an Inventory of the Ancient Monuments. Edinburgh: HMSO, 1963. Richardson, Glenn. “Hunting at the Courts of Francis I and Henry VIII.” Court Historian 18, no. 2 (2013): 127–41. Rowland, Beryl. Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974. Sarnowsky, Jurgen. “Impetus.” In Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven Livesey, and Faith Wallis, pp. 267–69. New York: Routledge, 2005. Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Shire, Helena M. “The King in his House: Three Architectural Artefacts Belonging to the Reign of James V.” In Stewart Style, 1513–1542: Essays on the Court of James V, ed. Janet Hadley Williams, pp. 72–96. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996. Silver, Larry. “Paper Pageants: The Triumphs of Emperor Maximilian I.” In “All the World’s a Stage”: Pageantry and Spectacle in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Wisch and Susan Munshower, pp. 292–331. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1990. Singer, Samuel Weller. Playing Cards; with illustrations of the Origin of Printing and Engraving on Wood. London: Bensley and Son, 1816. Skopalová, Eva. “The Mantegna Tarocchi and the View of the World in Northern Italy in the 15th Century.” Umĕní/Art 62, no. 6 (2014): 502–15. Stevenson, Jane. “Harley 6919: Word and Image in Renaissance Scotland.” European Journal of English Studies 18, no. 1 (2014): 42–59. Strauss, Walter L. The Complete Engravings, Etchings and Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer. New York: Dover, 1972. Taylor, Edward Samuel. The History of Playing Cards: with Anecdotes of Their Use in Conjuring, Fortune-Telling, and Card-Sharping. London: John Camden Hotten, 1865. Thomas, Andrea. Glory and Honour: the Renaissance in Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2013. ———. Princelie Majestie: The Court of James V of Scotland, 1528–1542. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005.

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Thompson, Francis. A Scottish Bestiary: The Lore and Literature of Scottish Beasts. Glasgow: Moledinar Press, 1978. Thurley, Simon. The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Warburg, Aby. “On Images of Planetary Deities in the Lower German Almanac of 1519 (1908).” In Aby Warburg, the Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, ed. Kurt W. Foster, trans. David Britt, pp. 593–96. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. Watts, Pauline Moffitt. Nicolaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of a Man. Leiden: Brill, 1982. Wood, Christopher S. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Zaho, Margaret Ann. Imago Triumphalis: The Function and Significance of Triumphal Imagery for Italian Renaissance Rulers. New York: P. Lang, 2004.

About the author Giovanna Guidicini is a Lecturer in Architectural History and Urban Studies at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art. She holds a laurea magistrale in Architecture from the Università degli Studi di Ferrara and a PhD in History of Architecture from the University of Edinburgh. Her monograph titled Performing Spaces: Triumphal Entries and Festivals in Early Modern Scotland is forthcoming and will be published with Routledge.

9. The Games of Philipp Hainhofer Ludic Appreciation and Use in Early Modern Art Cabinets Greger Sundin Abstract Games were important to the Augsburg art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647), and this ludic category was included in most of his art cabinets. It offered amusement as part of an overall ambition for the cabinets to be of service and use. Board games, dice, packs of cards, and games of both chance and skill represented many of the various game types of its day, while constituting a material taxonomy of games. With focus on the collections in the Gustavus Adolphus art cabinet (1625–31) and the Pomeranian art cabinet (1610–15), this chapter addresses the material culture of games in the Hainhofer cabinets. Were they merely representations of games or, rather, actively played? Keywords: Philipp Hainhofer, art cabinets, Kunstkammer, Kronbrautspiel, Tafelspiel, Brentaspiel, Vexierkartenspiel, Tourniquet

The merchant, banker, diplomat, art collector, and dealer Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) well personifies the climate of the city of Augsburg in the early 1600s.1 Learned but of lesser nobility, like his father before him he initially made his name and financial resources in the silk trade; however, he soon extended his services to deal in luxurious and extravagant objects within a wide network of royalty and humanist scholars all across Europe.2 An art agent extraordinaire, he supplied his patrons with a variety of exotic goods and objets d’arts, not only naturalia,

1 For further literature on Hainhofer, see, for example, Boström, Det underbara skåpet; Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank; Trepesch and Emmendörffer, Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank; and the ongoing Hainhofer project at Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, “Phillipp Hainhofer.” 2 See Boström, “Philipp Hainhofer als Vermittler von Luxusgütern.”

O’Bryan, R. (ed.), Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463728119/ch09

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anthropological specimens, and spices, but also relics, tapestries, books, and paintings.3 He was well-positioned to do so. In the sixteenth century the city of Augsburg had gained significance as a center of luxury production, much due to the expanding and lucrative involvement in mining, banking, the textile industry, and colonial trade and exchange. This was in turn controlled by an oligarchy of a few extraordinarily wealthy dynasties. 4 The combination of scholarly humanism, economic strength, and a direct access to the flow of marvelous objects resulted in rapidly expanding Kunstkammer collections in the city during this period.5 Hainhofer’s extensive trade in Kunstkammer objects and the formation of his own private Kunstkammer in 1604, sprung from this artisanal and mercantile milieu of the city and culminated in the 1610s with his production of Kunstschränke (art cabinets) for a princely market.6 Hainhofer engaged artists and artisans from a wide array of guilds to work on their fabrication. Functioning as miniature Kunstkammern, these free-standing ebony cabinets, elaborately decorated, were filled with both specially commissioned objects and with pieces from Hainhofer’s own Kunstkammer, which partly served as a repository.7 The cabinets were very costly to produce: Hainhofer made only six of note with a few more planned, and although they were initially commissioned, he soon started to produce art cabinets on a speculative basis without a specific patron in mind. 8 It would appear that Hainhofer undertook these projects for his own personal amusement and as a means to celebrate the arts and the city of Augsburg; however, several scholars and 3 As an agent, he would also represent patrons at public functions, and communicate news and current affairs to them; Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 58–59. 4 These were mainly the Fugger and Welser families. 5 Especially the Fugger Kunstkammer; see Meadow, “Merchants and Marvels.” Since 2014, the history of the Fugger and Welser families has been exhibited in the Fugger und Welser Erlebnismuseum in Augsburg (www.fugger-und-welser-museum.de). 6 His correspondence, travels, and close ties to the Augsburg trade provided direct access to many novelties for his own Kunstkammer and for those of his clients. The Kunstkammer itself was also frequently visited on its own merits by esteemed guests; see Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 66–69. 7 Many artisans worked for Hainhofer on several projects; these include the carpenter Ulrich Baumgartner (1579–1652), the engraver Paul Göttich (1586–1622), the goldsmith and instrument maker David Altenstetter (c. 1547–1617), and the painters Johann Matthias Kager (1566–1634) and Anton Mozart (1595–1620). See Trepesch and Emmendörffer, Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank. 8 For a brief overview of Hainhofer’s art cabinets, see Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 112–41. The major cabinets are: the Pomeranian art cabinet (1610–17, for Duke Philip II of Pomerania-Stettin, now in Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin); an art cabinet (1611–13, not preserved, for Maria Maddalena of Austria); the so-called Stipo tedesco (1619– c. 1625, purchased in 1628 by Archduke Leopold V of Austria, now in the Tesoro dei Granduchi (previously named Museo degli Argenti), Florence); the Gustavus Adolphus art cabinet (1625–32, now in the Uppsala University art collection, Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala); a smaller cabinet (c. 1627–31, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); and a midsize cabinet (1631–34, purchased by Duke August of Braunschweig-Lüneburg in 1647, with a secondary Swedish base, signed and dated by Georg Haupt 1776 now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

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biographers conjecture about his motivation for this very hazardous path, ascribing to him a certain vanity and implying that he wanted to associate himself with the grandeur of his patrons.9 The risks were increased by his habit of initiating a new cabinet before the previous one had been sold. As the projects employed many artisans and required substantial monetary outlay for the purchase of objects, Hainhofer’s personal financial situation ultimately became more and more strained. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years War was raging (1618–48), and subsequent epidemics and political complications led the city of Augsburg into decline. Ultimately, his business enterprises and his commerce in luxury goods suffered severe setbacks, and it was not until he was on his deathbed in 1647 that he was relieved from the overwhelming debts, when his last cabinet was sold.10 Although Hainhofer’s speculative ventures thus proved to have a negative impact upon his financial resources, the lack of commissioning patrons has had the positive result that we now know quite a bit about his views on potential clients and the cabinets’ contents and intended use, through his written attempts to market them.11 We will here touch upon one aspect of Hainhofer and his cabinets—namely his fascination with games. He was not alone in this interest. During the Renaissance, the development of new games together with a raised theoretical awareness of game practices fueled their popularity. Although religious and moral concerns with the perils of gambling had at times subdued enthusiasm overall, this situation was less antagonistic in the early 1600s, which benefited from the vogue for and production of games in Augsburg.12 Hainhofer included a rather large number of games and other humorous devices (such as anamorphs, optical illusions, and puzzle jugs) in his art cabinets, categorizing them as Kurzweil (pastimes, or amusements). With a few minor exceptions—mostly fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury playing cards, which were likely bought through the same channels as his other Kunstkammer objects—the games he had made were fabricated together with the cabinets and by the same artisans. As such they were intimately integrated, both conceptually and visually, into Hainhofer’s overarching idea of the Kunstschrank. Board games were not necessarily stored as individual objects within drawers of the cabinet, but rather sometimes functioned as the drawers or other structural components themselves, their fronts serving as part of the external decorative scheme of the cabinet. In addition to more popular 9 See Stetten, Lebensbeschreibung zur Erweckung, 288; Böttiger, Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala, 1: 9, 22–23; and Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 79. 10 Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 64–65. 11 See, for example, Böttiger, Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala, 1: 57–61; and Doering, Des Augsburger Patriciers Philipp Hainhofer, 115–38. 12 See Zollinger, Geschichte des Glücksspiels; Zollinger, Random Riches; and Bauer et al., Alte Spielverbote, verbotene Spiele.

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Fig. 9.1 The Pomeranian art cabinet, Berlin, 1610–17

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Fig. 9.2 The Gustavus Adolphus art cabinet, Uppsala, 1625–31

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games such as chess, tric-trac, and merels, Hainhofer showed an acquired taste for divertissements that stretched beyond the commonplace. Less well-known were the Game of the Goose, the Kronbautspiel, Tafelspiel and Brentaspiel,, and alternative types of playing cards, games which were more frequently associated with his connoisseurship than with many other collections at the time.13 He had a predilection for these unusual games, it seems. Two of Hainhofer’s cabinets—referred to, respectively, as the Berlin and Uppsala cabinets—serve as excellent case studies. Though he procured and made other cabinets and pieces of furniture, several which include gaming devices, these are two of his most important. Their preserved contents also make them the most suitable for study since in many cases they are among the earliest datable examples of game types. The history of these two cabinets also merits discussion. The Berlin art cabinet (the Pommersche Kunstschrank) was commissioned from Hainhofer by the Pomeranian duke Philip II (1573–1618) and delivered in 1617 after seven years of intensive correspondence between the two (Figure 9.1).14 By 1694, the cabinet had moved to the Prince-electoral Kunstkammer in Berlin, and remained there until the last stages of World War II, when it was destroyed during a bombing raid.15 Fortunately, the entire contents of the cabinet including the games had been stored separately and survived; they are now exhibited in the Museum for Applied Arts (the Kunstgewerbemuseum) in Berlin. The Uppsala cabinet was begun by Hainhofer in 1625, even though he had not yet secured a patron (Figure 9.2).16 Nevertheless, his speculative venture produced fruitful results seven years later when the Protestant city council welcomed King Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632) on his entrance into Augsburg in April 1632, a stop on his military campaign in Bavaria (part of the Thirty Years War). As a token of amicability, the council presented him with the cabinet during a ceremony held in the Fugger palace. Hainhofer was conveniently appointed Hofmeister (chamberlain) to the king during his stay, and was thus intimately involved in

13 Larger period Kunstkammern, such as in Munich (Albrecht V) and Prague (Rudolf II), have typically less than 1 percent of entries regarded as Kurzweil; see Diemer and Sauerländer, Johann Baptist Fickler; and Bauer and Haupt, Das Kunstkammerinventar Kaiser Rudolfs II. In comparison, the Hainhofer cabinet in Uppsala comprises about 5 percent. 14 Much scholarly literature exists on the Pommersche Kunstschrank. The first major work, including the inventory, was by Lessing and Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, in 1904; more recently Mundt has published Der Pommersche Kunstschrank. The correspondence is contained in Hainhofer, Des Augsburger Patriciers Philipp Hainhofer. 15 On the Berlin history of the cabinet, see Hinterkeuser, “Der Pommersche Kunstschrank in Berlin,” 59–60. 16 The reference works on the Uppsala cabinet are Böttiger, Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala; and Boström, Det underbara skåpet.

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the diplomatic practicalities of the official visit.17 As Hainhofer recorded in his diary, the king was much pleased with the gift and listened with great interest for several hours and showed much erudition as Hainhofer expounded on the cabinet and its contents.18 Unfortunately, six months later, the king was killed in battle, and the cabinet was subsequently shipped to Stockholm and Svartsjö Castle the following spring for the private use by the royal family. Sixty-one years later, it was bequeathed to Uppsala University by King Charles XI (1655–1697), where it has since remained.19 Although they share certain similarities, there are notable differences between the two cabinets. Whereas the Uppsala cabinet was intended to function as a complete Kunstkammer, albeit in a reduced scale, the Berlin cabinet was made to form one integrated part of a larger Kunstkammer; however, it was never completed owing to the demise of Duke Philip II the following year.20 As such, it lacked much of the naturalia and exotica that was included in the Uppsala cabinet’s more allembracing scheme. That deficiency notwithstanding, an examination of the games that were included in both these cabinets raises several interesting questions. What was characteristic about Hainhofer’s selections? Did his contemporaries appreciate them as games, or rather were they viewed as curiosities intended for no use other than for display? Hainhofer, as we will see, was quite particular about the games he chose for his cabinets, but to what extent did his fellow collectors and patrons share his preferences? In his role as art agent and procurer, did he simply conform to the taste of his princely patrons—or is it possible that they conformed to his taste? In order to answer these questions, we have to turn to the objects themselves.

Hainhofer’s Games The following examples are drawn from Hainhofer’s two cabinets, but with one exception these types of games could be found elsewhere during the period. They include chess (a game of strategic skill with royal connotations), tric-trac (a game very similar to today’s backgammon but with somewhat different rules), and merels (or nine men’s morris). Merels is played by moving counters (game pieces)

17 It also rendered him political influences that came to be an encumbrance once the Swedes had left and the Imperial troops returned in 1635; see Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 61–63. 18 See Böttiger, Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala, 1: 68–70; and Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 105. 19 On the history of the cabinet in Sweden, see Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 103–11; and Böttiger, Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala, 1: 71–74. 20 See Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 126–30.

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Fig. 9.3  A combined draughts game (left), a Game of the Goose (right), and a “Tower game” (the eight spandrel ovals), Berlin

on a grid of lines, somewhat similar to tic-tac-toe.21 There was also the game of draughts (checkers), which could be played with tric-trac counters on the dark squares of the chessboard. In the case of the Berlin cabinet, draughts even had a specif ic board separate from that of chess (as seen on the left in Figure 9.3). At the time, the four games were played at all levels of society. In addition to board games, Hainhofer’s collection also included playing cards. The cards of today, at least from an Anglo-American perspective, are completely dominated by the comparatively late French suits of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. The Renaissance playing cards were regionally specific, with alternatives to the French suits found in both Germany and Italy. 22 Hainhofer included decks of

21 On the history of chess, tric-trac, and merels, see, for example, Himmelheber, Spiele: Gesellschaftsspiele aus einem Jahrtausend; Meier, Von allerley Spil und Kurzweyl; Meier, “Der Teufel schuf das Würfelspiel,” 78; Murray, History of Chess; and Murray, History of Board-Games Other than Chess. 22 For more examples, see Parlett, History of Card Games, 35–46.

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Fig. 9.4  Game of the Goose, Uppsala

cards of many different suits, without any apparent preference.23 These decks were either acquired as antiques (as the fifteenth-century deck by the Master I.S., or the mid-sixteenth-century Jean Faucil deck in Uppsala), or commissioned by Hainhofer (as the deck in Uppsala signed N.L. and dated 1612, or the three silver decks in the Berlin cabinet).24 While these popular game types were included and held prominent positions in Hainhofer’s cabinets, they were accompanied by a group of other games that were less well-known, and in some cases even rare, both at the time, but even more so today.

23 For example, German, Latin (Italian), and French suits were represented on the silver playing cards made by Paul Göttich and Michael Frömmer in the Berlin cabinet, an example of sumptuous gaming paraphernalia with little practical use; Trepesch and Emmendörffer, Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 302, ill. 03, cat. 46.4.14 and 46.14.15; and Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 249–56, cat. P81–P83. We can note, however, that printed French suited cards were the only type of suits that would suffice as a base for the Vexierkartenspiel modifications Hainhofer had made. 24 Uppsala: inv. UUK183–UUK185, UUK502, Berlin: inv. P81–P84.

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The Gansspiel The Gansspiel (Game of the Goose) was in the early 1600s a somewhat unusual game, although it later became hugely popular.25 It belongs to a family of racing board games in which each player advances his or her marker along a given track of fields, assisted by dice (Figures 9.4 and 9.3). The track is divided into sixty-three consecutively numbered spaces and is often arranged in a spiral form (either clockwise or counterclockwise) with the starting point at the outside border and with the goal to reach the center first. The player rolls (typically) two dice and advances the marker accordingly. Positioned along the track are a number of spaces on which a goose is depicted; landing on a goose requires the player to move again by the same distance. Additional short cuts, such as spaces marked with a bridge, move the player to some other specified position. There are also a few penalty spaces that force the player to move backwards or to lose one or more turns. For example, landing on the space marked with a skull results in the player being sent back to “start.” In German tradition, the number 61 shows a glass, with the purpose of letting all players finish their drinks or determine who would pay for them. The game in the Berlin cabinet is one of the earliest examples of the game with this added feature. Hainhofer also varies the form of the track to a rhomboid circuit in the Berlin cabinet, while the painted board in Uppsala retains the traditional oval setup. On a side note, Hainhofer later included a Game of the Monkey instead of the Game of the Goose in another of his art cabinets of 1631–34,26 because, as he indicates, “the word goose can be unfortunately interpreted by women.”27 Gans (goose) in German would be a derogatory term directed towards the feeble-minded, as would the term oca in the Italian name for the game (Gioco dell’oca).28 Unfortunately, he does not elaborate on this.

The Kronbrautspiel The Kronbrautspiel (Game of the Crowned Bride) is a game for two to four players that combines a deck of German-suited playing cards and a board with seven 25 The Game of the Goose has been much researched by the British game scholar Adrian Seville, who notes that the earliest reference to this game type is from the 1480s, predating it by almost a century from what was generally believed; see his Royal Game of the Goose, and “Sociable Game of the Goose.” Also see Zollinger, “Zwei unbekannte Regeln zum Gänsespiel”; and Himmelheber, Spiele: Gesellschaftsspiele aus einem Jahrtausend, 163–66. 26 This game is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. Kunstkammer 3403. 27 “[…] weil das wortlin gansspiel beÿm frawenzimmer etwan sinistre mag ausgelegt werden”; Gobiet, Der Briefwechsel, 839. 28 See Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 4: 1265, main entry “Gans.”

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Fig. 9.5 Two of Hainhofer’s Kronbrautspiele

sections in which to place one’s bets. 29 The players place their jettons on the f ields according to how they judge their given hand. In the Berlin design, the adorned and crowned bride stands in the center of the board, surrounded by the four German suit markers combined with animals: acorns/sow, leaves/parrot, hearts/falcon and bells/lamb (Figure 9.5, right).30 In addition, there are f ields for specific combinations of cards; Drittgleich (three of the same, i.e., the three stags with a common head), der letzte Stich (the last trick/sting, i.e., a word pun of two jousting fools, one of which turns his lance towards himself—a definite last trick), and the central Kronbraut (the crowned bride). The combinations of suit/ animal are not fixed, and there are examples of other combinations from period Kronbraut games.31

29 Descriptions of the game rules from a later date are described in Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 240–41 and n. 94. 30 The Berlin design was by the Augsburg painter Johann Mathias Kager (1575–1634); see Trepesch and Emmendörffer, Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 299. The German suit names are Eichel, Grün or Blatt, Herz, and Schelle. 31 For examples, see Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 242.

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Fig. 9.6  Tafelspiel, Uppsala

The Kronbraut game is a version of the Turmspiel, or “tower game,” which is also played in combination with German-suited cards.32 The Berlin cabinet includes both a Kronbraut game and a Turmspiel, while Uppsala only has a painted version of the Kronbraut design on paper affixed to a panel (Figure 9.5, left).33 The decorative scheme is, however, very close to the design of the Kronbraut game in Berlin, albeit in polychrome and with an additional decorative floral fretwork in the background.34 32 That is in turn related to the game Poch, a game for three to six players in which one bets on the highest combination of cards. On the rules and history of Poch, see Parlett, History of Card Games, 86–89. 33 It is not a colored print, as stated by Lessing and Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 43, and Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 242. 34 Prints made after Berlin exist, but are mirrored, as prints tend to be. Compare the Tischkabinett for Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony in Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, inv. 47714, also

The Games of Philipp Hainhofer 

Fig. 9.7  Jacob van der Heyden, two women and a man playing a ball game on a table, 1608.

The Tafelspiel The Tafelspiel, or simply translated to “table game,” is solely based on the player’s dexterous ability to roll small gilt-bronze balls through an arcade with different points assigned to various gates. It was apparently known outside of a German context. In Shakespeare’s contemporary play The Winter’s Tale, the clown asks Autolycus “what manner of fellow was he that robbed you?” to which Autolycus replies “A fellow, sir, that I have known to go about with troll-my-dames.”35 “Trollmy-dames” would be the morphological misinterpretation of the French name for this game, Trou Madame.36 In both the Berlin and Uppsala games, the Tafel game boards are set up by joining the short sides of two other board games, turning them over, and adding an arcade at one end. This arcade is crowned on both sides by commissioned by Hainhofer, Augsburg 1620–30; see Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 241–42, ills. 16 and 17. 35 Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale, act 4, scene 3. First performed in 1611, the play was published in 1623. 36 Endrei, Spiele und Unterhaltung im alten Europa, 145–46.

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Fig. 9.8 Nicolas de Larmessin II, Habit de tabletier (dealer in fancy turnery, chessboards, etc.) from Les costumes grotesques, 1695

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an ivory plaque displaying the image of a fool. Hainhofer also uses the alternative name Narrenspil (Game of the Fool) when referring to this game.37 It is a difficult game to play, as the lane upon which one rolls the tiny balls (which are only onefifth of an inch in diameter) is more than twenty-three inches long, and each of the thirteen gates is only slightly larger than the balls themselves (their openings being only two-fifths of an inch across). The lane in the Uppsala game is padded with velvet (Figure 9.6), which is not the case in the earlier Berlin board with its faster ebony-veneered surface. The Uppsala game player needs to keep the balls on the velvet since the laced edges work as bowling gutters and effectively take the ball out of play. A contemporary print by Jacob van der Heyden from 1608 depicts a simpler version of the game as only the arcade placed on a tabletop (Figure 9.7), but the arcade is also to be seen in the print Habit de Tabletier (Clothes of a dealer in fancy turnery, chessboards, etc.) by Nicolas de Larmessin II from 1695, there labeled “troú Madame” (Figure 9.8).

The Brentaspiel The Brentaspiel (Brenta game) is somewhat more difficult to describe. The basic ingredients are a checkered board (a chessboard is sometimes used), dice, and a funnel on a stand, mounted to the side of the board. The dice are dropped through the funnel, and the winnings depend on whether the dice land on a black or white square.38 In France and England, versions of the game were known from at least the fourteenth century, but it is seemingly first described in Germany in the late 1500s, where it is referred to as Prentenspil. By 1600 the name Brentaspiel became more commonly used.39 In a letter to Duke August the Younger written around 1643, Hainhofer elaborates on how the game is played: When you insert the gilded stand and the funnel […] into the gilt tube on the side, and cast the gilt dice through the funnel of this Brenta onto the black ebony and the yellow sandstone, then it becomes a Brentenspiel, because then, if one compares, the one wins who has more pips on the dice or lies firm on a yellow field, and then you cannot cheat with dice through the funnel. 40 37 Lessing and Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 45. 38 For a larger version of this game, see Zollinger, “Infam und lukrativ: Das Glückspiel in der frühen Neuzeit,” 21. For further discussions on history and rules, see Zollinger, “Nundinae ludentes,” 135–39. 39 See Diemer and Sauerländer, Johann Baptist Fickler, 153; and Diemer et al., Die Münchner Kunstkammer, 2: 592–93. 40 “[…] vnd man dann auch durch den trachter die würfel nit knünpfen kan”; Gobiet, Der Briefwechsel, 842. “Würfel knüpfen” (of which knünpfen would be a variant or misspelling) is an early modern German

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Fig. 9.9  Matthias Gerung, Die Melancholie im Garten des Lebens (detail), 1558

Apparently, the prospect of cheating with dice was ever present, and the use of a funnel to lessen this likelihood was not considered too precautionary. (The Egyptians and Romans used so-called dice towers—fritilli in Latin—for this very purpose.41) In fact, in a case brought before the court in England in 1376, the tailor Nicholas Prestone had to answer for a rigged Brenta game (referred to as quek). According to the report: The said tables were then turned, and the complainants played with the defendant Nicholas at “quek” until they had lost at the games of tables and quek […]. After which the complainants, wondering at their continued losing, examined the board at which they had been playing and found it to be false and deceptive; seeing that in three quarters of the board all the black points were so depressed that all the white points in the same quarters were higher than the black points in the same; and, on the fourth quarter of the board all the white points were so depressed that all the black points in the same quarters were higher than the white. 42 idiom meaning “cheating with dice”; see Anderson et al., Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 8: 1230; and Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 11: 1522. I thank Jonas Richter for alerting me to these sources. 41 The best-known example of a Roman dice tower is the fourth century CE Vettweiss-Froitzheim dice tower in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, inv. no. 85.0269. I would like to thank Roland Cobbett for pointing this out to me. 42 Ashton, History of Gambling in England, 15.

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The report suggests that different areas of the board were prone to certain outcomes (for example, three-quarters of the board would favor a black square, whereas one-quarter would favor a white), in which case by knowing which area was which, to a certain degree the result of the cast could be predicted. As for Prestone, having been found guilty, his board was burned and he and his accomplice were punished with the pillory. Although referenced in contemporary sources, the Brenta game does not seem to have left a large imprint in visual culture. Apart from some occasional emblems including Brenta boards, one of the few known period depictions is in Matthias Gerung’s painting Die Melancholie im Garten des Lebens (Melancholy in the Garden of Love) from 1558 (detail, Figure 9.9). 43 Among the many small scenes of human activity surrounding the contemplative Melancholia is a group of four gentlemen playing a game of Brenta on a free-standing oblong board. One of them is just about to drop a die into the funnel while the others watch in anticipation. A purse on the board suggests stakes are involved. This illustrated Brenta game is a more prominent physical object than the much smaller Hainhofer board, but they share the vital elements of the game.

Dice Both cabinets include several sets of dice that were used not only for playing the board games, but which also functioned as games in their own right. The six sets in the Uppsala cabinet seem to cohere into a grander scheme representing variances in size, material, and function, as no set is similar to the other. Dice of ivory, silver, stone, and glass are engraved, painted, pitted, and gilded, with sizes ranging from fairly large (13 mm or .5 in.) to miniscule (3 mm or .125 in.). In addition, one set of bone dice is hollowed out with the secret compartment covered by a sliding face, which invites speculation as to its particular use. Especially interesting are the sets included in both cabinets, of the so-called “Singwürfeln” (singing dice) which sound like bells when cast. The Berlin cabinet contained two Singwürfel sets, the most ornate fabricated of silver gilt, with bordered faces and pips comprising flower petals in polychrome champlevé enamel. The second set is similar to that in Uppsala: it is made of silver with engraved pips, but is quite simple in execution (Figure 9.10). According to inventorial sources, the Singwürfeln may have been the favored type of dice to use with the Brentaspiel, which would have provided an entertaining musical note when playing the game.

43 Böttiger, Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala, 2: 43, fig. 72.

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Fig. 9.10  Singwürfel (singing dice), Uppsala

The Vexierkartenspiele Vexierkartenspiele, best translated as “jocular playing cards,” are strangely enough painted on the reverse of other decks of cards, and in Hainhofer’s case, French woodcut-printed decks from the sixteenth century. 44 They consist only of court cards that are either full-figured or what later came to be known as double-ended, that is, the top half of the figure was mirrored below. 45 The special feature of the Vexierkarten reversal is that the double-ended figure is not symmetrical and shifts depending on the orientation of the card as it is being held (Figure 9.11, the middle card being full-figured, surrounded by two double-ended cards). So by rotating the cards, the player can shift his or her hand in a more favorable fashion. In Hainhofer’s 44 If we compare the quality and the miniature painting style with those in his Stammbücher, or books of friendship, we see a close resemblance in technique and style to the cards; see Seibold, Hainhofers “Freunde.” Already in Friedrich Nicolai’s treatise on the cards in the Berlin cabinet from 1809, he attributed the cards to Anton Mozart or Johann Matthias Kager, who both frequently worked for Hainhofer; see Nicolai, “Noch einige Bemerkungen über Kartenspiele”; and Diefenthaler, “Vil zu speculiren und zu sehen,” 79. I am not convinced of this attribution, but the painters are surely to be found in the vicinity of Hainhofer’s circle. For a discussion on the artists active in Hainhofer’s Stammbücher, see Seibold, Hainhofers “Freunde,” 77–83. 45 The practice of double-ended court cards was developed for normal French-suited cards in the mid-eighteenth century. Also see Parlett, History of Card Games, 33.

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Fig. 9.11  Vexierkartenspiel, Uppsala

own descriptions and inventories, these ludic palimpsests are not addressed and he only refers to them as “Vexierkartenspiele” or “verkher carten.”46 An indication of his lack of interest in the original decks used is suggested by the fact that his Vexierkartenspiel in Berlin comprises cards from two different French decks, which naturally makes it unusable for the playing of most card games. In the Berlin deck, nine suits of characters have been identified: 1) Peasants; 2) Nobility; 3) Hunters and Prey; 4) Orientals with turbans or Indians with feathers; 5) Armed Men (soldiers) and Watchdogs; 6) Cooks and Cupbearers; 7) Musicians and Fools; 8) Skippers and Beggars; and 9) Comedians and Commedia dell’Arte Actors. 47 The Uppsala suits diverge somewhat from those in Berlin with added suits of flowers, birds, and infants, while excluding musicians, comedians, and dogs. Hainhofer himself later lists a set of these juxtaposed suits in a letter (written c. 1643) to Duke August the Younger, as “dogs and cats, priests and soldiers, cavaliers and ladies, doctors and fools, Turks and Moors, hunters and fishermen, cook and steward, barbers and scrubbers, peasants and their wives etc.”48 His late description fits neither the Berlin nor the Uppsala cabinet decks entirely, although it does make similar reference to 46 Lessing and Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 45–47. 47 After Mundt, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 256; and Lessing and Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, 45–47. 48 Gobiet, Der Briefwechsel, 844.

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their nine suits. We can conclude from this that the game is not entirely dependent on the iconographical content. There is another modified French-suited deck in the Uppsala cabinet but with sheet music hand-drawn on the reverse, so Hainhofer seems to have a preference to use the French cards for these modifications. 49

The Tourniquet (Roulette) In the uppermost section of the Uppsala cabinet there are two shelf-like drawers, fitted side by side, that slide out to reveal two game boards each; thus, the entire “drawer” may be pulled out and placed upon a table or other surface for playing the game. On the left, the game board depicts the Game of the Goose and the Kronbrautspiel; however, the adjacent board is configured with two games of a more uncertain implementation. The first is something similar to a roulette game (Figure 9.12).50 Visually the synthesis of a compass rose and a watch face, the central circular border is marked “1” to “12” with sequenced roman numerals and with rhomboid points indicating half steps. The bronze-gilt spinner is arrow-shaped, and the four corner cartouches depict cherries, olives, acorns, and sugar peas. It is not known what function these cartouches had, and they are seemingly unique for this particular game.51 Keep in mind that the 1620s is early for this type of gambling game and an archetype is not yet established. Many seventeenth-century roulettes were on the other hand closely related to dice or card games with much of their imagery taken from these prototypes,52 but the term “roulette” was not the contemporary name for the game.53 With its French origin, the word in reference to the game was not documented in use in France until 1716, which correlates well with the fact that Hainhofer never used the word either.54 In the 1680 edition of the Dictionnaire françois, “roulette” has no ludic meaning at all—but the game is well described under the entry “Tourniquet.”55 This is also the name associated with it 49 The Peter Flötner deck (c. 1540) has similar musical notation, albeit with German-suited cards; see Hoffmann, Altdeutsche Spielkarten 1500–1650, 185, cat. 56, ill. 96–103; and Husband, World in Play, 102–25. 50 Now included in the Jocari games database: “Uppsala, Philipp Hainhofer’s Art cabinet,” www.jocari. be/proddetail.php/?prod=je60a_roulette1626Uppsala (accessed 20 September 2017). 51 However, an unusual set of playing cards from 1583 in the Bavarian National Museum have similar corner cartouches with the four German suit markers; see Himmelheber, Spiele: Gesellschaftsspiele aus einem Jahrtausend, 146–47, cat. 352. 52 See, for example, ibid., 156–57. 53 For the following argument, I would like to thank Dr. Catherine Breyer of Belgium. For further details, see “Jeu de la Roulette,” www.jocari.be/proddetail.php/?prod=51_roulette (accessed 20 September 2017). 54 Lhôte, Dictionnaire des jeux de société. 55 “Tourniquet, s.m. C’est un ouvrage de tabletier qui est d’ordinaire de bois, de forme ronde, ou quarrée autour duquel sont marquez divers nombres en chiffre & au milieu duquel il y a un piton de fer avec une

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Fig. 9.12  Tourniquet (roulette), Uppsala.

in Larmessin’s print (see Figure 9.8). The board depicted by Larmessin lacks the corner cartouches, and the circle circumscribes another type of game plan, but the sequential numerals divided by points are there.

A Peculiar Game Accompanying the Tourniquet in the Uppsala cabinet is a game that is unknown from any other sources, and to which there are no references to either name or rules in Hainhofer’s writings (Figure 9.13). We therefore have to speculate on how the game was played. The iconography of the central image would determine the nature of the game: if a player falls into the central boiling pot, he or she is lost, and the winner is the last survivor. The center is circumscribed by three hexagonal red tracks connected by six radiants, and each intersection is adorned with themed icons on hunting, music, children, etc. In later games of somewhat similar visual design from the nineteenth éguille de même métal qu’on fait tourner quand on jouë & qui selon l’endroit du tourniquet où elle s’arrête, fait le bon, ou le mauvais destin de ce jeu”; in Richelet, Dictionnaire françois, 2: 468.

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Fig. 9.13 Unknown game, Uppsala

century, each player circulates on the outer track according to the throw of dice until some “accident” happens (for example, by landing on an unfavorable space) forcing the player to move to the track closer to the center. The same thing happens on each track until the player falls into the center. One might suppose the outermost points are the individual starting points for each player and the iconography of the starting space may be linked to a particular set of (un)favorable points for that player. An alternative game mechanic would be something similar to nine men’s morris, with its inscribed polygons joined by radial lines. However, the actual rules and mechanics of the game can only be conjectured and the game board is yet to be understood.

Analysis Hainhofer’s two cabinets were completed about fifteen years apart, during a period of much political turbulence in central Europe. Still, he kept the distribution of games relatively consistent between the two sets. All the different types are there: games of chance (e.g., dice, Game of the Goose, Brentaspiel, Tourniquet); games of

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skill (e.g., chess, merels, Tafelspiel); and the combination thereof, referred to as “tactical games of luck” (e.g., tric-trac, Kronbrautspiel, Vexierkartenspiel). As such, the cabinets include devices for every type of competence: good fortune, dexterous ability, and/or tactical shrewdness. The influence of time and politics is rather to be seen in the materials used themselves. In general, there is a difference in quality between the Berlin and Uppsala cabinets, both in terms of material and scale, as well as in attention to detail. For example, the Berlin cabinet was covered in applied silverwork whereas the Uppsala cabinet was not. This may be somewhat due to contextual discrepancies, as the Berlin cabinet was commissioned by Duke Philip II, who provided Hainhofer with a certain financial security for the project. Further, this cabinet was made prior to the soon emerging Thirty Years War that came to affect both demand and supply of materials, such as silver.56 The most telling example of the difference between the games housed in the cabinets is in the two Kronbrautspiele (see Figure 9.5). Although made by different artisans using completely different techniques, they basically have the same outline and size, and we can presume that Hainhofer saw no reason to modify those properties when he had the second game fabricated for the Uppsala cabinet. Either the two games were well-constructed and suitable for game play, or neither game was even actually intended for that purpose, in which case there would be no reason to change the design. Nor does the correspondence between Hainhofer and Duke Philip II’s heirs after his death provide any indication of whether the game was played. This leads us to question whether Hainhofer would have gained knowledge of any potential design flaws in the game layout even if they had existed. That issue notwithstanding, the main differences between the two games are to be seen in the materials that were used. In the Berlin cabinet, the design is conveyed through engraved silver inlaid into an ebony veneer, like much of the other decor of the cabinet. In Uppsala, however, the imagery is painted with oil and varnish on paper, which in turn was applied to a board that slides into the top section of the cabinet. Setting aside aesthetic properties and artistic modes of expression, the two game boards differ substantially in economic expenditure as well. These variances again remind us of the differences in the circumstances that led to their fabrication, with one commissioned and the other made in the hopes of procuring a buyer. Both cabinets also contain a Game of the Goose, each exhibiting the same method of transformation, that is, inlaid silver engravings versus oil paint on paper (see Figures 9.3 and 9.4), again of note in terms of their commissioning context. However, the Berlin design is completely subjected to an overall decorative scheme for the board, based on a central standing rhomboid surrounded by spandrel ovals. The second half of the board shows a similar setup for a draughts board, providing a visual coherence 56 See Boström, Det underbara skåpet, 27.

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between the two sides. The goose track is therefore angular instead of circular, and circumscribes a central figure of Fortuna instead of a scene of geese and a herder in a landscape.57 The use of oil paint in the Uppsala board allows for a much more freely executed image, with a clockwise oval-arcaded track. The smaller ovals of the two halves in Berlin are used jointly for a “tower game” (similar to a Kronbrautspiel). There is not much written evidence on the actual playing of the Hainhofer games; rather they are mentioned in lists and inventories and in his own descriptions. August the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1579–1666), with whom Hainhofer corresponded for well over thirty years, was an avid chess enthusiast (also publishing texts on the subject under the pseudonym Gustavus Selenus).58 Their correspondence concerns a lot of games but rarely touches upon the mechanics of actual play. There are, however, other sources that provide information on the personal gaming habits of Hainhofer himself. In the 1617 travelogue of his trip to Saxony and Pomerania during which time he delivered the Pommersche Kunstschrank to Duke Philip II, he mentions a game of Brenta he had played in early September, in which he won some silver-embellished crockery.59 Four days later, he and his companions played a Game of the Goose with three dice after dinner; the travelogue also mentions game sessions on nine further occasions during that month, all but one initiated after dinner.60 Apparently, a suitable time for social gaming was in the evenings, following a meal.

Conclusions So what can be said about Hainhofer’s taste in games? The distribution and game types were consistent in both the Berlin and Uppsala cabinets, even considering the different contexts in which they were made and the fact that they were constructed fifteen years apart. That suggests that the configuration of these cabinets was at Hainhofer’s own discretion rather than dictated by a patron. Hainhofer himself seems to have decided which games were important and the manner in which they should be presented, and he also determined how they benefited the Kunstschrank as a whole. To some extent, we might further ascribe to him a driving ambition to 57 Compare this with the carved game by Michael Holzbecher made for Archduke Karl of Austria, dated 1598, in which all geese are replaced by the symbol of Fortuna; see Seville, Royal Game of the Goose, 15. 58 Selenus, Das Schach oder König Spiel. 59 Hainhofer, Philipp Hainhofers Reise-Tagebuch […] 1617, 36. 60 Ibid., 49; and Zollinger, “Zwei unbekannte Regeln zum Gänsespiel,” 68. The types of games played varied from dice games (such as passadieri), Brentagame, Game of the Goose, cards, etc., to more vaguely defined games, such as Ungetreuen Nachbarn (Unfaithful Neighbors). See Hainhofer, Philipp Hainhofers Reise-Tagebuch […] 1617, 36, 49, 64, 71, 73, 84, 100–2.

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promote certain games that were apparently not part of a period canon or taste. The Kronbrautspiel and the Vexierkartenspiel are rarely seen outside of Hainhofer’s cabinets at all, and the Tourniquet and the unknown game in Uppsala (Figure 9.13) are unique. Hainhofer’s acquired taste for unusual games did not necessarily mean that people played them, even though they played the more ordinary games in his cabinets. Ultimately, these ludic devices became objects of display rather than of play, just like many of the collections of scientific and exotic objects that were similarly assembled for the princely Kunstkammern.61

Bibliography Primary Sources Hainhofer, Philipp. Des Augsburger Patriciers Philipp Hainhofer Beziehungen zum Herzog Philipp II. von Pommern-Stettin: Correspondenzen aus den Jahren 1610–1619: im Auszuge mitgetheilt und commentiert, ed. Oscar Doering. Vienna: C. Graeser, 1894. ———. Philipp Hainhofers Reise-Tagebuch, enthaltend Schilderungen aus Franken, Sachsen, der Mark Brandenburg und Pommern im Jahr 1617, ed. Friedrich Ludwig von Medem. Stettin: F. Hessenland, 1834. Richelet, César-Pierre. Dictionnaire françois, contenant les mots et les choses, plusieurs nouvelles remarques sur la langue françoise. Geneva: Jean Herman Widerhold, 1680. Selenus, Gustavus [Duke August II of Braunschweig-Lüneburg]. Das Schach oder König Spiel: in vier unterschiedene Bücher mit besonderm fleiß gründ und ordentlich abgefasset Auch mit dienlichen Kupfer Stichen gezieret; Diesem ist zu ende angefüget ein sehr altes Spiel genandt Rythmo Machia. Leipzig, 1616. Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Secondary Sources Anderson, Robert R., Ulrich Goebel, Joachim Schildt, and Oskar Reichmann, eds. Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 12 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Ashton, John. The History of Gambling in England. London: Duckworth & Co., 1898; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. 61 I would like to thank Dr. Mikael Ahlund and Anna Hamberg at Uppsala University Collections, and Dr. Achim Stiegel at Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, for generously and enthusiastically sharing their collections with me. For assisting me through the many perils of early modern German urtexts, I am in gratitude to Jonas Richter in Göttingen. I would also like to thank Adrian Seville and the many participants of the Board Games Studies colloquium in Nuremberg 2016 for interesting discussions on early modern gaming practices.

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Bauer, Günther G., and Rolande Eibl. Alte Spielverbote, verbotene Spiele, 1564–1853: Katalog der Ausstellung im Schloss Klessheim vom 25. August–28. Oktober 1995. Salzburg: Institut für Spielforschung und Spielpädagogik, 1995. Bauer, Rotraud, and Herbert Haupt. Das Kunstkammerinventar Kaiser Rudolfs II., 1607–1611. Vienna: Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 1976. Boström, Hans-Olof. Det underbara skåpet: Philipp Hainhofer och Gustav II Adolfs konstskåp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001. ———. “Philipp Hainhofer als Vermittler von Luxusgütern zwischen Augsburg und Wolfenbüttel.” Augsburg in der Frühen Neuzeit, Beiträge zu einem Forschungsprogramm (1995): 140–57. Böttiger, John. Philipp Hainhofer und der Kunstschrank Gustav Adolfs in Upsala. 4 vols. Stockholm: Verlag der Lithographischen Anstalt des Generalstabs, 1909. Diefenthaler, Sandra-Kristin. “‘Vil zu speculiren und zu sehen’: ein Literaturbericht zum Pommerschen Kunstschrank.” In Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank, ed. Christof Trepesch and Christoph Emmendörffer, pp. 79–85. Berlin: Maximilianmuseum, 2014. Diemer, Dorothea, Peter Diemer, Lorenz Seelig, Peter Volk, and Brigitte Volk-Knütteland. Die Münchner Kunstkammer. 3 vols. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008. Diemer, Peter, and Willibald Sauerländer. Johann Baptist Fickler: das Inventar der Münchner herzoglichen Kunstkammer von 1598; Transkription der Inventarhandschrift cgm 2133. Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2004. Doering, Oscar. Des Augsburger Patriciers Philipp Hainhofer Reisen nach Innsbruck und Dresden. Vienna: C. Graeser, 1901. Endrei, Walter. Spiele und Unterhaltung im alten Europa. Hanau: Dausien, 1988. Gobiet, Ronald, ed. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Philipp Hainhofer und Herzog August d. J. von Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Forschungshefte 8 (Bayerischen Nationalmuseum). Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1984. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. 33 vols. Leipzig, 1854–1961. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. “Phillipp Hainhofer—Art Agent and Diplomatic Actor of the Early Modern Period,” www.hab.de/en/home/research/projects/philipphainhofer-art-agent-and-diplomatic-actor-of-the-early-modern-period.html (accessed 18 August 2017). Himmelheber, Georg. Spiele: Gesellschaftsspiele aus einem Jahrtausend. Catalogue of the Bavarian National Museum 14. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1972. Hinterkeuser, Guido. “Der Pommersche Kunstschrank in Berlin: die Stationen bis zum Untergang.” In Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank, ed. Christof Trepesch and Christoph Emmendörffer, pp. 59–73. Berlin: Maximilianmuseum, 2014. Hoffmann, Detlef. Altdeutsche Spielkarten 1500–1650: Katalog der Holzschnittkarten mit deutschen Farben aus dem Deutschen Spielkarten-Museum Leinfelden-Echterdingen und dem Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg. Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 1993.

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Husband, Timothy. The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015. Jocari database, www.jocari.be (accessed 20 September 2017). Lessing, Julius, and Adolph Brüning. Der Pommersche Kunstschrank. Berlin: Kommissionsverlag bei Ernst Wasmuth A.-G., 1905. Lhôte, Jean-Marie. Dictionnaire des jeux de société. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Meadow, Mark A. “Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, pp. 182-200. New York: Routledge, 2001. Meier, Frank. “Der Teufel schuf das Würfelspiel […] Brett- und Glückspiele im Mittelalter.” In Glück-Zufall-Vorsehung: Vortragsreihe der Abteilung Mediävistik des Instituts für Literaturwissenschaft im Sommersemester 2008, ed. Burkhardt Krause, pp. 77–101. Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing, 2010. ———. Von allerley Spil und Kurzweyl: Spiel und Spielzeug in der Geschichte. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2006. Mundt, Barbara. Der Pommersche Kunstschrank des Augsburger Unternehmers Philipp Hainhofer für den gelehrten Herzog Philipp II. von Pommern. Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2009. Murray, Harold James Ruthven. A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. ———. A History of Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913; Northampton, MA: Benjamin Press, 1986. Nicolai, Friedrich. “Noch einige Bemerkungen über Kartenspiele.” Neue Berlinische Monatschrift 21 (1809): 257–71. Parlett, David. A History of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Seibold, Gerhard. Hainhofers “Freunde”: das geschäftliche und private Beziehungsnetzwerk eines Augsburger Kunsthändlers und politischen Agenten in der Zeit vom Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausgang des Dreissigjährigen Krieges im Spiegel seiner Stammbücher. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014. Seville, Adrian. The Royal Game of the Goose: 400 Years of Printed Board Games. New York: Grolier Club, 2016. ———. “The Sociable Game of the Goose” (from the Proceedings of Board Game Studies Colloquium XI, 23–26 April 2008, Lisbon, pp. 1000–14). Giochi dell’Oca e di percorso, ed. Luigi Ciompi and Adrian Seville, editors’ website, www.giochidelloca.it/storia/lisbona. pdf (accessed 2 July 2017). Stetten, Paul von. Lebensbeschreibung zur Erweckung und Unterhaltung bürgerlicher Tugend. Augsburg, 1778. Trepesch, Christof, and Christoph Emmendörffer, eds. Wunderwelt: der Pommersche Kunstschrank. Berlin: Maximilianmuseum, 2014.

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Zollinger, Manfred. Geschichte des Glücksspiels: vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vienna: Böhlau, 1997. ———. “Infam und lukrativ: Das Glückspiel in der frühen Neuzeit.” In Spiel! Kurzweil in Renaissance und Barock, ed. Sabine Haag, pp. 19–25. Vienna: Ausstellungskatalog des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, 2016. ———. “Nundinae ludentes. Bemerkungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Ökonomie, Emotion und Glücksspiel auf Messen, Jahrmärkten und Kirchweihfesten vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert.” Ludica 11 (2005): 132–50. ———. ed. Random Riches: Gambling Past and Present. New York: Routledge, 2016. ———. “Zwei unbekannte Regeln zum Gänsespiel: Ulisse Aldrovandi und Herzog August II. von Braunschweig-Lüneburg.” Board Games Studies 6 (2003): 61–84.

About the author Greger Sundin is a PhD candidate at the Department of Art History at Uppsala University, Sweden, after previously serving as curator for old master paintings and applied arts at Uppsala Auktionskammare for fourteen years. His forthcoming doctoral thesis is entitled “A Matter of Amusement: The Material Culture of Games and Pastimes in European Princely Collections 1550–1750.”

Index References to illustrations are in italics. addiction to games and gambling: 59, 141, 149–50, 153 Adolphus, Gustavus, king of Sweden: 249, 250 n. 8; 254 agōn: 23 Agrippa, Cornelius: 146 Alberti, Leon Battista, De re aedificatoria: 33 alea in reference to games of chance: 23 see also dice Alfonso X, king of Spain, Libro de los juegos: 19 Anne of Austria, queen of France: 93–94, 104–5, 110 architecture palaces designed with game playing areas: 33–34, 52, 222–25, 224 and n. 17 game imagery as decoration: 34 and nn. 88–89; 39, 61, 231, 236–44, 232, 241 see also games (spaces for play and display of); gardens; tennis courts art illustrating game theme: 19, 25 and n. 40; 26 and nn. 43, 47; 27, 30 and n. 65; 31–33, 34 and nn. 88–89; 35, 37, 38–39, 40 and n. 112; 41, 42, 46 and n. 148; 47, 52 and nn. 189–90; 53, 54 and n. 202; 55 and n. 211; 56, 57–58, 75, 76, 77, 78–79, 80–82; 83 and n. 33; 84 and n. 37; 85, 86 and n. 45; 87 and n. 47; 88 and n. 55; 89, 158 n. 4; 238, 261–62, 263, 269 see also Bruegel; Campi; Caravaggio; della Bella; Mitelli art cabinets for housing games: 35, 62, 249, 250 and n. 8; 251, 252–53, 254–257, 258, 260, 265, 267–273 audience for games: 36, 40 and n. 113; 42, 44, 47, 52 and n. 190; 57–58, 60–61, 86 and n. 45; 87 and n. 47; 93–94, 105, 112–13, 151, 158–59, 166, 168, 203–5, 210, 212–15, 228 n. 32; 233 see also spectators Augsburg: 62, 249–51, 254 August II, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg see Gustavus Selenus backgammon: 18–19, 27, 31, 33, 36–37, 41, 42, 50, 53, 55, 150 n. 35; 255 see also tric-trac ball games (general): 30 and n. 63; 31–34, 37, 45, 47–49, 56 n. 216; 208, 221, 225, 229, 231, 233, 244 see also calcio; jeu de paume; tennis Bardi, Giovanni de’: 30, 49 and n. 166 see also literature Bargagli, Girolamo: 29, 36 n. 100; 37, 50, 110, 161–62 see also literature

barley-break: 60, 185, 192 and n. 20; 193 and n. 24; 195–98 see also prisoner’s base bearbaiting: 54, 59, 128 and n. 20; 208 Bernardino of Siena: 54, 142 board games (general): 18, 22, 27–29, 47–48, 52, 58, 249, 251, 256, 258, 261, 265 Bologna: 157–58, 161, 164, 166 n. 32; 167–68, 171 bowling: 31, 34, 53, 56, 61, 208, 222, 224 and n. 17; 232–33, 263 Bowling Green(s): 224, 225, 229, 231, 233 Brentaspiel (Brenta game): 254, 263–65, 270, 272 and n. 60 Brome, Richard: 60, 184 see also plays Bruegel, Pieter: 31, 32, 55, 88 n. 52 Burgkmair, Hans: 235, 237, 238 and n. 78; 240 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy: 53 and n. 200; 54 cache (Scottish term for tennis): 223 cachepell: 223 Caillois, Roger: 20 n. 11; 22–24, 39 n.108 calcio: 30, 32, 34, 36, 46–47, 49 and n.166; 50 Calvin, John: 56 and n. 216 Calvinists: 56, 144 Campi, Giulio, Partita a scacchi (The Game of Chess): 57–58, 75, 76, 77–89 Caravaggio: 30, 39–40 card games: Hoc: 107–8 Karnöffel: 26 Le Flux: 225 n. 24 Piquet: 21 n. 20; 111 primero: 26 and n. 46; 40, 42, 50 tarot: 26, 240 n. 91; 243 n. 101 trionfi: 229, 236, 240, 244 tarocchi: 26, 227 trappola: 26 see also playing cards card playing and players: 33, 34 and nn. 88–89; 40, 46, 140–41, 225, 24 see also cardsharps Cardano, Girolamo: 21, 27, 44, 47–48, 53–55 see also literature cardinals (papal officials): 34, 49, 55 n. 211; 94 and n. 5; 107, 168, 234 n. 54; 244 n. 100 cards see playing cards cardsharps: 40 and nn. 113–14 Carnival: 21, 32, 44, 51 and n. 184; 121 n. 7; 165, 170, 175–76, 240 Carracci, Annibale: 158, 163, 166 Cartes des rois de France see Game of French Kings

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Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries

Castiglione, Baldassare, Il cortegiano: 17–18, 25, 29, 39, 41 n. 122; 161, 233 Cessolis, Jacobus de, Liber de moribus hominum et de officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo schachorum: 25 and n. 38; 43, 77 n. 4; 83 n. 30; 84 n. 39 chance (Chance): 19, 21–22, 23 and n. 29; 27, 29, 32, 53–54, 56, 123–24, 128 n.19; 130, 139–41, 143–44, 146–49, 153–54, 163, 167, 172, 176, 231, 249 see also dice; gambling and gamblers; games (games of chance) Charles, prince, son of King James I: 61, 203–4, 206, 214 n. 42; 216 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: 43, 49, 51, 96, 239 n. 85 cheats and cheating: 17, 37, 39 and n. 108; 40, 51 n. 187; 53, 141, 263, 264 and n. 40 as subject of painting: 39–40 and nn. 112–13 in literary works: 26, 39, 40 nn. 114–15; 46, 53, 59, 132, 141, 151–52 see also cons; dupes; gamesters; women checkers: 18, 256 see also draughts chess: 17, 18 and n. 2; 19, 21 n. 16; 22–27; 31–37, 40 n. 113; 41 n. 122; 43, 45 and n. 144; 46, 47 and n. 157; 48 and nn. 164–65; 49–50, 53 and n. 196; 55, 56, 57–58, 61, 75–89, 146, 211, 225, 228 n. 32; 254–56, 271–72 as allegory for love and seduction: 25 and n. 40; 58, 77–82, 88 bishop chess piece: 43, 82, 84 and n. 38; 85, 86 and n. 46; 87 see also fools “chess moralities”: 25, 77 and n. 4 see also Cessolis in imagery: 25–26, 34 n. 88; 35, 47, 57–58, 75, 76, 77, 78–79, 80–89 in literature: 17–18, 21 n. 16; 25–26, 33 n. 83; 36, 41 n. 122; 43, 46, 48–49, 53 and n. 196; 80–82, 83 n. 30; 84–85, 87–88, 146, 211, 228 n. 32 see also poetry knight chess piece: 43, 48, 85–86 “living chess”: 40, 43 and n. 129; 58, 87 “mad chess”: 58, 82–89 negative associations of: 18 n. 2; 53, 55 n. 210 queen chess piece: 43, 82 and n. 30; 85–86, 88 and nn. 53–55 see also women Clark, Stuart: 141–42 Cockaigne: 165, 173, 174–75 commedia dell’arte: 28, 36 and n. 100; 37, 40, 80, 164, 267 see also theater connoisseurship: 112–13, 254 Conrart, Valentin: 94, 105 cons: 39–40, 120, 125–27, 131–32, 136 see also cheats and cheating; dupes; gamesters; women Cortesi, Paolo, De cardinalatu: 34

Cotton, Charles: 39 and n. 109; 142 Counter-Reformation: 60, 157–58, 165, 167–68, 172–73 see also Calvinists; Protestants courtesans: 40, 45, 59, 79 n. 10; 143 see also prostitutes courtiers and game play: 17–18, 30, 39, 49, 61, 225, 233, 237, 242 and n. 98; 243 Croce, Giulio Cesare: 164–67, 171, 174–75 Cusano, Nicolò (Nicolaus Cusanus): 235 and n. 63; 243 n. 100 see also literature death (Death) as “emasculating force”: 122 in game imagery: 30, 55 as game topos: 30, 38 (morte), 46, 55 and n. 211; 122–28, 130, 132, 158 n. 4, 197, 199–200 as “odds-leveler”: 59, 123, 125, 135 deceit (Deceit): 40, 59, 61, 131, 149, 151, 153, 204, 206, 208–9, 211–14, 231 della Bella, Stefano: 36 n. 96; 58, 94, 96–104, 107–9, 111–13 see also Game of French Kings; Game of Geography; Game of Fables; Game of Famous Queens demonic possession and gambling: 59, 140–47, 148 and nn. 31–32; 149–50, 153–54 see also demonology; occult demonology: 140–43 Desmarets, Jean: 58, 93–113 devil (Devil): 54 and n. 205; 55 and n. 210; 56, 59, 61, 139, 141–42, 148 and n. 31; 149 and n. 33; 150, 153–54, 204, 208–9, 211–15, 226–27, 231 and n. 43; 232, 242 dice: 17 and n. 1; 18–19, 23–24, 27–29, 31 and n. 72; 32, 33 n. 80; 37, 39, 40 n. 112; 41, 43 n. 131; 45, 48 and n. 164; 49, 53, 54 and n. 206; 56 n. 216; 58–60, 106, 124, 128 n. 19; 131–32, 139–47, 149–54, 160, 163–65, 167–69, 171–74, 176, 209, 228 n. 32; 249, 258, 263, 264 and n. 40; 265, 266, 268, 270, 272 alea (Latin term for): 23 dice tower: 264 dicers: 125, 127, 149, 152 hazard (name of dice game): 27, 128 n. 19 taxilli: 31 and n. 72 see also see hazard; Singwürfel divination connection to dice: 141, 145–46 in fortune-telling game: 29 see also magic; occult Divine Providence: 54, 56, 144–45 draughts: 256, 271 see also checkers Drayton, Michael, Poly-Olbion: 197 drinking and gambling: 120 n. 2

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and games: 32 and n. 77; 33, 51, 63 and n. 239; 151, 193, 258 in game imagery: 32–33, 35, 41, 166, 169 dupes: 40, 119–20, 131 n. 29; 132 see also cheats and cheating; cons; gamesters Dürer, Albrecht: 23, 238 n. 78; 240 dwarfs: 41 and n. 123; 57–58, 75, 76, 78, 83 and n. 31; 84 and n. 35; 85–89 see also fools; jesters emasculation: 119, 121–25, 129, 134–35 see also death; gender; women emperors, Holy Roman: 35 n. 93; 56 n. 214; 160 n. 8; 227, 240 see also Charles V England: 31–32, 36, 39, 43 and n. 129; 51, 57, 61, 139, 140 and n. 3; 184, 205–6, 221, 223, 228 n. 32; 263–64 Erasmus, Desiderius Colloquies: 44–45 Institutio principis cristiani: 95 and n. 9; 96 Este family: 34, 227, 234 n. 54 Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara: 20, 30, 34, 37 and n. 104; 50 Borso, duke of Ferrara: 238–40 Francesco: 35, 239 n. 85 Fink, Eugen: 23–24 Florence: 32, 33 n. 80; 34 and n. 88; 45, 50 Flötner, Peter: 35, 43, 235 and n. 62; 239 and n. 85; 268 n. 49 see also playing cards (luxury decks) folklore: 59, 158, 161, 165, 184, 192 fools: 26, 37, 41, 43, 53–54, 61, 83, 84 and n. 35; 85–87, 88 and n. 52; 132, 175 n. 54; 226–27, 240, 241, 242, 259, 263 bishop chess piece: 86–87 Das Narrenschiff (Sebastian Brant): 53 in imagery of playing cards: 226, 227, 242, 267 Narrenspil (Game of the Fool): 263 see also dwarfs; jesters fortune (Fortune): 20, 23, 28, 49, 54, 56 and n. 216; 60, 119, 130, 140, 151, 153, 157–58, 160, 167, 174, 176, 184, 189–90, 236, 271 Fortuna: 21 n. 16; 236, 272 and n. 57 fortune telling/tellers and games: 29 and n. 59; 40, 146 France: 19 n. 10; 30–31, 34 n. 87; 50–51, 57, 62, 83, 93–98, 105–6, 111, 205–6, 234, 237 n. 77; 263, 268 Francis I, king of France: 34, 42, 50, 225 and n. 24; 233, 234 and nn. 53–54 gambling and gamblers: 21–22, 27, 33, 44, 51, 53, 57, 139–54, 157, 160–61, 168, 170–72, 174, 176, 205, 209, 251, 268 adventure (as gambling term): 130, 131 and n. 28; 134 bets: 123, 126 and n. 17; 128, 130, 152, 225, 259, 260 n. 32

lots: 145–46 lotteries: 51 and n. 186 odds: 59, 119–25, 126 and n. 17; 127–28, 131, 135, 150 and n. 35 see also death stakes: 14, 26, 27 n. 50; 39, 57 n. 217; 59, 108, 119–23, 125–27, 128 and n. 19; 129–35, 137,144, 265 venture (as gambling term): 29 (ventura), 51, 128 n. 19; 251, 254 wagers: 51, 58–59, 121, 128–29 see also addiction; demonic possession; gamesters Game of the Baker (Giuseppe Maria Mitelli): 162, 163–67 Game of the Crowned Bride see Kronbrautspiel Game of Fables (Stefano della Bella): 94, 99, 100, 101–2, 107 Game of Famous Queens (Stefano della Bella): 58, 94, 101, 102–3, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110 Game of French Kings (Stefano della Bella): 58, 94, 96–97, 105, 107–8, 111–12 Game of Geography (Stefano della Bella): 58, 94, 97–99, 107–8 Game of Gluttony (Giuseppe Maria Mitelli): 166, 167–71 Game of the Goose: 27, 33, 35, 160, 254, 256–57, 258, 268, 270–72 Game of the New Cockaigne (Giuseppe Maria Mitelli): 173, 174–76 Game of Simona and Filippa (Giuseppe Maria Mitelli): 170, 171–74 Game of Skin the Owl (Antonio Brambilla): 28, 29, 36, 160 game objects chessboards: 19, 48 n. 165; 56, 83, 257 and n. 23; 262, 263 furniture and game boxes: 35–36, 50 see also art cabinets game boards: 28, 35 game paraphernalia: 18–19, 30, 32, 36, 41, 51 and n. 182; 205, 208–11, 215, 255–56, 262, 268 objets d’arts and collectors’ items: 35 and n. 94; 52, 55, 225, 251–56, 257 and n. 23; 258–73 see also playing cards (luxury decks) see also game prints; playing cards game prints for cards and board games: 24, 26, 28, 29 and n. 57; 36 and n. 96; 43, 47, 50, 51 and n. 182; 58–60, 93, 113, 157–58, 159 and nn. 5–6; 168–69, 172, 225, 237, 257 n. 23; 266 games see also main index for games listed by name as allegories: 25 and n. 40; 30, 43, 46, 48–49, 55 n. 210; 58, 61, 77, 79–80, 81 and n. 20; 82, 86 n. 44; 88, 190, 227, 236, 237 and n. 76; 240, 243 for assertions of identity: 50, 61, 96–97 class and courtly hierarchies reflected in: 26, 43, 44 and nn. 135–36; 50, 61, 120, 123, 128, 130, 132,

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Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries

136–37, 147–48, 164, 171 n. 44; 176, 185, 223, 224 n. 17; 226–27, 237 and n. 77; 267 classification of (typology): 19–23, 270–71 children’s games: 31, 19 n. 8; 20, 23, 31 and n. 71; 32, 34, 47 nn. 157, 159; 52, 60–61, 184 educational games: 19, 32 n. 74; 47 and nn. 157, 159; 48–49, 77, 93–108, 113, 227, 233, 237 n. 76; 244 games of chance: 23, 55 n. 212; 58–60, 62, 139–42, 150, 157, 270 games of skill: 23, 62, 255, 271 games of tactical luck: 271 outdoor games and sports see calcio; golf; prisoner’s base; tennis in main index parlor games see main index seasonal games: 19, 32 tavern games: 32–33 for commercial enterprise: 51 and n. 183; 93–94, 105–8, 110–12, 122 n. 11 and courtship: 60, 79, 184, 189 see also chess; love; sex in main index criticisms of: 18, 27, 52–57 see also religious views toward in diplomacy: 49, 62, 254–55, 227 economic benefits of: 51 and n. 186; 52 in emblematic literature: 53, 206, 208–9, 215–16 as entertainment: 36–37, 46, 47 and n. 153; 59, 151, 162, 222, 233, 243 see also theater in main index and ingenuity: 35–36 and law: 20, 22 n. 25; 23 n. 29; 33 n. 80; 43 n. 130; 50, 55 n. 212; 122–23, 132, 140, 143, 145, 148, 151–52, 206 as metaphors: 24, 27, 40–42, 45 and n. 144; 49, 54–55, 57, 59–61, 77 and n. 4; 83 n. 30; 124–25, 127, 141, 144, 193 n. 23; 205–6, 208–11, 213–15; 232, 237 see also allegories and music: 29, 35–36, 85, 142, 164, 166, 189, 211–12, 265, 267–68 and n. 49; 269 and philosophy: 48, 61, 231–32, 237 and n. 77; 243 and nn. 100–1 and physical and mental health: 20, 32 n. 74; 47, 150, 209 see also madness; melancholy in main index and play: 21–24, 119–33, 136 as political and religious commentaries: 42–43, 203–16 popularity of: 18, 41, 63, 140 and n. 4 in propaganda: 42–43 religious views toward: 43 n. 131; 48, 54–55, 57, 152, 158–59, 206, 208, 212, 214, 251 see also Calvinists; Counter-Reformation; Protestants in main index as rhetorical expression: 40–41 puns: 27, 29, 41, 59, 125, 149, 152, 189, 205, 259 in satire and parody: 41, 42, 59–60, 162, 166, 167–69, 170, 171–72, 173, 174–76 scholarship on: 20–24

social benefits of: 46–52 and social order: 43–44; 61, 120, 121 n. 7; 127, 132–35 spaces for play and display of: 32, 33 and n. 81; 34–35, 37, 159, 224 n. 17 see also architecture; Bowling Greens; gardens; Kunstkammern; taverns in main index gamesters: 37, 38, 39, 54–55, 59, 64, 119–20, 123, 126, 128, 132, 133 n. 33; 135, 141, 143–45, 152–53 see also cheats; cons; dupes; gambling and gamblers Gansspiel see Game of the Goose gardens as site for games: 33 and n. 83; 34 and nn. 83–84; 89; 223, 265 in game imagery and texts: 29, 46, 54, 80, 83, 86 n. 45 Garzoni, Tomaso, La piazza universale di tutte le professione del mondo: 37 gender in game play and gambling: 21, 24, 44 and n. 138; 45 and n. 143; 58–59, 105, 119–21, 124–25, 128, 130, 131 and n. 29; 158–60, 162, 165 n. 28; 171–75 see also emasculation; women Germany: 43 n. 128; 57, 98, 237 n. 77; 238, 256 Gerung, Matthias Die Melancholie im Garten des Lebens (Melancholy in the Garden of Love): 53–54, 264, 265 giochi di vegli: 29 see also parlor games gioco dell’oca see Game of the Goose gluttony: 158, 160–61, 165, 167–71, 174–75 relationship to gambling: 170 see also Game of Gluttony; hunger God: 43 n. 131; 52–53, 56 and n. 216; 95, 123, 145, 205–6, 232–33, 237, 239, 243 as game player: 55–56, 213 gods and goddesses: 99–100, 204, 208 n. 20; 235–37, 238 n. 78; 240 n. 90 golf: 31, 223 and nn. 10–11 colf: 31 and n. 73 grotesque (as asethetic): 80 n. 16; 167, 169, 170 and n. 40; 171 and n. 43; 175 Guicciardini, Luigi, “Compara[z]ione del giuoco delli scacchi alla arte militaire”: 48–49 Hainhofer, Philipp: 62, 249–51, 254–58, 263, 265–73 hazard as term in dice: 27, 128 n. 19 as term in gambling: 128 n. 19 as term in tennis: 205, 209 Henry VII, king of England: 32 n. 76; 205–6, 225 Henry VIII, king of England: 31, 34, 42, 49, 206 Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: 21, 22 and n. 25; 23, 40 n. 116; 46 n. 145; 48 n. 164 hunger: 60, 159, 163, 165–67, 169, 175 see also Game of the Baker; gluttony

281

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hunting as pastime: 60, 185, 221–22, 233–34 motifs in game imagery: 26, 226, 235, 269 idleness: 52, 53 n. 194; 61, 142, 151, 231, 233 see also sloth ingegno (wit): 21 n. 16; 29 Isabella of Spain: 82 n. 29; 103 Italy: 29, 34, 45, 57–58, 75, 81, 98, 166, 227, 238 and n. 79; 256 James I, king of England: 61, 120 n. 3; 203, 204 and n. 3; 206 and n. 14; 207, 216, 223 and nn. 12, 15; 224 n. 17; 228 n. 33; 239 Basilikon (Basilicon) Doron: 53 n. 196; 206 and n. 14 see also literature James IV, king of Scotland: 221–23, 224 and n. 17; 225 and nn. 22–23; 228 and n. 33; 239 James V, king of Scotland: 61, 221–22, 223 and n. 11; 224–25, 228, 234 and n. 53; 236–37, 239– 40, 244 James VI, king of Scotland see James I jesters: 26 and n. 45; 41 and n. 123; 54 and n. 203; 55, 57–58, 75, 78, 83, 84 and n. 35; 85–89 see also dwarfs; fools Jeu de la géographie see Game of Geography jeu de paume: 30, 206 see also tennis Jeu des fables see Game of Fables Jeu des reynes renommées see Game of Famous Queens Jonson, Ben: 60, 152 n. 43; 184–85 see also plays jousts and jousting: 48, 54, 222, 259 Kellsall, John, Testemony against Gaming, Musick, Danceing, Singing, and Swearing: 142 knucklebones (tali): 18, 19 n. 8; 31 n. 72; 44, 146 n. 21 Kronbrautspiel (Game of the Crowned Bride): 254, 258, 259, 260, 268, 271–73 Kunstkammern for housing games and exotica: 34–35, 62, 250–51, 254 and n. 13; 255, 273 wunderkammer: 171 Kunstschrank see art cabinets Kurzweil (pastimes, amusements): 251, 254 n. 13 Lambert, Florentin: 94 n. 10; 105 n. 36; 108–13 Le Comte, Florent: 94, 111–13 Le Gras, Henri: 107–8 leisure and games: 18, 21, 54, 161, 225, 237 see also pastimes literary academies: 29, 161 and n.14 literature period works on games and/or gambling: Book of Games (Francis Willughby): 20 n. 12; 21, 186, 188 (page from his text)

Book of Sports (James I): 43 and n. 130; 52–53 Cento giuochi liberali, et d’ingegno (Innocenzio Ringhieri): 29, 110, 161 The Complete Gamester (Charles Cotton): 39 and n. 109 Das Schach- oder König-spiel (Gustavus Selenus): 25, 36 n. 95 De ludo globi (Nicolò Cusano): 48 and n. 162; 61, 231–32, 233 n. 49; 243 and n. 100 Dialogo dei giuochi (Girolamo Bargagli): 110, 161 Discorso sopra ‘l giuoco del calcio Fiorentino (Giovanni de’ Bardi): 30, 49 and n. 166 I trattenimenti di Scipion Bargagli . . . (Scipione Bargagli): 162 Il Gonzaga secondo overo del giuoco (Torquato Tasso): 20 and n. 15; 21 n. 16; 47 and n. 153 Il Romeo overo del giuoco (Torquato Tasso): 20 and n. 15; 50, 83 n. 30 Le carte parlanti (Pietro Aretino): 27 Leathermore: or Advice concerning Gaming (Charles Cotton): 142–43 Liber de ludo aleae (Girolamo Cardano): 21, 27 and n. 51 Libro de la ventura (Lorenzo Spirito): 29 A Manifest Detection of the Most Vyle and Detestable Use of Dice Play (Gilbert Walker): 39 Remedio de jugadores (Pedro de Covarrubias): 47, 54 Trattato del giuoco della palla (Antonio Scaino): 30 and n. 63; 45 and n. 140; 47–48, 49 and n. 166; 233 see also plays; poetry Louis XIV, king of France: 49–50, 58, 93–99, 110–13 love as game topos: 25 and n. 40; 45–46, 54 and n. 202; 58–60, 77 and n. 4; 78–83; 88, 143–46, 161, 172, 194–99 as tennis term: 46, 213–14 see also games (courtship); sex Lucena, Luis Ramirez de: 25 n. 40; 45 n. 144 see also poetry luck: 21 n. 16; 23, 28, 37, 59, 123–25, 130, 143, 153, 236, 271 see also fortune, Fortuna Luther, Martin: 53–55 madness: 54, 57, 59–60, 75, 88 and n. 52; 125, 185, 193, 196–98 see also addiction; demonic possession; gambling and gamblers; melancholy; occult magic: 84, 88 n. 55; 134, 142–43, 146, 154, 211 see also occult marriage and games: 46, 50, 59, 76–80, 82 n. 26; 121 n. 8; 125–27, 130, 133, 136, 152, 173, 196–97 see also games (courtship); love masques (court) and games: 30, 37, 61, 203–4, 210–11, 213, 215

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Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries

Medici family: 34, 37, 50, 105, 108 Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France: 29 Cosimo I, duke of Florence: 34, 37 n. 104; 45, 49 Eleonora of Toledo, duchess of Florence: 45 and n. 142 Francesco I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany: 28 n. 55; 30, 49 melancholy and game play and gambling: 52–54, 264, 265 see also madness merels (mill): 19, 254–56, 271 see also nine men’s morris Middleton, Thomas: 30, 41 n. 121; 43 and n. 129; 59, 61 see also plays Mitelli, Giuseppe Maria: 38–39, 55, 59–60, 157–58, 159 and n. 5; 160–61, 163–76 see also Game of the Baker; Game of Gluttony; Game of Simona and Filippa; Game of the New Cockaigne Mortier, Pierre: 108–9 Murner, Thomas: 47, 55, 106 n. 42 nine men’s morris: 19, 31, 36, 255, 270 see also merels Noblet, Jean: 226, 240 n. 93 Northbrooke, John: 141, 145, 153 occult: 23, 54–56, 59, 139–44, 146, 150–53, 227 n. 27 see also demonic possession; fortune (Fortuna); magic Ovid: 99–102, 107 Metamorphoses: 99–102; 107 Paris: 34, 37, 106–8, 158, 159 n. 5; 227 n. 31; 239, 240 n. 93 parlor games: 22 and n. 24; 29, 32, 35–37, 44–46, 50, 59, 110, 157 n. 1; 161–63 see also literature; performance pastimes: 184–85, 235, 242 games as: 18–19, 22, 27, 53, 57, 75, 120, 161, 184, 192 and n. 20; 193, 208, 225, 228 n. 32; 236, 251 see also Kurzweil performance and games: 23, 36, 37, 50, 58, 93–94, 105, 152–53, 157 and n. 1; 159, 162–63, 174, 184–85, 191, 211–12 see also parlor games Philip II, duke of Pomerania: 250, 254–55, 271–72 Philip II, king of Spain: 49 playing cards: 19, 22, 24, 26–27, 29, 31–32, 35–37, 39, 41–42, 43 and n. 128; 44, 47, 49, 51, 54–58, 61, 93–95, 96–97, 98–99, 100, 101, 102–13, 225, 226, 227 and n. 31; 236–39, 251, 254, 256, 257 n. 23; 258, 266–67, 271, 273 in book format: 95 n. 10; 106 and n. 39; 107, 109, 111–12 didactic: 47, 48 and n. 60; 49, 96–113 Jeu d’armoires: 106

luxury decks: 19, 26 and n. 44; 35, 57, 61, 96–113, 225, 226, 227–28, 235–43, 257 and n. 23; 265–68 suits: 26, 35, 43, 107, 111, 226–27, 237 n. 77; 256–58, 267, 268 and n. 51 Tarocchi del Mantegna: 226, 227 and n. 28; 236, 237 nn. 76–77; 238 and nn. 78–79, 82; 239 and n. 84; 242, 243 n. 100 tarot (tarocchi): 26, 227 and nn. 27, 31–32; 228 n. 32; 236, 237 n. 76; 240 and nn. 91, 93; 242 Trionfi: 61, 226, 227 and n. 27; 229, 236, 239, 240 and n. 91; 242–43 Vexierkartenspiel (jocular playing cards): 257 n. 23; 266, 267, 271, 273 Visconti-Sforza deck: 226, 227, 236, 242 see also card games plays incorporating games and/or gambling: The Antipodes (Richard Brome): 185, 192 n. 20 The Costlie Whore (anonymous): 143–46 The Court Beggar (Richard Brome): 193–94 Edward II (Christopher Marlowe): 189, 192, 200 Greenes Tu Quoquo, or the Cittie Gallant (John Cooke): 141 The Sad Shepherd (Ben Jonson): 192 The Spanish Curate (John Fletcher and Philip Massinger): 46 The Tragedy of Hoffman (Henry Chettle): 185–86, 194–200 The Wise-woman of Hogsden (Thomas Heywood): 152 and n. 43; 153 A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood): 41, 46 by Thomas Middleton: A Game at Chess: 43, 211 The Ghost of Lucrece: 209 No Wit, No Help like a Woman’s: 209 A Trick to Catch the Old One: 210 The World Tossed at Tennis (with William Rowley): 30, 203–16, 207 (title page) The Yorkshire Tragedy: 30, 146–50 by William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra: 121, 123–25, 135 Cymbeline: 190–91, 200 Hamlet: 121, 125–27, 196 Henry V: 42, 205–6, 208 King Richard III: 27 The Life of Timon of Athens: 119–20, 124 Love’s Labour’s Lost: 206 Measure for Measure: 123 The Merchant of Venice: 122–23 Merry Wives of Windsor: 26 The Taming of the Shrew: 121, 128–30 The Tempest: 26, 36 The Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher): 193 and n. 23; 196–98 The Winter’s Tale: 121, 130–35, 261 Twelfth Night: 128 Two Gentlemen of Verona: 187

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Index 

poetry about games Échecs amoureux (anonymous): 80 and n. 17; 83, 88 The Four Knaves (Samuel Rowlands): 41–42 Le Livre des échecs amoureux moralisés (Évrart de Conty): 80, 88 Repetición de amores y arte de axedres (Luis Ramirez de Lucena): 82 and nn. 27, 29 Scacchia ludus (Marco Girolamo Vida): 82 and nn. 26–27; 83 n. 30; 85 Scachs d’amor (anonymous): 81, 82, 85, 87–88 pope: 42–43, 51, 56, 227 possession see demonic possession prints see game prints prisoner’s base: 31, 60, 184–86, 187 (schematic of playing field), 188–200 alternate names for: 184–85, 190, 192–93, 195, 197, 200 mechanics of play: 184, 186–92, 197, 199–200 see also barley-break probability: 21 n. 20; 48, 123, 139–41 prohibitions against games: 32 n. 76; 33 n. 80; 43, 56, 148, 206, 208 see also Calvinists; Protestants prostitutes: 33 n. 81; 120, 158 see also courtesans Protestants: 43, 160 n. 8; 167–68 proverbs: 157, 159–60, 165 Providence see Divine Providence Prynne, William, Histrio-mastix: The Players Scourge: 151–52 quek: 264 quoits: 31, 33, 53–54 Rabelais, François, Gargantua and Pantagruel: 18, 62, 85 n. 42 Ringhieri, Innocenzio: 29, 46, 51, 110, 161 see also literature Rithmomachia: 48 and n. 164 roulette see Tourniquet scacchi alla rabiosa/arrabbiata see “mad chess” Scaino, Antonio: 30 and n. 63; 44 n. 136; 45 and n. 140; 47–48, 49 and n. 166; 50, 233 see also literature Scotland: 57 and n. 218; 61, 204 n. 3; 221–44 Selenus, Gustavus (August II, duke of BrunswickLüneburg): 25, 36 n. 95; 272 see also literature sex as game subtext: 25, 29, 33, 45, 46 n. 145; 77 and n. 4; 78–79, 80 and nn. 15, 17; 81 and n. 23; 103, 120, 124–25, 127, 129–31, 136, 192, 193 n. 23; 196, 209 see also games (courtship); love Shakespeare, William: 36, 41, 58–60 see also plays

Singwürfel (singing dice): 265, 266 see also dice skittles see bowling sloth (Sloth): 52, 53 n. 194; 61, 148, 171, 231, 235 see also idleness soldiers: 27 and nn. 51–52; 40, 48–49, 124, 166 n. 31; 191, 204, 211–12, 214–15, 235, 267 Spain: 19, 25, 31, 37, 43 n. 129, 49, 98 spectators: 32, 37, 47, 59, 87, 149, 152, 242 see also audience; games (as entertainment) speculum principis: 25, 95–96 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene: 190 sports: 22–23, 30, 36, 43, 47, 52, 54, 59, 128 n. 20; 184, 206, 231 see also ball games; calcio; tennis stage see theater Stirling Castle (Scotland): 222–23, 224, 225, 226 (schematic), 228, 230, 232, 234–35, 241, 243 Studley, David: 183–84, 18, 194 Suits, Bernard: 23 tables: 19, 43 n. 131; 54, 139–40, 142, 228 n. 32; 264 see also backgammon; tric-trac Tafelspiel: 254, 260–61, 263, 271 tali see knucklebones Tasso, Torquato: 20 and n. 15; 45 n. 143; 47 and n. 153; 50 see also literature taverns as setting for games and gambling: 32–33, 159 reputation for drunkenness and sexual encounters: 33 tennis: 22, 30 and n. 63; 31 and n. 72; 32 n. 74; 34 n. 87; 37 n. 104; 42, 43 n. 131; 44 n. 136; 46, 48, 61–62, 63 n. 221; 233 in art and literature: 30, 37, 52, 146, 203–16 beneficial qualities of: 31, 49 and n. 166; 51–52, 233 French origins of: 205–6 as futile undertaking: 53 in diplomacy: 37, 49 as metaphor: 40–41, 61, 205–11, 213–15 in rhetoric: 40–41, 210, 212–13 royal game: 30, 31, 44, 205–6, 223, 232 sexual allusions to: 41, 209 tennis players: 37, 45, 53, 62, 206 terminology: 46, 205–6, 209–10, 212–14 see also jeu de paume; literature tennis courts: 209 benefits for construction industry: 52 conversion to theaters: 37, 61 for nobility: 33–34, 44 n. 135; 222, 223 and n. 15 for public: 34 see also cachepelle theater(s): 57, 59, 161 n. 14; 167, 204, 214 connection to games: 23, 36–37, 40, 59, 140, 151, 153, 158, 185, 208, 210 negative connotations of: 40–41, 43 n. 131; 59, 141, 147, 151–52

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Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries

Swan Theatre (London): 203, 205, 215 tennis courts converted to: 37 and n. 103; 61 see also masques; performance; plays theatricality: 40,152–53 Thirty Years War: 48 n. 164; 58, 61, 98, 160 n. 8; 166 n. 31; 204, 216, 251, 254, 271 Tourniquet (roulette): 268 and n. 55; 269, 270, 273 tric-trac: 19, 254–56, 271 see also backgammon; tables triumphs: 238, 239 and n. 85; 240 and n. 91; 242–43 and playing card imagery: 239–43 Trou Madame: 261, 262, 263 see also Tafelspiel Turmspiel (tower game): 256, 260 Venice: 33, 45, 47, 51 n. 184 Vexierkartenspiel see playing cards Vives, Juan Luis, Dialogos: 20 and n.14; 31 and n. 72; 39 n. 109; 44 n. 138; 47 n. 159 war/battle and games: 41, 44 and n. 38; 45 n. 144; 48 and n. 164; 49 and n. 166; 60, 77 and n. 4; 83 n. 30; 98,

123–24, 159, 166 n. 31; 184, 189, 191, 205, 207, 214, 216, 234 see also Guicciardini; Thirty Years War Willughby, Francis: 21, 186 see also literature witchcraft: 55, 59, 142 women in games and gambling:34 nn. 88–89; 37, 40, 44 and n. 138; 45 and nn. 143–44; 46, 58–60, 75, 76, 77 and n. 4; 78–79, 80–82, 83 and n. 30; 84–86, 87 and n. 47; 88–90, 94, 120–35, 142,157 n. 1; 158–60; 162; 171–75, 261 challenging patriarchal authority: 44, 45 and n. 144; 59, 82, 83 n. 30; 85,127, 157 n. 1; 175 implications for reputations: 45–46, 60, 77, 128, 142 portrayed as cheats: 40, 132 reinforcement of sexual mores: 45–46, 58, 60, 158–59, 171–73 see also games (courtship); gender; love “world upside down”: 41, 60, 157–58, 160, 165, 174, 175 and n. 54; 176 zero-sum game: 121