Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England 9789048553525

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Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England

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 Theatre in Shakespeare’s England

Edited by Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Max Bloom and Flagg Miller Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 325 1 e-isbn 978 90 4855 352 5 doi 10.5117/9789463723251 nur 685 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 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.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 7 List of Abbreviations

9

Introduction 11 Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin

Part I 1. The Player’s Game

41

2. “The Madnes of Tenys” and the Commercialization of Pastimes in Early Tudor London

69

3. The Roll of the Dice and the Whims of Fate in SixteenthCenturyMorality Drama

89

The Activity of the Player in Early Modern Drama Stephen Purcell

David Kathman

Katherine Steele Brokaw

4. “The games afoote”

Playing, Preying and Projecting in Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar Heather Hirschfeld

115

Part II 5. Playing with Paradoxes in Troilus and Cressida 139 Patricia Badir

6. Bowling Alone, or The Whole Point of No Return

159

7. Playing (in) the Streets

179

Paul Menzer

Games and Adaptation in The Merchant of Venice Marissa Greenberg

Part III 8. The Moods of Gamification in The Tempest 203 Ellen MacKay

9. Videogames and Hamlet 229 Experiencing Tragic Choice and Consequences Rebecca Bushnell

10. Shakespeare Videogames, Adaptation/Appropriation, and Collaborative Reception

255

11. Shakespeare, Game, and Play in Digital Pedagogical Shakespeare Games

275

Epilogue: Field of Play

303

Geoffrey Way

Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho

Gamifying Early Modern Theatre and Performance Studies Natasha Korda

Index 317

Acknowledgments If playing is a shared experience that strengthens social bonds, then this collection exemplifies the warm affective relations that flourish in the wake of such collaboration. In addition to our wonderful contributors, whose enthusiasm for the project has been matched only by their patience, a number of friends and colleagues deserve special thanks for their part in seeing this undertaking through to fruition. The three of us first discussed embarking on this joint venture at a 2014 Renaissance Society of America panel on games and theatre. Although the present volume contains no material from that session, we extend our appreciation to Henry S. Turner for so ably chairing it and to our audience for their generous questions. Numerous colleagues offered much-needed advice, comment, or encouragement along the way, and we are particularly beholden to: Fran Dolan, Peter Eckersall, Murray Edmond, Jean Graham-Jones, Kenneth Gross, Donald Hedrick, Pedro Ilgenfritz, Katherine Hunt, Kathleen Lynch, Colin Milburn, Richard Preiss, Adam Smyth, Evelyn Tribble, William N. West, Owen Williams, and Adam Zucker. We are much obliged to the American Society for Theatre Research for awarding us a 2020 Research Fellowship. Heartfelt thanks also go to Erika’s research assistants Casey Berner, Esther Neff, Philip Wiles, and especially Jennie Youssef for their work editing and compiling the manuscript as well as to Max Bloom and Flagg Miller for their help with the cover image. This volume would never have seen the light of day without the initial interest and ongoing dedication of our amazing editor Erika Gaffney. For keeping faith with this project, we are much indebted to her, to the series editors, and to the entire team at Amsterdam University Press. A special word of acknowledgment must also be said for the anonymous reader who provided such thoughtful feedback on our volume’s introduction. Last but not least, we are deeply grateful to those who have sustained each of us with their profound love and support: Viva DeConcini, Flagg Miller, and Deanne Williams.



List of Abbreviations

epil. epilogue induct. induction prol. prologue prompt. promptbook non-player-controlled characters NPCs stage direction s.d. through line number TLN CLR CSPD EEBO FSL GL LMA L&P REED TNA V&A

Corporation of London Repertory, London Metropolitan Archive, London Calendar of State Papers Domestic of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I, 12 vols. (London: Longman, 1856–1872) Early English Books Online Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC Guildhall Library, London London Metropolitan Archive, London Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of King Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols. (London: HMSO, 1862–1932) Records of Early English Drama series The National Archives, London Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Introduction Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin Abstract This introduction expounds the historical and theoretical overlaps between games and theatre by analyzing how playing crucially links these phenomena. The early modern English stage is an ideal locus for exploring that intersection, given its cultural signif icance as ludic entertainment and its ongoing impact on gaming today. We contextualize these issues by examining scholarship on play, from Huizinga and Caillois to more recent work; by centering aspects of drama beyond mimesis and situating these within theatre and performance studies; and by articulating how theatre challenges games as rule-bound systems. We conclude with an overview of the volume’s three sections, respectively on the history of early modern games, the incorporation of games into stageplays, and Shakespearean drama’s legacy in contemporary videogames. Keywords: play; theatre; games; performance; mimesis; videogame

In the final scene of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, two simultaneous but unequal games are played, one by the Navarrese lords and one by the ladies of France they are wooing. The King of Navarre and his three lords, who have sworn to seclude themselves from society, disguise themselves as Muscovites, aiming to visit the ladies unrecognized so as not to be scorned for breaking their oath. The ladies of France, tipped off, put on masks and trade love tokens so that each of the men unwittingly swears devotion to the wrong woman. The lords are players in the masquing tradition in which men wearing fantastical costumes would court their beloveds in disguise.1 1 On amorous masking, see Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_intro

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The ladies, too, become players when they “change […] favors,”2 a phrase referring simultaneously to exchanging physical badges or markers and to altering their faces by wearing vizards. The men’s game of deception is outdone by the women, whose counter-game of misdirection one-ups theirs. At the end of the interlude, after all is revealed, the lords, suitably humiliated, bring on the clownish pageant of the Nine Worthies, for “’tis some policy/ To have one show worse than the King’s and his company” (5.2.512–513). This episode captures some of the myriad fascinations and challenges that lie at the intersection of games and theatre. In Shakespeare’s stageplay, the masque of Russians and the ladies’ counteraction are imagined as a kind of competitive recreation. As the Princess puts it: There’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown, To make theirs ours and ours none but our own; So shall we stay, mocking intended game, And they, well mock’d, depart away with shame. (5.2.153–156)

Like an athletic event, the game here takes the form of sparring, a battle of wits between the sexes. The objective is to see whose mocking is better: the men’s mock-Russian disguises or the women’s mocking of their favors. As in Henry V, when the Dauphin insultingly presents the King with a gift of tennis balls, Shakespeare here deploys the term mock to mean both “jest” and “jeer,” both mirthful game and genuine scorn.3 The side that wins the game achieves not only pleasant pastime but also superior status. This is a jest whose moral is in earnest: the ladies devastatingly demonstrate that, just as the lords quickly broke their oaths to fast and study, so they will also quickly be forsworn in love. Yet competitive mocking is not the only game mechanic at work in this scene, for the contest is effected through acts of impersonation that the men and women present before each other and, simultaneously, before the playhouse audience. The complex layering of games and theatre is figured on our book’s cover, which depicts this scene from Love’s Labor’s Lost being played 2 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 5.2.134. Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, except where otherwise specified, are from G. Blakemore Evans et al., eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); subsequent citations will be in the body of the text. 3 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, 3rd ed. (2002), s.v. “mock, v.” (defs. 2 and 3a), published online June 2020, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120530. A further meaning of “mock” (def. 6b) as “to mimic” is relevant to the entire enterprise of theatre.

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within a contemporary videogame, Play the Knave.4 This mixed reality game invites users to perform a virtual scene from Shakespeare, using their own voices and bodies to animate their selected avatars, such that the dramatic episode is performed simultaneously on screen and in real life. In the game session on our cover, the game player has chosen an alien avatar to stand in for one of the masquerading male lovers—a fitting choice for representing the othering of the foreign implicit in the men’s Muscovite disguises. As the game player dances in real life in order to make his avatar dance on screen, his embodied act underscores the ways that gaming both produces and is produced through theatrical mimesis, within the dramatic fiction and in the physical playing space itself. Love’s Labor’s Lost revels in precisely this overlap when it uses theatre’s own device of impersonation to dramatize the fictional games of impersonation the lords and ladies play. Like the game player on our cover, Shakespeare’s characters mobilize within their local game the same representational strategies that lie at the heart of the medium of theatre. As entertainment for audiences both onstage and off, for both the ladies in the drama and the spectators in the theatre, the game depicted within the narrative of Love’s Labor’s Lost merges with the game that is the stageplay itself—and doubly, since the men do not know that they are being “gamed” just as the characters do not know that they are fictions. Those dualities are reinforced in the word disguising, which describes the lords’ outlandish personas in two early modern senses: (failed) concealment of identity and a genre of courtly entertainment.5 This sequence in Love’s Labor’s Lost is thus not just a play-within-a-play but also a game-within-a-game, and the two are interlinked. Convincingly enacting Muscovite visitors will not stop the Navarrese lords from losing the game of the disguising, and the “earnests,” or tokens, of the men’s “true” love are precisely the means by which the ladies turn the jest to their advantage. At the same time, the entire episode, or jest, is offered earnestly as real-life theatrical entertainment. The actors who play both “winning” ladies and “losing” lords collectively succeed at their higher-level game of performing for the playhouse audience. Jest within one frame can become earnest in another, and vice versa. The essays in this volume explore the social and cultural dynamics of this sort of slippage between games and theatre in early modern England, 4 Gina Bloom, Evan Buswell, Nicholas Toothman, Colin Milburn, and Michael Neff, Play the Knave (ModLab, 2020), open access at https://www.playtheknave.org/download.html (accessed 22 February 2020). 5 OED Online, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. “disguising, n.” (defs. 1b, 1c, and 3), published online June 2020, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/54418.

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and the analytical leverage offered by approaching theatre as a game. What kind of game was theatre in that era, and what can that localized example teach us about the broader theoretical contours of both games and theatre? This collection treats the discourse and practice of games—from dicing to bowling to contemporary videogames—as integral to the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and to their subsequent legacy. Our goal is not only to produce new analyses of the history and design of the drama but also to explore wider questions about play in all its forms within, around, and outside of the theatre. The volume’s contributors examine both the ludic foundations of early modern theatre and the theatrical underpinnings of games in Shakespeare’s time and in our own. Our aim is to stake a claim for “play” as the crucial broader concept connecting games and theatre, which are often treated as separate cultural forms. Playing, we contend, is precisely the active process as well as the formal structure through which games and theatre are linked, and examining that intersection allows us to see more clearly the cultural significance and performative efficacy of both phenomena. The early modern English stage is an ideal locus for a project about the links between games and theatre. Although the academic field of game studies has been focused on the late twentieth and early twenty-f irst centuries 6 —when videogames became commercially successful and widespread—scholars in a range of disciplines have also been attending recently to games and game theory in relation to earlier periods.7 This research has shown not only that games were integral elements of social, artistic, and political life in the medieval and early modern periods, but also that this longer history is vital to understanding the phenomenon of gaming today. Despite this burgeoning work, however, few studies have 6 One notable exception in game studies is scholarship on the long history of military games. See, for instance, Philipp von Hilgers, War Games: A History of War on Paper, trans. Ross Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); and Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds., Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2010). 7 Recent work on medieval and early modern games includes Gina Bloom, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018); Robin O’Bryan, ed., Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019); Allison Mary Levy, ed., Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2017); Serina Patterson, ed., Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Michael Scham, Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); and Peter Ramey, “The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama,” Comparative Drama 47, no. 1 (2013): 55–83.

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taken seriously the relevance of games to theatre. Although scholars have explored the representation of games in early modern dramatic literature,8 they have had less to say about the relationship between games and theatre as a medium and institution. This is especially surprising given their profound connections. In medieval England, games and theatre were described using the same term, ludus.9 Intersections between games and theatre persisted and even deepened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in large metropolitan areas like London, where a new “leisure market” was growing rapidly, offering stageplays as a commercial good alongside, and even in the same spaces as, many other ludic entertainments.10 8 On the representation of games in early modern dramatic literature, see, for example, Linda Woodbridge, “‘He Beats Thee ’Gainst the Odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra,” in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Sara Munson Deats (New York: Routledge, 2004), 193–211; Cynthia Marshall, “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33, no. 2 (1993): 265–287; Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003). 9 Key studies include Glending Olson, “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1995): 195–221; V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); and Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 10 On early modern theatre and tabletop games, see Bloom, Gaming the Stage. On the theatre and London’s leisure market more generally, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Douglas Bruster, Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Donald Hedrick, “Real Entertainment: Sportification, Coercion, and Carceral Theater,” in Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, ed. Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 50–66. On the relationship between theatre and the emerging market economy, see also Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On prizefighting in playhouses as a ludic entertainment and its impact on drama, see Erika T. Lin, “Popular Festivity and the Early Modern Stage: The Case of George a Greene,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 271–297, at 284–291. For animal baiting on London stages, see Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Erika T. Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 161–163; Andrew Gurr, “Bears and Players: Philip Henslowe’s Double Acts,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 4 (2004): 31–41; Jason Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2003): 63–82; John R. Ford, “Changeable Taffeta: Re-dressing the Bears in Twelfth Night,” in Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press: 2006), 174–191; Rebecca Ann

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If the relationship between theatre and games has been undertheorized in scholarship on both cultural forms, this may be in part because foundational theorists of play and recent game studies scholars often conceive of theatre and drama too narrowly. Historian Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, published in Dutch in 1938, established the importance of play as a cultural phenomenon and developed foundational concepts that have persisted for decades, including the idea that play should be distinct from ordinary life in terms of its time, place, and purpose.11 Notably, Huizinga explicitly excludes the theatre of Shakespeare’s age as an example of the “play-element in civilization,” maintaining that the seventeenth-century “fashion to liken the world to a stage on which every man plays his part” was merely a “variation on the ancient theme of the vanity of all things” and in no way evidence that early moderns recognized how “play and culture are actually interwoven.”12 Since the publication of Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games, which was influenced signif icantly by Huizinga’s seminal work, the relationship between games and theatre has often been misconstrued. Caillois posited four types of games: agōn (competitive games), alea (chance-based games), mimicry (games involving mimesis), and ilinx (essentially, thrill games that alter one’s perceptions). These four categories lie along a continuum of play between what Caillois called paidia (free, unconstrained, improvised play) and ludus (rule-bound, organized play). In Caillois’s terms, theatre would be defined as mimicry, a role-playing game that falls much closer to paidia than to ludus on the play spectrum. Much of the later scholarship on ludic elements in early modern drama follows these traditions. Some of these studies treat games in theatre as a form of generalized “play,” overlooking intersections between the Bach, “Bearbaiting, Dominion, and Colonialism,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 19–35; and Oscar Brownstein, “The Popularity of Baiting in England before 1600: A Study in Social and Theatrical History,” Educational Theatre Journal 21 (1969): 237–250. 11 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949). Other influential work on play includes Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Bernie DeKoven, The Well-Played Game: A Playful Path to Wholeness (Lincoln, NE: Writer’s Club Press, 1978); and Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005). Miguel Sicart revises some of these foundational theories of play in Play Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 12 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 5. Suits also, though for different reasons, does not regard the performance of a stageplay as coming within his definition of a game (Suits, Grasshopper, 90, 104); see Tom Bishop, “Are Plays Games?” Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana 17 (2014): 1–16.

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representation of games in dramatic narratives and the medium of theatre through which these narratives were performed.13 When scholars do attend to the particularities of dramatic form, they tend to see games as reflecting on the nature of theatrical pretense and often overlook what Tom Bishop has called the “working texture” of play in the theatre, where ludic elements like competition and improvisation are just as central as pretense.14 As we have begun to demonstrate through our brief reading of Love’s Labor’s Lost, the gaminess of theatre lies less (or less solely) in its use of mimesis as a representational strategy than in its deployment of mimesis as a pretext, means, or opportunity to play games with and for an audience. As Gina Bloom has argued, the early modern theatre was itself an interactive game, a “playable medium”; and dramas were “forms of play; […] ways of gaming.”15 Theatre audiences are not simply consumers of a mimetic fiction contained in the drama, just as actors are not simply makers of the fiction. Rather, actors and audiences are players. Though we might ask whether they are playing the same sort of game in each case, or in what ways different sorts of games might interact with each other, stageplays come into being specifically when performers and spectators simultaneously play for and with each other. In exploring early modern theatre as a game, we draw on definitions of theatre that emphasize its improvisational as well as mimetic dimensions. Artists and practitioners—from Jacques Copeau to Augusto Boal to Jacques Lecoq—have long been interested in theatre’s ludic qualities, employing games in their devising processes and their creative products.16 Games are central to modern actor training and are integral to “immersive” and “participatory” theatre as well as experimental performance forms. Yet when conceiving of theatre as a game, scripted stageplays, particularly the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, have often been discounted, if not imagined as the very opposite of game. Richard Schechner’s influential essay 13 Louis A. Montrose, “‘Sport by Sport O’erthrown’: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 4 (1977): 528–552; Marianne L. Novy, “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew,” English Literary Renaissance 9, no. 2 (1979): 264–280; Anna K. Nardo, The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), esp. chap. 2; and Alba Floreale, Game and Gaming Metaphor: Proteus and the Gamester Masks in Seventeenth-Century Conduct Books and the Comedy of Manners (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004). 14 Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88, at 72. 15 Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 6. 16 John Rudlin, Jacques Copeau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 2nd ed., trans. Adrian Jackson (London: Routledge, 1992); Jacques Lecoq et al., The Moving Body (Le Corps Poétique): Teaching Creative Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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“Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance” claimed that “cultures which emphasize the dyad drama–script de-emphasize theatre–performance; and vice-versa.”17 Perhaps because of Shakespeare’s status as a literary author, early modern drama often stands in as a straw man for a more limited conception of scripted theatre, obscuring its performative dimension beyond the stage and, with that, its connection to games. To understand the gamelike nature of early modern drama, one has to recognize the centrality of play to the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Although this collection centers on early modern England, it aims not only to illuminate that period’s drama through attention to the concept of play but also, in doing so, to inform the study of contemporary games. Following from Caillois, games often have been defined as structured activities enacted according to rules in order to achieve an objective that, within the parameters of the gameworld, constitutes a desirable outcome but outside those parameters is arbitrary or irrelevant.18 To play chess, for example, one has to know how each piece on the board is allowed to move, and players are presumed to agree upon these rules for movement. When they participate in a game, players enter the field of play, or “magic circle,” where activity is structured and contained by artificial rules established a priori. To put this into theatrical terms, the rules of games are usually imagined as a kind of script for play. But approaching games through theatre, and particularly early modern theatre, puts pressure on this conventional conception of game rules.19 Schechner writes of the dramatic script that it “pre-exist[s] any given enactment” and “persist[s] from enactment to enactment,” but scholarship on early modern theatre has shown that scripts, while they can inform the performance of a drama, hardly determine or authorize 17 Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 17, no. 3 (1973): 5–36, at 9. The essay was reprinted in Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), where the quotation appears on p. 70. 18 In addition to foundational play scholars cited above, see more recent game studies scholarship, including Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Thomas M. Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 95–113; and Thomas M. Malaby, “Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 205–218. 19 Some recent game studies scholars have also challenged this view. Sicart, for example, underscores that rules are constantly renegotiated during play as contexts change. See also Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Mia Consalvo, “There is No Magic Circle,” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 408–417; and Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

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it.20 In part, this is because improvisation is foundational to early modern theatre. Take, for instance, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clowns, actors who often devised speech and stage business on the fly, diverging from the lines laid down in the script in order better to entertain theatre spectators. The clown, on this model, doesn’t so much enact the script as play with it in order to further the game of theatre with the audience.21 Examining early modern theatre reminds us that even the most seemingly rigid of game rules may in practice be flexible systems, enacted and reinforced—and sometimes changed and subverted—in and through the very act of play. Just as the dramatic script is but one (malleable) element of theatrical performance, game rules that are iterated through play may also be transformed by improvisation in and around play. In theatre and performance studies, such questions of iterability have been examined especially in relation to ceremonial, ritual, and quotidian performance, and have informed theories of performativity with broad critical reach.22 By examining the intersection of games and theatre in early modern England, as well as their subsequent impact on related cultural forms, this book brings historical depth to such conversations, offering an alternative perspective on matters such as subject formation, political organization, and the production of social norms, and sharpening or revising theoretical models that grow out of analyses of later eras. Our volume brings together these varied scholarly approaches with the original insights of our contributors, whose expertise lies in dramatic literature and theatre history, in order to explicate the centrality of “play” to both games and theatre. Neither games nor theatre can exist without being 20 Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance,” 6. W. B. Worthen calls attention to the material practices involved in writing and publishing dramatic literature to argue that “[d]ramatic performance is not determined by the text of the play: it strikes a much more interactive, performative relation between writing and the spaces, places, and behaviors that give it meaning, force, as theatrical action.” Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12. See also W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 21 See Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 22 Influential work includes Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

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realized through play. Placing play at the heart of our analysis modifies the traditional view of theatre as principally mimesis, emphasizing instead the exploratory and experimental elements it shares with games. Thinking of theatre this way additionally underscores that stageplays are not only artistic works but also recreative entertainments and, like games, are culturally central and socially efficacious beyond their function as representation. Such historically informed analysis of play is especially important now, as videogame use has reached higher than ever levels and as we are witnessing the gamification of a range of human activities in domains from education and research to health and communication. Indeed, our collection’s questions about the digital adaptation of earlier play structures feel especially urgent and pressing at the current moment. As we write this introduction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, live theatre has been suspended and in effect put under threat, and social media’s public personas (and imaginary avatars) are playing a prominent role in political upheaval and racial reckoning. Through a combination of theoretical, historical, and practical research, the essays gathered here seek to illuminate both the history of play as an aspect of early modern theatre and the nature of play as revealed by that theatre, in order to open up new ways of understanding how play works and why it matters today. *** To investigate early modern play as both a framework and a subject matter, we must first historicize how playing was understood in that era. If, as we maintain above, play was a category within and through which what we now call drama was constructed, then play must have had its own historical agents, institutions, and technologies. The four essays in the volume’s first section all explore various ways in which early modern dramatic performance was framed within and in relation to the contemporary languages and practices of game playing. Games as experiences that shaped agents such as playwrights and actors, games as activities institutionalized in early modern England, and games as specific technologies for behaving and making things happen—all these were incorporated into theatrical playing or put pressure on it, and in various and changing ways over time. In the first essay in this section, Stephen Purcell provides an overview linking our volume’s two foci by comparing the game languages of early modern stageplays with recent, historically informed attempts to reactivate that language as a practical technology at the London Globe Theatre, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames in 1997. Purcell shows first how

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the resonances of “game” were typically deployed in dramas of this period, both for the general activity of performing a stageplay and also for specific kinds of situations and actions—especially scenes of subterfuge or deception where the audience is privy to a character’s true designs against another character. This raises the question of the management of differential levels of understanding among player, character, and audience, which Purcell explores through an account of a “bisociated” acting technique. He then goes on to discuss concrete examples and emerging discourses of play and game on the contemporary Globe stage, especially those influenced by the work of Jacques Lecoq and other recent exponents of a ludic and “physical” performance style distinct from the main line of Stanislavskian acting. Using the Globe’s extensive production records, Purcell shows how the reconstruction of an early modern technology in a twentieth-century theatre building itself has released onto the stage a variety of ludic and sportive possibilities for performance that raise both new questions and new problems for any account of early modern playing. Purcell’s essay invites the question of how early modern stageplays were placed in the context of other games. David Kathman’s essay on the relation of dramatic playing to the playing of tennis addresses this question by examining games as a set of regulated activities in early Tudor London. Unpacking the implications of the observation that theatre was often perceived in this period as belonging to the same category of activity as what we would now call “sport,” Kathman shows that this overlap had practical consequences for how drama was treated physically and administratively by commerce and government. For instance, since records of performing spaces in these years are scant, Kathman inquires into the regulation of the locations where tennis, a cognate pastime, was played. This approach literalizes in a fully historicized way what is in fact a fairly common metaphor of and for early modern drama: “Well bandied both,” says the Princess in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, “a set of wit well played” (5.2.29). The influential legacy of the tennis metaphor is evident in Tom Stoppard’s 1990 film of his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which shows the Danish patsies playing their rounds of “questions” as an actual tennis match, a strategy also resumed in the London Globe’s 1999 staging of The Comedy of Errors, as Stephen Purcell records. Katherine Steele Brokaw focuses on a different game analogue to theatrical playing, exploring the complex way in which dice-playing onstage became an intersection point where cultural controversies and pressures in early modern England came into tension with one another. Dicing across this period was a form of gameplay involving varying degrees or awareness of chance, risk, skill,

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cunning, and value both moral and social. It was widely inveighed against by moralists early and late, yet also gradually normalized as part of the social texture of gentry and gallant life, as Heather Hirschfeld’s essay in this volume also argues. By teasing out of some of these strands, Brokaw shows the fascinating ways that dramatic styles and dramaturgical possibilities changed as different kinds of polemic and anxiety were brought to bear on a series of sixteenth-century stageplays. Examining the early moral interlude of Youth, the Edwardian and Marian dramas of Nice Wanton and Impatient Poverty, and the mid-Elizabethan comedy Misogonus, Brokaw brings together morality, classical, Italianate, and popular strands of dramaturgy in an intriguing hybrid. In doing so, she shows how dicing provides a focus of exploration not only for conflicting cultural discourses around gambling but also for features of dramaturgical style—and so for the valences that run between theatrical and non-theatrical play. The resulting argument has further implications for Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—where risk, hazard, wager, and various versions of profit, gain, and loss provide a central vocabulary for examining human interaction—and Antony and Cleopatra, with its queasy exploration of the changing currents of fortune and value. The encroachments of contemporary commerce on stage-playing also form the subject of Heather Hirschfeld’s discussion of Richard Brome’s 1640 drama, The Court Beggar. Picking up part of Brokaw’s argument, Hirschfeld reveals how the languages of late Caroline capitalism—particularly of speculation and projection—were altering theatre in ways that Brome was aware of and possibly anxious about. From early Tudor times, as Kathman shows, commerce and regulation were integral parts of the environment of theatrical playing. Hirschfeld demonstrates that the ever-expanding strategies of mercantile and entrepreneurial capitalism in the succeeding century threatened the capture of the ludic enterprise of theatre by various parties extrinsic to it. Of course, such capture had long been part of the texture of doing business with stage-playing; the career of theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe demonstrates that well enough. But an emerging culture of investment, promotion, and innovation in Caroline England, satirized variously by Brome in his drama, saw theatrical institutions as possible leverage points for commercial scheming in a new way, as one of Brome’s characters comically imagines with his proposal to construct and invite investment in a floating playhouse on the Thames. Hirschfeld shows how Brome both ridicules the daffier side of Caroline “projection” projects and also recognizes the impact of the changing culture on ideas and practices of playing. ***

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If the essays of the first section explore how games provide a conceptual and regulatory context for early modern stageplays, those in the second section examine how different kinds of games—including games incorporated into stageplays themselves—modify, respond to, or put pressure on the sort of game playing that the theatre stages. What kind of game is theatre, and what happens when this game is juxtaposed with other sorts of games? In Caillois’s taxonomy, stageplays are games of mimicry, and they have been characterized as such as far back as Aristotle. In early modern England, both defenders and opponents of drama used the concept, if not the term, “mimesis” to describe theatre. Opposition to stageplays as plays (rather than as, say, public health or crowd-control issues) tended to focus on the matter or object of imitation, rather than on the mimicry game itself. Similarly, distinctions between “good” and “bad” games—taxonomized in the period as “lawful” or “unlawful”—tended to turn on a game’s presumed external utility. Setting aside concerns about games interfering with religious services, there were questions about the nature and value of games themselves. “Idleness” was a key yardstick in debates over “playing” that took place throughout Elizabeth’s reign and in Sabbatarian controversies over Sunday recreations that recurred around King James’s Book of Sports, published first in 1618 and again under Charles I in 1633.23 Games of chance were viewed as idle play, testing and challenging divine providence, and thus immoral. Games of bodily prowess, by contrast, might be salutary, increasing players’ strength and martial readiness.24 But while some activities fell fairly easily into one group or the other—gambling was idle, tournaments were beneficial—other kinds of playing were less easy to categorize.25 Theatre was one of these latter. 23 On lawful and unlawful games and the Book of Sports, see Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–23; and Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature. 24 The latter category overlaps with dance and sports. For recent work, see, for instance, Emily Winerock, “Competitive Capers: Gender, Gentility, and Dancing in Early Modern England,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, ed. Sherril Dodds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 65–85; Holly Faith Nelson and Jim Daems, eds., Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019); Mike Huggins, “Early Modern Sport,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sports History, ed. Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 113–127; James Kelly, Sport in Ireland, 1600–1840 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014); and John McClelland and Brian Merrilees, eds., Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010). 25 Like their early modern counterparts, later discussants of play have also applied productivity as a yardstick, but within a capitalist more than religious frame. For these scholars, play is “leisure,” what happens when one is engaged in action that is not economically useful as “work.” See especially E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,”

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Where drama was defended, it should be noted, just as where it was attacked, it was not considered as a game per se, but rather in relation to the ends of that game—a useful skill imparted (rhetoric, elocution, and so forth) or a moral lesson of some kind. In the latter case, the mimesis in question was—and Aristotle shared this view—firmly attached to a teleologically directed narrative action and could be judged in that action. Utility lay in the shape of the narrative, laudable or disgraceful as the case might be, not in the fact of mimesis itself. But the performance of that mimesis, the game at the heart of theatre as play, remained outside this binary, for it was only when mimesis was presented or framed as a game, accepted or refused, that theatrical play could take place. This paradigm is depicted in Love’s Labor’s Lost when, in the pageant of the Nine Worthies, Costard proclaims “I Pompey am—,” only to have Berowne reply “You lie, you are not he” (5.2.547), rejecting the proposed game. As Gregory Bateson memorably said, “Play is not the name of an act or action; it is the name of a frame for action.”26 What is at stake in the game of theatrical mimesis, however, is questioning the frame itself, asking what the rules are that make this action the kind of action that it is. Or, as Brian Sutton-Smith put it, “playfighting as an analogy to real fighting seems more like displaying the meaning of fighting than rehearsing for real combat.”27 When the point of the game is to keep foregrounding and inquiring into the nature of the frame that makes the action itself a game, it isn’t clear where to draw the line between productive and gratuitous, between useful and idle. The three essays in the volume’s second section all address this tension raised by theatrical mimesis as a game of games. Building on a strong Past & Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56–97; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780–c. 1880 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980); Chris Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory (London: Tavistock, 1985); Robert A. Stebbins, Between Work and Leisure: The Common Ground of Two Separate Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Chris Rojek, The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2010). For related approaches in studies of the long early modern period, see Peter Burke, “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past & Present 146 (1995): 136–150, as well as the response to it by Joan-Lluis Mafany, “Debate: The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past & Present 156 (1997): 174–219; Nancy L. Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Peter Borsay, A History of Leisure: The British Experience Since 1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Tom Rutter, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Hugh Cunningham, Time, Work and Leisure: Life Changes in England Since 1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 26 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979), 139. 27 Sutton-Smith, Ambiguity of Play, 23.

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historicist foundation, the authors examine games verbally reported in theatrical dialogue, literally enacted on the stage, and figuratively invoked by dramatic narrative and production history. Patricia Badir’s essay opens this section with an analysis of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as a drama that sets mimetic gameplay in opposition to teleologies of progress. She describes two games. On the Greek side, Achilles and Patroclus play a game of imitation in a lazy bed—a “bad” private game of camp and sexual dissipation. On the Trojan side, Hector issues a challenge to fight for his lady’s beauty and honor—a “good” public game of martial strength. Shakespeare pointedly juxtaposes these two games, with the game of imitation undermining the authority of the combat game. By not staging Patroclus and Achilles’ game but rather having Ulysses give a verbal reporting and canny re-enactment of it, Shakespeare, Badir reveals, privileges the imagination, foregrounding what is evoked by Ulysses’ words over Hector’s physical contest. Rather than seeing war as “an obligatory and rational means for moving forward,” as Badir puts it, Shakespeare’s drama reverses and undermines that position through the verbal report of a game of theatrical mimesis that reframes war as vanity and posturing. Picking up on queer theory’s critique of (re)productivity, teleo­ logy, and linear history, Badir argues that Patroclus and Achilles’ “leisurely, pleasure-driven and irrational” game of imitation is decidedly “unproductive play—play that opposes itself not just to work but also to history.” Badir’s focus on the anti-teleological, “non-aesthetic and non-cathartic” pleasures of theatrical playing agrees with Paul Menzer, whose chapter explores the implications of early modern bowling as a game always in danger of veering out of control. Menzer shows how, when the anonymous drama Look About You incorporates bowling into its prison escape scene, it “builds into its dramaturgy a fundamentally uncontainable game.” Bowling, he avers, challenges conventional views by implying that drama might run on but go nowhere, thus raising questions about how games in stageplays threaten to reframe the limits of theatrical play. Just as balls may roll offstage at any time, dramatic narrative has the potential to fly out of the playwright’s control. Bowling thus offers a figure for the unpredictable, non-productive nature of theatre. At the same time, however, because a stageplay is scripted in advance, “the outcome is predetermined, howsoever liable to error and surprise acting might be.” Indeed, Menzer points out that actors “obliged by the script to bowl” are “not bowling. They are just actors rolling balls across the stage.” Tension between the contingent and the determined also animates Marissa Greenberg’s chapter. Focusing on the jailor’s scene in The Merchant of Venice as part of the theatrical legacy of dicing for Christ’s garments in medieval Passion plays, Greenberg examines the subsequent production

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history of this episode to reveal how the game provides a powerful model for theorizing adaptation. The scene in Shakespeare, she argues, evokes a tension between freedom and fixity, possibility and restrictive authority, analogous to dicing. Like that game, which involved throwing the dice (giving them up to chance), letting them settle (resolution into fixity), and then repetition of that pattern again and again, the jailor episode enacts the repeated release and consolidation of authority, judicial and spatial. Using both textual analysis and archival research, she proposes that this same dynamic can be seen in the subsequent stage history of Merchant adaptations. The alternation of release and stabilization in dicing, she argues, resembles the interplay between change and fidelity that characterizes the very act of adaptation—and thus suggests how such iterations over time call into question what counts as imitation at all. *** Greenberg’s theoretical questions about games and adaptations open out in the final section of the book into a complementary examination of a new archive for the study of early modern drama: videogames. Over the past decade or so, videogames that adapt and/or appropriate Shakespearean drama have proliferated, taking their place among the fastest growing and most commercially successful play forms of the modern age. The centrality of Shakespeare to the niche of literary-themed videogames is not surprising in light of his predominance among adaptations in a range of media,28 but examining them in the context of other essays in this volume casts in a new light the historical and theoretical connections between gaming and 28 Prior scholarship on videogames and Shakespeare includes Peter S. Donaldson, “Game Space/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor’s Titus,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 457–477; Katherine Rowe, “Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 58–67; Laurie Osborne, “iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 48–57; Gina Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games,” in “Forum: Skill,” ed. Evelyn B. Tribble, special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127; Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone, “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design,” in “Shakespeare and Social Media,” ed. Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill, special issue, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation 10, no. 1 (2016): n.p.; Matthew Harrison and Michael Lutz, “South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, ed. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 23–40; Gina Bloom, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell, “Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2017): 408–430.

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theatre that this project addresses. The essays in this section use the frame of videogames to analyze early modern drama and theorize theatrical performance more broadly. At the same time, they show how a deeper understanding of historical stageplays, particularly in performance, can enhance the study and making of games in our current moment. The authors here pick up on the debate engaged in previous sections concerning rules, structures, and systems, on the one hand, versus free or open play, on the other, but these questions are refracted differently because videogames seem to be more closed systems than are the games discussed in earlier chapters. Games, as interactive media, must offer their players choices, but in videogames the choices available to players appear to be entirely pre-scripted by the designers. Unlike in a board game, for instance, where players might bend or rework rules during gameplay—even, conceivably, in a tightly rule-bound game like chess—videogames cannot be rewritten during the action without a skilled programmer who can enter into and modify a game’s code. For this reason, some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that videogames are not really games at all, but rather algorithmic systems that a user moves through.29 This characterization of videogames begs the question of what sorts of overlaps there can be between videogames and early modern theatre, which, though scripted in some ways (i.e. there may be a dramatic text), can be enacted differently during each live performance. Indeed, as discussed above, if we follow W. B. Worthen and other theatre scholars, the playscript is neither a stable entity nor an authorizing force for performance.30 The essays in this section probe these overlaps and dissonances and ask whether and how the early modern theatre can be viewed as a point of origin or a foundational structure for videogames. In so doing, they not only offer new insights into the drama, but also demonstrate how extending the paradigm of theatrical performance to videogames reveals modalities of free or open play in or around these seemingly closed systems. Leading off this section is Ellen MacKay’s essay, which reads Shakespeare’s The Tempest in relation to recent scholarly debates about the ethics and effectiveness of gamif ication.31 For some, gamif ied environments are fulfilling—a chance to practice through low-stakes play high-stakes real-life 29 See Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming. 30 Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance; Worthen, Shakespeare Performance Studies. 31 For a good overview of gamification from a range of disciplinary approaches, see Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding, eds., The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

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skills—whereas for others, games indoctrinate players into any number of nefarious systems and ideologies. MacKay reads The Tempest as a simulated training environment that shares much in common with one of the drama’s intertexts or inspirations: the 1609 shipwreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda. Some historical accounts present that incident as priming the stranded mariners who would go on to resuscitate the struggling Jamestown colony. In much the same way, the island in Shakespeare’s drama prepares shipwrecked characters for a harsher world to come. The difference, of course, is that in The Tempest social optimization is carefully managed by Prospero. MacKay argues that Prospero’s “challenge environment” incorporates the kind of game mechanics so often seen in today’s videogames. Ferdinand’s mundane and repetitive task of carrying logs from one place to another, for instance, uncannily resembles “grinding” in videogames—repetitive, mindless tasks that must be done before a player is able to level up—which some critics have interpreted as a method of conscripting players into capitalist systems. If, as Patrick Jagoda argues, contemporary videogames are idioms of late capitalism, then, MacKay maintains, we can find the seeds of this phenomenon in the early seventeenth century.32 But even as The Tempest reveals how gamification acclimates subjects to exploitative economic systems, it also enables subjects to reflect on and question those systems. Whether the drama accomplishes the latter goal depends on how its “happy ending” is received. Rebecca Bushnell’s essay also grapples with the agency of players within the ostensibly closed systems of videogames, locating this tension in dramatic genre. In tragedy, the dramatic narrative drives inexorably toward its fatal conclusion, but the theatre audience is made to feel moment by moment that this outcome could be averted if the characters were to make different choices. Bushnell uses videogames to unpack this conflict, demonstrating how a story-based videogame like The Wolf Among Us can expose “tragic necessity.” Like MacKay, Bushnell’s aim is not only to trace a longer history of game concepts and mechanics assumed to have emerged only recently, but also to use videogames to shed light on early modern drama. In particular, she argues that what is for many people the paradigmatic Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet, presents an open world in which any outcome feels possible, a game structure that “collides with narrative purpose.” This contradictory dynamic is especially evident in the drama’s many videogame adaptations, which tend toward one or the other poles of tragic theatre: some compel players to “comply with what the game demands” while others emphasize 32 Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2 40, no. 2 (2013): 113–144.

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their agency. Bushnell argues that, in these videogames, players must feel the avatar’s choices are free and consequential, even if the audience/player is aware that there must be some narrative closure. Thus, in Hamlet and in the videogames that adapt it, Bushnell finds a more open and unfixed world than many have seen. If Bushnell locates unfixity and possibility in game designers’ creative use of tragic form, Geoffrey Way’s essay situates that openness in game reception. Recognizing that game systems are finite, Way maintains that the narratives that emerge from videogames can still be quite diverse and unpredictable, because audiences bring to the act of play such varied experiences with Shakespeare and with games. Such experiences matter profoundly because videogames are defined by interactivity: the narrative is not only “embedded” by the game’s designers, but arises specifically through the user’s engagement. These “emergent” narratives may be informed by players’ knowledge about and expectations for the videogame’s genre as well as their familiarity with Shakespeare and his works. Even embedded narratives in these videogames may be more varied than they at first appear by comprising not only the playwright’s dramas but also narratives that signal particular gaming genres. For instance, Alawar Entertainment’s Hamlet, or the Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement appropriates and adapts elements from quest and puzzle games; these are as much its “source texts” as is Hamlet. Alawar combines the embedded narratives of the quest game with elements from Shakespeare’s drama to allow players to “create new emergent narratives”—complicating our definitions of concepts like adaptation and appropriation. Way emphasizes that such videogames need to be understood not only in relation to Shakespeare but also in relation to games, for the player’s experience with both of these areas will determine what narratives emerge from the videogame when it is played. Whereas Way and Bushnell show how videogames might illuminate Shakespeare, Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho worry that in these games something significant about Shakespearean drama is lost in translation. Their essay’s focus is a particular subset of games designed by scholars and/or for pedagogical purposes, games that therefore ought to be better able than commercial videogames to teach about Shakespeare. Despite their tremendous pedagogical promise, however, these games are limited by their “text-centric” perspectives on theatre. Roberts-Smith and DeSouza-Coelho argue that because videogames are closed systems, they are not an ideal medium through which to understand or teach the “collaborative ontogenesis” that is theatrical performance. Scholar-designed Shakespeare

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games, they submit, have yet to acknowledge the role of audiences in the theatre, the differences between the work of spectators and of actors in a live performance, and the rich collaborations between these entities that give rise to the experience of a stageplay. To develop more robust pedagogical engagements with both games and theatre, they urge scholars to ensure that students have as strong of an understanding of videogames as they do of Shakespeare. Students not only need to play Shakespeare games produced by others, but to learn to make these games themselves. Roberts-Smith and DeSouza-Coelho thus arrive at a point that very much echoes Way’s when they urge that we “need to learn game in order to gamify Shakespeare.” All the essays in this section use the paradigm of theatre, and particularly the critical role of audiences as players or makers, to break down the fourth wall that seems to divide videogames from those who engage with them. Videogames may be scripted, but, like stageplays, they are not inert objects. They are works that live in and through the act of playing. And in this playing, there is the possibility for the unexpected. Indeed, contemporary videogame players enjoy nothing more than discovering new ways to engage with these games and to outwit digital systems that seem closed to their shaping input. Gamers devise innovative methods for interacting with scripted videogames, such as “speedrunning” and blindfolded play; they circulate walkthroughs and “cheats” to help other players navigate around game constraints; they develop and share “mods” that manipulate the underlying code.33 These sorts of practices are so common today that videogame designers, instead of spurning them as unethical “hacking,” now anticipate such forms of engagement and even court gamer communities by actively building in space for modding. In short, videogame culture today has come to resemble the improvisatory and participatory culture of theatregoing in early modern England.34 *** 33 Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming; Colin Milburn, Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 34 On lively audience behavior in early modern theatres, see, for instance, Preiss, Clowning and Authorship; Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Erika T. Lin , “Social Functions: Audience Participation, Eff icacious Entertainment,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age, ed. Robert Henke (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 35–50; and Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill, eds., Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), especially Paul Menzer, “Crowd Control,” 19–36, and Nova Myhill, “Taking the Stage: Spectators as Spectacle in the Caroline Private Theaters,” 37–54.

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Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrate how games and theatre, far from being distinct cultural phenomena, are in fact intimately entwined. Natasha Korda’s Epilogue theorizes further the stakes of this interconnection by teasing out conceptual strands that cut across the volume’s essays while also opening up their analyses to new questions. How does research on games and theatre call for a corresponding gamification of our archives and methodologies? If the power of play is embedded in a history of patriarchy and colonialism, how might early modern theatre studies probe and resist oppressive gaming cultures of the past and the present? Korda foregrounds such political questions by shrinking the scale of play, drawing our attention to the example of the doll house as a more broadly accessible, yet often overlooked, kind of theatrical stage. With its miniature versions of real-world objects, the doll house constitutes an alternative site for play that does not simply represent everyday life but offers “polychronic and polychoric models for imagining life otherwise and effecting social transformation.” Korda’s Epilogue helps underscore the broader stakes of this volume’s investments in the links between games and theatre. A deeper knowledge of how games were and continue to be played certainly sheds new light on particular early modern dramas, the institutions and people who created and received them, and the performance conventions that defined them. But even more importantly, analyzing games and theatre together reveals that stageplays are merely one among many forms of play. Although designating theatre as art, rather than game, seemingly elevates it, doing so actually prises it out of a larger cultural matrix that gives it social significance. The essays that follow aim to restore these rich interconnections by revealing the myriad and multifaceted ways that theatre was embedded in wider forms of play, both in the early modern period and in that era’s legacy today.

Works Cited Agnew, Christopher. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Arcangeli, Alessandro. Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bach, Rebecca Ann. “Bearbaiting, Dominion, and Colonialism.” In Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, edited by Joyce Green MacDonald, 19–35. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton, 1979.

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Berry, Edward. Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bishop, Tom. “Are Plays Games?” Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana 17 (2014): 1–16. –––. “Shakespeare’s Theater Games.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88. Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. –––. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.” In “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble. Special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127. Bloom, Gina, Evan Buswell, Nicholas Toothman, Colin Milburn, and Michael Neff. Play the Knave. ModLab, 2020. Accessed 22 February 2020. https://www. playtheknave.org/download.html. Bloom, Gina, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell. “Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2017): 408–430. Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 2nd ed. Translated by Adrian Jackson. London: Routledge, 1992. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Borsay, Peter. A History of Leisure: The British Experience Since 1500. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Brownstein, Oscar. “The Popularity of Baiting in England before 1600: A Study in Social and Theatrical History.” Educational Theatre Journal 21 (1969): 237–250. Bruster, Douglas. Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Burke, Peter. “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe.” Past & Present 146 (1995): 136–150. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. –––. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

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Clopper, Lawrence M. Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. –––. “There is No Magic Circle.” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 408–417. Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780–c. 1880. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. –––. Time, Work and Leisure: Life Changes in England Since 1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. DeKoven, Bernie. The Well-Played Game: A Playful Path to Wholeness. Lincoln, NE: Writer’s Club Press, 1978. Donaldson, Peter S. “Game Space/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor’s Titus.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, 457–477. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Evans, G. Blakemore, et al., eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Floreale, Alba. Game and Gaming Metaphor: Proteus and the Gamester Masks in Seventeenth-Century Conduct Books and the Comedy of Manners. Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Ford, John R. “Changeable Taffeta: Re-dressing the Bears in Twelfth Night.” In Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, edited by Paul Menzer, 174–191. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. Fudge, Erica. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Gurr, Andrew. “Bears and Players: Philip Henslowe’s Double Acts.” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 4 (2004): 31–41. –––. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Harrison, Matthew, and Michael Lutz. “South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 23–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hedrick, Donald. “Real Entertainment: Sportification, Coercion, and Carceral Theater.” In Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, edited by Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko, 50–66. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010. Hilgers, Philipp von. War Games: A History of War on Paper. Translated by Ross Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

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Höfele, Andreas. Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Huggins, Mike. “Early Modern Sport.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sports History, edited by Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson, 113–127. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949. Huntemann, Nina B., and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds. Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jagoda, Patrick. “Gamif ication and Other Forms of Play.” boundary 2 40, no. 2 (2013): 113–144. Kelly, James. Sport in Ireland, 1600–1840. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Lecoq, Jacques, Jean-Gabriel Carasso, and Jean-Claude Lallias. The Moving Body (Le Corps Poétique): Teaching Creative Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2002. Levy, Allison Mary, ed. Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2017. Lin, Erika T. “Popular Festivity and the Early Modern Stage: The Case of George a Greene.” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 271–297. –––. Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. –––. “Social Functions: Audience Participation, Efficacious Entertainment.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age, edited by Robert Henke, 35–50. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Low, Jennifer A. Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Low, Jennifer A., and Nova Myhill, eds. Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Mafany, Joan-Lluis.“Debate: The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe.” Past & Present 156 (1997): 174–219. Malaby, Thomas M. “Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience.” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 205–218. –––. “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games.” Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 95–113. Marcus, Leah S. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Marshall, Cynthia. “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33, no. 2 (1993): 265–287.

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McClelland, John, and Brian Merrilees, eds. Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010. Milburn, Colin. Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Montrose, Louis A. “‘Sport by Sport O’erthrown’: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 4 (1977): 528–552. Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Nardo, Anna K. The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Nelson, Holly Faith, and Jim Daems, eds. Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Novy, Marianne L. “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew.” English Literary Renaissance 9, no. 2 (1979): 264–280. O’Bryan, Robin, ed. Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th–17th Centuries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Olson, Glending. “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1995): 195–221. Osborne, Laurie. “iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 48–57. Patterson, Serina, ed. Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Preiss, Richard. Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ramey, Peter. “The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama.” Comparative Drama 47, no. 1 (2013): 55–83. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone. “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design.” In “Shakespeare and Social Media,” edited by Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill. Special issue, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation 10, no. 1 (2016): n.p. Rojek, Chris. Capitalism and Leisure Theory. London: Tavistock, 1985. –––. The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2010. Rowe, Katherine. “Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 58–67.

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Rudlin, John. Jacques Copeau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Rutter, Tom. Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Salen Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Scham, Michael. Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Schechner, Richard. “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance.” TDR: The Drama Review 17, no. 3 (1973): 5–36. –––. Performance Theory, rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2003. 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. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Sicart Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Stebbins, Robert A. Between Work and Leisure: The Common Ground of Two Separate Worlds. New York: Routledge, 2004. Struna, Nancy L. People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 2nd ed. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56–97. Twycross, Meg, and Sarah Carpenter. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Walz, Steffen P., and Sebastian Deterding, eds. The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Winerock, Emily. “Competitive Capers: Gender, Gentility, and Dancing in Early Modern England.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, edited by Sherril Dodds, 65–85. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Woodbridge, Linda. “‘He Beats Thee ’Gainst the Odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra.” In Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, edited by Sara Munson Deats, 193–211. New York: Routledge, 2004. Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. –––. Shakespeare Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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About the Authors Tom Bishop is Professor and former Head of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and drama. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), the translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003), a co-editor of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Internet Shakespeare Editions), and a continuing general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Routledge). He has published work on Elizabethan music, Shakespeare, Jonson, court masques, Australian literature, the Renaissance Bible, early modern religion, and other topics. He is currently editing As You Like It for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series) and working on a book on Shakespeare’s theatre games. Gina Bloom is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her book Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) was named best book of the year by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Her second book, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2018), was runner up for the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She co-edited, with Susan Bennett, a special issue on “Shakespeare and Performance Studies” for the Shakespeare Bulletin and has published articles in edited collections and journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and Theatre Survey. Bloom co-created the mixed-reality Shakespeare game Play the Knave, exhibiting it in theatres, cultural institutions, libraries, and classrooms around the world. She is a former Trustee for the Shakespeare Association of America. Erika T. Lin is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, which received the 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. Her prize-winning essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, and many edited collections. She is currently writing a book on seasonal festivities and early modern commercial theatre, a project recognized by various honors and grants including an Andrew W. Mellon Long-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She recently served as the book review editor for Theatre Survey and as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Shakespeare Association of America.

1.

The Player’s Game The Activity of the Player in Early Modern Drama Stephen Purcell Abstract In medieval England, games and plays were cognate activities. By Shakespeare’s time, “games” seem to have become a category distinct from drama, but the persistence of the term “player” suggests that theatrical performance was still considered a form of ludic activity. This essay historicizes the term “game”, thinking about the meanings of the word available to the early modern player and the ways in which those meanings are both similar to and different from those available to modern actors and directors. It then examines gamelike practice at the modern Shakespeare’s Globe, considering the extent to which the contemporary experiment allows us any kind of insight into the early modern dramaturgy of the “game.” Keywords: game; clowning; acting; players; improvisation

In medieval England, games and plays were cognate activities. The Latin term ludus was used to refer to both, and there was a substantial overlap between dramatic representations and other forms of ludic activity such as Misrule, May-games and mumming, in which participants also dressed up and adopted semi-fictional personas.1 In the fourteenth and fifteenth 1 For detailed discussion of this, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), esp. 19; Glending Olson, “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1995): 195–221; Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 3–19; Laura Kendrick, “Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 43–61; Tom Bishop, “The Art of

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch01

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centuries, the English word “game” could be used to refer to performed drama, and even in the sixteenth century “game-player” was used as a term for what would now be called an actor. By Shakespeare’s time, “games” seem to have become a category distinct from drama, but the persistence of the term “player” suggests that theatrical performance was still considered a form of ludic activity. Modern critics have often found it useful to think of early modern drama as gamelike in nature, and it is striking that the theatre practitioners involved in performance at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe have also returned to the metaphor with some frequency.2 This essay will first historicize the term “game,” thinking about the meanings of the word available to the early modern player and the ways in which those meanings are both similar to and different from those available to modern actors and directors. It will then examine gamelike practice at the modern Globe, considering the extent to which the contemporary experiment allows us any kind of insight into the early modern dramaturgy of the “game.”

Drama as Game on the Early English Stage There are numerous examples of medieval plays referring to themselves as “games.” The prolucutor for the mid-fourteenth-century Anglo-Irish play The Pride of Life announces that “this oure game schal gin and ende/ Throgh Jhesu Cristis swete grace” (lines 111–112); the Durham prologue requests its spectators to fall silent for “Oure gamen” (line 3); the epilogue from the late fifteenth-century Reynes Extracts likewise refers to its audience as “Ye that arn come to sen oure game” (line 24).3 Other medieval plays use the word “game” to refer to the particular activities or strategies enacted by their characters, or the pleasure induced by these activities in spectators: in the morality play Mankind (c. 1470), the chief Vice, Mischief, announces himself as having “cumme hedyr [hither] to make yow game” (line 69), while the Playing,” in Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, ed. Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 159–176. 2 For readings of early modern drama as a sort of game, see for example Louis A. Montrose, “‘Sport by Sport O’erthrown’: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 4 (1977): 528–552; Cynthia Marshall, “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33, no. 2 (1993): 265–287; Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88; Gina Bloom, “Games,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–211. 3 John C. Coldewey, ed., Early English Drama: An Anthology (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 31, 15, 13.

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devil Titivillus promises spectators as he prepares to dupe the protagonist Mankind that “a praty game shall be sheude yow or ye go hens” (line 591). 4 A character in the roughly contemporaneous Fulgens and Lucrece tells the audience at the end that the aim of the play, at least in part, has been “to make folk mirth and game” (line 2320).5 Similar uses of the word persisted into the sixteenth century. Much like Fulgens and Lucrece, the prologue to Jacke Jugeler (printed c. 1562) announces that the playwright’s aim is “to make at seasuns convenient pastims mirth and game” (line 60).6 The Norwich edition of Records of Early English Drama contains multiple instances between 1542 and 1609 of several touring playing companies, especially the Queen’s Players, being referred to as “gameplayers.”7 Lord Ambrose Dudley’s Players were paid “for playeng A game in the freechamber” in Norwich in January 1564, while in February 1589 the Mayor of Norwich issued a proclamation “ageynst gameplayers” in which he lamented that “dyuerse gameplayers haue resortyd to this Citie of Norwiche playeng their gamys and interludes vpon the Sabaoth dayes as well in tymes of preachinges.”8 This 1589 proclamation goes on to refer to “the same playes and interludes” as “provocacions and allurementes to vyces and synnes,” and to ban citizens from attending “any playe or enterlude”; this conflation of “gamys” and “playes” suggests that in Norwich at least, “game” remained a synonym for “play” right into the heyday of the Elizabethan professional theatre. The proclamation also indicates that “game” was not a respectable activity. Like the Mayor of Norwich, the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes saw “vnlawfull games, Playes and Enterluds” as similar sorts of pastimes. Inveighing against them in his 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes lamented the fact that some spend the Sabaoth day (for the most part) in frequenting of baudie Stage-playes and enterludes, in maintaining Lords of mis-rule (for so they call a certaine kinde of play which they vse), May-games, Church-ales, feasts and wakesses […] wherby the Lord God is dishonoured, his Sabaoth 4 Ibid, 110, 125. 5 Greg Walker, ed., The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 98. 6 William Tydeman, ed., Four Tudor Comedies (London: Penguin, 1984), 55. 7 REED Norwich, 1540–1642, ed. David Galloway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 7, 62, 64, 70, 88, 142; the same term crops up in REED Sussex, ed. Cameron Louis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), in 1482 and 1483 (54–55), and REED Cambridge, ed. Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), in 1537–1538 (1:114). 8 REED Norwich, 51, 91.

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violated, his woord neglected, his sacraments contemned and his People meruelously corrupted, and caryed away from true vertue and godlynes.9

Countless other sixteenth-century documents describe plays and games as similarly ungodly uses of time, often as if the two were one and the same thing.10 Can we think of Elizabethan and Jacobean stage performance as a species of “game”? As Tom Bishop argues, the term “player” associates early modern dramatic performance “with playing, with the recreational or gamesome”: the notion of the theater as a form of play or an event which includes various kinds of games or play-routines is very much a part of Shakespeare’s sense of what players do and what plays are made of.11

The phrase “in game” was regularly used in contrast to “in earnest” to describe non-serious activity,12 and to be “gamesome” was to be merry and playful.13 Gamelike theatrical activity, then, would have involved mirth, role-playing and make-believe, and perhaps also jest, mockery and trickery. Uses of the word from a number of early modern plays show that “game” provides a resonant metaphor for a range of stage activities. Though surviving plays of the period rarely use the word “game” to describe dramatic action directly, an exception can be found in the act-2 prologue to Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar: Now listen, lordings, now begins the game, Sebastian’s tragedy in this tragic war. (2.prol.52–53)14 9 EEBO, sig. ¶4v, sig. L2v. Plays were evidently part of the May games in London, as Stow describes: “in the moneth of May, the Citizens of London, of all estates, lightlie in euery parish, or sometimes two or three parishes ioyning together, had their seuerall mayinges, and did fetch in Maypoles, with diuers warlike shewes, with good Archers, Morrice dauncers, and other deuises for pastime all the day long, and towardes the euening they had stage playes and bonefires in the streetes”. Stow notes that by his time, these “greate Mayinges and Maygames” were a vanishing tradition, not being “so freely vsed as afore” (John Stow, Suruey of London [London, 1598], EEBO, 73-4). 10 For an early and influential exploration of the implications of this for the Elizabethan stage, see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). 11 Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” 66. 12 For example, in Jacke Jugeler: “But speake you all this in earnest, or in game?” (line 388). 13 See, for example, The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.240, Julius Caesar, 1.2.30, Cymbeline, 1.6.61. 14 Charles Edelman, ed., The Stukeley Plays, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

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But “game” here signifies something more complex than “play”—this is the act-2 prologue, after all, and not the beginning of the play. Here, “game” seems to suggest a thickening of the plot, the start of a more compelling development, a competition between factions and, perhaps, a deception. Act 2 introduces several new characters who are “players” in the power game around which The Battle of Alcazar revolves, and the “tragedy” to which the prologue refers is that of King Sebastian of Portugal, who will be duped by a “show of friendship” from Muly Mahamet (3.59) into a military alliance that results in his death. A similar phrase, “here begins the game,” is used in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay to herald the start of the magical contest between Friar Bungay and Vandermast (9.76).15 There is also, perhaps, something metadramatic about Peele’s use of the word, as if the author takes a kind of dark delight in stirring up trouble amongst his characters. It is not unlike Venus’s repeated use of the word “game” to describe her intervention in mortal affairs in Thomas Preston’s Cambyses, King of Persia (printed 1570): the goddess makes a brief appearance in the play, telling Cupid her plans “to force this game of mine.” Cupid, she explains to him, is to shoot an arrow into Cambyses in order to make the king fall in love with a kinswoman; Venus describes the ruse as “my silver sugred game,” and anticipates that the smitten king “may in my game please me wel.”16 To think of early modern drama in terms of “game,” then, might suggest a potentially mischievous delight in dramatic conflict on the part of both the makers of the play and the audience. The word is often used in dramatic contexts to describe the deception and mockery of a dupe. At least two Tudor Vices use it to share their enjoyment at having successfully disguised their identities: Envy in Impatient Poverty (printed 1561) considers it “a joly game/ That Conscience doeth not knowe my name,” while Injury in Albion Knight (printed 1566) gloats, Now here begynneth a game ywys For Manhode they wene my name is But trust mee syrs if I shuld not lye My name is called Injury.17 15 Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). 16 EEBO, sig. C1r. One might compare the way in which Shakespeare’s Puck anticipates that his mistaken enchantment of Lysander will result in a “fond pageant” in which “two at once woo one,” a show-within-a-show that he anticipates will be “sport” for him (3.2.114, 118, 119). 17 EEBO, sig. C1v; EEBO, sig. B4v.

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In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess, recognizing that the men had “intended game” with her and her ladies by disguising themselves as Russians, describes her plan to mock the lords by playing along as “sport by sport o’erthrown” (5.2.154, 152).18 Later in the scene, she describes the visit of the “Russians” as “pleasant game,” her double meaning evident only to her co-conspirators and to the audience (5.2.360). “Game” thus signifies not only a plot in which one character outwits another by means of some ruse, but a deception that the audience is invited to collude in and enjoy. Bishop notes Shakespeare’s penchant for “spying game” sequences like the gulling scenes in Much Ado about Nothing or Twelfth Night, and such scenes fit this description perfectly.19 In similar uses of the term “May-game,” we see a glimpse of the festive roots of this kind of theatrical game playing: to “make a May-game” of a subject was to make a mockery of it, to hold it up for ridicule, and so, for example, Donado cautions his nephew Bergetto against making himself “a may-game to all the world” in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1.3.48–49).20 But May-games were bounded subversions, their cruelties temporary and their communities ultimately reconciled.21 At the end of Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho, when the trio of jealous husbands learn that their wives have been faithful to them after all, Justiniano observes that “all is but a merriment, all but a May-game” (5.4.277–278).22 In early modern England, just as now, “game” often signified some sort of strategic contest. Middleton found the game of chess a particularly rich metaphor for dramatic conflict. In a famous scene from Women Beware Women, the Machiavellian Livia plays chess with an old Widow in order to distract her while Livia’s accomplice Guardiano tricks the Widow’s daughterin-law Bianca into entering a secluded room where the Duke of Florence will rape her. Livia, who hopes to gain the Duke’s favor by these means, uses her conversation with the Widow over chess to make a veiled commentary on the wider “game” she is playing: “She that can place her man well,” she tells the Widow, “can never lose her game” (2.2.295–296).23 For her part, the Widow 18 All citations from Shakespeare are from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd ed.), ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19 Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” 75. 20 Simon Barker and Hilary Hinds, eds., The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 2003). 21 See Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. 22 Thomas Dekker and John Webster, Westward Ho, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 318–403. 23 All citations from Middleton are from Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women and Other Plays, ed. Richard Dutton, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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recognizes, while oblivious to the double meaning, that her opponent is “cunning at the game” and that Livia’s rook, or “Duke,” has “done me all the mischief in this game” (2.2.293, 414). Middleton would of course use chess as a play-length metaphor for deceptions, conflicts and strategic maneuverings in A Game at Chess. “Game,” then, could signify a hidden strategy, an attempt by a character to achieve an objective by underhand or deceptive means. In Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, the willing cuckold Allwit recognizes his manipulation of Sir Walter Whorehound’s ego as a “game,” and himself as a successful “gamester” (1.2.73, 5.1.168). When Shakespeare’s Hermia accuses Helena of using her taller height in order to win Lysander’s affections, she exclaims, “Ay, that way goes the game”—a colloquial phrase that carries here a charge of conscious manipulation on Helena’s part (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.290). As Troilus parts from Cressida, he imagines the Greeks as particularly able to “play at subtle games,” the implication being that they will be able to tempt Cressida into betraying him (Troilus and Cressida, 4.5.88). It is noticeable that all of the examples in the previous paragraph concern the pursuit of sex. “Game,” of course, was a widely used euphemism for sex, as was “sport”—when Lucio refers to a “game of tick-tack” in Measure for Measure, for example, the sexual meaning is clear (1.2.178–179), while Middleton’s Touchwood Senior describes copulation as “that game/ That ever pleased both genders” (A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 2.1.54–55). The famous anecdote about Shakespeare and Burbage from John Manningham’s diary in 1602 shows how the “game” of sex could combine competition, deception and role-play: Vpon a tyme when Burbidge played Richard III, there was a citizen grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night vnto hir by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare ouerhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.24

Such uses of the word characterize sex as a pleasurable and recreational activity, of course, but they can also carry more sinister undertones. “Game” is also a word for the quarry that is the object of a hunt,25 and uses of the 24 John Bruce, ed., Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, barrister-at-law, 1602–1603 (Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1868), 39. 25 The line “The game’s afoot” and similar references presumably use the word in this sense (Henry V, 3.1.32).

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word to describe the pursuit of sex can carry the implication that the man is the hunter of the woman’s sexuality: hence Clarence’s observation, during Edward IV’s pursuit of Lady Grey, that his brother “knows the game; how true he keeps the wind!” (3 Henry VI, 3.2.14). Then, as now, “the game” was also a synonym for prostitution: the “daughters of the game” with whom Ulysses links Cressida are presumably prostitutes (Troilus and Cressida, 4.6.64); Bertram slanders Diana as “a common gamester to the camp” (All’s Well that Ends Well, 5.3.191); Lysimachus asks Marina, in the brothel, how long she has been “a gamester” (Pericles, 19.77). When Iago imagines Desdemona as “full of game,” Cassio agrees, missing the slanderous implication but unambiguously constructing her as an object of sexual desire (Othello, 2.3.19). As in Women Beware Women and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, game playing often brings together deception, strategy and illicit sex. In both Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness, a cuckolded husband plays a game onstage with his wife’s lover.26 In the former, Alice’s lover Mosby proposes a game of backgammon with her husband Arden: “we, like friends,/ Will play a game or two at tables here” (14.105–106). The game is, of course, a deadly ruse. During it, Mosby arranges to give “a certain watchword”—“Now I take you”—upon which his murderous accomplices will spring out from their hiding place and stab his rival to death. The scene was evidently an iconic one, becoming the subject of the frontispiece illustration to the 1633 quarto. In scene 8 of Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, meanwhile, John Frankford’s loyal servant Nicholas tells his master of Anne Frankford’s affair with Wendoll; Frankford decides to feign ignorance until he has learned more (“Till I know all, I’ll nothing seem to know,” 8.115) and invites both Anne and Wendoll to play a game of cards with him. Their conversation during the game is full of double meanings about, for example, partnering and “playing false,” and is littered with Frankford’s angry asides. Most competitive games involve a combination of chance, skill and strategy, and this can make “game” a potent metaphor for power struggles at the highest levels of politics.27 In Antony and Cleopatra, the Soothsayer warns Antony that if he plays with Caesar “at any game,” he is “sure to lose” (2.3.23–24). The same metaphor occurs twice in King John: when Salisbury hears of the death of Prince Arthur, he recognizes it as “apparent foul play” and wishes the same on the King in his own “game” (4.293–295); later, Louis the Dauphin, considering himself to have both the legitimate claim and 26 Citations from both plays are from Barker and Hinds, eds., Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama. See Bloom, “Games,” for an extended analysis of both scenes. 27 The title of the television series Game of Thrones is thus based upon an age-old metaphor.

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the tactical advantage over his rival, considers these “the best cards for the game,/ To win this easy match played for a crown” (5.2.105–106). Provoked by another Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls, Henry V famously imagines his war with the French in gamelike terms: “We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set/ Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard” (1.2.262–263). Such metaphors perhaps recall Thomas More’s description of Richard III’s gambits during the latter’s power grab as “King’s games, as it were stage plays […] for the more part played upon scaffolds,” an image that must have influenced Shakespeare’s own portrayal of Richard III as the ultimate political gamester.28 What emerges from this necessarily brief survey into early modern theatrical uses of the word is a multifaceted—but decidedly performative—understanding of “game” as dramatic action. Stage figures involved in “game” are likely to be motivated by illicit desires, especially for sex, influence or power. They will usually share those desires with the audience but hide them from others onstage, forging a complicity with spectators that may be morally transgressive and may involve mockery. They are likely to be in competition with other stage figures, often characters who are unwitting dupes. The actions undertaken by such characters typically involve some improvisation, taking an idea and extending it, playing with it for the audience’s pleasure just as much as for their own. Frequently, their actions involve an element of risk-taking. The examples considered here point to the ways in which numerous fictional characters are engaged in various sorts of “games” in early drama. What remains unclear from this is how “games” of this sort might have manifested as stage practice for the player. When a performer played a role that was engaged in some sort of gamelike activity, would the player’s own “game” have been identical to that of his role? Would an early modern player performing a role of this sort have identified his character’s desires, and shared them performatively with his audience? Might he have competed with his fellow players for stage presence in a semi-improvised performance contest? Theatrical performance is by its nature ephemeral, leaving only tantalizing traces for the historian; though there is much that we do know about early modern acting practices, a great deal more remains lost to time.29 28 Richard S. Sylvester, ed., The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 81. 29 For detailed analysis of these traces as they relate to early modern rehearsal and performance practices, see for example Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004); Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);

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Since we do not know what theatrical game playing of this sort would have looked like on the early modern stage, it may be helpful to look at how the contemporary stage has approached the problem. There is of course a danger here of anachronism: a discussion of the stage figure’s desires and objectives can easily slip into Stanislavskian notions of character and motivation. Indeed, as we shall see, modern theatre practitioners frequently approach “game” from something like this starting point. Nonetheless, this essay proposes that if we are careful to historicize both early modern and modern stage practices, we may be able to make some educated guesses about the former through an analysis of the latter.

Game as Dramaturgy at Shakespeare’s Globe The notion of stage action as a form of game has been central to practice at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe, especially during the tenure of its first artistic director, Mark Rylance (1995–2005). I do not argue that this has been anything like a straightforward “rediscovery” of early modern playing styles: the ways in which the idea of the “player’s game” manifested itself at the Globe were rooted just as much in modern naturalism or twentieth-century clowning as they were in the space’s particular playing conditions. Nonetheless, the discoveries of modern Globe actors may offer some tentative insights into early modern dramaturgy. Shakespeare’s Globe is unique among modern Shakespearean theatres in the amount of archival material generated by its actors: until 2002, the theatre routinely published Research Bulletins and end-of-season practitioner interviews for its main productions, and it continues to publish regular actor interviews as part of its Adopt an Actor scheme. A number of different models of theatre-as-game emerge from these interviews, spanning structured, competitive theatre games and open-ended, collaborative ones—both forms for which we can find openings and invitations in surviving early modern scripts.30 In fact, the new Globe was being constructed as a space for gamelike theatrical playing before it had even opened. Globe Education projects in 1992 and 1993 brought together professional footballers, Globe actors and local John H. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 30 I have written about this at greater length in my book Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 109–153.

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students and teachers in an attempt, in the words of Director of Globe Education Patrick Spottiswoode, to compare “games and plays, players and actors and crowds and audiences.”31 The children were encouraged “to ‘train’ and rehearse for a performance in the Cockpit at the end of the term,” and taken to both a football match and a Shakespearean performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company.32 The project was, on one level, a straightforward attempt to align Globe spectatorship with modern popular culture—to “add a sense of ‘street cred’ to an otherwise ‘luvvie’ impression the students had of actors and acting”33—but the idea that preparing for performance might involve training as an ensemble and making “live” decisions was one that would become persistent at the theatre. Like most modern actors, the performers who worked at the Globe during its first decade tended to have an essentially Stanislavskian understanding of character and stage action. Mariah Gale, who played Hero in Tamara Harvey’s Much Ado about Nothing in 2004, articulated the basic tenet in one of her Adopt an Actor interviews: What we’re actually doing in rehearsal is paring the huge range of possibilities down to a core that consists of what is going on. Actually, the core is pretty simple: what does your character want? What do they do to get it?34

During rehearsal, in other words, each actor would determine their character’s super-objective and identify the actions performed by that character in their attempts to achieve that objective. Thus, at the Globe as in other modern theatres, actors often thought about their scenes as a competition between characters, in which the drama consisted of characters with mutually contradictory objectives fighting it out between them. But the Globe went further in this understanding of drama than many other theatres. Early in his own acting career, Rylance had been heavily influenced by the theatre director Mike Alfreds, who had directed him in two productions at the National Theatre in 1987. Though Alfreds did not direct a production at the Globe until 2001, Rylance was citing him as 31 Tackling Shakespeare program, 1993, Shakespeare’s Globe, London. 32 Barry Day, This Wooden “O”: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn (London: Oberon Books, 1996), 285. 33 Nick Williams, “Tackling Shakespeare: An Evaluation,” 11, quoted in Rob Conkie, The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 67. 34 Mariah Gale, “Adopt An Actor: Hero played by Mariah (Minnie) Gale,” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 18 April 2004, https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record. aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f21%2f2&pos=2.

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an inspiration for the Globe’s artistic practice as early as 1997.35 Alfreds’s methods are articulated in full in his 2007 book Different Every Night (which quotes an endorsement from Rylance on its cover), but perhaps his central principle is this: Each performance should be a disciplined improvisation in which the “what” (text and, to a certain degree, actions and objectives) remains unchanged, but the “how” (the execution of these) can vary.36

As his book’s title suggests, Alfreds values liveness above predictability, and the risk of spontaneity above the safety of a carefully blocked production. The audience, he argues, “deserves at very least the occasional possibility of experiencing those thrilling moments that seem mostly to happen during rehearsal.”37 The Globe’s Research Bulletin for Alfreds’s 2001 production of Cymbeline gives a detailed account of the way in which Alfreds prepares his actors for such freedom, breaking the text down into Stanislavskian units of action and working in detail on their characters’ moment-by-moment objectives, but encouraging the actors to use different tactics to achieve those objectives each time they play the unit.38 The goal of this preparation is that the actors should feel empowered to improvise in performance, and to respond to the stimulus of their improvising scene partners, confident in the knowledge that their actions are consistent with the story that is being told. Philippa Stanton, who played Hermia in Alfreds’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2002, noted in one of her Adopt an Actor interviews that even halfway through the season, the production was “still changing and growing,” largely because there was “no pre-determined blocking.”39 This philosophy was shared by many of the directors at the Globe during the Rylance era, albeit to varying extents. Discussing her role in Kathryn Hunter’s The Comedy of Errors in 1999, Yolanda Vazquez noted that she and her fellow cast members “try to be flexible and not to fix the way a moment 35 Mark Rylance, “Playing the Globe: Artistic Policy and Practice,” in Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 169–176, at 171. 36 Mike Alfreds, Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007), 25 (emphasis original). 37 Ibid. 38 Jaq Bessell, “The 2001 Globe Season: The Rose Company, Cymbeline,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 22, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, May 2002. 39 Philippa Stanton, “Adopt An Actor: Hermia and Fairy played by Philippa Stanton,” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 31 August 2002, https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/ Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f14%2f4&pos=3.

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is played, so that each performance will be spontaneous,” but that “this is only possible if the actors are clear about their character’s motivation and relationship to the other characters in the scene.”40 The Rylance-era Globe’s most prolific director, Tim Carroll, encouraged the cast of his 2000 production of Two Noble Kinsmen to play the same scene multiple times during rehearsals, “each time using slightly different tactics,” and asked them to identify the “intentions” driving their characters’ behavior. 41 As time went on and a semi-regular ensemble of Globe actors began to emerge, Carroll became more confident in leaving blocking to chance, and by 2002, his production of Twelfth Night allowed the actors “a fair amount of freedom with the blocking within each scene, changing it slightly each time a scene was run.”42 In his discussion of John Dove’s The Winter’s Tale in 2005, actor Peter Forbes likened this sort of acting specifically to the playing of a game, suggesting that the scenes between Philip Bird’s Camillo and his own character Polixenes were “a bit like playing tennis”: We know each other’s usual game-plan and we can vary that as we choose: “Normally I’d lob here to the baseline but actually I’m just going to play a little drop volley and see what happens,” and the other actor has to react to those changes. 43

Rehearsals, explained Forbes, were “not so much about practising to get something right” as they were about “working out the parameters of the stage: where are the baselines, the tramlines and the net? Then playing is actually playing: it’s a game!”44 Most of the approaches discussed so far have been rooted in Stanislavskian notions of character, but the strongly physical dimension to Forbes’ metaphor 40 Yolanda Vazquez, “Adopt an Actor: Adriana played by Yolanda Vazquez,” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 24 May 1999 [collection currently unavailable], https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f5. 41 Jaq Bessell, “The 2000 Globe Season: The Red Company, Two Noble Kinsmen,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 19, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, March 2001, 9, 13. 42 Jessica Ryan, “The 2002 Globe Season: The White Company, Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 26, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, July 2002, 34. 43 Peter Forbes, “Adopt An Actor: Polixenes and Pandarus played by Peter Forbes,” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 9 June 2005, https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record. aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f26%2f4. 44 Ibid. In her foreword to Different Every Night, the actress Pam Ferris describes the experience of “battling out a well-written scene with another actor” as being “like an improvisation with carefully worked-out parameters, but within those limits, it’s as free as any football match” (in Alfreds, Different Every Night, xi).

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suggests the influence of a rather different performance tradition. Some years ago, I interviewed the physical theatre actor Marcello Magni about his approach to performing at the Globe, and he told me that his first question was always “What’s the game that Shakespeare is creating?”: There must be always, in the relationship of a play, a certain tactic. In life we are like that: we charm, we entice. I see it in a playful way, like a game. So then I have to put it physically on stage. I have to find the dynamic of that play. Either it’s attraction—pulling—or it’s pushing, it’s rejection. And then there are many different variations on doing that—searching, hunting. They’re all physical expressions. 45

Magni’s understanding of game as a physical manifestation of characters’ tactics is based on his training in the early 1980s at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq taught that “everything a person does in their life can be reduced to two essential actions: ‘to pull’ and ‘to push’”: We do nothing else! These actions include the passive “I am pulled” and “I am pushed” and the reflexive “I pull myself” and “I push myself” and can go in many different directions: forwards, to one side or the other, backwards, diagonally, etc. 46

Thus, for example, when Magni performed Antipholus and Dromio’s backand-forth series of puns about baldness in Kathryn Hunter’s The Comedy of Errors, the sequence was physicalized as a tennis match; Magni had identified the dynamic of the scene as “sending something back violently, with the energy of wanting to defend myself.”47 Magni’s notion of the “game” of performing Shakespeare is broadly similar to the more naturalistic understanding outlined above, in that it is focused on identifying a character’s desire and developing performance “tactics” in order to achieve it. But a crucial difference is in its self-advertising theatricality. When the theatre director John Wright describes “theatre as game and acting as play” as “the two most radical ideas to hit theatre-making over the last twenty years,” he is writing not as a Stanislavskian, but as a 45 Interviewed June 2010, quoted in Stephen Purcell, “Marcello Magni,” in The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 2012) 158–173, at 158, 160. 46 Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 84–86. 47 Interviewed September 2010, quoted in Purcell, “Marcello Magni,” 160.

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specialist in physical theatre and clowning. 48 For Wright, games have “the same function as an objective”: The plot gives you the dramatic context but the game gives us the life of the interaction. Games give you a simple structure in which to play an objective—and you must play to win. 49

But whereas the Stanislavskian actor hides the game from the audience, so that the character appears as a contained, lifelike fictional person with half-submerged wishes and desires, the clown “declares” the game to the audience: Once the game is declared, the audience will know you’re playing and everything will look as if it’s actually happening. [There will] be no illusion, and all your actions will be valued for what they are rather than for what they imply. When you declare the game, you play it so as to have an effect on the audience.50

Wright concludes his section on “Theatre as Game” with an account of Rylance’s performance as Cleopatra at the Globe in 1999, in which “the game was clear right from the start”—the male performer behind the female character, he argues, was “palpably” clear and “very funny.”51 But by the end of the performance, says Wright, the nature of the game changed. As the tragedy reached its climax, Rylance was Cleopatra “with all the beauty, power and dignity that the role demanded,” and “for a few moments at least, this was for real.”52 This idea of sharing the game with the audience, then, both encompasses and moves beyond the notion described in the first section of this essay of a character sharing his or her hidden strategy with the audience. Here, the player co-opts the audience into sharing the imaginative work of acting, pulling the audience dynamically in and out of the fictional world. This is the kind of metatheatrical “game” invoked by Carroll when he describes Twelfth Night’s gulling scene in such terms: 48 John Wright, Why Is that So Funny?: A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy (London: Nick Hern Books, 2006), 80. 49 Ibid., 88. Wright’s observation recalls Jacques Lecoq’s: “An actor can only truly play when the driving structure of the written play allows him to do so” (Lecoq, Moving Body, 105). 50 Ibid., 46. 51 Ibid., 95. 52 Ibid., 96.

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The whole situation is so unrealistic that I had a disagreement with one of my colleagues at the Globe, who said, “You have the box-tree too close to Malvolio.” He said, “Surely they should be in the musicians” gallery, where it is easier to believe that Malvolio would not hear them.” I said, “Wherever we put them, it is impossible to believe that Malvolio would not hear them. It’s a game.”53

Bishop has made a similar analysis of this scene as a “theater game,” noting that the scene requires its trickster-characters to remain invisible to Malvolio however much the actor playing Malvolio threatens to “see” them: “an imperative which reduces them to automata desperately improvising ways to stay hidden even while the script and the comic bent of the scene require them to risk breaking cover.”54 At such moments, argues Carroll, the audience becomes “complicit in accepting something which is literally unbelievable.”55 The idea that audience members are “complicit” in the game of make-believe is another one that may derive, in part, from Jacques Lecoq: Magni and Hunter were among several alumni of the Lecoq-based physical theatre company Complicite (formerly Théâtre de Complicite) to work at the Globe. Lecoq insisted that it is “not possible to be a clown for an audience; you play with your audience.”56 It is a model of performance that has also been endorsed by another of the Globe’s artistic directors, Emma Rice, who notes in the foreword to a collection of plays by her company, Kneehigh, that she sees the audience as the actors’ “accomplices” and invites them to “join in with the game.”57 In some instances of gamelike theatrical playing, then, it is the player rather than the character who is involved in the gamelike activity. But in many instances, the separation between the two begins to blur. In much Elizabethan theatre, the stage figure is clearly aware of the presence of the audience, speaking to them in soliloquies or in asides. This stage figure, as Bridget Escolme has argued, may be driven by very different imperatives than the naturalistic character behind his or her “fourth wall”: 53 Tim Carroll, “Practising Behaviour to his Own Shadow,” in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 37–44, at 38. 54 Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” 74 55 Carroll, “Practising Behaviour to his Own Shadow,”, 38. 56 Lecoq, Moving Body, 157. 57 Carl Grose, Tom Morris, Emma Rice, Anna Maria Murphy, and Kneehigh Theatre, comp., The Kneehigh Anthology: Volume 1; Tristan and Yseult, Red Shoes, The Wooden Frock, The Bacchae (London: Oberon Books, 2005), 10.

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whereas in the naturalistic theatre it is impossible for any character to desire or have an interest in anything outside the fiction, Shakespeare’s stage figures have another set of desires and interests, inseparable from those of the actor. They want the audience to listen to them, notice them, approve their performance, ignore others on stage for their sake.58

Later in her book, Escolme illustrates the idea with detailed reference to Rylance’s performance as Hamlet at the Globe in 2000, a performance in which Rylance/Hamlet made frequent appeals to the audience to understand him, to judge him, even to confront him, and responded in character to their reactions. It is, in fact, an idea that recurs throughout Globe actor interviews. Melanie Jessop, playing Lady Capulet in 2004, suggested that “each character wants to make the play and the story their own”: The idea of competitiveness between Lady Capulet and the Nurse is particularly interesting. I think it’s a competition the Nurse wins hands down—clearly, Lady Capulet has been involved in an ongoing battle to dominate this member of her household and she has never won.59

Peter Forbes and Juliet Rylance likewise played the relationship between Perdita and Polixenes in 4.4 as a status game, as Forbes explains: You find yourself centre stage for a minute before the other person somehow manages to knock you off that position [and] steals your focus—it’s up to you to get it back again! It’s like a status game where you have to win each point in a different way, and perfect for the back-and-forth dialogue between Perdita and Polixenes.60

Self-aware stage figures might thus compete with one another in a game that is both competitive and collaborative at once, co-opting the audience 58 Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005), 16 59 Melanie Jessop, “Adopt An Actor: Lady Capulet played by Melanie Jessop,” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 9 April 2004, https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record. aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f22%2f4&pos=3. It is worth noting that Jessop moves her description of a metatheatrical game back into a more conventional (and questionable) observation about the dynamic between the characters within the fictional world of the play; perhaps Jessop’s sense that Lady Capulet “has never won” stems from the Nurse’s theatrical irrepressibility. 60 Forbes, “Adopt An Actor: Polixenes and Pandarus played by Peter Forbes.”

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as witnesses to, or even fellow players in, a metatheatrical competition between scene partners. Actor Ben Walden described in an end-of-season interview in 1999 how for him, “a sense of play” was the “most important” aspect of Globe performance: There is a sense of celebration when two actors start to play off each other, feed off each other and involve the audience. It feels like a wonderful game, even if it’s a tragedy.61

The objectives of the actor and his or her character are identical in such games, collapsing the two into a single “bisociated” stage figure.62 By far the most persistent game analogy in Globe actor interviews is that of team sport, especially football. This seems to have been led by Rylance himself. In a retrospective essay in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Rylance articulates a frustration he had felt in his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a young actor: “it was a bit like going to see a football match where the two teams had practised an interpretation of the beautiful game.”63 For Rylance, “playing” means embracing the unpredictable and the unplanned, responding to the input of the audience and the contingencies of the live open-air event. In 1999, he remarked that Globe actors needed the right preparation to come out and be able to play in a very live and present way, in a similar way to the way sportsmen are so lucky to be able to do, because they don’t know the final score of the match, or the moves of the other players.64

That preparation, he suggested elsewhere, required committed teamwork: the playing ensemble needed to develop a collective “shorthand,” like “a football team in which each player instinctively knows where to find another, sight unseen.”65 Actors, he explained to the Twelfth Night company in 2002, 61 Quoted in Jaq Bessell, “Interviews with the Red Company: 1999 Season,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 15b, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, February 2000, 32. 62 I borrow the concept of “bisociation” from Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation, where the term is used to describe “the perceiving of a situation or idea […] in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference” (Koestler, The Act of Creation [London: Danube, 1976], 35). I have explored the idea of metatheatre as a game of bisociation in my article, “Are Shakespeare’s Plays Always Metatheatrical?” Shakespeare Bulletin 36, no. 1 (2018): 19–35. 63 Mark Rylance, “Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Shakespeare’s Globe, ed. Carson and Karim-Cooper, 103–114, at 106. 64 Quoted in Bessell, “Interviews with the Red Company: 1999 Season,” 4. 65 Quoted in Day, This Wooden “O”, 271.

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should be able to “pass the story like a ball.”66 In a newspaper interview about Richard II the following year, he developed the analogy further: “You have to use the field, create opportunities for passes. […] Bolingbroke sends the ball to me, I send it to Mowbray.”67 Actor Jem Wall explains the metaphor in practical terms: If I have a line, to make it work it is up to you to receive the line […] You have to make sure you are always available. You also need to be constantly aware of everything—your actions and movements—because they can either increase or decrease the focus from where it should be.68

This is, of course, partly a response to the demands of the space itself, in which the absence of stage lighting puts greater pressure on the actor’s body as the central means of controlling visual focus. It may be one of the reasons why Magni has described the Globe as “an actor-athlete’s space,”69 one that necessitates ensemble warm-ups “like when you get ready to play a football match.”70 At the reconstructed Globe, then, “game” encompasses numerous different dramaturgies. It can represent a sort of semi-improvised contest between f ictional characters with competing agendas, a game that most actors speak about in broadly Stanislavskian terms (objectives, actions, tactics) but that can also have a strongly physical dimension. It can be a game of a more metatheatrical kind, declared to and shared with the audience; the competition may be between the players themselves, or rather between bisociated stage figures who are both players and characters at once, competing for the audience’s attention or approval and involving spectators in their developing “play.” But the game can also be a more collaborative one, a shared effort on the part of the ensemble and between them and the audience. In a 1998 program note, Rylance issued the Globe audience the following invitation: “If you feel like playing as well, we would love to pass 66 Quoted in Ryan, “2002 Globe Season: The White Company, Twelfth Night,” 31. 67 Quoted in Christopher Rawson, “Brave New Globe under Mark Rylance’s Leadership,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2 November 2003. 68 Quoted in Jessica Ryan, “Interviews with Company Members from the 2002 Theatre Season: The Season of Cupid and Psyche,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin [unnumbered], Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 2002, 8. 69 Jaq Bessell, “Interviews with the White Company: The 1999 Season,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 15a [Globe Education], Shakespeare’s Globe, London, February 2000, 15. 70 Marcello Magni, “Adopt An Actor: Helicanus, Simonides and Boult played by Marcello Magni,” Shakespeare’s Globe, 27 May 2005, https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/ Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f24%2f3&pos=5.

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the ball to you, join in.”71 Here, his metaphor implies not a structured or even an especially disciplined game, but something akin to a kick-about in the park. These various models of “the player’s game” differ in many respects, but one thing they all share is their emphasis on the spontaneous and unplanned, and an element of risk. The meanings of Globe performance are thus at the mercy of the contingencies of the live event; the director is no longer in control. Indeed, Tim Carroll has said that his practice is not so much about interpretation as it is aimed at “creating situations which are fruitful and allow interesting things to happen.”72

The Player’s Game: Some Conclusions Dramatic action and theatrical playing have, then, been constructed as gamelike activities on both the early modern stage and its modern reconstruction. I have been careful to situate the reconstructed Globe’s game metaphors in the context of modern European theatre: they emerge just as much from the training backgrounds and aesthetic preferences of Globe practitioners as they do from the texts of the plays or the architecture of the theatre. There are certainly some substantial overlaps between early modern and modern conceptions of theatre-as-game, but there are also some key differences. The similarities are clear. On both the early modern stage and its modern reconstruction, dramatic conflict, especially trickery or strategic contest, has been understood in gamelike terms. Under such an understanding, stage figures are driven by an objective, often an illicit one, which is shared with the audience, and the audience is assumed not only to enjoy but to be complicit in the live unfolding of the stage figure’s pursuit of this desire. Modern practitioners like Jacques Lecoq, Mark Rylance and Emma Rice have been quoted in this essay describing the way in which gamelike performance requires the active collaboration of audience members; their words recall David Wiles’ description of the Elizabethan clown as a “game-maker” who “performed with, and not to, an audience constructed as equals,”73 and the invitations of numerous early modern prologues for audiences to contribute their imaginative energies to the construction of the playworld.74 These 71 The Merchant of Venice program, 1998, Shakespeare’s Globe, London. 72 Quoted in Rawson, “Brave New Globe under Mark Rylance’s Leadership.” 73 David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179. Wiles uses the term “game-maker” throughout his book. 74 The most famous of these, of course, is Henry V’s Chorus, who appeals to the audience to “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them” (prol.26).

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approaches resist dominant twentieth-century notions of the way in which theatrical meanings are generated: opening up the theatrical text to the spontaneous and unplanned renders its meaning unstable and contingent, displacing the author and director as the centers of authority. Richard Preiss has argued in a recent study that early modern audiences “did not ‘read’ performances as we read texts,” and that “the forms of attention they brought could be too abundant, too intense, too diverse, to guarantee a clear division of producer and consumer.”75 At the modern Globe, too, actors and audience become “co-authors” of the performance. But whereas gamelike playing is often constructed by modern practitioners as a largely collaborative activity, it was perhaps not quite so benevolent on the early modern stage. The football metaphors used by practitioners at the modern Globe are often founded upon a distinctly modern understanding of competitive sport, in which teams work and train together to achieve a shared objective. While early modern sports like hunting or dancing would have called for coordinated teamwork, others would pit individual against individual, sometimes violently. Football was certainly very different from its modern namesake, more of a free-for-all than a regulated game: it was, according to Dennis Brailsford, “still essentially a sport of mass participation, a riot for apprentices or an affray for the peasants […] it was not a game for the civilized.”76 Indeed, Louis A. Knafla’s research into early modern Assize indictment files has revealed multiple accounts of early modern sportsmen dying from football-related injuries, generally after violent altercations with opponents.77 When in King Lear Kent calls Oswald a “base football player” (1.4.84–85), he is insulting Goneril’s steward by associating him with a violent plebeian game in which each player was out for himself.78 On the early modern stage, to imagine theatrical playing as a gamelike activity would certainly have been to think of it as mirthful, but perhaps also to construct it as competitive, even antagonistic. This competition would not necessarily have been confined to rivalry between characters or even players, but might also have been felt between performers and audience: Preiss imagines the early modern 75 Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30. 76 Dennis Brailsford, Sport and Society: Elizabeth to Anne (London: Routledge, 1969), 53. 77 Louis A. Knafla, “‘John at Love Killed Her’: The Assizes and Criminal Law in Early Modern England,” University of Toronto Law Journal 35, no. 3 (1985): 305–320, at 317. My thanks to Kate M. Graham for drawing my attention to these accounts. 78 Stubbes linked “foot-ball playing” with “other deuilish pastimes.” Anatomie of Abuses, 1583, EEBO, sig. L2v.

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theatre as an “unstructured, bilateral game” in which players and spectators wrestled for control.79 As for the extent to which early modern dramatic performance would have been a semi-improvised game between players, the evidence is inconclusive. It is clear that early modern players tended to perform after what would be, by modern standards, a minimal period of rehearsal. The modern “director” was as yet unheard of, though some players seem to have been instructed individually by playwrights or their fellow actors.80 These factors alone mean that performances of plays could not generally have been “blocked” in any cohesive way, and that players enacting a new script would have had by necessity to have done a fair amount of thinking on their feet in performance, responding to the (initially unpredictable) decisions of their scene partners. The boy players in the induction to John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida ask each other “Are ye ready, are ye perfect?,” and enquire which parts their fellow actors are to play, just as the performance is about to start (lines 2, 5, 20, 28);81 as Palfrey and Stern note, this suggests that the boys “do not know what each other’s performance will be like.”82 If Marston’s induction is based on real-life practice, playing must have been a contingent activity for the performers, full of moment-by-moment surprises. How players would have prepared for such unpredictability is less clear. The process of line-learning (“conning,” or “study”) would have given players the opportunity to reflect upon and privately rehearse the sorts of performance strategies, including physical ones, appropriate to their parts: Stephen Gosson wrote in The Ephemerides of Phialo (printed 1579) that “the Player so beateth his parte too him selfe at home, that hee gives it right gesture when he comes to the scaffolde.”83 Gosson’s emphasis on “right gesture” suggests that just as at the modern Globe, players would have sought appropriate physical expressions for their parts; however, it may also imply that this would have been a fixed sequence of movements—the pre-planned, individual choice of the player—rather than a flexible physical manifestation of intercharacter dynamics of the sort described by Magni. 79 Preiss, Clowning and Authorship, 40. Similar metaphors for the relationship between actors and audience are, in fact, present in actor interviews from the very earliest seasons at the reconstructed Globe; see Purcell, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 133–135. 80 See Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, 67–81, and Making Shakespeare, 79–84; Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 66–70. 81 John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, ed. W. Reavley Gair, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 82 Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 65. 83 EEBO, sig. K2r.

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Indeed, Palfrey and Stern show that players were sometimes instructed in pronunciation and action (or gesture), which suggests that the performance of some parts may have been more predetermined than improvisatory, especially for those roles which another actor had originated.84 It is also highly unlikely that early modern players would have been able to do the kind of character analysis common among modern professional actors, not least because partial access to the script would have made it impossible for them to study much more than their own parts: what other characters said to or about their own would have remained largely inaccessible to players until after their preparation process was more-or-less complete. However, players would have been familiar with the stock types to which their characters generally conformed; indeed, some roles may have been suited by playwrights to the personas of the actors who were to play them.85 Players would thus have been able to draw on a pre-existing vocabulary of stage action appropriate to those stock types, anticipating collaborative stage business in the manner of lazzi, the short stock comic routines of the improvised Italian commedia dell’arte. This may have been especially true of clowns: John Day’s 1607 play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers depicts a fictionalized Will Kempe, invited to “play a part” with “an Italian Harlaken,” declaring himself “somewhat hard of study” but willing to take part in “any extemporall merriment.”86 In conclusion, then, while we cannot know the extent to which gamelike playing practices were performed on the early modern stage, it is likely that they were. Different companies may have had different practices in this respect; it seems likely, too, that different practices would have coexisted within one company of players. Apprentices may have been more likely to learn their intonations and gestures by rote, while more senior and experienced players may have had more latitude for invention in the moment of performance (clowns in particular were allowed plenty of scope for this, if sources like Tarlton’s Jests are anything to go by). Roles that involved trickery, mockery, strategic competition, the pursuit of illicit sex, or a clandestine power grab seem especially likely to have accommodated gamelike playing styles, especially when the audience was made complicit in these activities through direct address. Just as performance at the modern Globe exploits a binary between directed, preprogrammed acting styles and semi-improvisatory “liveness,” 84 Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 66–70. 85 See Stern, Making Shakespeare, 64–76. 86 EEBO, sig. E4r.

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it is possible that those gamelike roles in early modern drama were ludic precisely because they contrasted with a more fixed mode of presentation. Robert Weimann has argued that Elizabethan drama inherited from its medieval forebears a dialogic use of space and representation equating to the earlier drama’s locus and platea.87 While the locus-centered elements of early modern drama “tended to privilege the authority of what and who was represented,” Weimann suggests, the platea-like dimension “privileged the authority not of what was represented […] but of what was representing and who was performing.”88 Performances that had been learned as a fixed sequence of pronunciation and action, especially those in imitation of an authoritative “original,” would have been locus-like in nature, “defined in accordance with a certain amount of verisimilitude, decorum, aloofness from the audience, and representational closure.”89 A platea-like performance style would have involved the opposite, emphasizing the activity of playing itself, the presence of the audience and the agency of the player. Perhaps the early modern drama represented a moment of juncture in this dynamic, as the platea dimension of self-presentation began to give way to the locus of representational self-containment; this could be why the use of the word “game” as a synonym for theatrical performance had already begun to slip out of use during this period. It may be that newly professionalized practices were eroding the gamelike nature of performance, gradually replacing its spontaneity with the authority of the author and of the canonized performance.

Works Cited Alfreds, Mike. Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor. London: Nick Hern Books, 2007. Astington, John H. Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959. Barker, Simon, and Hilary Hinds, eds. The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama. London: Routledge, 2003. 87 Weimann’s influential theory was f irst elaborated in his Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 88 Robert Weimann, “Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theater,” PMLA 107, no. 3 (1992): 497–510, at 503. 89 Ibid..

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Bessell, Jaq. “The 2000 Globe Season: The Red Company, Two Noble Kinsmen.” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 19, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, March 2001. –––. “The 2001 Globe Season: The Rose Company, Cymbeline.” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 22, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, May 2002. –––. “Interviews with the Red Company: 1999 Season.” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 15b, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, February 2000. –––. “Interviews with the White Company: The 1999 Season.” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 15a [Globe Education], Shakespeare’s Globe, London, February 2000. Bishop, Tom. “The Art of Playing.” In Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, 159–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––. “Shakespeare’s Theater Games.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88. Bloom, Gina. “Games.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 189–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Brailsford, Dennis. Sport and Society: Elizabeth to Anne. London: Routledge, 1969. Bruce, John, ed. Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, barrister-at-law, 1602–1603. Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1868. Carroll, Tim. “Practising Behaviour to his Own Shadow.” In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, 37–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Clopper, Lawrence M. Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Coldewey, John C., ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Conkie, Rob. The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Day, Barry. This Wooden “O”: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn. London: Oberon Books, 1996. Dekker, Thomas, and John Webster. Westward Ho. In The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers, 2:318–403. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Edelman, Charles, ed. The Stukeley Plays. Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Escolme, Bridget. Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self. London: Routledge, 2005. Forbes, Peter. “Adopt An Actor: Polixenes and Pandarus played by Peter Forbes.” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 9 June 2005. https://archive.shakespearesglobe.

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com/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fE D%2fLRN%2f2%2f26%2f4. Gale, Mariah. “Adopt An Actor: Hero played by Mariah (Minnie) Gale.” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 18 April 2004. https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/ Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2% 2f21%2f2&pos=2. Greene, Robert. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, edited by Daniel Seltzer. Regents Renaissance Drama Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963. Grose, Carl, Tom Morris, Emma Rice, Anna Maria Murphy, and Kneehigh Theatre, comp. The Kneehigh Anthology: Volume 1; Tristan and Yseult, Red Shoes, The Wooden Frock, The Bacchae (Oberon Modern Plays). London: Oberon Books, 2005. Jessop, Melanie. “Adopt An Actor: Lady Capulet played by Melanie Jessop.” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 9 April 2004. https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2f LRN%2f2%2f22%2f4&pos=3. Kendrick, Laura. “Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It.” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 43–61. Knafla, Louis A. “‘John at Love Killed Her’: The Assizes and Criminal Law in Early Modern England.” University of Toronto Law Journal 35, no. 3 (1985): 305–320. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Danube, 1976. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Lecoq, Jacques. The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre. Translated by David Bradby. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Magni, Marcello. “Adopt An Actor: Helicanus, Simonides and Boult played by Marcello Magni.” Shakespeare’s Globe, 27 May 2005. https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+33 16+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f24%2f3&pos=5. Marshall, Cynthia. “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33, no. 2 (1993): 265–287. Marston, John. Antonio and Mellida, edited by W. Reavley Gair. Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Middleton, Thomas. Women Beware Women and Other Plays, edited by Richard Dutton. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Montrose, Louis A. “‘Sport by Sport O’erthrown’: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 4 (1977): 528–552. Olson, Glending. “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1995): 195–221. Palfrey, Simon, and Tiffany Stern. Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Preiss, Richard. Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Purcell, Stephen. “Are Shakespeare’s Plays Always Metatheatrical?” Shakespeare Bulletin 36, no. 1 (2018): 19–35. –––. “Marcello Magni.” In The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown, 158–173. London: Routledge, 2012. –––. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Rawson, Christopher. “Brave New Globe under Mark Rylance’s Leadership.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2 November 2003. Ryan, Jessica. “The 2002 Globe Season, The White Company, Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 26, Shakespeare’s Globe London, July 2002. –––. “Interviews with Company Members from the 2002 Theatre Season: The Season of Cupid and Psyche.” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin [unnumbered]. Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 2002. Rylance, Mark. “Playing the Globe: Artistic Policy and Practice.” In Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, edited by J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, 169–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. –––. “Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe.” In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, 103–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Stanton, Philippa. “Adopt An Actor: Hermia and Fairy played by Philippa Stanton.” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 31 August 2002. https://archive.shakespearesglobe. com/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED %2fLRN%2f2%2f14%2f4&pos=3. Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. London: Routledge, 2004. –––. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Sylvester, Richard S., ed. The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Tydeman, William, ed. Four Tudor Comedies. London: Penguin, 1984. Vazquez, Yolanda. “Adopt an Actor: Adriana played by Yolanda Vazquez.” Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 24 May 1999 [collection currently unavailable]. https:// archive.shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalo g&id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f5. Walker, Greg, ed. The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Weimann, Robert. “Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theater.” PMLA 107 (1992): 497–510. –––. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Edited by Robert Schwartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

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Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Wright, John. Why Is that So Funny?: A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy. London: Nick Hern Books, 2006.

About the Author Stephen Purcell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on Shakespeare and his contemporaries in modern performance and popular culture. His publications include Popular Shakespeare, the Shakespeare Handbooks volume on Webster’s The White Devil, Shakespeare and Audience in Practice, and Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe. He has published in journals including Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Shakespeare Jahrbuch. He is joint artistic director of the theatre company The Pantaloons, and regularly leads practical workshops on Shakespeare at conferences and elsewhere.

2.

“The Madnes of Tenys” and the Commercialization of Pastimesin Early Tudor London David Kathman

Abstract Efforts to control professional theatre in London in the 1570s contained echoes of the authorities’ previous reactions to the commercialization of tennis and bowling. As early as the 1470s, the London authorities had cracked down on tennis playing in the city, and records of the sale of tennis balls by the Ironmongers’ Company show that this attempt was successful in the short term. Over the next 50 years, those records provide a surprisingly detailed account of the surging popularity of tennis in the city, punctuated by occasional attempts by the authorities to ban it. Records from crackdowns on tennis and bowling in 1516 and 1528 provide information about the people who were trying to make money off these sports. Keywords: tennis; bowling; Ironmongers; balls

The 1570s were a crucial decade in the development of the Elizabethan professional theatre, and attempts to control and regulate the growth of the theatre played an important role in that development. A 1572 Act of Parliament restricted patronage of playing companies to noblemen, and in 1574 the Earl of Leicester’s Men became the first such company to receive a royal patent.1 Such patents gave companies more security than they had enjoyed before, but they were also a key element in the crown’s efforts to exert more control over the burgeoning professional stage, after decades of intermittently trying to quash it altogether. In late 1574, the London 1

E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:269–272.

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch02

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Common Council passed an act regulating playhouses and plays within the City, and within a few years the first commercial playhouses began to sprout up in and around London. It is sometimes stated that the 1574 act banned playing in the city and thus drove the players to build their playhouses in the suburbs, but this is not really accurate. William Ingram has argued (rather persuasively) that the law was simply trying to regulate and make money from city playing, and that the building of playhouses in the suburbs was an unintended consequence.2 These actions by the royal and city authorities were not ad hoc responses to the growth of professional plays; rather, they were similar in many ways to the responses of earlier authorities to other leisure activities that grew rapidly in popularity, in particular tennis and bowling. Tennis (not modern lawn tennis, but an indoor game now known as “real tennis”) exploded in popularity in London in the 1460s and 1470s, more than a century before the first permanent, custom-built playhouses. This popularity can be traced through sales figures for tennis balls, which have surprisingly survived in the records of the Ironmongers’ Company, and through explicit attempts to suppress tennis and bowling in London, starting in 1473. Between 1470 and 1530, tennis ball sales waxed and waned in remarkable concert with London authorities’ occasional attempts to put down tennis and similar “wasteful” activities, and some of these attempts resulted in historically valuable records of commercial tennis courts and bowling greens in the city. In the mid-1530s, Henry VIII began issuing licenses for operators of bowling and tennis venues, presaging the issuance of royal patents to professional playing companies 40 years later. Official disapproval of “unlawful games” in England dates back to the Middle Ages, and was initially driven by the idea that such games took men away from archery practice. All able-bodied adult males were supposed to be available for military service if needed, and thus were expected to own weapons and know how to use them. This requirement was made explicit in 1285 in the Statute of Winchester, which stated that all men between the ages of 15 and 60 should have bows and arrows, with men of sufficient wealth also required to have swords, armor, and a horse.3 The archery requirement became more important in the fourteenth century with the outbreak of 2 William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Callan Davies has recently argued that similar pressures were brought to bear at this time on London bowling alleys, which were institutions not unlike playhouses in the city’s “leisure ecology.” See Callan Davies, “Bowling Alleys and Playhouses in London, 1560–90,” Early Theatre 22, no. 2 (2019): 39–66. 3 13 Edw. I, stat. 2, c.6; Roger Morgan, Tudor Tennis: A Miscellany (Oxford: Ronaldson Publications, 1981), 129.

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the Hundred Years War against France, in which the superiority of English archers was a major factor in the nation’s success. The first official ordinance against games came in a Latin letter that Edward III sent to the sheriffs of England on 1 June 1363, designed to encourage archery and prohibit “useless and disreputable games” (“Ludis inutilibus & inhonestis”). The king complained that people of every degree (“tam Nobiles, quam Ignobiles”) were leaving the art of archery in favor of games such as casting the stone, wood, and iron (“Jactus Lapidum, Lignorum, & Ferri”), and ball games played with the hand, foot, or stick (“tad pilam Manualem, Pedivam, & Bacularem”), as well as “cambuc” (a game with a ball and a curved stick) and cockfighting (“Canibucam & Gallorum Pugnam”). Ball games played with the hand would have included early versions of tennis.4 Similar restrictions came in a 1388 Act of Parliament (12 Ric. II c.6) issued to regulate wages in the wake of the Black Death. The Act specified that servants or laborers should not have swords, bucklers, or daggers except in time of war, but that they should have bows and arrows, and should use the same (i.e. practice) on Sundays and holidays. It also said that servants and laborers should “leave all playing at Tennis or Football, and other Games called Coits, Dice, Casting of the Stone, Kailes and other such importune Games.” The list of prohibited games is similar to that in the 1363 ordinance, but it also includes kailes (a form of bowling) and dice (since gambling had long been closely associated with such games).5 The next wave of attempts to control unlawful games in England came in the 1470s, and this time the London authorities became directly involved for the first time. On 1 April 1473, the London Common Council passed an ordinance prohibiting tennis playing or “cloysh playing” in the city.6 Cloish (or closh) was a game with pins and a rolled ball, similar to kailes if not identical to it, so here we have tennis and bowling again linked by the authorities. This ordinance clearly did not get rid of these games in the city, for three years later on 12 March 1476, the Lord Mayor issued a precept declaring that no one was to exercise tennis playing or cloish playing in their house.7 The mention of houses suggests in this context that the precept was aimed at people operating tennis courts and bowling alleys for paying customers. 4 Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 126–127. As Morgan notes, “casting the stone” was a common sport, while casting wood may have been the Scottish sport of caber toss, and casting iron may have been quoits (ring toss) and/or horseshoes. 5 Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 127–128. The Act was passed again under Henry IV in 1409 (11 Hen. IV c.4), with the penalty for violators specified as six days in prison. 6 CLJ 8 (LMA COL/CC/01/01/008), fol. 74. 7 Ibid., fol. 127v.

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The following year, 1477, Parliament passed the Unlawful Games Act, which specifically sought to control dice, coits (quoits), tennis, football, and “divers new-imagined Plays.”8 On 27 May 1479, the London Common Council issued a proclamation explicitly designed to implement the new Act by prohibiting laborers, servants, and apprentices from playing tennis, kailes, cloish, football, dice, cards, and other unlawful games, instead ordering them to “vse & ex[er]cise their bowes in shotyng.” The opening of the proclamation is entertainingly blunt: “fforasmoche as by the madnes of Tenys playing[,] playing at Cailles Clossh ffoteball disyng and cardyng and other like games many hurtes & Inconueniences in daies passed haue growen ffor the Reformacion whereof diuerse actes & statutes by auctorite of sondrie parliamentes haue been ordeyned & made,” the Lord Mayor orders that no labourer, servant, or apprentice should play at tennis, kailles, closh, football, or use dicing or carding upon pain of imprisonment for six days, “but that thei vse shotyng or other semblable games which be not prohibet nor for boden by the kyng oure soveraigne lordes lawes.”9

Although the ostensible reason for the ban was to give these laborers and servants time to practice with their bows and arrows, the Council was clearly annoyed by the growth in popularity of these games (as shown by their reference to “the madnes of Tenys playing”), and looking for ways to control it. As it turns out, this growth in popularity can be quantified by figures from an unexpected source—the records of the Ironmongers’ Company of London. The Ironmongers had their company hall on Fenchurch Street near Billiter Lane, in a building they had bought, along with surrounding gardens and yards, in 1457. Adjacent to the garden west of their hall was another building which was used as a tennis court, or “tennis play,” for well over a century. This was a long, narrow building, about 70 feet long by 17 feet wide, accessible from Fenchurch Street by a passageway. Like other fifteenth-century tennis courts, it would have been timber-framed, with a stone floor and walls of oak boards, and was probably open to the sky to let in light, given that the surrounding buildings were four stories high.10 Although the Ironmongers never actually owned this tennis court, 8 17 Edw. IV c. 3. 9 CLJ 8 (LMA COL/CC/01/01/008), fol. 201. 10 More detail about these buildings and their history can be found in Roger Morgan, “A Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court in London,” International Journal of the History of Sport 13, no. 3

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the west wall of their garden apparently formed part of its structure, and throughout the sixteenth century the company’s wardens’ accounts show them receiving rent payments from the court’s owners and operators.11 More importantly for our purposes, those accounts also show the Ironmongers regularly receiving payments for large quantities of tennis balls, which would have been leather-covered and sewn by hand. The records of these payments, which often show the number of balls sold as well as the total price, can serve as an imperfect but very useful proxy for the popularity of tennis in London over a roughly 70-year period. The first records of payments to the Ironmongers for tennis balls are found during the wardenship of Nicholas Marshall and Robert Tooke, which began in 1461, four years after the company bought their new hall. Near the beginning of his wardenship (the entries are not dated), Tooke paid the company £4 for tennis balls, and some time later, several people paid the company £4 17s 1d for balls (pounds, shillings, and pence). These amounts total 2,125 pence (960 pence + 1,165 pence), and since the relevant period in the register is roughly five years (1461–1466), we can estimate that the Ironmongers received about 425 pence a year for tennis balls during this time.12 A later entry is even more informative: it tells us that between 7 November 1466 and 28 July 1468, the Ironmongers sold 55 and a half gross of tennis balls at 20 pence a gross, for a total receipt of £4 12s 6d. Thus, during that period of roughly one year and eight months, the company sold 7,992 tennis balls (55.5 × 144 balls in a gross) for a total of 1,110 pence, for an annual average of roughly 4,700 balls and 650 pence. A still later entry shows that in the period ending midsummer 1470 (and presumably starting two years earlier, at the end of the previous period), the company sold 47 gross of balls (6,768 balls) to Thomas Tooke for £3 18s 4d, for an annual average of 3,384 balls and 470 pence.13 (1996), 418–431; Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 9–25, esp. 12 (a revised version of Morgan’s 1996 paper); and John Schofield, ed., The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell (London: London Topographical Society, 1987), 74–78. 11 See Morgan, “Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court,” 420, and Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 11. As Morgan notes, several entries in the Ironmongers’ wardens’ accounts from the 1570s and later refer to rent being received “ffor the bordes of the tennis play sett upon our wall,” suggesting that boards were attached to the garden wall to raise its height and make it suitable for the tennis court. However, this is a century after the first Ironmongers’ records involving the tennis court, and the structure may well have changed over that time. 12 GL MS 16988, fol. 25v, line 2; fol. 27v, line 10; transcribed in Morgan, “Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court,” 426, and Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 17. Henceforth I will only cite the original MS for entries in this register, but transcriptions of all these entries can be found in Morgan’s article and book. 13 GL MS 16988, fol. 28v, line 6; fol. 31v, line 3.

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By going through the Ironmongers’ wardens’ accounts in this way and standardizing the results for easier comparison, it’s possible to make a table tracking tennis ball sales from 1461 to 1500, with the total amount paid and number of balls sold for each period, and the same figures on an annualized basis, along with the price per gross that the company was charging. Receipts are recorded erratically, especially in the early years, and often appear alongside records of what people owed for balls. Most entries are only approximately datable, and only some give the number of balls sold, so some guesswork is necessary. Table 1 is my best effort at disentangling the data, with italicized numbers representing estimates based on partial data. Throughout the 1460s and early 1470s, the Ironmongers were bringing in an average of around 500 to 600 pence a year (£2–£3) selling an average of around 4,000 tennis balls annually at 20 pence a gross. Many of these were sold to members of the Ironmongers, who were presumably playing on the tennis court, and possibly helping run it.14 In about 1472–1474, during the wardenship of William Portlowthe and Thomas Breten, there is a significant dip, with Portlowthe and Breten recording sales of only four gross of balls for 6s 8d during their two-year wardenship. It is probably no coincidence that this period includes the 1 April 1473 Common Council order that banned tennis playing in the city, the very first attempt by city authorities to control the game. If there was a dip in tennis activity in London, it did not last long, for between 27 June 1474 and 20 June 1477, the Ironmongers sold £10 3s 4d worth of tennis balls. No price is given, but if they were selling the balls at 20 pence a gross as before, that sum would represent nearly 20,000 balls, or roughly 6,500 a year, a significant higher rate than ever before. During this period (1474–1477), the company paid 10 shillings “to the p[ar]son of the chyrche for offrynges & tythe,” but also threw in “v grosse of ballys thertto.”15 The fact that the company was giving tennis balls to the parson of the local church as part of its offerings may be one indication of how popular tennis had become. It was also during this period that we find the first record of who was operating the tennis court, when John Young, “kep[er] of the new tennys pley,” owed the company 41s 6d for reparations.16 Presumably these were reparations to the wall shared by the tennis court and the Ironmongers’ garden, and the mention of “the new tennys pley” 14 As noted above, the company’s first recorded sale of tennis balls was in 1461 to Robert Tooke when he was a warden of the company, and Thomas Tooke, possibly a relative of Robert’s, was the primary purchaser of balls in the 1470s. 15 GL MS 16988, fol. 37v, line 27. 16 Ibid., fol. 38v, line 13.

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Table 1  Tennis balls sold by the Ironmongers’ Company of London, 1461–1500

1461–1466 1466–1468 1468–1470 1470–1472 1472–1474 1474–1477 1477–1479 1479–1482 1482–1483 1483–1485 1485–1487 1487–1494 1495 1499

Receipts in pence

Balls sold

Receipts in Balls sold pence (annual) (annual)

Price per gross (pence)

2125 1110 940 1166 80 2710 69 0 540 941 121 0 303 52

— 7992 6768 8396 576 19500 — — 6480 12144 1044 — — 720

425 650 470 583 40 903 35 0 540 470 60 0 ? 52

— 20 20 20 20 20 — — 12 9.5–16 16.7 — — 8–12

— 4700 3384 4198 288 6500 — — 3200 6072 522 — — —

suggests that this was part of a broader rebuilding or remodeling of the court. Young was a member of the Tailors’ Company who owned the tennis court and lived in the local parish, All Hallows Staining, as we learn from his 1481 will. In that will, Young left instructions for his body to be buried in the churchyard of All Hallows Staining next to his son John, and he bequeathed the “tenement called the Tenyspley in the aforesaid parish” to his wife Cicely “to have hold and occupy.”17 The tennis boom would not last forever, though. As noted above, in 1476 the Lord Mayor of London enacted restrictions on tennis playing; in 1477 Parliament passed the Unlawful Games Act in an effort to curb tennis and other sports; and on 27 May 1479 the London Common Council passed an ordinance prohibiting laborers, servants, and apprentices from playing tennis and other games. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that the Ironmongers’ sales of tennis balls dropped off dramatically in 1477–1479, when the company received only 5s 9d for balls, and that the company recorded no sales of tennis balls at all for the next several years. There was a bit of a revival between 1482 and 1487, with the biggest jump in the sale of tennis balls coming during the two-year reign of Richard III from mid-1483 to August 1485. However, the market price of a gross of 17 Young’s will is GL MS 9171/6, fol. 312v (viewable on microfilm at LMA), and is described by Morgan, “Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court,” 419, and Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 10.

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tennis balls had fallen significantly, from its long-time level of 20 pence to anywhere between 9.5 and 16 pence, suggesting that demand had slackened. One interesting part of the Ironmongers’ register for the 1483–1485 period is a list of five people who owed the company money for tennis balls, giving some insight into who was buying the balls. William Brugges owed 16 pence for one gross of balls; Roger Barttelett owed 22 pence for one gross and four dozen balls (16 pence per gross); Richard Smith at Newgate owed 2s 8d for two gross of balls (16 pence per gross); John Belle owed 11s 8d for 10 gross of balls (14 pence per gross); and John Saykyn of Maldon, Essex owed 20 shillings for 20 gross of balls (12 pence per gross). It looks like the company may have been giving buyers a discount for larger orders, charging Brugges, Barttelett, and Smith 16 pence per gross for their small orders, but giving Belle and Saykyn a cheaper price for their purchases of 10 gross and 20 gross of balls.18 After 1487, there is another long stretch where the Ironmongers record no sales of tennis balls. In 1495 the company recorded receipt of 25s 3d “for ballis at divers tymes”; in 1499 they recorded payment of 3 shillings for 3 gross of balls (a rate of 12 pence per gross); and not long after that they sold 2 gross of balls to “Pops [Pope’s] wife” for 16 pence, a rate of only 8 pence per gross, the lowest they had ever charged.19 After this low point, though, sales of tennis balls began to pick up again, until they reached an even higher level than during the previous peak in the 1470s. Table 2 shows the relevant data from the Ironmongers’ wardens’ accounts for the first 20 years of the sixteenth century, including the same data points as in Table 1.20 As before, the original entries are only sporadically dated, often requiring some interpretation and guesswork, and italicized amounts in the table represent estimated numbers of balls based on partial information. As this table shows, the first decade of the sixteenth century saw only modest sales of tennis balls by the Ironmongers, more than in the previous decade but not dramatically so. The going price for a gross of balls had settled at 12 pence, 40 percent below what it had been during the 1470s. The interesting thing in the register during these years is evidence that the company’s tennis court was now occupied by one Barnard Solas, sometimes called “Barnard the Lombard.” Since two entries from 1515 call him “Barnard tennis player,” and numerous entries show him paying annual rent of two 18 GL MS 16988, fol. 45r, line 12. 19 Ibid., fol. 69v, line 20; fol. 79v, line 13; fol. 80v, line 29. 20 The relevant entries are in ibid., fols. 86–111, and transcribed in Morgan, “Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court,” 428–429, and Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 19–21.

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Table 2  Tennis balls sold by the Ironmongers’ Company of London, 1501–1523

1501–1503 1503-1505 1505-1509 1509-1513 1513-1515 1515-1516 1516-1517 1517–1523

Receipts in pence

Balls sold

Receipts in Balls sold pence (annual) (annual)

Price per gross (pence)

180 360 240 1589 1140 1478 853 0

— 4320 2880 19068 13680 17000 10236 0

90 180 60 397 570 1478 853 —

— 12 12 12 12 12–24 12 —

— 2160 720 4767 6840 17000 10236 —

“marks” (26s 8d) to the Ironmongers (presumably for the use of their garden wall), he was most likely a tennis professional who had bought or leased the court and was operating it for a profit.21 One intriguing pair of entries from 1505 shows Solas paying 12d “for the 4 peahens in our garden for his tennis play for a year quit-rent ended at Christmas 1505.”22 It’s not clear what this entry means, but taken at face value it means that Solas was keeping four peahens (female peacocks) in the Ironmongers’ garden for his tennis court, and paying the company 12 pence a year for the privilege. Why he needed peahens for his tennis court is not at all clear. Starting around 1509, the year Henry VIII came to the throne, the number of tennis balls sold by the Ironmongers ramped up significantly. Between 1490 and 1513 the company received a total of £6 12s 5d for tennis balls, or 1589 pence. If all of these were sold for 12 pence a gross, as three-quarters of them definitely were, that means the Ironmongers sold over 19,000 tennis balls in this four-year period, or more than 4,700 a year. Many of these were sold to Barnard Solas, but significant numbers were sold to other people (Richard Pound, a stranger, John Maria, master King) or to unspecified buyers. In 1513, Solas paid the Ironmongers £4 15s for 95 gross of tennis balls—13,680 balls, the largest single order he ever made. In 1515–1516 the Ironmongers sold roughly 17,000 tennis balls in a one-year period, a staggering number given that the entire population of London was around 70,000 in 1500. That was the peak, though; in 1516–1517 the number of balls sold declined 21 The entries where Solas is called a tennis player are GL MS 16988, fol. 106r, line 8, and fol. 108v, line 24. 22 Ibid., fol. 90v, line 11. I have modernized the spelling; the original reads “Item. R[eceived] of Barnard Solas for the iiij poohyns in owr garden for hys tenys play ffor a yere quett rent ended at Christmas 1505.” It is possible Solas was paying to get rid of the peahens to clear the garden for tennis. I thank an anonymous reviewer of my essay for this suggestion.

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to around 10,000, and after that, sales stopped entirely, with no balls at all being sold from 1517 to 1523. What happened? As it turns out, this dramatic drop-off in tennis ball sales by the Ironmongers corresponds closely to another effort by the London authorities to clamp down on unlawful games, including tennis, and Barnard Solas was one of its primary targets. This effort was instigated by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey within his first year after taking office, when he was consolidating his political and ecclesiastical power. Wolsey was made a cardinal by Pope Leo X on 10 September 1515, and took the oath as lord chancellor of England three months later on Christmas Eve.23 On 6 March 1516, the aldermen of London resolved to send a deputation to Wolsey seeking his favor, and in early June Wolsey replied with a letter to the lord mayor containing a list of abuses in the city that needed to be remedied: rampant sedition, disobedience, ignorance of the statute of apparel, vagabonds and masterless men, and “unlawful games” in houses.24 This letter reflects Wolsey’s concern with law and order, especially in fastgrowing London, and two of his long-time pet causes: sumptuary laws, which prescribed what people of different social classes could wear, and controlling unlawful games.25 On 7 June, the aldermen responded to Wolsey’s letter by issuing an injunction to Alleyn Hall and Barnard Solace, “which kepen diverse Tennys playes within this Citie that they and every of them shall suffre no commen players occupye their seyd playes until the tyme that this court be otherwyse aduised.”26 Three days later, the aldermen made Thomas Jenyns, citizen and skinner of London, sign a £100 bond to “suffre no manner of vnlaufull Games as dyse Cards & such other to be openly & vsually vsyd within his mansion place within this cite.” On the same day, John Milburn, alderman of Aldgate Ward (where Ironmongers’ Hall and Solas’s tennis court were located), presented a list of four people who were keeping tennis plays and bowling alleys in his ward, including Solas, and all the aldermen were instructed to make similar lists for their wards and bring them to the next meeting.27 Between then and the end of July, several men were brought before the aldermen and made to sign £10 bonds saying that they would no longer 23 Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1990), 33, 104. 24 CLR 3 (LMA COL/CA/01/01/003), fols. 70v–71r, 86r–86v. 25 Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 435–39, discusses Wolsey’s obsession with these two issues and tries (mostly unsuccessfully) to make sense of it. 26 CLR 3, fol. 88r. 27 Ibid., fols. 88v–89r.

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allow tennis or bowling on their property. These included Barnard Solas and two other operators of tennis courts, who were brought in on 19 June, and three operators of bowling alleys who were brought in later.28 From these records and the others mentioned above, it’s possible to make a list of the people who were operating tennis courts and bowling alleys in London in the summer of 1516, and the locations of most of them: – As noted above, Alleyn Hall was operating a tennis court and Thomas Jenyns was operating a gambling establishment, but the records do not specify their location, and neither man appears in any later record. – Barnard Solace (Solas) kept a tennis play in Fenchurch Street, which we know from the Ironmongers’ records was the one next to their hall. Solas made his will on 4 September 1516, and it was proved a week later in the Commissary Court of London.29 He also asked to be buried in Allhallows Staining, where he lived, and left all his goods to his wife Agnes and son-in-law John Wyllingall. – William Hyll, freemason, kept two tennis plays in Fenchurch Street. Hill made his will on 11 September 1526, and it was proved on 20 December 1527 in the Commissary Court of London.30 He left property in Eardisley, Herefordshire, and Rayleigh, Essex, to his wife Joan, then to his sons James, Thomas, and John. – William Yole, merchant taylor, kept a tennis play “besyde the place where George Monoux Alderman now dwellyth.” This may have been in Bassishaw ward, northeast of the Guildhall, of which Monoux was alderman. – Simon Martin kept a tennis play in Aldgate Ward. – William Burgh kept a bowling alley in “the Earl of Northumberlands place” in Fenchurch Street. – William Trelawny kept a bowling alley in St. Mary Mounthaw parish, southeast of St. Paul’s. – Richard Townsend, pasteler, kept a bowling alley in St. Michael the Archangel parish. – Thomas Haryngton, yeoman, kept a bowling alley at Warwick Inn, south of Newgate. It appears that Fenchurch Street, where Ironmongers’ Hall and Barnard Solas’s tennis court were located, was something of a hotspot for games in the early 28 Ibid., fol. 90. The other records are CLR 3, fols. 96r (10 July) and 98v (29 July). 29 GL MS 9171/9, fol. 3v (on microfilm at LMA). 30 GL MS 9171/10, fol. 99v (on microfilm at LMA).

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sixteenth century, with at least three tennis courts and a bowling alley. It would remain known as an entertainment district for decades afterwards. The tennis court next to the Ironmongers’ garden remained in use for at least a century longer, until Ralph Treswell surveyed it for the Clothworkers’ Company in 1612.31 Northumberland Place, where William Burgh had his bowling alley, was a few hundred yards to the northeast, and it remained a popular place for bowling and gambling at least into the mid-sixteenth century. At the end of the century, John Stow wrote that this Northumberland Place, “of late being left by the Earles [of Northumberland], the Gardens thereof were made into bowling Alleys, and other parts into Dicing houses, common to all comers for their money, there to bowle and hazard,” but that by the time he was writing in 1598, it was “left and forsaken of her Gamesters, and therefore turned into a number of great rents, small cottages, for strangers and others.”32 Following six years with no sales of tennis balls by the Ironmongers, the wardens’ accounts record new sales in the 1523–1524 fiscal year, and substantial receipts for several years after that. This revival may have been inspired by a high-profile day of tennis playing between Henry VIII and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at Bridewell on 8 June 1522, during the emperor’s diplomatic visit to England.33 Table 3 shows the Ironmongers’ receipts for tennis balls from 1523 to 1531, including the number of balls sold each year and price per gross, where they are recorded.34 Although none of the entries between 1525 and 1530 are dated, it’s possible to divide the entries up by fiscal year because the accounts for this period record the annual tithes that the company paid to the parson of Allhallows Staining for their income from tennis balls.35 Only in three of these years do the records show the number of balls sold, and for two of these the total number (shown in italics) is estimated based on partial data. After modest receipts of 182 pence for 2,184 balls in 1523–1524, similar to the annual amounts from the first decade of the century, the Ironmongers 31 Schofield, The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell, 74–78. 32 John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 1:149. Northumberland Place was often under siege in the mid-sixteenth century by protoPuritan city authorities who tried to shut it down, along with other gambling houses. The story of this place and the men who ran it in the sixteenth century would require an article of its own. 33 Alison Weir, Henry VIII: The King and his Court (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 237. 34 The relevant entries from these years are in GL MS 16988, fols. 123–149, and are transcribed in Morgan, “Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court,” 429–430, and Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 21–23. 35 As Morgan, Tudor Tennis, 14, explains, these were not the Great Tithes, which comprised one-tenth of the natural increase in production of the land, but personal tithes paid on the profits of trades and crafts, and they imply that the Ironmongers were making the tennis balls themselves, rather than buying them to resell.

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Table 3  Tennis balls sold by the Ironmongers’ Company of London, 1523–1531

1523–1524 1524–1525 1525–1526 1526–1527 1527–1528 1528–1529 1529–1530 1530–1531

Receipts in pence

Balls sold

Price per gross (pence)

182 450 720 588 508 246 184 0

2184 — 8640 7350 — — — 0

12 — 12 11.5 — — — —

received £3 (720 pence) two years later for an estimated 8,640 balls, more than they sold in any year except the 1515–1516 peak. Receipts fell over the next two years but were still substantial, but in 1528–1529 they dropped by more than 50 percent, and two years after that the company sold no balls at all. For the rest of the sixteenth century, the Ironmongers recorded no sales of tennis balls, so they had presumably left that business behind, though they continued to record regular rent payments from the keepers of the tennis court. Once again, this decline in the sale of tennis balls corresponds closely to attempts by the London authorities to clamp down on tennis and other games, as part of their efforts to promote and regulate longbows and other weapons of war. In June 1526, just about at the peak of the Ironmongers’ tennis ball sales, Henry VIII issued a royal proclamation against unlawful games, ordering local officials to see that it was enforced. Unlike previous statutes and proclamations that made exceptions for the upper classes, this one ordered that “no person within this realm of what estate, degree or condition he or they be, do play or use the said unlawful games, nor any of them, nor any householder suffer them within their houses.” Cardinal Wolsey enthusiastically set out to enforce this proclamation, ordering commissions to be appointed in every county to see “that in all places, tables, dice, cards, bowls were taken and burnt.” These orders probably put pressure on game players, including tennis players, but the harshest measures were not carried out. Thus, in late 1527 and early 1528 the king issued further royal proclamations ordering stricter enforcement of the statutes against unlawful games.36 36 R. W. Heinze, The Proclamations of the Tudor Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 91–92.

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It was in the wake of these proclamations that the London court of aldermen brought in three men on 5 May 1528 and made them sign £10 bonds, similar to those in the 1516 crackdown. The men were Thomas Nykson, haberdasher, who was keeping a common tennis play in Suffolk Lane (in the parish of Allhallows the Less) and was ordered to “take down the bordes & other things of the same before the x day of this present month”; John Rydgat, who was keeping a common tennis play in Cosen Lane, Dowgate Ward; and Gilbert Speght, who was keeping a bowling alley at an unspecified location.37 These cannot have been the only tennis courts and bowling alleys in London, since the Ironmongers (at least) were still operating their tennis court and selling thousands of tennis balls in 1528, but this record gives us further insight into where such establishments were located then. Cosen Lane was near the Thames docks at Dowgate, and Suffolk Lane was a few hundred feet to the northeast, north of Thames Street, so these tennis courts most likely catered to foreign merchants. Thomas Nykson’s tennis play in Suffolk Lane is presumably the same one later occupied by William Griffeth in 1538–1542, when Griffeth was licensed to keep a tennis play “for the use of strangers” (foreigners) in Allhallows the Less. Giles Lamberd, citizen and draper, in his 1581 will bequeathed the rent from “my Tenysplace and the tenement situate in Suffolke Lane in the parish of Little Alhallowes, London.”38 In early December 1528, the king, undoubtedly prompted by Wolsey, issued a final, harsher proclamation against illegal weapons and unlawful games. Most of the proclamation dealt with the populace’s lack of skill in shooting longbows, and their use of illegal crossbows and handguns; it authorized anybody seeing such a weapon to seize it and break it into pieces, and authorized anybody to enter a house where such weapons were suspected to be, and demand them “upon pain of death.” The last part of the proclamation ordered anyone “keeping any hostelry, inn or alehouse” not to allow any unlawful games on their premises, and to allow the king’s agents “to take and burn the said tables, dice, cards, bowls, closhes, tennis balls and all other things pertaining to the said unlawful games.”39 In response, on 3 December 1528 the London aldermen ordered a search for dice, cards, and bowling in taverns, and on 22 December they brought in three tavern keepers and made them sign £20 bonds promising not to allow such illegal 37 CLR 7 (LMA COL/CA/01/01/007), fol. 257. 38 NA, C66/716, m.37; L&P, vol. 17, ed. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (1900), 264, 443.56; Edward Alex Fry, ed., Abstracts of Inquisitiones Post Mortem for the City of London, pt. 3, 1577–1603 (London: British Record Society, 1908), 63. 39 Heinze, Proclamations of the Tudor Kings, 92–93.

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games. The three were James Staveley, vintner, of the Rose in Pudding Lane (between Eastcheap and Thames Street); Richard Alwoode, vintner, of the Boar’s Head in Old Fish Street (southeast of St. Paul’s); and Elizabeth Parkyns, widow, of the Garland in Eastcheap. 40 There were undoubtedly many more taverns hosting such games, but these three were presumably punished as an example to others. This harsh December 1528 proclamation corresponds to the 50 percent drop in Ironmongers’ tennis ball sales in 1528–1529 relative to the previous year, and it is difficult not to see some cause and effect. As noted above, the Ironmongers’ receipts for tennis balls fell even more in 1529–1530, and dried up entirely after 1530. But while the Ironmongers apparently got out of the tennis ball business after 1530, the tennis court next to their garden remained in use for the rest of the century, as we saw above. There may have been a break for a few years, as there was after the previous crackdowns described above, but by 1535 “Maystres Bentley of the tennys play,” the widow of previous owner Roger Bentley, was paying the Ironmongers a yearly rent of 2 shillings, just as her husband had done. 41 The 1530s seem to have seen a general increase in game playing of all kinds, following the efforts to clamp down on unlawful games in the late 1520s. The downfall of Wolsey in 1529–1530 stopped any momentum behind those efforts, especially with the king preoccupied by his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, his courting of Anne Boleyn, and his break from Rome. Rather than trying to ban unlawful games, which had repeatedly proved to be impractical, the king decided that it would be better to license and regulate them, a key development in the legitimization of commercial entertainment. Starting in 1535, Henry VIII began issuing royal licenses for operators of tennis plays, bowling alleys, and gambling houses, which were often paired with bowling alleys. The first record of these was on 14 January 1535, when Hugh Foster of London presented a royal license to the London Common Council authorizing him “to keep open in any house the game of bowling and bowling alleys, with all manner of other games for the pastime of honest persons, except almoners, apprentices, and vagabonds.”42 Five months later on 17 June, the aldermen noted a Privy Seal letter in favor of Paulus, an Italian, to have a license for a tennis play in his house.43 On 31 March 1537, John Newman and his wife Joan received a royal license in survivorship “to 40 41 42 43

CLR 8 (LMA COL/CA/01/01/008), fols. 10, 13v. GL MS 16988, fol. 167r, line 28. CLJ 13 (LMA COL/CC/01/01/013), fol. 431. CLR 9 (LMA COL/CA/01/01/009), fol. 113.

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keep open bowling and bowling alleys and table playing in any their dwelling place or places” within the city of London, prentices excepted, and on 1 July 1538 the Common Council noted that John Jans was authorized to keep “a game called the nyne pynnes with the castynge of the halff bolle/ playing at the tables with the dyse” in the city and suburbs. 44 On 22 November 1541, the aldermen made John Chowe sign a £20 bond promising to bring in the king’s license to have a bowling alley. 45 In 1541 Parliament passed the Artillery Act, also known as the Unlawful Games Act, which prohibited the hosting of such games except by those who had a royal license (a “placard”). This made such licenses even more valuable, and many of them subsequently went to minor courtiers who apparently used their connections to obtain them. William Griffeth, who as we saw above was licensed in 1542 to keep the tennis court in Suffolk Lane that had previously been kept by Thomas Nykson, was described in the license as “the king’s servant” and keeper of the wardrobe in the manor of Horsleigh, Surrey. John Flecher, who with his wife Agnes received a license on 25 October 1551 to keep a tennis play in London, was a servant of the marquess of Dorset, Henry Grey (the father of Lady Jane Grey).46 On 27 November 1553, a few months after Mary I became queen, her servant John Reynolds, a marshal of the royal hall, was granted a license to use the game of “handout,” otherwise called “black and whyte,” in any of their dwelling places in London. Several months later on 7 May 1554, James Towne, one of the grooms of the chamber, was granted a license to keep a tennis play.47 Examples could easily be multiplied. What is interesting from the perspective of a theatre historian are the similarities between these licenses for bowling, tennis, and gaming, and the later royal licenses given to playing companies starting in the 1570s. In fact, the trajectory of official attempts to control bowling, tennis, and similar games in London between the 1470s and the 1530s is similar in many ways to the later development of attempts to control stage-playing in London between the 1540s and the 1570s. As we saw above, the London authorities first took explicit notice of bowling and tennis in the 1470s, when the popularity of such games was rapidly increasing and they were becoming more commercialized through venues such as the tennis court 44 L&P, vol. 12, pt. 1, ed. James Gairdner (1890), 512, 1103.14; CLJ 13, fol. 76. 45 CLR 10 (LMA COL/CA/01/01/010), fol. 232. 46 TNA C66/841, m.8; Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward VI (London: HMSO, 1924), 4:197. 47 TNA C66/878, m.5; C66/888, m.5; Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Philip and Mary (London: HMSO, 1936), 1:383, 387.

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next to Ironmongers’ Hall. Those authorities first tried to ban these games or place major restrictions on them, which worked temporarily but never lasted long. In 1516, the authorities began targeting specific operators of tennis courts and bowling alleys, making them sign bonds promising not to host these games any more; this was also temporarily successful in suppressing the games, but it did not last. After a third attempted crackdown in the 1520s worked only temporarily, the king began licensing bowling alleys, tennis courts, and gaming houses, probably figuring that if it wasn’t possible to shut them down, he might as well have some measure of control and make some money off them. Most of the elements of this story show up decades later when the London authorities were trying to get a handle on the burgeoning popularity of the professional theatre. Although the attempts by London authorities to control the professional stage in the 1570s (as described at the beginning of this chapter) are well known, the earliest such attempts came some 30 years earlier in the early 1540s, when London theatre was becoming commercialized for the first time. 48 On 11 April 1542, Lord Mayor Michael Dormer ordered the aldermen to prevent “any commen playes or enterludes” within livery company halls, and six days after that, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, issued an injunction prohibiting all “common playes or interludes” in churches or chapels. Believe it or not, these are the first recorded attempts to control or prohibit plays in London. Nearly a year later on 1 April 1543, the common council made Ambrose Chapman, citizen and draper, sign a bond saying he would no longer stage any disguisings or plays in Carpenter’s Yard in St. Botolph’s parish, and the following day, the court of aldermen made three citizens sign bonds for £40 apiece (an enormous sum) promising not to permit interludes or common plays in their “dwelling houses”: William Blytheman, citizen and clothworker; George Tadlowe, citizen and haberdasher; and Thomas Hancock, citizen and vintner. These bonds were very similar to the bonds that the aldermen forced keepers of tennis plays and bowling alleys to sign in 1516 and 1528, except they were for a larger amount, signaling that the aldermen were taking plays more seriously. Professional players were hardly a novelty in London, but they had previously been hired to perform at civic events or livery company feasts; what was new in the early 1540s was that playing was becoming commercialized, with actors hiring out venues, attracting an audience through advertising, and charging admission. 48 See David Kathman, “The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London,” Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (2009): 15–38, from which the facts in the rest of this paragraph are taken.

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Over the next several decades, the London authorities made a few more people sign bonds promising to no longer host plays, while also attempting to restrict playing (and other types of performance, such as minstrelsy) in various ways as audiences grew bigger and players moved into bigger venues, such as inns. Sometimes there was a lord mayor or faction of aldermen who were particularly anti-theatre and tried to shut down playing, or at least kick it out of the city, much like Wolsey tried to eliminate bowling, tennis, and other “unlawful games”; however, like Wolsey’s attempts, these crackdowns did not last, and did little to slow the popularity of the professional theatre. Finally, in 1574 Leicester’s Men received the first royal patent issued to a playing company, providing official approval, of sorts, for the professional stage. This was a novel and important step in the development of the Elizabethan theatre, but it was closely paralleled by Henry VIII’s issuance of royal licenses to keepers of bowling alleys and tennis courts 40 years earlier. It’s possible to make too much of the similarities here. There were more operators of tennis courts, bowling alleys, and gaming houses than there were playing companies, and the requirement for playing companies to have a patron, plus the fact that plays had content that could be deemed offensive or seditious, are extra complications. But it’s clear that, at a fundamental level, the methods that the London authorities used for dealing with the rising popularity of professional stage-playing throughout the course of the sixteenth century were the same ones they had used decades before in handling “unlawful” games. Both were seen as frivolous things that distracted the populace from more important pursuits, but both proved impossible to eliminate altogether, and the authorities eventually began to license both. The history of commercial tennis, bowling, and gambling in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London is a fascinating and largely untold one, about which there is much more to say. I hope to have shown here that it also provides valuable context for the later history of the Elizabethan theatre.

Works Cited Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward VI. London: HMSO, 1924. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Philip and Mary. London: HMSO, 1936. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923.

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Davies, Callan. “Bowling Alleys and Playhouses in London, 1560–90,” Early Theatre 22, no. 2 (2019): 39–66. Fry, Edward Alex, ed. Abstracts of Inquisitiones Post Mortem for the City of London. Pt. 3, 1577–1603. London: British Record Society, 1908. Gwyn, Peter. The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1990. Heinze, R. W. The Proclamations of the Tudor Kings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Ingram, William. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Kathman, David. “The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London.” Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (2009): 15–38 Morgan, Roger. “A Fifteenth-Century Tennis Court in London.” International Journal of the History of Sport 13, no. 3 (1996): 418–431. –––. Tudor Tennis: A Miscellany. Oxford: Ronaldson Publications, 1981. Schofield, John, ed. The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell. London: London Topographical Society, 1987. Stow, John. A Survey of London. Edited by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. Weir, Alison. Henry VIII: The King and his Court. New York: Ballantine, 2001.

About the Author David Kathman is an independent scholar in Chicago. He has done extensive archival research on Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and has published on theatrical apprenticeship, biographies of actors and other theatre people, the Shakespeare authorship question, and London inns and taverns where plays were performed. His work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Newsletter, Shakespeare Bulletin, Early Theatre, and Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, among other places. He also wrote more than three dozen entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and has contributed to several other reference works.

3.

The Roll of the Dice and the Whims of Fate in Sixteenth-CenturyMorality Drama Katherine Steele Brokaw

Abstract Young characters play dice games in the early Tudor morality plays Nice Wanton (c. 1547–1553), Impatient Poverty (c. 1554–1558), and Misogonus (c. 1564–1577). These staged games are best understood in the context of the mid-sixteenth century’s theological upheavals, particularly in response to Calvinism, and the concurrent rise of an increasingly capitalist economy that rewarded economic risk-taking, a behavior that is mirrored in gambling. In looking at the role (and roll) of dice in these three plays, this essay traces the way staged dice play contributes to increasingly complex debates on the religious and economic implications of risk-taking. Keywords: Calvinism; history of capitalism; Tudor drama; dice; early modern religion; history of gambling

When Youth, the protagonist of the early sixteenth-century morality play The Interlude of Youth (c. 1515–1520), meets up with the bad influence that is Riot, Riot promises to teach him “to play at the dice […] and many other games mo” (lines 671, 674).1 Playing games of chance—cards and particularly dice—is set up as a sign of sin, and a particularly dangerous sin for wealthy young men like Youth who may be tempted to gamble away their money rather than giving it to the poor, as was encouraged by Catholic doctrine. Almost a hundred years later, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is shot through with the language of games and gambling, including two uses of the word 1

Youth, in Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé (New York: Penguin, 1972), 113–138.

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch03

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“hazard,” the name of one of the era’s most popular dice games. Enobarbus warns Antony of the risks he takes in choosing to engage in battle at sea, which would make Antony vulnerable “to chance and hazard from firm security” (3.7.47–48).2 When he loses, Enobarbus chastises him for having “nicked his captainship”—a nick is a winning throw of the dice in the game Hazard (3.13.8), and the word is used in this way in the mid-sixteenth-century morality play Nice Wanton, too, when one character playing the game asks “do ye nick us?”3 Warning Antony that he is destined to fall to Caesar, the Soothsayer says, “if thou dost play with him at any game/ Thou are sure to lose” (2.3.23–24); Antony’s frustrated response admits that, indeed, “the very dice obey him [Caesar]” (2.3.31). Youth is typical of early Catholic morality plays in using vice to index sin, but as these references from Antony and Cleopatra suggest, by the turn of the sixteenth century, the stage was employing dice play and references to it to signify a wide range of issues, from the dangers of gambling and the unfairness of fate; to upper-class sociability, as in John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, to the hypocrisy of cheaters, as when Hamlet refers to Gertrude’s marriage vows as being “false as dicer’s oaths (3.4.43).”4 Dice also describe deceitfulness—the paranoid Leontes characterizes women as “false/ As dice” (1.2.130–131)—and they stand for the randomness of destiny, as when Morocco ruminates on Hercules and Lichas playing at dice before he chooses a casket in Merchant of Venice.5 But before Shakespeare and his contemporaries were playing with dice metaphors, sixteenth-century moralities had been using dice games for increasingly complex and specific explorations of character psychology and social milieus.6 This essay will look at the use of dice in three mid-Tudor morality plays written between Youth and the opening of the professional amphitheatres to explore these dramatic developments, and also to suggest why valences for staged dice play grew more and more nuanced and evocative of real 2 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Niell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3 Nice Wanton, in The Tudor Interludes: “Nice Wanton” and “Impatient Poverty,” ed. Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 64–126; the reference is line 214. 4 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006). 5 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Arden, 2006). 6 Adam Zucker notes that 167 of the 1,116 plays performed between 1500 and 1642, and indexed in the Records of Early English Drama database, use the word “dice,” and 167 use “gamester.” Zucker, “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 67–86, at 70.

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social life. It will argue that two contexts are especially relevant to the mid-sixteenth century’s changing representations of games of chance: one is the theological upheavals between Edward VI’s reformist state religion (1547–1553), Mary I’s Catholicism (1553–1558), and Elizabeth’s so-called Anglican compromise of the late 1550s; and the other is the rise of an increasingly capitalist economy that (sometimes) rewarded economic risk-taking, a behavior that is mirrored in gambling. The Edwardian play Nice Wanton (c. 1547–1553) subscribes to a Calvinistic theological framework that uses dice to signify the reprobate status of the play’s sinners. Matters are complicated in the Catholic Impatient Poverty from Mary I’s reign (c. 1554–1558), in which dice are used to underscore that wealth is best spent on charity rather than gambling, a notion that is somewhat undermined by the way the play rewards its central character with the very prosperity it warns can be dangerous to the soul. The tensions between Christian doctrines of prudence and charity and a budding capitalist economy that celebrates venture are pushed further by the early Elizabethan Misogonus (c. 1564–1577), in which dice play is used to expose continued theological confusion and ecclesiastic hypocrisy regarding speculation and the accumulation of wealth. Adam Zucker, Linda Woodbridge, Tom Bishop, and Gina Bloom have made compelling arguments regarding the way games played on the early modern stage interact with issues of urban sociability, economics, acting skill, and spectatorship, respectively.7 This essay argues that staged games also comment on and reflect growing epistemic crises regarding eschatology. Heaven, the ultimate win, became an increasingly uncertain proposition in the sixteenth century, as the emphasis on grace as well as the Calvinistic clarification on double predestination—that some are preordained for reprobation and some elected for salvation—vied with traditional religion’s emphases on the efficacies of sacraments like penance and on the Good Works of charity.8 7 Zucker, “Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London”; Linda Woodbridge, “‘He Beats Thee ’Gainst the Odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra,” in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Sara Munson Deats (New York: Routledge, 2004), 193–211; Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88; Gina Bloom, “Games,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–211. 8 The doctrine of predestination is upheld by Augustine, but Calvin’s clarification on double predestination—that if there were those who were predestined to the Elect there were others who were predestined to be Reprobate—gave the notion that one had been pricked out for Heaven or Hell before birth more widespread currency and clarity. Though it was never adapted

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These theological tensions were made more complex by the growth of a merchant class who gambled recreationally and, in a way, professionally for their wealth. Traders took risks as exchange rates fluctuated, and these very risks protected them from accusations of usury and other moral sins, so that some types of gambling were deemed good and some bad. In Woodbridge’s words, “such conflicted attitudes toward risk and skill reveal fault lines in a culture that was in transition to a capitalist system to which risk and chance were fundamental.”9 On- and offstage, games of chance and betting were playful echoes of the capitalistic gambles merchants made. In Adam Zucker’s analysis, early modern English theatre stages “gambling’s links to social and economic practice in the period and extract[s] a useful narrative device from the field of commerce: the mystifying force of chance profit.”10 The apotheosis of the dramatization of the connection between gambling and commerce on the early modern stage is perhaps Antonio’s high-risk investments in the doomed trade ships of Merchant of Venice, and Bassanio “hazard[ing] all” on Portia’s casket game (2.7.9).11 But such associations were being made throughout the sixteenth century in a variety of morality plays. All three of the dramatic works discussed in this essay are youth moralities, stories of young men and women who are tempted into sin by the lure of dice, among other vices. Many such plays were written for and performed by schoolboys or university students, and the genre remained popular and influential through most of the sixteenth century, until the rise of professional amphitheatre drama. In looking at the role (and roll) of dice in these three plays, this essay traces the way dice in drama from the 1540s through ’70s reflect and contribute to increasingly complex debates on the religious and economic implications of risk-taking.

Nice Wanton (c. 1547–1553) Nice Wanton is one of the earliest examples of a drama that takes the reprobate youth play—of which Youth is a paradigmatic example—and revises its plot to address the theology of reformed religion, particularly as an official article of faith in the Elizabethan church, the idea was circulating—and preached by some—during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth. 9 Woodbridge, 195. 10 Zucker, 68. 11 For a nuanced analysis of the way this play is preoccupied with probability, see Luke Wilson, “Drama and Marine Insurance in Shakespeare’s London,” in The Law in Shakespeare, ed. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 127–142.

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the doctrine of the Elect. Like many such plays, Nice Wanton advocates for proper upbringing and sound education, a message undercut by the notion that the play’s virtuous characters—in particular Barnabas, the well-behaved brother—are predestined for goodness while the play’s reprobate characters, Barnabas’s siblings, Ismael and Dalila, are destined for damnation. A staged dice game is central to the sequence that demonstrates Ismael and Dalila’s reprobation. The scene not only uses the game to index the siblings’ irredeemable reprobation, though, but also its staging evokes (probably unintentionally) the unknowable nature of one’s fate according to the doctrine of double predestination. The audience learns early in the play that Barnabas goes to school and work while his siblings Ismael and Dalila embrace pleasure and idle merriment. It is clear that Barnabas’s work ethic comes from his being born virtuous—his goodness is a sign of Election—and that his siblings are “prone to evil” (line 27). They meet their fated ends by the end of the play: lacking in God’s grace, Dalila dies of venereal disease and Ismael is hanged as a criminal.12 The siblings’ idleness is demonstrated by having them play a dice game. After Dalila and Ismael cast away their books and ignore their brother’s advice to go to school, the audience next sees them re-enter with Iniquity, a vice figure typical of morality plays. After a quarrel breaks out between the siblings over their immoral sexuality, Iniquity uses a game of dice to bring peace to the group: Well, no more ado, let all this go, We kinsfolk must be friends, it must be so. Come on, come on, come on, He casteth dice on the board. Here they be that will do us all good. (Lines 171–174)

While preparing to play, Iniquity and Dalila begin kissing (stage direction after line 191), and the three join in a bawdy song (lines 193–206). The message is clear: merely agreeing to throw dice leads to immoral behavior. Nice Wanton stages the actual dice-playing; the characters play the game Hazard. To play Hazard, the caster throws until he gets a “Main,” any number between five and nine, and then throws for his “Chance,” a number between 12 Barnabas tells his sister to repent, but whether or not she was able to successfully repent and be saved is left ambiguous in the text, as is appropriate to a Calvinistic worldview in which one’s fate is known by God but not clear to the living.

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four and ten. Then he throws until he repeats one of these—if he gets the Main first, he loses, if he gets the Chance first, he has thrown a “Nick,” and he wins.13 After laying down wagers, the trio plays a round: Ismael: Do ye nick us? Be-knave your noly [head] Iniquity: Ten mine. Ismael: Six mine. Ismael casteth. Have at it, and it were for all my fathers kin, It is lost by his wounds, and ten to one. Iniquity: Take the dice Dalila, cast on. Dalila: Come on five. She casteth, and they set. Thrive at fairest. Ismael: Gup, whore, and I at rest. By God’s blood, I ween God and the devil be against me. He loseth. (Lines 214–223)

The staging of a dice game and Ismael’s commentary on his loss—his feeling that “God and the devil” are “against” him—together contribute to the sense of fate’s unfairness when it comes to, not only games of chance like dice-playing, but also the randomness of one’s fate after death. Dice’s signification of sin resonates with contemporary discourses on idleness, while Ismael’s comments on the cruelty of God’s ill-favor echo with clarifications on predestination that suggest that God is indeed “against” reprobates. Preachers and other churchmen often used dice-playing as code for indolence. For example, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London under Mary I, wrote in 1555 that everyone should come to the evensong “to pray for their sins,” rather than remaining “idle at home,” or “wych is more detestable,” coming to church and engaging “forsooth at the dice, or unprofytable games, or sportes.”14 Dice were often called unprofitable, endangering both worldly and heavenly profit. John Northbrooke’s massive Spiritus est vicarius, often quoted for its anti-theatricalism, is subtitled A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes, or enterluds are reproved: dicing is the first abomination listed. Like many other treatises against games, Northbrooke denounces 13 Delmar Solem, “Some Elizabethan Game Scenes,” Educational Theatre Journal 6, no. 1 (1954): 15–21, at 17. 14 Edmund Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto/ set forth by the reuerend father in God, Edmunde Byshop of London (London, 1555), Nn2r.

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dice as the worst possible kind of game because it is entirely based on luck rather than skill. Cards—a combination of skill and luck—are condemnable but slightly less problematic, and chess, a game of pure skill, is beneficial in moderation, according to Northbrooke.15 He explains that dice games are dishonest play because they in no way improve the mind or body: the Playe at Dice is a very corruption of Gods holy permission, & of true and honest play. For all playes are appointed and lyked of men for two causes onely: eyther for the exercise of the bodye (whereof Diceplay is wholy contrarie, being a sport of a sorte of ydle unthriftes:) or else Playe shoulde serve for the recreation of the minde […] whereunto Diceplaye is wholy repugnant and contrarie: for therein is no exercise of our wittes, but we onely stay upon the chaunce of the Dyce, whyle as well he that winneth, as he that loseth, is amazed and unsure of his chaunce, but alwayes gapeth for the chaunce of his happe, without any pleasure, but onely a covetous desire to gain.16

For Northbrooke, dice play dazzles its players with the uncertainty of chance, making them not only lazy, unskilled, and covetous but also reliant on random luck rather than work. Woodbridge argues that “one reason chance was bad and skill good [in early modern discourse about games] stemmed from the growing Protestant work ethic: skill demanded effort and labor, while only a lazy man sought windfall profits purely by chance.”17 Indeed, one can argue that Calvinist morality plays like Nice Wanton as well as Northbrooke’s treatise promote the notion that hard work, like that in which Barnabas engages, is a sign of election and godliness, whereas only a reprobate like Dalila or Ismael would try to gain profits by mere luck. But the Weberian notion of the “Protestant work ethic” to which Woodbridge refers is only partially explanatory here, and in this very early Reformation moment—when “Protestant” ideas were new and not always labelled as such—characters express something like anxiety about God’s unequal favor. In Nice Wanton, the Calvinist worldview asserting that Dalilia and Ismael are truly reprobate—unable to be reformed by any amount of Good Works 15 John Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra: A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes [et]c. commonly vsed on the Sabboth day, are reproued by the authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers (London, 1577), 108–113. 16 Ibid., 108. 17 Woodbridge, 195.

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or education—explains their willingness to seek worldly gain. After losing in the dice game, Ismael’s exchange with Iniquity continues: Ismael: By God’s blood, I ween God and the devil be against me. He loseth. Iniquity: If the one forsake thee, the other will take thee. Ismael: Then is he a good fellow, I would not pass, So that I might bear a rule in hell by the mass, To toss firebrands at these penny-fathers’ pates, I would be porter and receive them at the gates, In boiling lead and brimstone, I would see them each one The knaves have al the money, good fellows have none. (Lines 223–230)

In his anger at losing all his money, Ismael expresses frustration at the unfairness of election: if you’re not with God, you’re with the devil. However, it is the “good fellows” that are without reward here on earth. Arthur Golding’s translation of Calvin (from a 1555 sermon) expresses God’s unequal selection of the Elect: “And wheras he pitieth not all alike, but letteth whom hee list alone: therein he intendeth to give the greater shewe of his goodnesse.”18 Sensing himself of the devil’s party and now bereft of all his earthly money (lines 231–232), Ismael’s ensuing decision to go “rob the next [he] meet[s]” (lines 234) seems almost logical, as the freedom to indulge materialist pleasures must be the only advantage of being damned. Under the logic of double predestination, if one thinks they have been “forsaken” by God, there is no incentive to be good. That a dice game crystallizes these issues is particularly apt. It is important to note that theories of probability were not published in Europe until the seventeenth century: laws of averages and notions of reverting to the mean that help modern-day gamblers hedge their bets were as yet rudimentary at best.19 The complete unpredictability of dice play was in some ways arguably similar, then, to the epistemic challenge posed by strict Calvinist doctrine: one could not in fact know if they were saved or damned, and no amount of skill or effort or prayer would actually change one’s destiny.20 18 John Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie faithfully gathered word for word as he preached them in open pulpet […], trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1583), 166. 19 See Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 3–11, 45–46. 20 For more on Calvinism and providentialism, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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The problem for Calvinist morality plays like Nice Wanton is that a sinning character’s redemption—a climactic plot point in Catholic dramas like Youth—cannot be staged if one’s salvation or damnation is predetermined by God and unknowable to those living. Youth plays dice when he is fallen and is later redeemed, but in Nice Wanton, dice play is a symptom of probable reprobation rather than a temporary distraction that the sinner will renounce once saved. The Calvinistic worldview and the humanist stress on moralizing education, often a goal of Protestant morality plays, are thus somewhat at odds. Kent Cartwright convincingly argues that later morality plays self-consciously explore these very tensions, so that meanings become increasingly unstable, reflecting “ironic, enigmatic dimensions of humanist habits of thought.”21 As reformist theology spread, non-dramatic discussion of dice increasingly suggested that the enjoyment of dice-playing was a sign one might be reprobate. A sermon preached before King Edward VI by Thomas Lever argued that a “godly king” will find more pleasure in bringing offenders of the Commonwealth to trial “then in casting dice at hasarde, to alow & maintaine by his example, such thynges as should not be suffered in a commune wealth.”22 From Kings on down, the sense was that if one had been graced by God, they would be predisposed to “profitable” activities. Following this logic, Dalila and Ismael’s decision to pursue a life of sin and worldly gain is understandable. If no amount of effort, no number of Good Works or sacraments, can save the pre-damned, life is actually worse than a game of chance, where at least one has hope of winning through a skilled flick of the wrist or a hastily uttered prayer. The reprobate play against loaded dice, living out a script that has marked them to be losers. It may be, then, that part of reformers’ anxiety about dice play and other games of chance was related to the awkward ways in which their random nature as well as their ability to be unfairly rigged were too close for comfort to the Calvinistic worldview. Here is Northbrooke on the casting of lots: So that whosoever useth this chaunce of lottes in ydle and trifling things, taketh the name and providence of God in vaine […] And therefore we maye not use lottes so triflinglye, as it were to tempt God […] and not in 21 Kent Cartwright, “Humanist Reading and Interpretation in Early Elizabethan Morality Drama,” Allegorica 28 (2012): 9–31, at 17. See also Janette Dillon’s discussion of the ambivalence of Protestant preachers and dramatists towards learning in Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 125–140. 22 Thomas Lever, A sermon preached the thyrd Sondaye in Lente before the kynges Maiestie, and his honorable counsell, by Thomas Leauer (London, 1550), C5v–C6r.

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sleyght things, as thoughe wee woulde make God servaunt to our Pastymes and Sportes, and trye what care wee hadde of them.23

He worries, that is, that games of chance abuse God’s providential ability to control the right outcomes, to choose deserving winners. The performance of dice play in Nice Wanton, while seemingly dramatizing Lever’s notion that reprobates like Ismael and Dalila are marked by their affinity for idle games, also highlights the notion that providence is a fixed game. If the odds are not in one’s favor, they live out a life of playing against loaded dice. While the play’s characters exclaim the numbers they roll, they are of course reciting lines rather than reacting to what is actually thrown on the prop dice. The rules of drama dictate that the outcome of the game has been predetermined: every time Nice Wanton is played, Ismael will lose. Soon after the composition of Nice Wanton, England’s official religion reverted back to Catholicism for the five years of Mary I’s reign. The back and forth between Edward VI’s Calvinism, Mary’s Catholicism, and Elizabeth I’s establishment of what would come to be called the Anglican Church—all intensified by the myriad views of the church leaders—created feelings of religious uncertainty among most of the English in the mid-sixteenth century. Indeed, choosing which eschatological doctrine to believe must have felt like a game of chance. In writing about these religious debates, people often use the dicing word “hazard.” Protestant treatises and sermons talk about “hazarding” one’s life for the true religion: John Bradford, an early reformer who was burnt at the stake in 1555, implores God to “rather strengthen us all in thi grace […] that we may here hasarde our life for thy sake,” and Calvin, in Golding’s translation, is inspired by “men which are frayle of their owne nature, not afrayd too hazard their lyves in bearing record of Gods truth.”24 Such uses of the word “hazard” to mean “to risk” carried with them connotations of the popular game of chance, of players’ “hazarding” before each role of the die. Additionally, both Catholic and reformist writers discuss the hazard—the dangerous chanciness—of choosing what to believe. For example, Oxford bishop John Bridges’s 1587 defense of the Church of England, which prompted the first Marprelate tract, uses the word “hazard” eighteen times, and also 23 Northbrooke, 107. 24 John Bradford, An exhortacion to the carienge of Chrystes crosse wyth a true and brefe confutacion of false and papisticall doctryne ([Wesel?], 1555), 151–152; John Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin, vpon the Epistle of S. Paule too the Ephesians, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1577), 110, emphases mine.

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speaks of the “probability” of various truth claims. Bridges says that Catholic doctrine “hath no small probabilitie (as we judge necessitie) of trueth out of the Scriptures.” He maintains that calling those who believe in Catholic doctrine “true Christians” stands “but on the uncertainty of probability” and doing so is “to hazard the truth of our Christianity, for not judging these things to bee at least probable.”25 Around the same time, Catholic William Allen implores his countrymen not to risk eternal damnation by getting mixed up in the “strange mutation” of state religion under the Tudor monarchs: And it were the pitifullest hazard, and uncertainty of our faith and salvation, that could be, so to hang on the Princes will […] to beleeve what our temporal Lord and Maister list […]. [I]n one mans memorie and since this strange mutation began, we have had to our Prince, a man, who abolished the Popes authoritie by his laws [Henry VIII], and yet in other pointes kept the faith of his fathers: we have had a child, who by the like lawes abolished together with the Papacie, the whole ancient religion [Edward VI]: we had a woman, who restored both againe, and sharply punished Protestants [Mary I]: and lastly her Ma.tie that now is, who by the like lawes hath long since abolished both againe, and now seuerely punisheth Catholikes, as the other did Protestants [Elizabeth I]: and al these strange differences within the compasse of about 30 years.26

Allen well articulates the overwhelming religious confusion of the midsixteenth century. It is no wonder that certainty and consistency are increasingly hard to find in theological dramatic discourse of this period, and that similar dramatic conventions—like staged dice games or the morality-play plots—were often put to various ends. In the early Calvinist Nice Wanton, dice signify a proclivity towards vice that is potentially indicative of its player’s predetermined doom. Dice are used to different theological ends in the Catholic Impatient Poverty of a few years later, demonstrating their hermeneutic flexibility on the stage and reflecting the confessional mutability of mid-sixteenth century England. 25 John Bridges, A defence of the gouernment established in the Church of Englande for ecclesiasticall matters Contayning an aunswere vnto a treatise called, The learned discourse of eccl. gouernment, otherwise intituled, A briefe and plaine declaration concerning the desires of all the faithfull ministers that haue, and do seeke for the discipline and reformation of the Church of Englande (London, 1587), 5v, emphasis mine. 26 William Allen, An apologie and true declaration of the institution and endeuours of the tvvo English colleges, the one in Rome, the other novv resident in Rhemes against certaine sinister informations giuen vp against the same (Mounts in Henault [Rheims], 1581), 34r–v, emphasis mine.

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Impatient Poverty (c. 1554–1558) During the Catholic Marian years that followed the intensely reformist agenda of Edward’s advisors, an anonymous playwright attempted to wrest the youth morality play, and its dicing motifs, back to a more Catholic worldview, or at least one that is not clearly reformist in its agenda. 27 The uses of dice games in that play, Impatient Poverty, not only expose theological uncertainty, but also suggest the ways in which Christian values from across the confessional divides were at odds with budding capitalist enterprises. The plot of Impatient Poverty is often contradictory, and its confusions reveal much about the contending theological ideologies of the 1550s, and the somewhat related tensions between both Catholic and reformist Christian ideals and nascent capitalist enterprise. 28 The play’s dice sequence in particular reveals the complexities of these issues, tied as they are to notions of risk-taking and the spending of money. While Nice Wanton suggests that Barnabas’s virtue is manifest in his hard work and Dalila and Ismael’s reprobation is demonstrated by their idleness, Impatient Poverty argues an almost opposite notion regarding the virtues of work. A vice of the titular character, Impatient Poverty, is his desire to get rich quickly, and he ignores virtuous advice about making money honestly to instead gamble his money away in a dice game. Impatient Poverty encourages its protagonist to behave with Christian morals, patiently holding out for deserved prosperity and, in keeping with the notion of Good Works, to share it with the poor when it comes. Dice games become the play’s central sign of impatience, indicating an imprudent and greedy desire to get rich. Peace, the play’s most virtuous character and Impatient Poverty’s redeemer twice in the play, warns Impatient Poverty after his first fall from grace: Beware of misrule in any wise; Play not at kayles [ninepins], cards, nor dice […] Haunt no taverns, nor sit up not late. (Lines 223–225)

27 As Roberta Mullini argues, “the play touches on many aspects of typical Catholic plays and has nothing of the Reformist flavor […] [of] Nice Wanton.” Mullini, “Impatient Poverty: The Intertextual Game of Satire,” in Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power, and Theatricality, ed. Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 291–314, at 291. 28 Impatient Poverty, in Tudor Interludes, ed. Tennenhouse, 127–217.

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That is, Peace sees the newly wealthy as vulnerable to the lures of dicing and related games. Impatient Poverty has at this point been renamed “Prosperity,” a moniker given to him after he accepted Christ’s law, which also helped turn around his personal fortunes. Prosperity, bestowed by God’s grace, is set in contrast to Abundance (another allegorized character), won through the greedy ways of the world. In Leonard Tennenhouse’s words about the play, “wealth is therefore both a source of evil and the reward for virtue.”29 Peace urges the newly converted Prosperity not to gamble away his new wealth, but rather to give it to the poor, “for every penny that is so spent/ God will send thee double” (lines 233–234). There is a paradox: giving to the poor comes with a reward, and it is a surer bet, a better investment for the prosperous giver than gambling. Charity is not its own reward, but an accumulation of wealth is promised to the central character if he stops trying to win it and accepts the notion that God will take care of those who wait for it. Prosperity does not heed Peace, however, and the middle of the play sees him tempted by Envy and Misrule into a dice game that Envy, true to his name, has rigged to get back at Prosperity for his pompousness and good fortune. After loosening Prosperity up with talk of some whores, Misrule sends Prosperity to a tavern to meet a fellow called Colehazard; his name literally means “one who cheats at dice.”30 The game itself is not shown onstage, but Colehazard’s entrance announces the outcome upon entering: “Here is a bag of gold so round,/ Herein is two thousand pound;/ Of Prosperity me it won” (lines 830–832). Peace diagnoses the problem of dice play, which is that it makes players destitute of reason: He regarded not my counsel, he lacked grace, Which, in time coming, shall turn him to inconvenience. With hazarders and rioters he keepeth residence At clash and cards, with all unthrifty game; Which in continuance shall bring him to shame. (Lines 795–800)

The less sympathetic Misrule laughs at Prosperity’s stupidity: “Prosperity? Nay, I may call him Foolish Poverty,/ As wise as a drake./ I have brought him to dice, cards, and clash;/ And ever on his side ran the loss” (lines 814–817). 29 Tennenhouse, “Introduction,” Tudor Interludes, 11. 30 cf. “Cole, n.2,” definition 2 in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A deceiver, cheat, sharper (at dice).”

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Misrule is also duped by Colehazard, though: Colehazard refuses to share in his gambling profits, as he initially had promised. Conning other vices, the dice player is thus the worst of the worst when it comes to the play’s villains, but he is also the most financially successful. In a way, his gambling and his industriousness pay off. In the final scene, the character formerly known as Impatient Poverty formerly known as Prosperity re-enters as simply “Poverty”; he’s lost everything. But after Poverty’s self-aware speech of contrition (lines 921–927), Peace again comes to the rescue, explaining that an “open punishment” (line 1027) and forsaking the company of Envy and Misrule (lines 1047–1048) will restore riches to Poverty. His name soon converts once more, back to Prosperity. In the end the protagonist beseeches the audience to follow his final lead, to “take patience” (line 1066). Impatient Poverty is particularly focused, then, on the problems of wealth, and the way some initial financial success can make people greedy for more and thus prone to gambling. The protagonist’s gullibility in the face of smooth talking, wealthy-seeming characters like Colehazard resembles other contemporary discourse on the dangers of glamorous gamblers among the upper classes.31 For instance, Gilbert Walker’s 1555 treatise A manifest detection of the moste vyle and detestable vse of diceplay is set up as a dialogue between the young R and the older M. With enthusiasm, the guileless R tells M about meeting a well-dressed Londoner who brings him back to his beautiful home, treating him to good food and drink and gracious hospitality. After R is thoroughly charmed, the table was removed, in came one of the wayters with a fayre sylver boule full of Dyce and Cardes, now maysters (quod the goodman) who is so disposed, fal to: here is my. xxl; win it & weare it. Then eache man chose his game, some kepte the good man company at the hasard, some matched themselves at a new game called Primero.32

R explains that he was pulled into a game of dice, and he is not too concerned with his losses. He then becomes a boarder with the mysterious gentleman, receiving free food and drink so long as he continues to ante up into the 31 As Mullini points out, Abundance and Colehazard are “negative exempla of the nouveaux riches, people who go through life acquiring wealth illegally, by usury and by playing unlawful games, respectively,” 302. 32 Gilbert Walker, A manifest detection of the moste vyle and detestable vse of diceplay, and other practises lyke the same a myrrour very necessary for all yonge gentilmen [and] others sodenly enabled by worldly abu[n]dace, to loke in. Newly set forth for their behoufe (London, 1555), B2v.

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nightly dice games (the wealthy gentleman’s tactics predict modern-day Vegas casinos, which often give their gamblers free drinks so long as they keep playing). M is concerned for R and spends several pages explaining how these gamblers rig their games to blind unsuspecting young men. The treatise becomes an exposé of “false dice,” and of various ways “chetors” manipulate card games, too. Impatient Poverty dramatizes these upper-class swindlers, these early professional gamblers who were threats especially to young men with some money to spend. It is a fair enough warning, but in Impatient Poverty, the moralizing framework mixes the message. While Peace’s warnings are consistent with contemporary sermons and treatises on dicing in urging Impatient Poverty to give to the poor instead of gambling,33 the play’s double renaming of Impatient Poverty as “Prosperity” and Peace’s frequent reference to the rewards gained by patience and repentance mean that the play does not categorically denounce the desire for wealth. Such a tolerance for ambitions of affluence is not inconsistent with Catholic doctrine, encouraging as it is of charitable acts. Nor, for that matter, is this tolerance inconsistent with Reformed notions that the virtuous can be rewarded in this world. The play thus works for more Catholic and more reformed sensibilities, demonstrating a subtler dramatization of theological cruxes than is seen in Youth or Nice Wanton. It does so by evoking contemporary social concerns, perhaps even satirizing the fluctuating fortunes of the newly rich.34 Redemption in Impatient Poverty is framed as something that will bring eternal and worldly rewards, allowing the protagonist to live comfortably while he does his charitable giving. Presenting a more nuanced analysis of the dangers and responsibilities facing the prosperous than is shown in Catholic plays like Youth, Impatient Poverty echoes that earlier play in instructing its audience on the proper use of wealth.35 33 For example, Henry Bedel’s 1571 sermon “The Mouth of the Poor” implores people to not spend money on “mercylesse pleasure” like bear-baiting, dancing, or “upon cardes and dice as some others do […] but upon the godly and the vertuous poore, for that is the gift that hath the promise of reward annexed unto it.” Bedel, A sermon exhorting to pitie the poore Preached the xv of Nouember Anno 1571 at Christes Churche in London: By Henry Bedel uicar there, which treatise may well be called The mouth of the poore (London, 1573), E2r. Northbrooke’s Age says that Youth would be wrong to want to “play away and spende his mony at his pleasure, and […] not rather give it in ames to his brethren.” Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra, 92. 34 This argument is consistent with Mullini’s, who sees Impatient Poverty as having a “cohesion […] of plot and structure through the use of satire and intertextuality,” 296. 35 Claire Sponsler suggests that Youth is a sort of dramatic conduct book for the wealthy in Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 95. See also Theresa Coletti’s “Paupertas

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The social and religious contexts of the 1550s are not the only explanation for the ways Impatient Poverty differs from Youth and Nice Wanton. That prosperity is the reward for good behavior—not a desire to be entirely curtailed—perhaps also has something to do with sixteenth-century England’s budding proto-capitalist enterprises like trade and banking. Indeed, as the century wore on, not only the desire for prosperity but also financial behaviors like gambling, venture capitalism, and usury—once categorically immoral—became less and less problematic, even in religious discourse. Sermons, conduct manuals, and plays from the later half of the sixteenth century often suggest that gambling is a perfectly reasonable pastime in moderation, as long as little money is lost.36 Woodbridge suggests that this changed attitude can be explained by the fact that success in trade and banking is dependent on the responsible management of risk.37 Indeed, Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk argues that the growth of capitalism in the Western world was a result of people’s ability to manage risk.38 Not wishing to anger merchants and bankers—or to insult a practice necessary to the changing economy—even some church leaders began to qualify their warnings about gambling.39 The end of a poem by Anglican Nicholas Breton is characteristic of this kind of hedging: “For how can Cardes or Dyce hurt those/ That care not whether they win or lose?/ […] Therefore as I begone, I ende,/ Moderate play I doe defend.”40 est donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion, and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Speculum 76, no. 2 (2001): 337–378, which argues that that play “works to resolve contradictions between a spiritual ideology whose highest value counseled renunciation of the world and a prosperous social and economic environment whose moral fissures are registered in anxieties about property, status consciousness, and promotion of charity,” 341. 36 Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier is typical. When Gaspar asks “doe you not thynke it a vice in the Courtier to plaie at Dice and Cardes?,” Sir Frederick responds that he “thynke[s] it none, […] onlesse a man apply it tomuch, & by reason of that, setteth aside other thynges more necessary, or elles for none other entent but to get money […].” Castiglione, The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes: Very necessary and profitable for yonge gentilmen and gentilwomen abiding in court, palaice or place, done into Englysche by Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), P3v. 37 Woodbridge, 197. 38 Bernstein, 1, 3, and passim. 39 As Woodbridge explains, “some Anglican writers granted qualified permission to gambling,” 195. She attributes this to the fact that “preachers didn’t want to offend bankers, merchants, and investors among parishioners by attacking principles of risking money to gain money,” 197. Mullini also makes the point that mid-sixteenth-century England had “changed its ideas about wealth and merchandising, no longer condemning merchants” as was done in early plays and treatises, 302. 40 Nicholas Breton, A floorish vpon fancie As gallant a glose vpon so triflinge a text, as euer was written: Compiled by N.B. Gent; To which are annexed, manie pretie pamphlets, for pleasant heads to passe away idle time withal; By the same authour (London, 1577), H3r.

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The state began to loosen its stance, too, as Elizabeth’s 1562 proclamation against playing games “for gayne” was little enforced and then abandoned.41 For Christians of all stripes, covetousness is a sin and charity a virtue (though one that isn’t strictly necessary under reformed doctrine). While Nice Wanton largely eschews the theological complexities of undeserved prosperity by having its gamblers lose all their money and die, Impatient Poverty’s back and forth between wealth and destitution exposes an uncomfortable relationship between the worldly prosperity afforded by successful risk-taking and Christian priorities. In the mid-century Impatient Poverty, then, we can see the fault lines between a religion that—according to the Gospels—should privilege charity and even poverty and warn against the dangers of accumulating wealth. Recent think pieces on the hypocrisy of the modern-day “Prosperity gospel” suggest that this remains, in the Western, Christianized world, a fundamental anxiety. 42

Misogonus (1564–1577) Misognus, an Elizabethan morality play likely written just before the opening of professional theatres, self-consciously exposes church hypocrisy on issues theological and economic. It features the longest and most elaborate staged game sequence of any extant morality play, a scene that I contend selfconsciously demonstrates the theological confusions of the early Elizabethan era. In elaborate games of dice (and also cards) between the wayward and wealthy Misogonus, his servants, and a debauched Catholic priest named Sir John, the play highlights issues related to random chance, cheating, risk taking, and hedging bets. At the same time, Misogonus responds to the theological and economic dynamism of early Elizabethan England by pulling together tropes and dramatic structures from romance, classical comedy, English clowning traditions, and satirical domestic realism, the last of which is especially evident in the gaming scene. That scene explores the nuances of various contested binaries: activity and idleness, Catholic sacrament and Protestant grace, and Christian religious principles and the economics of capitalism. 41 A proclamation for the obseruation of certein statutes with a fourme howe the same shal be executed, and a summarye abridgement of every of the same statutes, following (1562), C3v. 42 See for example Cathleen Falsani, “The Worst Ideas of the Decade: the Prosperity Gospel,” Washington Post (December 2009), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/opinions/outlook/ worst-ideas/prosperity-gospel.html.

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Misogonus has a more ambitious plot than the earlier plays discussed above. It features a typical youth-morality-play conf lict between a distressed father, Philogonus, and his wayward son, Misogonus. But in addition to the story of Misogonus making trouble, the play contains the romancelike revelation that Misogonus was separated at birth from a twin brother, who is introduced to his grateful father and envious brother towards the end of the play. Misogonus finally repents and reconciles with his family before the manuscript ends prematurely. It is tempting to see this more elaborate, mixed-genre plotting as leading the way to the professional drama that would emerge over the next decade. The playwrights’ ambition in tackling multiple contemporary issues is best demonstrated in the dicing sequence, a scene rendered with vivid social interaction and a crackling dramatic sense that—as in a real dice game—many outcomes are possible. 43 The majority of the 476 lines of act 2, scene 2, are consumed with the setting up and playing of a game of Novem, which is likely very similar to Hazard in its rules. 44 When Misogonus and his girlfriend Melissa cannot find dice and want to enlist another player, Misogonus’s servant Oenophilus suggests Sir John, asserting, “Neither cards nor dice, I am sure, he doth lack” (2.2.44). Misogonus is dubious that a priest would be good company for a dice game, but Oeniphilus assures him that John is good fun and not at all like a priest when he is “out of his gown” (line 48). Part of what makes John such a delight is that Oeniphilus “know[s] him to be skillful” at cards and dice (2.2.58). While, as we have seen, many moralists categorically denounced dice as a game solely relying on chance (thus making “skill” irrelevant), the management of betting on one’s dice-playing does require some ability. Woodbridge points out that by the late sixteenth century, risk and chance were praised in other contexts, particularly mercantile spaces like those dramatized in Merchant of Venice, a play in which Bassanio is rewarded for being willing to, as the lead casket indicates, “hazard all he hath” (2.7.9). Calling dice and cards a thing at which one could be “skillful” suggests a confused but perceptible shift in the status of games of chance, which were perhaps beginning to be seen as even somewhat educative, what with their parallels to modern economic risks. 43 Six names are listed on the manuscript, and at least three, Anthony Rudd, Laurence Johnson, and Thomas Richards, have been proposed as probable authors. See Lester E. Barber, introduction to Misogonus, ed. Lester E. Barber (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 1–81, at 7–27. All quotations from the play come from this edition. 44 Solem, “Some Elizabethan Game Scenes,” 17. Novem is also played in Greene’s Tu Quoque.

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But the five players of the long game that unfolds once Sir John arrives attribute success and failure in the game to a number of factors beyond skill. While the other players often swear “by the Mass” when making statements about the game’s progress, the Catholic priest invokes a bastardized version of the Roman God of skill: “Marcus Mercurius, help thy master at a pinch” (2.2.166). But before his first roll, John says “I’ good luck I begin” (2.2.151), and indeed he wins quite a bit of money in the first round. The frustrated Orgalus, Misogonus’s other servant, thrice repeats the word “luck.” For example, speaking directly to his dice, he asks them “Why dice, no luck tonight? Will all be gone?” (2.2.160). Melissa thanks the Christian God after she wins a round: “God have mercy for that good dice yet that came i’ th’ nick” (2.2.175), and Misogonus attributes John’s sudden losing streak to the wheel of fortune: “What, does Dame Fortune begin now to frown?” (2.2.184). As the rounds of dice throwing progress and various players win and lose, then, the results are attributed to skill, a Roman God, blind luck, the Christian God, and Lady Fortune. In a depiction of inconsistent and superstitious gambling behaviors that seems psychologically plausible then and now, both human and otherworldly entities are blamed and thanked for controlling the game’s destiny. Whereas the Calvinist Nice Wanton is certain of God’s omnipotent providence, Misogonus dramatizes theological confusion by having so many guesses about who controls the fate of dice games, and by staging the unfolding of the game, with its many wins and losses for the characters, in dramatic real time. Earlier morality plays followed a predictable course when it comes to the staging or invocation of dice games: in all the plays we have discussed and many others, a character named after a vice leads the youth astray in a game that takes all his money. But in Misogonus, the characters are more like “real” people; and it is Sir John, not the wayward Misogonus, who ends up losing all his money in the game. The dramaturgy itself is thus unpredictable, creating a scene of real tension and unpredictability, a funny, complex, theatrical rendering of social life that’s come a long way from the simple equations of dice-playing with vice in plays like Youth. Misogonus’s dice scene shows not only how truly impossible it is to know who will win in a game of chance, but also that dice games are not necessarily dangerous to all involved: Misogonus, Melissa, and the servants all do quite well before they simply grow tired of playing (2.2.260). No moralizing characters promote dice as moral or useful, and ending in a fizzle out rather than a bankruptcy for the protagonist does not condemn the game with the vehemence of earlier dramas. This more nuanced staging reflects the period’s changing attitudes towards risk, the consequences of skepticism about Calvinist doctrine, and

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the continued rise of proto-capitalist enterprise. It also demonstrates the ability of staged games in particular to render a social phenomenon with humor and to make that rendering more thrillingly lifelike—more theatrical, even—because of the aleatory nature of games. As a wealthy youth, Misogonus is caught between several competing, evolving, and mutually influential discourses about chance. Increasingly, games of chance became a marker of upper-class status, as they often are in plays of the late Elizabethan era. As Delmar Solem points out in his survey of Elizabethan game scenes, later Elizabethan plays “present the characters engaged in dice play as honorable men who might be considered the social norm.”45 In the 1560s or ’70s, Misogonus stages a game that still had many negative connotations, but which was starting to become socially and even morally acceptable. People were beginning to hedge their bets on gambling itself. While the Misogonus dice game demonstrates increasingly complex attitudes towards games of chance, it also directly mocks Catholicism in the portrayal of the alehouse-loving, heavy-drinking, self-proclaimed “gamester,” Sir John (2.2.93, 107, 115). His distance from Protestantism becomes a joke for Orgalus: “A Bible? Nay, soft you. He’ll yet be more wise./ I tell you, he is none of this new start-up rabbles” (2.2.63–64). Sir John is a good ole boy, preferring games to the “start-up rabbles” of the newer religion. His portrayal follows early reformist rhetorical conventions that correlate Catholicism with its festive traditions, associating dice-playing and cards with the outlawed holiday games of traditional religion. Thomas Noageorg’s anti-Catholic poem The popish kingdome, or reigne of Antichrist, talks about Catholics going “out of hand to Masse […]/ content with olde accustomde guise” before they go to the alehouse “[t]o passe the tyme with Cardes and dice, or with some wanton talk.”46 By the time Misogonus was written, though, the indulgently ludic priest figure had become cliché: the play sends up the stock character type, demonstrating that his actions potentially harm himself more than anyone else. Sir John is a far cry from the Catholic-coded Vices of earlier reformist drama like John Bale’s Three Laws, for example. As the game progresses and John gets deeper and deeper into debt, he begins to neglect his occupational duties. A saunce bell rings (2.2.308–309), indicating that Mass is about to start. But John does not want to perform this Mass until he has won his money back: “I’ll play still, come on’t what 45 Solem, 19. 46 Thomas Naogeorg, The popish kingdome, or reigne of Antichrist, written in Latine verse by Thomas Naogeorgus, and englyshed by Barnabe Googe (London, 1570), 18v.

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will. I’ll never give over i’ th’ lurch [when one player is far behind in a game]/ Let them ring till their arses ache. I know the worst” (2.2.211–212). Oeniphilus encourages Sir John to do his job: “Away, priest! By this time they are all come to th’ church./ For shame! Get thee hence, priest. Thou’t be ’bom’nably curse” (2.2.213–214). So, not all dice players epitomize idleness. When the priest’s distressed clerk enters, he implores John to come to the church to do his duty. John instructs the clerk on how to lead the service in his stead: “Faith, Jack, it’s no matter an all thy lessons be lacking./ Say a Magnificat nunc dimittis and even end with the Creed” (2.2.242–243). E. S. Miller explains that the priest’s instruction splices together two Canticles from the Vespers with the Nunc Dimittis of the Roman Catholic breviary, a practice replicated in English prayer books, which often combined Roman rites. 47 As I argue elsewhere, the moment thus parodies the format of reformed services while calling attention to the recent Anglican compromise’s reliance on the old faith. 48 It also suggests that for every corrupt priest, there is a helpful clerk and a responsible parishioner: things are more complicated than black and white binaries between Vices and Virtues, between evil Catholics and saintly Protestants, or between the Elected and the irredeemable Reprobate. In the context of a dice game, this more complex and palimpsestic evocation of church practice is apt. In a world where Good Works and hard effort may be necessary for or merely symptomatic of salvation, where grace is being redefined in unpredictable ways, where taking chances seems increasingly acceptable and beneficial to one’s economic and social status, subscribing to a more complex, hybridized theology of wealth, charity, and risk seems to be the best way to hedge one’s bets when it comes to salvation. As the Misogonus plot wears on and Philogonus discovers his lost son and Misogonus finally reconciles with his father, the capricious, aleatory nature of life itself starts to seem less terrifying. At the same time, drama is revealed as an appropriate medium not for conveying the predictable destinies of earlier morality plays, but for playing out something like the vagrancies of real human lives. If a traditional morality play like Youth or a Calvinist one like Nice Wanton script predictable outcomes—be they that every sinner may be redeemed through sacraments and Good Works or that reprobates are destined to remain so—the improbably redemptive, 47 E. S. Miller, “‘Magnificat Nunc Dimittis’ in Misogonus,” Modern Language Notes 60, no. 1 (1945): 45–7, at 46. 48 Katherine Steele Brokaw, Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 151.

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romancelike plot of Misogonus better reflects the nuances of realistic social worlds and unpredictable fates. If there is wisdom in proverbial sayings, we might wonder why many of our metaphors for life’s predictability and its volatility, and for the uncomfortable mismatch between notions of destiny and free will, come from theatre and games. All the world’s a stage with unpredictable entrances and an inevitable exit, but it’s also often a gamble. We don’t know who has an ace up their sleeve, or what will happen when we just roll the dice. The performance of games onstage combines the metaphorical density of these two worlds: it conveys at once the sense of a scripted, destined narrative that must end, and the unpredictability of what numbers will be rolled, what cards the other players hold. Brian Sutton-Smith suggests that games of chance hold perennial fascination for the way they mimic the randomness of the brain and the universe, a decidedly modern thought grounded in astrophysics and cognitive science.49 But indeed, people have long wondered how much control they have over their destiny, what combination of luck, skill, work, divine intervention, and malpractice on their own part or on the part of their opponents will make or break their hopes for wealth, social status, salvation. So much is up to chance. But perhaps the increasingly complex valences of staged dice play across the English sixteenth century—viewed within their particular religious, economic, and theatrical contexts—are not random at all.

Works Cited Allen, William. An apologie and true declaration of the institution and endeuours of the tvvo English colleges, the one in Rome, the other novv resident in Rhemes against certaine sinister informations giuen vp against the same. Mounts in Henault [Rheims], 1581. Barber, Lester E. Introduction to Misogonus. Edited by Lester E. Barber, 1–81. New York: Garland, 1979. Bedel, Henry. A sermon exhorting to pitie the poore Preached the xv of Nouember Anno. 1571 at Christes Churche in London: By Henry Bedel uicar there, which treatise may well be called The mouth of the poore. London, 1573. Bernstein, Peter L. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. 49 Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 59.

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Bishop, Tom. “Shakespeare’s Theater Games.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88. Bloom, Gina. “Games.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 189–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Bonner, Edmund. A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto/ set forth by the reuerend father in God, Edmunde Byshop of London. London, 1555. Bradford, John. An exhortacion to the carienge of Chrystes crosse wyth a true and brefe confutacion of false and papisticall doctryne. [Wesel?], 1555. Breton, Nicholas. A floorish vpon fancie As gallant a glose vpon so triflinge a text, as euer was written: Compiled by N.B. Gent; To which are annexed, manie pretie pamphlets, for pleasant heads to passe away idle time withal; By the same authour. London, 1577. Bridges, John. A defence of the gouernment established in the Church of Englande for ecclesiasticall matters Contayning an aunswere vnto a treatise called, The learned discourse of eccl. gouernment, otherwise intituled, A briefe and plaine declaration concerning the desires of all the faithfull ministers that haue, and do seeke for the discipline and reformation of the Church of Englande. London, 1587. Brokaw, Katherine Steele. Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Calvin, Jean. The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin, vpon the Epistle of S. Paule too the Ephesians. Translated by Arthur Golding. London, 1577. –––. The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie faithfully gathered word for word as he preached them in open pulpet […]. Translated by Arthur Golding. London, 1583. Cartwright, Kent. “Humanist Reading and Interpretation in Early Elizabethan Morality Drama.” Allegorica 28 (2012): 9–31. Castiglione, Baldassare. The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes: Very necessary and profitable for yonge gentilmen and gentilwomen abiding in court, palaice or place, done into Englysche by Thomas Hoby. Translated by Thomas Hoby. London, 1561. Coletti, Theresa. “Paupertas est donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion, and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene.” Speculum 76, no. 2 (2001): 337–378. Dillon, Janette. Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Impatient Poverty. In The Tudor Interludes: “Nice Wanton” and “Impatient Poverty.” Edited by Leonard Tennenhouse, 127–217. New York: Garland, 1984. Lever, Thomas. A sermon preached the thyrd Sondaye in Lente before the kynges Maiestie, and his honorable counsell, by Thomas Leauer. London, 1550.

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Miller, E. S. “‘Magnificat Nunc Dimittis’ in Misogonus.” Modern Language Notes 60, no. 1 (January 1945): 45-47. Misogonus. Edited by Lester E. Barber. New York: Garland, 1979. Mullini, Roberta. “Impatient Poverty: The Intertextual Game of Satire.” In Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power, and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, 291–314. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Naogeorg, Thomas. The popish kingdome, or reigne of Antichrist, written in Latine verse by Thomas Naogeorgus, and englyshed by Barnabe Googe. London, 1570. Nice Wanton. In The Tudor Interludes: “Nice Wanton” and “Impatient Poverty.” Edited by Leonard Tennenhouse, 64–126. New York: Garland, 1984. Northbrooke, John. Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra: A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes [et]c. commonly vsed on the Sabboth day, are reproued by the authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers. London, 1577. A proclamation for the obseruation of certein statutes with a fourme howe the same shal be executed, and a summarye abridgement of every of the same statutes, following. 1562. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. –––. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006. –––. Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Russell Brown. London: Arden, 2006. –––. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shatkin, Laurence. “Holiday Games in Early Tudor Moral Interludes.” PhD diss., Lehigh University, 1978. Solem, Delmar. “Some Elizabethan Game Scenes.” Educational Theatre Journal 6, no. 1 (1954): 15–21. Sponsler, Claire. Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Tennenhouse, Leonard. “Introduction.” In The Tudor Interludes Nice Wanton and Impatient Poverty, edited by Leonard Tennenhouse, 1–63. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984 Walker, Gilbert. A manifest detection of the moste vyle and detestable vse of diceplay, and other practises lyke the same a myrrour very necessary for all yonge gentilmen [and] others sodenly enabled by worldly abu[n]dace [sic], to loke in. Newly set forth for their behoufe. London, 1555. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Wilson, Luke. “Drama and Marine Insurance in Shakespeare’s London.” In The Law in Shakespeare, edited by Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, 127–142. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Woodbridge, Linda. “‘He Beats Thee ’Gainst the Odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra.” In Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, edited by Sara Munson Deats, 193–211. New York: Routledge, 2004. Youth. In Tudor Interludes. Edited by Peter Happé, 113–138. New York: Penguin, 1972. Zucker, Adam. “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, edited by Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, 67–86. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

About the Author Katherine Steele Brokaw is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Merced. She wrote Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early English Drama (Cornell, 2016), which received the David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. With Jay Zysk, she co-edited Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (Northwestern, 2019). She edited Macbeth for the Arden Performance Editions series (2019) and is writing a new book on community performances of Shakespeare for Palgrave Macmillan. She produces Shakespeare in Yosemite, which offers free, annual Shakespearean performances in Yosemite National Park in celebration of Earth Day, and cofounded the EarthShakes Alliance, a global collective of theatre companies and scholars focused on Shakespeare and the environment.

4. “The games afoote” Playing, Preying and Projecting in Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar Heather Hirschfeld Abstract This essay examines Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar (1640), charting the associative field the play establishes between recreational games, hunting, financial projects, and the theater. Within this field, itself the product of the socio-economic and political environment of the 1630s, predation is never far from the ludic, particularly as it is crystallized in the play’s proposal for a “floating Theatre.” This semi-serious, semi-parodic scheme serves as Brome’s unique contribution to ways of thinking about London entertainment industries, including the theatre, in the years just before the English Civil War. Keywords: Brome, Richard; economic projects; water drama; hunting; Caroline drama; metadrama; Second Poets’ War

“The games afoote,” declares Gabriel, the savvy servant of Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar, as he observes three projectors entering the house of his master, Sir Andrew Mendicant. “They hunt in full cry.”1 Gabriel’s observation about the projectors—early modern inventors of varieties of often questionable money-making schemes—is part of the play’s comprehensive satire of Mendicant, the eponymous court beggar who has forfeited the perquisites of gentle country life in pursuit of social status in the fashionable West End. Or, as his daughter, Charissa, reminds him, he has exchanged “large 1 Richard Brome, The Court Begger, in Five New Playes (London, 1653), N7v. I have silently emended the spelling of the title from “Begger” to “Beggar” in the text. All subsequent quotations given in the text are from this edition.

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch04

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fruitfull Fields, rich Medowes and sweet pastures” for a “lodging in the Strand” (N6r). Like Gabriel, Charissa frames this exchange of country for city in the vocabularies of both recreation and those economic enterprises known in the period as projects. Once Mendicant had “a numerous Family/ Of Servants and Attendants, out of whom/ […] you could call/ Your Bayliffe, Groom, your Falconer, or your Huntsman.” He also had “hounds […] that made you sport and Musick.” Now, she tells her father, there are “none but your project beagles, that smell out/ Where such a forfeiture is to be begg’d” (N6r–6v). Mendicant, identified in the dramatis personae of the play’s first printed edition (1653) as “an old Knight, turnd a Projector,” has become the projectors’ quarry. The comic structure of The Court Beggar, performed at the Phoenix, or Cockpit, Theatre in 1640, derives from the hunt, for which “game” was both a synonym (“entertainment derived from the chase […] the sport of hunting and shooting (or otherwise catching or killing) animals, birds, etc., as a countryside pursuit”) and the name of its object (“wild animals or birds of the kind that are or have traditionally been pursued, caught, or killed for sport, or that are or have been the quarry of hunters”).2 The play’s special insight, as suggested in Gabriel and Charissa’s language above, is its imaginative triangulation of the hunt, other leisure pastimes, and projects, those technological and commercial “improvement schemes” that promised to serve the commonwealth but “remained prone to perversion, not only by the self-interest of promoters, but also by the financial necessities of ambitious monarchs.”3 That insight depends in turn upon the intersection in these endeavors of the ludic and the predatory, of forms of entertainment or recreation and forms of f inancial as well as physical threat. Such connections take on a fresh urgency when they involve the stage itself—that is, when the play metadramatically gestures to the theatre as the object of preying and projecting. This essay charts the associative field between the hunt, projects, games and theatre established in The Court Beggar, connecting that field’s particular shape to the socio-economic and political environment of the 1630s and “the decade’s interrogation of the place of recreation.”4 Brome does not offer any single answer to this interrogation, but I suggest that the play’s semi-serious, 2 “game, n.,” OED Online. 3 Koji Yamamoto, “Reformation and the Distrust of the Projector in the Hartlib Circle,” Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 375–397, at 379. 4 Adam Zucker, “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 79.

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semi-parodic proposal for a “floating Theatre” represents a unique vision of the relationship between drama and games in the years immediately before the English Civil War.

The Hunter Hunted, the Projector Projected, the Gamer Gamed The early modern hunt was a serious game: a highly ritualized form of sport or recreation whose apparent cruelty was justified by claims that it trained royalty, nobility and gentry in the martial skills and virtues necessary for battle.5 The princely hunt in forests and parks operated as a symbol of royal prerogative, an “emblem of monarchical power,” while the lawful, licensed hunt by peers and gentry served either as an adjunct to “courtly pageantry” or as an expression of martial prowess and ancient rights and privileges.6 Ideally these pursuits would reinforce one another and the hierarchical order underlying them. But royal, noble and gentle interests in the hunt were often in tension, particularly, as Roger Manning has documented, in the early Stuart period, as f irst James I and then Charles I rewrote the terms of Game Laws in order to “expand the royal prerogative at the expense of Parliamentary legislative authority.”7 The effect was to encourage f irst unlawful, violent poaching raids between 5 Consider Sir Thomas Cockayne’s explanation that “the honorable and delightfull sport of hunting” enables hunters who “by their continuall trauaile, painfull labour, often watching, and enduring of hunger, of heate, and of cold, are much enabled aboue others to the seruice of their Prince and Countrey in the warres” (Cockayne, A Short Treatise of Hunting [London, 1591], A3r–A3v). Consider also the commendatory couplets to George Gascoigne’s Arte of Venerie (1575, 1611): “Why leade not men such liues, in quiet comely wise,/ As might with honest sport & game, their worldly minds suff ise?/ Amongst the rest, that game, which in this booke is taught,/ Doth seeme to yeld [sic] as much content, as may on earth be sought./ And but my simple Muze, both myrth and meane mistake,/ It is a meane of as much mirth, as any sport can make./ It occupies the mynde, which else might chaunce to muse/ On mischiefe, malice, f ilth, and fraudes, that mortall men do use./ And as for exercise, it seemes to beare the bell,/ Since by the same, mens bodies be, in health mainteyned well./ It exceriseth strength, it excerciseth wit […]” (Aiiiv). For a modern historical overview of the hunt’s proponents and detractors, as well as its sociopolitical meaning, see Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 6 Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4. Manning makes clear that hunting was part of popular as well as elite culture: “Despite the many attempts by medieval and early modern kings and parliaments to declare that hunting was a royal and aristocratic privilege, the sport continued to appeal to popular tastes as well” (Hunters and Poachers, 11). 7 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 83.

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rival factions of the peerage and gentry and eventually the widespread, socially diverse assaults in 1641 on the royal forests of Waltham and Windsor. 8 Edward Berry sees this kind of “riotous hunting” in terms of ritual inversion, according to which a “noble ceremonial of the hunt” is turned into a “mock-ceremonial.”9 For Manning, the raids represented “attacks upon the royal or aristocratic hunting preserve as a symbol of power, prerogative, and privilege.”10 The symbolic density, inherent theatricality, and material reality of the hunt had long made it an ideal analogue for the literary depiction of courtship and sexual violence as well as political intrigue.11 In The Court Beggar Brome identifies the hunt’s contiguity with other Caroline absolutist encroachments and figures it in relation to economic projects, those “practical schemes for exploiting material things” that had been important engines of the Elizabethan economy but had become by the 1630s the object of both skeptical satire and public controversy as well as a key source of political friction between the Caroline court and its critics.12 Brome yokes the two enterprises as functionally as well as conceptually similar activities: they both target victims for selfish ends, pursue them with various degrees of strategy and ingenuity, and rationalize their rapacity in terms of the common good. Equally important, Brome recognizes both as manifestations of the abuses associated with Charles I’s Personal Rule and with broader shifts in the decade’s cultural and social landscape. As Koji Yamamoto notes, the 1630s “saw probably the fullest and most controversial fiscal exploitation of the patent system alongside other branches of royal prerogative […]. The conspicuous rise in patents for invention was a part of this broader exercise of prerogative, including the levying of ship money, forced loans, and the vigorous exploitation of forest laws.” By 1641, he adds, “the projector came 8 See Daniel C. Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 9 Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt, 19. 10 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 34. 11 See Berry, passim, and Jeffrey S. Theis, Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2009). Theis suggests that in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, for instance, poaching, the illegal “other” of the hunt, “rises to the level of a governing metaphor” (136). Rhodri Lewis offers a strong reading of the hunt in Hamlet as a form of court intrigue in Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 43–111. 12 See Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 1–24, quotation on p. 1; Robert Ashton, The City and the Court, 1603–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 121–131. For Charles’s enforcement of Game Laws as a “mechanism [he] would foolishly exploit with disastrous consequences for the crown,” see Theis, Writing the Forest, 128.

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to spell out what had gone wrong in court politics, patronage, and the fiscal exploitation of prerogative.”13 Brome satirizes both hunter and projector, using plots that undo the character who thinks he is in control of the game.14 In Mendicant’s case, he turns the hunter-projector into the hunted-projected. Such an inversion is a standard trope of the Western literary tradition; Brome may have learned it best from his “master,” Ben Jonson, who exploits the plot to great effect in plays such as Volpone and Bartholomew Fair. (The latter features a version of an early modern “shout-out” to Brome.)15 Brome twists the convention in a peculiar way, one that highlights the violence at the heart of hunting and projecting at the same time as it renders that violence particularly comic. The program starts in the first act, as we have seen, when Gabriel notes that Mendicant is no longer the hunter of projects but the hunted of the projectors. It continues with the projectors’ more or less cartoonish proposals, including a monopoly for the making of perukes, the levying of a charge on retailers of new fashions, and even a tax on infant daughters “to hearten men/ To live soberly and get Souldiers” (O1v). And it is fully realized in the play’s final scene, when Mendicant learns that his most cherished hunt/project—marrying his daughter to the debauched Sir Ferdinand and getting his estate—has collapsed: Charissa, with the help of Gabriel, has instead married Frederick and Ferdinand will keep his property. Mendicant runs offstage to avoid the celebratory wedding revels, but soon the projectors herald his return, announcing that he has sunk “to the Gulfe/ Of deepe despaire” (S6v) and has “hang’d himselfe” (S7r) in frustration and fury. At this point Mendicant re-enters the stage “attir’d all in Patents; A Windmill on his head” (S7r)—he has not hung himself so much as he has hung legal documents on himself: “draughts of Projects, Suits,/ Petitions, Grants, and Pattents, such as were/ The Studies and the Labours of his Life,/ And so attir’d he thinks himselfe well arm’d/ T’incounter all your scornes” 13 Koji Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism before its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and ‘Projecting’ in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2018), 76, 103. 14 For a survey of literary satires that represent “a diverse response to the contemporary political and economic context for invention,” see Jessica Ratcliff, “Art to Cheat the Common-Weale: Inventors, Projectors, and Patentees in English Satire, ca. 1630–70,” Technology and Culture 53, no. 2 (2012): 337–365, at 342. Richard Allen Cave describes Mendicant as “a kind of financial pimp,” in Cave, “The Playwriting Sons of Ben: Nathan Field and Richard Brome,” in Jonsonians: Living Traditions, ed. Brian Woolland (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 69–92, at 83. 15 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), induct.7–8.

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(S6r). He has, in other words, projected himself. As if addressing Parliament, he “present[s] all I have/ For you to cancel” (S7r). Brome’s hunted hunter hangs himself with a paper trail of projects. The jest highlights Brome’s revision of the standard trope, according to which the satiric victim is penalized by others rather than by himself. Indeed, the scene seems to cite, with a bodily inversion, the lost “merry Comedy, stiled; A Projector lately dead” from 1636. The farce, described in a didactic treatment of Sabbath-breaking, is said to have brought the late Attorney General and defender of monopolies Sir William Noy “in his Lawyers robes upon the Stage,” where he was “openly dissected” to reveal “100 Proclamations in his head, a bundle of old motheaten records in his maw, halfe a barrell of new white sope in his belly.”16 Mendicant, instead, suffers from self-inflicted punishment. His ploy may be an attempt at wit, a display of clever “linguistic acrobatics” that might re-establish his “cultural fluency” and thus his social status amongst his West End peers.17 But it redounds more to Brome’s credit than the character’s. The playwright’s twist on the hunter-hunted convention allows him to play his part in what Michael Neill has called the “mutually stimulating game” of the Caroline stage, in which dramatists maintained a “constant dialogue with a hypercritical audience” and supplied its desires for both novelty and tradition.18 At the same time, the pun illuminates the ludic but also predatory and punitive drives that knit together the game of the hunt and that of the economic project.

Sporte and businesse too Brome stages this conceptual and material continuity more explicitly in one of the play’s other plots, an uncomfortable romance between the rich widow Lady Strangelove and the love-crazed Sir Ferdinand, whom scholars have long recognized as a personation of Sir John Suckling and thus an “epitome” 16 Henry Burton, A Divine Tragedie Lately Acted (London, 1636), 45. See James S. Hart, Jr., “Noy [Noye], William (1577–1634),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online], 21 May 2009, Oxford University Press, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-20384?rskey=WBVScz&result=1 (accessed 24 June 2020), and Yamamoto: “the same trope of theatrical dissection of vices was turned upon its head to reveal what had gone wrong under Charles’s Personal Rule” (Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism before its Triumph, 98). 17 Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9. 18 Michael Neill, “‘Wits Most Accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18, no. 2 (1978): 341–360, at 347.

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of “those Cavalier qualities which Brome reprehended.”19 Lady Strangelove rejects Ferdinand at first, but eventually agrees to house him when she is convinced, by his doctor and others, that she is the cause of his madness. Now inside her townhouse in the Strand, the manic Ferdinand continues to woo Lady Strangelove. The comic courting scenarios are also deeply menacing (at one point, Lady Strangelove is set up by the doctor to be raped by Ferdinand), and they are figured in terms of the hunt: Ferdinand himself calls Lady Strangelove “his Diana,” recalling the mythological huntress spied upon by Acteon. Like Acteon, who was changed into a deer and chased by his own hounds, Ferdinand will also become a hunted hunter when Lady Strangelove—the truly witty one—sees through his designs and threatens to make him “the perpetuall shame of Court” (R5v). The doctor suffers the same fate, as he is threatened with a talionic gelding by outraged attendants on the lady: “that will be sport indeed,” they say (R2r). Sir Ferdinand’s amorous pursuit of Lady Strangelove is part of the play’s vocabulary of hunt and project. As Gabriel puts it, the assaultive wooing and its aftermath “may prove sport and businesse too” (Q8r). And this time “the sport and businesse” involve indoor entertainments—cards, dice and other leisure amusements—which materialize the connection in a concentrated way. References to these games are undoubtedly topical nods to Suckling, who invented cribbage and who was reported at the end of the century to be “the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest gamester, both for bowling and cards.”20 Ferdinand gets ample space to announce his interest in various leisure pastimes. At the start of the third act, Ferdinand is delivered to Lady Strangelove “in a chaire bound and hooded.” Ferdinand thinks he is a prisoner in the north (a gesture to Suckling’s failed efforts in the First Bishops’ War). But he still wishes to play and gamble. As he tells the doctor: “Merry! why not? come, let’s ha’ cards; and you and I to cribbidge/ For an od hundred pound” (P6r). When he notices Mendicant standing nearby, he proposes gleek, a multi-stage, 44-card game “full of variety and delight” that calls specifically for three players.21 “Let’s then to Gleeke,” proposes Ferdinand, which leads to an argument over the amounts to be wagered. Ferdinand finally gives over: “Away with cards. Bring dice, set all at hazard” (P6r). 19 Richard Kaufmann, Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 152. 20 John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1669–1696, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 2:240–241. Aubrey discusses cribbage on 243. See also David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), who underscores the game’s “courtly status” (130). 21 John Cotgrave, Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus (London, 1662), 365.

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The kinds of parlor amusements to which Ferdinand refers had by the 1630s become emblematic of a “lifestyle of conspicuous consumption” associated with the “socially exclusive settings” and “culture of gentry sociability” of Westminster.22 As Adam Zucker explains, such games and “their playful enactments, their contingent discourses, their pleasures, and their dangers— were crucial, symbolic elements within the intensely incorporative social relations that accompanied the rise of commercial society in early modern London.”23 Ferdinand’s games of chance and skill, we might say, channel the same socially rivalrous energies of the outdoor hunt into the space of urban indoor sociability. In turn, these two recreational practices share material, discursive and ideological space with the play’s projects.24 Ferdinand explicitly links his card games to economic endeavors: “And though I lose all,” he says to the doctor and Mendicant, “I have yet a project/ That at the end o’ th’ war, and the great sitting/ Shall fetch all in agen” (P6r, my italics). Brome’s satiric depiction of the captured Ferdinand—gamester, madman and would-be rapist—indicates his suspicion of this space and its connection to “a social arena that was outside the Court itself although within its social ambit.”25 Ferdinand’s project is never named or developed. But a specter of it, while not attached directly to him, lurks elsewhere in the play. It represents Brome’s deepest quandary about the confluence of economic schemes and recreational enjoyments—a quandary about their relationship to the theatre. Certainly Brome’s Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors had called attention to this relationship, whether by highlighting the theatrical appeal of projects, the rootedness of the theatre in market success, or the conceptual overlap of projecting (devising a plan) and plotting. The plot of Jonson’s The Alchemist is a pre-eminent example, since Face and Subtle’s master project—swindling the play’s dupes by acting as alchemists—involves the scientific project of “projecting” for the philosopher’s stone. But as the “very name became a dirty word in the early seventeenth century,”26 and as projects, patents and monopolies became increasingly suspect in the 1630s as a means to advance crown revenue in the absence of Parliament,27 their relation to the theatre took on new dimensions. As Jessica 22 J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 140, 165. 23 Zucker, “Social Stakes of Gambling,” 68–69. 24 Ratcliff, “Art to Cheat the Common-Weale,” 357. 25 Merritt, Early Modern Westminster, 166. 26 Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 17. 27 Kevin Sharpe’s discussion is exceptionally well balanced, acknowledging that while the motive of Caroline projects “emerged from genuine inventiveness, [and] a governmental desire

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Ratcliff observes, plays presented more uniformly than before a “caustic take on the projector’s rhetoric of innovative technological projects as progress for the public good.”28 Projects and projectors were presented literally, not only figuratively (as in The Alchemist), serving as the “scapegoat for the perceived destruction of traditional social and economic systems.”29 Such satires included James Shirley’s 1633 masque for the King and Queen, The Triumph of Peace, which featured in its antimasque a sequence of projectors whose designs included ideas such as “a flayle, which by the motion/ Of a queint wheele, shall without helpe of hands,/ thresh Corne all day” and “a new way to fatten Poultry/ With scrapings of a Carrot.”30 More interesting, Shackerley Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer, for the Salisbury Court playhouse, makes projects into theatre, spectacles for observation. As one of the central characters, Agurtes, remarks about his acquaintances’ implausible get-rich ploys: “one of them/ will undertake the making of bay-salt,/ For a penny a bushell, to serve the state,/ another dreames of building water-workes,/ Drying of fennes and marshes, like the Dutchmen.” He sardonically encourages these proposals as a form of entertainment: “I must into them, and feast them with new hopes,/ ’Twill be good sport, to heare how they dispute it.”31 Marmion’s play, then, mocks the projectors by making them the object of Agurtes’s personal theatre. Brome’s play, in contrast, mocks the projectors by making the theatre their object. In so doing, it reframes not only the relationship between the stage and projects but also—given the rich associative field it has built—between the stage and games.

A “Play-house upon the Thames” This reframing is most vivid in The Court Beggar’s proposal for a “floating Theatre.” A projector comes to Mendicant with a new project For buylding a new Theatre or Play-house to regulate a trade or to protect a new manufacture,” they were nevertheless “supported for their yield to the crown as well as their promised benefits to the country.” They thus “loomed large in criticism of Charles I’s regime” (Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], 120–121). 28 Ratcliff, “Art to Cheat the Common-Weale,” 357. 29 Samantha Heller, “Poets and Projectors: Profit, Production, and Economic Paradigms in Early Modern England” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1999), 79. 30 James Shirley, The Triumph of Peace (London, 1634), 7, 8. 31 Shackerley Marmion, Hollands Leaguer (London, 1632), C4v, italics mine.

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Upon the Thames on Barges or flat boats To helpe the watermen out of the losse They’ve suffer’d by Sedans.

He goes on to extol the money this will accrue to the watermen and even to performers and playwrights: This shall bring flouds of gaine to th’ watermen Of which they’l give a fourth of every fare They shall boord at the floating Theatre, Or set ashore from thence, the Poets and Actors Halfe of their first yeares profits. (O1v)

Critics have long recognized the scheme as a highly topical gesture to Sir William Davenant’s March 1639 patent to build a playhouse “of unprecedented size” in Fleet Street.32 Although the license was annulled a few months later and the stage never built, the “ambitious design” represented, G. E. Bentley suggests, a direct challenge to other nearby theatres: Brome’s current home the Phoenix but also the Blackfriars and Salisbury Court.33 The Davenant patent has thus been understood as a symptom of the broader institutional tensions particular to the theatrical world of the 1630s, what might be summed up as the shaping pressure of court investments and inventions on the London scene.34 As multiple historians of the stage have explained, the conditions and content of the late Caroline drama were recognizably distinct from previous decades. While an earlier critical tradition viewed the 1630s drama as royalist or escapist, Martin Butler established in his seminal Theatre and Crisis that the period’s professional drama was distinctly, even defiantly, “anti-courtly in sentiment” and that it benefited from being located in playing spaces that were “neutral zones, independent of the court, where the gentry gathered casually, but also on a regular basis.”35 More recent scholarship, however, including work by Butler 32 CSPD, 28 March 1639, 604; John Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant’s Theater Project of 1639,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10, no. 3 (1968): 367–383, at 373. 33 G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 4:304–307. 34 For the new “aristocratic interest in the theater, [and] its potential to shape public opinion,” see Darryl Grantley, London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 150. See also Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 151–155. 35 Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis: 1634–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 5, 100.

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himself, has emphasized the ways in which the theatrical scene was becoming an “increasingly privileged—and increasingly institutionalized—place for drama.”36 A geographical shift moved stages westward and indoors, favoring the “values [of] the hall-playhouse companies”; courtier poets began writing for and producing plays at the Blackfriars; competitive playhouse owner-managers like the Beeston at the Cockpit and Richard Gunnell and Richard Heton at Salisbury Hall asserted control over the companies that may have depended as much on a “hand-in-glove relationship with great authorities at Whitehall” as on their own entrepreneurial power in the West End.37 These developments fueled what is now called the Second Poets’ War, the skirmishes that pitted amateur writers with court connections such as Suckling and Davenant against established professionals such as Philip Massinger and Brome.38 The Court Beggar is entrenched in this conflict, as Brome makes clear in his prologue: he suggests that the audience now favors “a new strayne of wit,” the masque-heavy, stylized drama of the courtier poets and their “gaudy Sceane[s]” (N4v). Against this backdrop, then, the projector’s project for a floating theatre invites suspicion. It seems to offer a good-spirited design for the watermen, whose livelihoods had been compromised both by the use of coaches for swift travel in London and by the concentration (and popularity) of theatres north of the Thames. But the plan rehearses a customary projecting rhetoric: it justifies private interests by claiming concern for the public good.39 Thus John Freehafer reads the fictional “Play-house […] on barges” as a satiric expression of Brome’s “indignation against patents and innovations in the theater,” while more recently Marion O’Connor sees it as a mocking response to Brome’s fear that the Phoenix would “los[e] audiences to the modish and showy fare which Davenant’s project would have retailed.”40 36 Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer, introduction to Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, ed. Zucker and Farmer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–15, at 2. 37 Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 153; Martin Butler, “Exeunt Fighting: Poets, Players, and Impresarios at the Caroline Hall Theaters,” in Localizing Caroline Drama, ed. Zucker and Farmer, 97–128, at 112. 38 For the Second Poets’ War, see Matthew Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson, English Literary Studies Monograph Series (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, Department of English, 1998), 111–124. 39 See Steggle, Wars of the Theatres, for the irony of a monopoly to cancel out the effects of a monopoly, 121. 40 Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling,” 370. Marion O’Connor’s gloss (“Court Beggar: A Critical Introduction”) can be found at Richard Brome Online, Royal Holloway, University of London/

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The floating theatre, according to these accounts, combines Brome’s general distrust of projects with his specific concern about their potential effects on the professional theatre. But the play’s interlocking vocabulary of projects, hunts and recreations allows us to be even more precise: the playhouse on barges represents Brome’s intuition, and his response to the intuition, that courtly pressures will use or treat the theatre as an object, as game, in the pursuit of their own interests. Brome’s vision here can be set alongside traditional as well as more recent accounts of the complex relationship between theatre and games. Since Johan Huizinga observed the persistence of an “essential play-element” across socio-economic life, 41 scholars have emphasized the common performative structures and values linking games and theatre more generally: strategizing, improvising, rule-following and rule–breaking, risk-taking. 42 Tom Bishop, focusing on Shakespeare, suggests that the playwright retains the medieval notion of drama as an ethical activity, and that his plays thus reflect “the notion of the theater as a form of play or an event which includes various kinds of games or play-routines.”43 Other discussions, working from the fact that London’s early modern theatres existed in close physical and ideological proximity to sites for bear- and bull-baiting as well as houses for gambling, dicing, bowling and card-playing, have linked the two in terms of their shared geography, architecture and cultural functions. Louis Montrose notes that “playhouse” and “gamehouse” were used interchangeably during the period by both opponents and supporters of the stage, and Joachim Frenk connects them as “ludic locations par excellence.”44 And Gina Bloom has distilled the relationship to a fine point, suggesting that the dramatization of games helped to train adept spectators. As she explains, the staging of parlor games such as cards and backgammon “invited audiences familiar with these games to repurpose their gaming competencies in order to become Humanities Research Institute, University of Shelffield, www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal. jsp?play=CB&type=CRIT (accessed 20 April 2021). 41 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1970), 50. 42 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), esp. 13–22, 96–103. 43 Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88. 44 Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19; Joachim Frenk, “Games,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock, and Abigail Shinn (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 221–234, at 222.

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skilled theater-goers […]. [T]he goal was […] to teach audience members their proper place as consumers.”45 The Court Beggar, in its unfolding of a field of literal and metaphoric hunts, games, projects and playing, suggests a more antagonistic relationship, one in which social distinctions and symbolic affiliations are carefully parsed.46 In its depiction of Ferdinand, the play casts leisure pastimes as emblems of the louche courtier (indeed, we might note that Brome’s script enumerates, but never stages, Ferdinand’s various calls for gleek and cribbage, as though it doesn’t want to participate in his games).47 And in its depiction of projectors, the floating theatre serves as a sportive but potentially predatory incursion of court interests into the theatrical landscape, an effort to reduce theatre to an object or an instrument of their own ends. In Brome’s eyes, projects and games threaten not simply to compete with the professional stage but to co-opt it. The very institutional status of the London theatre after roughly 65 years of existence—its “pressing consciousness of [its] accruing history”—may have made it that much more vulnerable to such co-option, and Brome that much more aware of such vulnerability. 48 This threat is rehearsed in the play’s other theatrically oriented projects, including one by a character named Court-Wit. Long identified as a personation of Davenant, who by 1640 had written multiple court masques as well as scripted plays that were performed at the Blackfriars and the Globe, the courtly Court-Wit wants that no Playes may be admitted to the Stage, but of their making who Professe or indeavour to live by the quality: That no Courtiers, Divines, 45 Gina Bloom, “Games,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–211, at 191, 194. See also her readings of games and plays as embodied experiences that navigate social structures such as friendship and marriage in Bloom, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2018). 46 Attempts to distinguish among pastimes were, as Gregory M. Colón Semenza has documented, a routine reflex of early modern thinking about sports and games: various moral and political as well as literary treatises attempted to draw boundaries between proper or improper recreation, between “functional sports and licentious mirth” (Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003]), 16. Brome’s approach is motivated by different assumptions; he is less concerned with conceptual and doctrinal hierarchies of order and sanctity than with institutional distinctions between theatrical professional and theatrical amateur, and between appropriate and inappropriate investment in the stage. 47 For the staging of games as an expression of a cultural fear that “gentility […] had begun to encompass a range of urban pleasures,” see Zucker, “Social Stakes of Gambling,” 79. 48 Zucker and Farmer, introduction to Localizing Caroline Drama, 2.

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Students at Law, Lawyer-Clearks, Tradesmen or Prentises be allow’d to write ’em, nor the Works of any lay-Poet whatsoever to be receav’d to the Stage, though freely given unto the Actors, nay though any such Poet should give a summe of money with his Play, as with an Apprentice, unlesse the Author doe also become bound that it shall doe true and faithfull service for a whole Terme. (P4r)49

According to this scheme, a courtier proposes to rid the public stage of courtier (and other) amateurs. The irony here, as Steggle makes clear, is that the proposal “attempt[s] to buy drama” and would thus categorically undermine the very “quality” it purports to serve.50 Indeed, as a project it is meant to benefit Court-Wit above all. The plan specifically preserves his place in the “quality,” perhaps as the lone courtier who will “become bound […] for a whole Terme” in order to have his plays performed.51 Brome was not, nor should we be, naïve about the novelty of economic and courtly pressures on the professional theatre. The early modern English stage was always implicated in the competitive dynamics of the marketplace and was always connected—in terms of licensing, select performances, and censorship—to the court and monarch. But he is diagnosing something new 49 The passage on “giv[ing] a summe of money” is another reference to Suckling. 50 Steggle, Wars of the Theatres, 120. Consider also Kaufmann: “Court-Wit […] say[s] something that Brome believes in (that drama should be written by professionals)—only to have it classified as similar to the outlandish projects already suggested to Sir Andrew and therefore equally absurd” (Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 166). 51 The same logic is at work in Court-Wit’s request for a patent “for my selfe to have the onely priviledge to give instructions to all the actors in the City, (especially the younger sort) the better to enable them to speake their parts emphatically and to the life” (P4r). Another of the play’s topical allusions, the addendum rehearses Davenant’s interests in controlling or owning a company in the late 1630s (the cruel joke embedded here is that Davenant, with his syphilitic nose, could not possibly instruct young actors on how to speak properly). But the larger irony is that Davenant was indeed appointed by the Lord Chamberlain in May 1640 to take over for William Beeston as manager of the Phoenix playhouse, where Brome himself was employed. Scholars disagree as to whether the removal of Beeston and his replacement by Davenant were the effect of an unlicensed performance of The Court Beggar in early 1640 or whether they were the topical cause of the play’s presentation of Court-Wit’s patent. Butler believes that The Court Beggar got Beeston into trouble (Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 135–136); Nigel Bawcutt suggests it may have been another play called The Challenge (see Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of the Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623–73 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 70–71). Marion O’Connor, in her critical introduction, agrees with Bawcutt, suggesting that The Court Beggar may have been written and/or performed after the fracas. See par. 7 of “Court Beggar: A Critical Introduction,” Richard Brome Online, www.dhi. ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal.jsp?play=CB&type=CRIT (accessed 20 April 2021). Either way, it represents the monopolizing claim of the courtier on the public stage.

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and unique about projects as a form of investment and as a form of court incursion into the theatre, one he figures as a kind of predatory game. By 1640, projects had become a signature of the many flaws of the Personal Rule; only a decade later a contemporary could suggest that in the years before the Civil War English “estates and liberties” “were impoverished and enthralled, by multitudes of projects and illegal ways.”52 Sir Anthony Weldon (or the sympathetic author who added on to his posthumously published treatise on the Stuart kings) was not an unbiased reporter.53 But The Court Beggar’s floating theatre as well as its other projects seem to be curious explorations of the existential threat of which Weldon speaks: that as the object of projects the theatre risks being “impoverished and enthralled.” The play speaks to this threat comically and dramaturgically. We have already seen the triumph by his daughter and servant over Mendicant, who is turned into the hunted hunter. We have also seen Lady Strangelove’s wit over the courtier Sir Ferdinand (though in a deeply problematic version of the woman falling for her would-be rapist, she marries him at the play’s end). Court-Wit endures a similar “undoing”: he is asked by Lady Strangelove to write a masque to celebrate the weddings, a seeming sop to his dramatist’s aspirations. But the request hardly affords the kind of authority his projects had demanded earlier. Although he has “cast the designe for’t already,” as he tells Lady Strangelove, the request vexes Court-Wit since it has to “be done extempore or in six minutes” and because he has to write for both a young, untrained boy and a woman, Philomel (S2r). And he is expressly prevented from “instructing” his actors by Cit-Wit, who tells him “I’le read to ’em my selfe, you give your words no grace” (S3v). The commission, which reaches its satiric climax when the boy actor, Philomel’s illegitimate son, can’t remember his lines, is both a gesture to and the cancellation of the prospects of Court-Wit’s earlier proposal.54 In these examples, then, theatrical conventions and resources triumph over the intentions of projects; they beat projects at their own game. The floating theatre affords a final, and complicated, version of this performative achievement. The projector’s proposal for a floating theatre, as we have seen, is a comic expression of a genuine concern, an exaggeration that, in 52 Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James: Whereunto is Now Added the Court of King Charles (London, 1651), 196. 53 See Joseph Marshall and Sean Kelsey, “Weldon, Sir Anthony (bap. 1583, d.1648),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3 January 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-28988. 54 For this plot as a “retaliation” not against the courtier playwrights but against the professional Salisbury Theatre and its manager, Richard Heton, see Butler, “Exeunt Fighting,” 119.

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its improbability, both calls attention to and neutralizes what was perceived as a real threat. But the idea has an appeal that exceeds the topicality of the satire and escapes the deconstructive mockery dealt to the other games and projects. Samantha Heller has explained this appeal as the floating theatre’s potential to “restore a mutually symbiotic working relationship destroyed through the advent of another innovation,” the relationship between the theatre and the watermen, displaced by the sedan chair. “The project thus becomes the means of effecting a kind of theatrical community, a community knit together through and formulated out of self-interest.”55 Here I suggest that such an appeal derives specifically from the allure of playing on the water. As Margaret Shewring reminds us, the “performance possibilities of water” were multiple: “Water provides a stage, natural or constructed. It separates the performers from the spectators gathered to watch the occasion, whether from the bank, from bridges, from stands erected around a flooded courtyard or lake, or from a boat.”56 Early modern English theatrics on the water have a long and diverse history, from the spectacles staged at Kenilworth for Elizabeth I in 1575, to the f ireworks and sea-f ights to celebrate the marriage of Elizabeth and Prince Frederick in 1613, to the yearly flotillas in the Lord Mayor’s pageants that “really were the Thames en fete.”57 Julie Sanders notes that, “drama on rivers was a landscape practice in itself in the early seventeenth century”; the Thames especially was “associated with theater, spectacle, and performance.”58 Indeed, as contemporaries remarked with approval, the Thames was a point of national pride, an avenue for commerce but also a venue for entertainment. Barges allowed people to “Row upon the Water for pleasure” ; the river was also seen as a stage itself: “you have at London a river flowing twenty foot, and full of stately ships that fly to us with merchandise from all the ports of the world, the sight yielding astonishment, and the use perpetual comfort.”59 During the Caroline period, “the community both 55 Heller,”Poets and Projectors,” 121. 56 Margaret Shewring, introduction to Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne, ed. Margaret Shewring (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1–8, at 6. 57 Sydney Anglo, “The Thames en Fete,” in Waterborne Pageants, ed. Shewring, 265–273, at 268. The Lord Mayor’s pageants had an “almost unbroken history from the fourteenth century onwards” (267). 58 Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 13, 43. 59 Thomas Heywood, A True Description of his Majesties Royall Ship (London, 1637), C1v; Thomas Gainsford, The Glory of England (London, 1618), quoted in Lawrence Manley, ed., London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1986), 44–45, italics mine.

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staged events upon the river and staged the idea of that river back to the public gaze in the form of commercial, courtly, and civic theatre, pageants and entertainments.”60 The proposal for the floating theatre seizes on such associations and gives them a twist. It revises the temporary infrastructure for these water spectacles and imagines instead a permanent house for a regular repertoire and audience—the spectators who “shall boord at the floating Theatre,/ Or [be] set ashore from thence.” It relocates offshore, in other words, a theatre under local, landed pressures. Such an escape is both satire and fantasy. As fantasy, it is a “historical product and [has] historical motives.”61 As the projector’s fantasy, the floating theatre, under the pretense of assisting the watermen, could be seen to exploit earlier theatrical traditions to novel ends. It would capitalize on the pleasures of barges as a signature of the culture of Caroline consumption (consider the custom of the Duchess of Newcastle’s sisters to go “ ‘in the winter time … to plays or to ride in their coaches about the streets to see the concourse and recourse of people, and in the springtime to visit the Spring Garden, Hyde Park and the like places, and sometimes they would have music and sup in barges upon the water’ ”62). And it would participate in the “waterborne pageantry” which was essential to “the way Charles I’s monarchy represented itself” and which was in turn “fused onto the wider cultural, political, and military practices of his regime.”63 It would, in other words, stretch the incursion of court-oriented theatre into Thames itself. But another version of the fantasy, finally, floats away from such determinants. It does so partly on the waves of parody, since a theatre on barges can be seen to mock Caroline nautical iconography and its “idealized vision of true kingship and maritime military potency.”64 More important, 60 Sanders, Cultural Geography, 29. 61 Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. 62 Quoted in F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (1948): 37–50, at 48, italics mine. 63 Iain McClure, “The Ambassador’s Reception: The Moroccan Embassy to London of 1637–1638 and the Pageantry of Maritime Politics,” in Waterborne Pageants, ed. Shewring, 291–299, at 298. See also Michael Holden, who notes that more and more early modern livery purchased their own barges: “ownership of a decorated barge to use in full public gaze on the Thames became one of the most evident displays of wealth and social standing” (Holden, “Royal River: The Watermen’s Company and Pageantry on the Thames,” in Waterborne Pageants, ed. Margaret Shewring, 275–289, at 277). 64 McClure, “Ambassador’s Reception,” 297.

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however, the proposal imagines a theatre set physically apart, removed from the theatres and other associated games and pastimes crowding the West End. Recalling the popular image of a Roman-era floating theatre “built in the midst of the river Tyber, standing on pillers and arches, the foundation wrought under water like London-bridge, the Nobles and Ladyes in their Barges and Gondelayes, landed at the very stayres of the galleryes,”65 the plan takes on a momentum of its own. As a vision invented by Brome, a “revisionary adopt[er] of dramatic traditions,” the proposal contains, almost in spite of itself, a corrective to the use of the theatre by projectors. It secures the idea of a public playhouse on the Thames.66 Since Butler claimed that Brome “was perhaps the first person of his day, both within the theatres and without, to voice openly the possibility of a full-scale social division that was real and not merely fictional,” scholars have noted the playwright’s ability to identify and critique both late Caroline politics and the conditions of the late Caroline stage.67 Others have read him as a spokesman for a 1630s Erasmianism who could imagine that religio-political “‘strife’ in English society can be turned into ‘a comedy’ […] with a shared wandering from the precise sectarianism that has divided one otherwise ‘civil Christian’ from another.”68 Despite such perspicuity, however, there is no indication that the playwright consciously planned his floating theatre as a recuperative solution to projects and their influence. But this is precisely where the play is at its most gamelike. Whether understood as exercises in chance or fate, as opportunities for improvisation or rule-following,69 games involve the intentional choices of agents which produce “outcomes [that] might have been intended by none of the agents.”70 The floating theatre, then, is the distinctly ludic consequence of Brome’s comic vision: one that apprehended, even as it mocked, the threat of hunts, projects, games and their capacity to “impoverish” the professional theatre. 65 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), D3v. For the use of the image, see Jean Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 17. 66 Ira Clark, The Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), 157. 67 Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 279. 68 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 78. 69 Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 70 Don Ross, “Game Theory,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring 2016), ed. Edward N. Zalta, n.p., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/game-theory/.

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Works Cited Anglo, Sydney. “The Thames en Fete.” In Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne, edited by Margaret Shewring, 265–273. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Ashton, Robert. The City and the Court, 1603–1643. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Aubrey, John. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1669–1696. Edited by Andrew Clark. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898. Bawcutt, Nigel, ed. The Control and Censorship of the Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623–73. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Beaver, Daniel C. Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Bentley, G. E., eds. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Berry, Edward. Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bishop, Tom. “Shakespeare’s Theater Games.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 65–88. Bloom, Gina. “Games.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 189–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. –––. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2018. Burton, Henry. A Divine Tragedie Lately Acted. Amsterdam, 1636. Butler, Martin. “Exeunt Fighting: Poets, Players, and Impresarios at the Caroline Hall Theaters.” In Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer, 97–128. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. –––. Theatre and Crisis, 1634–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Brome, Richard. The Court Begger. In Five New Playes. London, 1653. Cave, Richard Allen. “The Playwriting Sons of Ben: Nathan Field and Richard Brome.” In Jonsonians: Living Traditions, edited by Brian Woolland, 69–92. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Clark, Ira. The Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992. Cockayne, Thomas. A Short Treatise of Hunting. London, 1591. Fisher, F. J. “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (1948): 37–50. Freehafer, John. “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant’s Theater Project of 1639.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10, no. 3 (1968): 367–383.

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Frenk, Joachim. “Games.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock, and Abigail Shinn, 221–234. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Gainsford, Thomas. The Glory of England. London, 1618. Gascoigne, George. Arte of Venerie. London, 1575. Grantley, Darryl. London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Hart, James S., Jr. “Noy [Noye], William (1577–1634).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online], 21 May 2009. Oxford University Press. Accessed 24 June 2020. w w w.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-20384?rskey=WBVScz&result=1. Heller, Samantha. “Poets and Projectors: Profit, Production, and Economic Paradigms in Early Modern England.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1999. Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors. London, 1612. –––. A True Description of his Majesties Royall Ship. London, 1637. Holden, Michael. “Royal River: The Watermen’s Company and Pageantry on the Thames.” In Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne, edited by Margaret Shewring, 275–289. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Howard, Jean. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. New York: J. & J. Harper, 1970. Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. In English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, edited by David Bevington et al. New York: Norton, 2002. Kaufmann, Richard. Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Knapp, Jeffrey. Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Loewenstein, Joseph. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Manley, Lawrence, ed. London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1986. Manning, Roger B. Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Marmion, Shackerley. Hollands Leaguer. London, 1632. Marshall, Joseph, and Sean Kelsey. “Weldon, Sir Anthony (bap. 1583, d.1648).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online], 3 January 2008. Oxford University

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Press. www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-28988. McClure, Iain. “The Ambassador’s Reception: The Moroccan Embassy to London of 1637–1638 and the Pageantry of Maritime Politics.” In Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne, edited by Margaret Shewring, 291–299. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Merritt, J. F. The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Neill, Michael. “‘Wits Most Accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18, no. 2 (1978): 341–360. O’Connor, Marion. “The Court Beggar: A Critical Introduction.” Richard Brome Online, Royal Holloway, University of London/Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield. Accessed 20 April 2021. www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal.jsp?play=CB&type=CRIT. Parlett, David. The Oxford Guide to Card Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Ratcliff, Jessica. “Art to Cheat the Common-Weale: Inventors, Projectors, and Patentees in English Satire, ca. 1630–70.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 2 (2012): 337–365. Ross, Don. “Game Theory.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring 2016), edited by Edward N. Zalta, n.p. Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2016/entries/game-theory/. Sanders, Julie. The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Shewring, Margaret. Introduction to Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne, edited by Margaret Shewring, 1–8. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Shirley, James. The Triumph of Peace. London, 1634. Steggle, Matthew. Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson. English Literary Studies Monograph Series. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, Department of English, 1998. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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Theis, Jeffrey S. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2009. Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Weldon, Anthony. The Court and Character of King James: Whereunto is Now Added the Court of King Charles. London, 1651. Yamamoto, Koji. “Reformation and the Distrust of the Projector in the Hartlib Circle.” Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 375–397. –––. Taming Capitalism before its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and “Projecting” in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Zucker, Adam. The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. –––. “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, edited by Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, 67–86. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Zucker, Adam, and Alan B. Farmer. Introduction to Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer, 1–15. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

About the Author Heather Hirschfeld is Kenneth Curry Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the editor of the revised New Cambridge Shakespeare Hamlet (2019) and of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy (2018). She is the author of The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (Cornell, 2014) and Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and she has published articles in journals including The Review of English Studies, Shakespeare Studies, ELH, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Quarterly.

5.

Playing with Paradoxes in Troilus and Cressida Patricia Badir

Abstract In 1.3 of Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses reports that Patroclus has been “pageanting” the Greeks for Achilles who languishes in bed. Ulysses claims the performance is terrible: Patroclus’s gestures are ridiculous, his dialogue wooden, his emotions overstated. We recognize, however, that Patroclus is doing impressions and Achilles’ amusement is derived from hyperbolic likenesses. This chapter will consider this scene of impersonation as both private game and public play in order to show that while the bed game is framed as wasteful and unproductive, the report constitutes a rare moment in this play, in which words actually capture the truth of the things they seek to represent. Keywords: impersonation; parody; wit; performance; text play

The epistle that prefaces the “b” issue of the quarto printing of Troilus and Cressida is an interaction between a “never writer” and an “ever” reader.1 Presumed to have been written between the first private performance of the drama (possibly at the Inns of Court) and its eventual public staging (hypothetically at the Globe), the epistle describes Shakespeare’s scathing “comedy” as “never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar,” immediately establishing tension between the private activity of reading and the public activity of theatregoing as well as, correspondingly, between the sophisticated sensibilities of readers and the 1 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 193–194. All subsequent quotations refer to this edition and are referenced in the body of the essay.

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indiscriminate tastes of theatregoers. The appeal of Troilus and Cressida, for the discerning reader, lies in its wit: comedy, we are informed, is no vain matter—though comedies are forever being styled as vanities by their censors. Thus, turning from the page to the stage, the epistle proposes a defense of public stage-playing that is familiar: “the most displeased with plays,” should they be drawn “by report” to the playhouse, “have found that wit there that they never found in themselves, and have parted better witted than they came, feeling an edge of wit set upon them, more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on.” This improvement happens, the writer claims, because Shakespeare’s comedies are “so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit” (193). The epistle is an apology for the stage, penned in the Aristotelian/Horatian tradition: because they show us our follies, stageplays make us better humans. But, there is also a counter-poetics in operation here, put into play by the intimacy established at the beginning of the piece between writer and reader. If Troilus and Cressida comes to be performed, it will mess with those “most displeased with plays.” The drama’s value lies in its ability to generate an intimate and private bond between clever readers who will, in turn, take no small pleasure in the drama’s contempt for the witless, particularly those who have shown disdain for playing. The author shares with the reader a great respect for comedies, and even for theatre, but not for playhouse audiences. In 1.3 Ulysses tells of an idle, frivolous and potentially damaging “play” performed in “a lazy bed” by Patroclus for Achilles. By Ulysses’ report, Patroclus has been “pageanting” the Greek chain of command while “the great Achilles” lies mocking their “designs.” To the Greek commanders, this kind of mimetic play—a bed game of sorts—is injurious to the Greek agenda because it is antithetical to the war effort. Nestor, acutely aware of the political power of Patroclus’s form of playing, observes that “in the imitation of these twain […] many are infect” (1.3.184–186)—a paraphrase of the anti-theatricalist position that stageplays, particularly comedies, are idle entertainments and that stage-playing will undermine authority in every way.2 If we are to draw a connection between the Qb epistle and 2 See Darryl Chalk, “Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theatre as Plague in Troilus and Cressida,” in “This Earthly Stage”: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Worthen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 75–101, and Laurie E. Maguire, “Performing Anger: The Anatomy of Abuse(s) in Troilus and Cressida,” Renaissance Drama 31 (2002): 153–183.

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Troilus and Cressida, the drama’s targets will be those who, like Ulysses and Nestor, think of play as a counterproductive, backward-looking indulgence that stifles momentum and undermines progress in every way. The editors of this collection have proposed that early modern dramas present and analyze “play” as a major category of human behavior, using “players” as their medium of exploration. “Placing play at the heart of our analysis modifies the traditional view of theatre as principally mimesis, emphasizing instead the exploratory and experimental elements it shares with games.” This realignment “underscores that stageplays are not only artistic works but also recreative entertainments and, like games, are culturally central and socially efficacious beyond their function as representation.”3 The writer of the Qb epistle might agree—though he draws his reader’s attention to the stage’s power to “frame to the life,” he also points rather wickedly to the theatre’s less savory motives and to its discriminating operations. But more specifically, Ulysses’ account of Patroclus and Achilles at play directs our attention to an idea of “play” that, in its opposition to the teleology of war, brings history to a grinding halt. Ultimately, I will propose that Troilus and Cressida’s oft-remarked-upon tonal ambiguity is a function of writing that understands comedy as a form of play whose pleasures are explicitly non-aesthetic and non-cathartic. 4 These pleasures are, in the epistle’s terms, more intimate and private than we might think and as such they turn inward, setting themselves against real world ends and teleologies of progress. To begin with, a game like the one Patroclus plays with Achilles is a form of witty, mischievous play that interacts with authority by exposing through imitation how openly authority, ironically, desires to see itself imitated. Here is Achilles on the subject: The beauty that is borne here in the face The bearer knows not, but commends itself 3 Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin, “Introduction” to this volume, p. 20. 4 For discussions of the drama’s “modernity”—that is, its tonal ambiguity—see Barbara Everett, “The Inaction of Troilus and Cressida,” Essays in Criticism 32, no.2 (1982): 119–139; Jonathan Gil Harris, “‘The Enterprise is Sick’: Pathologies of Value and Transnationality in Troilus and Cressida,” Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 3–37; David Hillman, “The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1997): 295–313; Paul M. Kendall, “Inaction and Ambivalence in Troilus and Cressida,” University of Virginia Studies 4 (1951): 131–145; and Jeanne T. Newlin, “The Modernity of Troilus and Cressida: The Case for Theatrical Criticism,” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969): 353–373. Hamish F. G. Swanston, “The Baroque Element in Troilus and Cressida,” Durham University Journal 19 (1958): 14–23, is also relevant here.

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To others’ eyes; nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed Salutes each other with each other’s form; For speculation turns not to itself, Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there Where it may see itself. (3.3.103–111)

Ulysses agrees with his comrade, pointing out that no man can know himself unless he finds a way to “communicate his parts to others” and that no man can be himself until he sees himself “formèd in th’applause” of others who: like an arch, reverb’rate The voice again; or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. (3.3.115–124)

Authority, in Troilus and Cressida, does not simply want to be acknowledged, it wants to be reflected and replayed in public because the worst thing you can to do to a Greek or Trojan hero is fail to recognize him.5 Hector’s challenge—a game that provides opportunity for precisely the kind of imitation Achilles and Ulysses speak of—puts Patroclus’s parodic corruption of the mimetic systems in play at the heart of authority into even sharper relief. Tired of the stalemate between the Greek and Trojan camps, Hector proposes the following (repeated here by Aeneas): Kings, princes, lords, If there be one among the fair’st of Greece, That holds his honour higher than his ease, That seeks his praise more than he fears his peril, That knows his valour and knows not his fear, That loves his mistress more than in confession With truant vows to her own lips he loves, And dare avow her beauty and her worth 5 Ulysses knows this to be the case and this is why he has ordered his troops to “pass strangely” before Achilles who “feels not what he owes, but by reflection;/ As when his virtues, shining upon others,/ Heat them and they retort that heat again/ To the first giver” (3.3.38–39, 99–101). See Frank Kermode, “‘Opinion’ in Troilus and Cressida” (1983), reprinted in Critical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2012): 88–102, and Stephen X. Mead, “‘Thou art chang’d’: Public Value and Personal Identity in Troilus and Cressida,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 2 (1992): 237–259.

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In other arms than hers—to him this challenge, Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks, Shall make it good, or do his best to do it, He hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer, Than ever Greek did compass in his arms; And will tomorrow with his trumpet call, Midway between your tents and walls of Troy, To rouse a Grecian that is true in love. If any come, Hector shall honour him; If none, he’ll say in Troy when he retires, The Grecian dames are sunburnt, and not worth The splinter of a lance. (1.3.260–279)

“Warlike cultures have warlike games” writes Brian Sutton-Smith in his paraphrase of Johan Huizinga’s theory of play as representation of political conflict.6 Nestor states that Hector’s challenge is “a sportful combat,” that it is courtly play not war. And yet the game is remarkably imitative of the Trojan war itself, waged as it was for the honor of a woman. As one would expect of such a game, the stakes are high; in this trial “much opinion dwells/ For here the Trojans taste our dear’st repute/ With their fin’st palate.” The old warrior understands that while the challenge is only play, such games “give a scantling/ Of good or bad unto the general;/ And in such indexes, although small pricks/ To their subsequent volumes, there is seen/ The baby figure of the giant mass/ Of things to come at large” (1.3.331–341). Games like this one, by imitating martial procedures and by mirroring the social hierarchies those procedures administer, become the means by which warriors see themselves in the “applause” of others, thereby consolidating the status of the people who control, not just the rules of the game, but the rules of the war itself. “From contest (power) comes the development of social hierarchies (identity),” argues Sutton-Smith, “around which the society constructs its values.”7 Hector’s imitation game is thus a political contest, designed to cement combative male rhetoric that Ulysses articulates in his oration on “the specialty of rule” (1.3.74–136): honor is valued over comfort; the quest for praise overcomes the risk of peril; and valor triumphs over fear. The game 6 Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 76. See also Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 7 Sutton-Smith, Ambiguity of Play, 78.

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that entertains Patroclus and Achilles, on the other hand, parodies that hierarchy and is thus styled by Ulysses as feminine and frivolous. Games of contest—festivals, tournaments or challenges like the game Hector proposes—generally exclude less powerful people (women and servants) and serve as exercises of power for kings, princes, generals and their warriors. Games of wit, alternatively, are more pleasing to what Sutton-Smith describes as “the social and intellectual elites, always concerned to differentiate their own sophisticated social or solitary playfulness from that of the masses.”8 Here Achilles and Patroclus have something in common with the writer of the Qb epistle and his readerly interlocutor. Deliberately isolating themselves from more public forms of play, Achilles and Patroclus will find themselves scorned as weak and idle. But it is also the case that the presence of their “bad” game—and its biting attack on Greek vanity—undermines the sobriety of the “good” game and begins to give us fuller access to the mechanics of imitation in this drama. As the prologue proposes, it is left to the spectator to “like or find fault” in what is to come: “Now good or bad, ‘tis but the chance of war” (prol.30–31). Ulysses too frames Hector’s challenge as a “chance” (3.3.131) opportunity for the Greeks to recover their greatest martial asset. The hope is that Achilles will be irritated enough to stop playing with Patroclus and return to the serious business of the battlefield. Chance has nothing to do with it though. We know the lottery is rigged. Effectively, the role of chance in the drama’s warlike games is consistent with what Sutton-Smith characterizes as the rhetoric of fate that we see elsewhere in the drama. Arguing against the seemingly arbitrary nature of games of fortune, Nestor, paraphrasing Agamemnon’s opening address to the Greek camp, claims that “the true proof of men” lies in “the reproof of chance.” The “show” of valor is tested “in storms of fortune” for “then the thing of courage,/ As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize,/ And with an accent tuned in selfsame key/ Rechides to chiding Fortune” (1.3.32–53). Might, roused by anger, trumps fate so convincingly that when Troilus explains to Cressida that the return to the battlefield is “an injury of chance” that “rudely beguiles” and “forcibly prevents” their embraces, strangling their vows “even in the birth of our own laboring breath” (4.4.32–37), we no more believe him than she does. The contests that make up the narrative of Troilus and Cressida are repeatedly interpreted by their male players as tests of strength and virility. If the drama toys in any way with the notion that all mortals are subject to a game of fortune played out by capricious forces beyond 8

Ibid., 206.

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human control, it registers this possibility in a female character cursed never to be believed; Cassandra’s “brainsick raptures/ Cannot distaste the goodness of a quarrel” that has engaged the attention of all of the drama’s warriors (2.2.121–122). It is this very “goodness” that Achilles and Patroclus seek to contaminate as they play in what Sutton-Smith calls “the genre of comedians and tricksters, of wits and dilettantes.”9 Their game is in fact “metaplay” that plays with normal expectations of mimetic play by flirting with the transgressiveness of camp that Fabio Cleto (working from Judith Butler) describes as allied to kitsch and pop “in its privilege of the secondary and derivative” and in its authorization of “serial reproduction over the original, showing that the secondary is always already copy of a copy.”10 Thus, when Patroclus “pageants” the Greeks, he outs them, exposing their grandiose “designs” as a form of campy make-believe that makes use of the very performative paradigms the illustrious warriors scorn. Huizinga’s point is made for us: legendary contests “still belong to the domain of play.”11 Interestingly though, Ulysses reports that Patroclus’s “imitation” is, in his opinion at least, not very good: his “scurrile jests” are “ridiculous and awkward,” his dialogue is “wooden” and his affects overly hyperbolic, “such to-be pitied and o’er wrested seeming” (1.3.147–160).12 It is possible that Patroclus is acting ridiculous, wooden and hyperbolic because Agamemnon, Nestor and Ulysses are themselves ridiculous, wooden and hyperbolic. But, ultimately, it doesn’t actually matter if Patroclus plays Agamemnon “right,” as long as the impressions are recognizable and Ulysses makes it clear to his listeners that they are. Anna Deavere Smith writing for the New York Times in 1992 9 Ibid., 148. 10 Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 1–42, at 20. “Thus gay is to straight,” insists Judith Butler, “not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of the ‘the original’ […] reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 31). See also Gregory W. Bredbeck, “Constructing Patroclus: The High and Low Discourses of Renaissance Sodomy,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle G. Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 77–91; Gary Spear, “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1993): 409–422, and Alan Sinf ield, “The Leather Men and the Lovely Boy: Reading Positions in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 376–384. 11 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 55. 12 The Q variant of l.148 is “ridiculous and silly.”

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(about George Bush) helps explain the effectiveness of the impressionist (or impersonator) by pointing to the comedic inversions that come precisely from the imperfect copy: For the health of a society, it should not be [a perfect imitation]; it should, in fact, be authority turned upside down. Mimics study authority while standing on their hands. They wear respectable clothing—designer jeans in their real lives and business suits while portraying politicians. But underneath is the spirit of Harlequin and his multicolors and a view of the world that is inverted. The public takes this reflection and uses it as a key. The mimic has opened up a new way of seeing.13

This isn’t in fact a theatre that frames “to the life” at all; it is rather one that mischievously makes a travesty of lives, allowing the viewer (or the “ever reader”) to sneer at them.14 It is, however, important to keep in mind that the scene that Ulysses reports does not offer us direct access to Patroclus’s show and thus an analytic that works through play theory’s interaction with metatheatre is not, on its own, sufficient. What we see in 1.3 is Ulysses giving a verbal account of something that has been seen. Ulysses stands between the representation he sees (Patroclus’s impressions performed for Achilles’ appreciative eye), his listening subjects (the Greek camp) to whom the account is addressed, and the reader-spectator who observes the whole thing. Consider again one of the more memorable moments of Ulysses’ account: The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling, From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause, Cries “Excellent! ‘Tis Agamemnon right! Now play me Nestor: hem and stroke thy beard, As he being dressed to some oration.” That’s done, as near as the extremest ends Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife. Yet god Achilles still cries “Excellent! ‘Tis Nestor right! Now play him me, Patroclus, 13 Anna Deavere Smith, “Inside the Political Mimic’s Fun-House Mirror,” New York Times, 16 August 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/16/arts/cultural-view-inside-the-politicalmimic-s-fun-house-mirror.html. 14 For another discussion of the metatheatrical elements of Troilus and Cressida, see Rudolph Stamm, “The Glass of Pandar’s Praise: The Word-Scenery, Mirror Passages, and Reported Scenes in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Essays and Studies 17 (1964): 55–77.

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Arming to answer in a night alarm.” And then forsooth the faint defects of age Must be the scene of mirth: to cough and spit, And with a palsy, fumbling on his gorget, Shake in and out the rivet. And at this sport Sir Valour dies; cries “O, enough, Patroclus Or give me ribs of steel! I shall split all In pleasure of my spleen.” (1.3.161–170)

The actual “play” is denied to the scene’s audiences, making Patroclus’s impressions of Greeks all the more interesting for their apparent success. Ulysses’ report really belongs to another category of Shakespearean pageantry along with Enobarbus’s account of Cleopatra’s entry into Rome (2.2.195–247) or the Duke of York’s account of Bolingbroke’s arrival in London in Richard II (5.2.8–23). As W. J. T Mitchell puts it, something “special and magical is required of language” here.15 This is not to say that the scene in question retreats from matters of embodied performance—the scene is obviously about theatre but my point is that the text Ulysses speaks devises a series of nested games that beg some disassembly. Wolfgang Iser proposes that “text play”—different from but very much related to the other forms of play discussed here—“arises out of the coexistence of the fictive and the imaginary.” Iser proposes that “whenever realities are transposed into the text [the fictive], they turn [by means of the imaginary] into signs for something else” and “they are made to outstrip their original determinacy.” Under such conditions of figuration, “reproduced reality is made to point to a ‘reality’ beyond itself, while the imaginary is lured into form.”16 I propose that Shakespeare gives us Ulysses in the act of fictionalizing, in Iser’s sense of the term; that is Ulysses’ words work to bind his auditors’ imaginary capacities into a particular form and in so doing the reality he reproduces becomes something beyond that which he experiences himself. Rooting his thinking in game theory proposed by Roger Caillois, Iser f inds four kinds of games that can be at play with each other within a single text.17 The first is agōn, which is the most basic and manifests itself 15 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 158; emphasis mine. 16 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 3. 17 See Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (1961; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

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as a competition, a “strife, or even a rift, through which referential realities are antagonistically arranged and intratextual positions are antithetically arranged so that the textual world clashes with the reader’s expectations.” Agōn both consolidates “the opposing norms, values, feelings, thoughts, opinions, and so on into positions” and “initiates the surmounting of what has congealed into positions through the conflict” thus entailing both “a consolidation and an undermining of what has been consolidated.” More specif ically, agōn can set denotation against f iguration with an eye to overcoming the difference its very properties set in play. Alea, Iser’s second form of text play, aligns itself against agōn whose agential sense of strife works against any sense of fate.18 Alea can be the force of intertexts and contexts that interrupt any sense of linguistic agency, leaving any reading, in some sense, to chance. By opening the game to the interruptions of inter- or extratextual elements, alea unfolds as variety and possibility, making the stability that agōn strives for inconceivable.19 Mimicry, Iser’s third form of text play, strives to make that which is being denotated or described disappear into figuration so that subject and art become one and the same. But because mimicry operates under the proviso of “as if,” Iser sees it as “only a refinement of illusion.” Mimicry is thus most evident when the illusion is broken, when “the mimicking of reality is punctured and the text reveals what it cannot be—reality—though it presents this very reality that it has mimicked for observation.” If the illusion is broken, Iser continues, “it makes transparent what it pretended to be” and “the seemingly eradicated difference reasserts itself, and illusion as deception tilts into illusion as a means of grasping what has been imitated.”20 The final category of text play is ilinx best understood by quoting Iser at length: a game of subversion whose “vertiginous” element consists in the carnivalization of all the positions assembled in the text. […] There is clearly an anarchic tendency in ilinx, and this not only liberates what has been suppressed; it also reintegrates what has been excluded. Thus it allows the absent to play against the present, and in everything that is present it opens a difference that makes whatever has been excluded fight back against the representative claims that excluded it. Whatever is present is as if mirrored from its reverse side.21 18 Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, 260. 19 Ibid., 261. 20 Ibid., 262. 21 Ibid., 262.

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The various kinds of play making up Iser’s understanding of text play can be difficult to grasp when all four are in operation because each dissolves indiscernibly into the others. However, placing text play at the center of a reading of Ulysses’ text helps to draw attention to Shakespeare’s formal experiments—both textual and performative—and, in turn, to understand how this particular narrative interacts with the larger mechanics of play in operation in Troilus and Cressida. In his account of the goings-on in Achilles’ tent, Ulysses gives his auditors what he understands is a representation of reality: Patroclus has been performing discourteous impressions of the Greek chain of command. In the process of providing the details of this “imitation,” however, Ulysses provides imaginary access to a competing reality: the “scurrile jests” themselves and the effects they have upon their original audience “the large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling” (1.3.160–161). A rift (Iser’s agōn) is created between referential realities—Ulysses and Achilles both see the scene differently. It could be argued that the text works to overcome the rift between the humor of Patroclus’s deliciously biting performance and Ulysses’ blistering account of it by insisting on Ulysses’ authority as a general and as a first-hand witness; but, as Iser proposes, the more the rift between denotation and figuration, between imitation and symbolization, “dominates the strife, the more irreconcilable the adversaries will be, so that finally it will not be a matter of winning or losing but of visualizing the gap itself.”22 This gap opens up as the play acknowledges that Patroclus’s impersonations—even filtered through Ulysses—are, despite their alleged flatness, surprisingly “right.” This perception can be partially accounted for by the fact that Ulysses’ recollection of Patroclus’s play is always in some sense interacting with Troilus and Cressida’s classical and Renaissance intertexts (Iser’s alea). In the closing lines of the account, when Ulysses refers to “All our abilities, gifts, natures, shapes/ Several and generals of grace exact,/ Achievements, plots, orders, prevention etc.,” we see the text appealing to the stories beyond the story and to a collective cultural memory.23 This 22 Ibid., 261–262. 23 For further discussion of the drama’s interaction with its intertexts see Gretchen E. Minton, “‘Discharging Less than the Tenth Part of One’: Performance Anxiety and/in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 101–119; Douglas Cole, “Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1980): 76–84; Linda Charnes, “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 413–440; Andrew Griffin, “The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida,” Early Modern Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 12, https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/12-2/grifbana.htm;

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appeal reintroduces the very element of chance that warriors are anxious to dismiss for, as many others have pointed out, it doesn’t matter how many times the drama reproduces the accomplishments of these always already legendary figures, their persons are only recognized by chance, making Ulysses’ account of Patroclus’s hyperbolic, wooden play all the more astonishing in its effectiveness (Iser’s mimicry).24 A crucial feature of the speech’s narrative vivacity is that Ulysses’ words figure well. When Ulysses claims that Patroclus “pageants us,” Ulysses is actually doing the hard work: first he gives us Patroclus, voicing “great Agamemnon,” then the ancient Nestor. It is Ulysses who provides the powerful images of the private tent and the decadent bed, of Patroclus parading about, of Achilles buckling over hardly able to bear the strain of his own laughter. All of the scene’s most memorable “hyperbole,” all of its “fusty stuff,” are conjured by Ulysses’ words. And yet, Ulysses’ fiction becomes most clear and most vivid when the illusion he fabricates is broken by the onstage speech of the very subjects Patroclus mocks—the real Nestor and the real Agamemnon. When Nestor speaks and Agamemnon responds (1.3.137–141), the illusion is broken and becomes a means of understanding not just a scene that has been described but not played but the entire drama. In other words, the more Ulysses talks, the less Nestor and Agamemnon see what he wants them to see—the “dainty” Achilles and his good-for-nothing lover, Patroclus. The more Agamemnon’s “topless disputation” and Nestor’s “defects of age” are “acted in” to this biting “scene of mirth,” the more the two warriors grasp that they are being mocked with an efficacy that disarms them. What they see is Ulysses communicating their parts, in a rather unflattering light, to others. Carolyn Asp, “Transcendence Denied: The Failure of Role Assumption in Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature 18, no. 2 (1978): 257–274; and Mihoko Suzuki, “‘Truth Tired with Iteration’: Myth and Fiction in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Philological Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1987): 153–174. 24 Aeneas needs to be schooled in Greek celebrity in 1.3 and again in 4.5 only then to ask who is “the high and mighty Agamemnon?” (229). We should also remember that in 1.2 Trojans parade across the stage as Pandarus introduces them, as if for the first time, to Cressida. Troilus hopes that “True swains in love shall in the world to come approve their truth by Troilus,” but the truth is no one seems to know who he is (3.2.163). In 4.5 Agamemnon asks if the man cavorting with Cressida “is not yond Diomed?” and later if the woman to whom he speaks is “the Lady Cressid?” (13, 17). Troilus too questions his ability to recognize Cressida when she stands right before him (“Was Cressid here?”; “Think this not Cressid”; “This is not she”; “This is, and is not, Cressid,” 5.2.122, 131, 136, 144). In a scene that copies the introductory pageantry of 1.2, Hector, in 4.5, is informed of the names and shapes of all the Greeks. “Is this Achilles?” he asks when he finds himself facing the formidable (and, as one would expect, familiar) warrior. “I am Achilles,” his opponent replies, nonplussed by the misrecognition (233–234).

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We—the reader or the theatre spectator, whichever we are—see all of this. Ulysses’ text frees precisely what he has been trying to suppress: theatre. The absent scene here, in all its camp extravagance, plays against the strikingly static, wordy present, reintroducing, to Ulysses’ detriment, the scene’s absent elements (Iser’s ilinx). Patroclus and Achilles’ game, though excluded from the stage, fights back from the claim that the progressive rhetoric of war must triumph over the idle play of theatre. As has been noted before, this is a drama in which “words pay no debts” (3.2.52); in which the language of praise, “tired with iteration” (3.2.166), wants similes and is reduced to tautology; and in which evidence of the very emptiness of figurative language accumulates: Troilus: You have bereft me of all words, lady. (3.2.51) Pandarus: Have you not done talking yet? (3.2.94) Cressida: Stop my mouth. (3.2.126) Troilus: Words, words, mere words, no matter from my heart. (5.3.108) Troilus: Hector is dead; there is no more to say. (5.10.22)

In this context it is exactly right that Ulysses’ words acquire an antic life of their own. In fact, if Ulysses imitation is accompanied by gestures—as it surely is—the most mischievous game that the text plays here is with the stage. If Patroclus is a “strutting player,” he becomes so by means of Ulysses’ physical mimicry just as Patroclus’s hamstring and stretched footing are Ulysses’ own. And yet, even if, despite Ulysses best efforts, the stage wins the day here, the scene shows little regard for the theatre’s audience. Nestor and Agamemnon, who have drawn the losing stick once again, recognize themselves in their general’s pageant and feel, as do the epistle’s imagined spectators, “an edge of wit set upon them more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on.” The text play set in motion by Ulysses’ account acknowledges the potency of the embodied theatre but, as is the case in the epistle, there is little faith that a theatre audience will actually understand the game they have been swept into. In its disdain for public spectatorship, this scene does not seem to want to be watched at all. It wants us, following the epistle, to imagine its performance (much as we imagine Patroclus at play) before an audience of fools like Nestor and Agamemnon. At least at this moment, the “ever reader” is invited into an unsullied, intimate space to join Achilles in the private and often wicked pleasures of comedy. However, the full extent of the games at play in this sequence are not apparent until 3.3 when Ulysses (aided by Patroclus) sparks some life into Achilles by revealing that it will be Ajax who responds to Hector’s challenge.

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Achilles does not react to this news as Ulysses hopes, by insisting that he play the game in Ajax’s stead; rather, he proposes that the Trojan lords be invited to a party in the Greek camp after the combat. He has a “woman’s longing,” he says, “An appetite that I am sick withal,/ To see great Hector in his weeds of peace,/ To talk with him, and to behold his visage,/ Even to my full of view” (3.3.236–239). This is not the reaction that Ulysses was looking for—a “womanish” inclination toward sociality at precisely the point where macho ambition would be helpful. Moreover, Achilles’ twist provides the opportunity for further play-acting that challenges the effectiveness of Hector’s game as a form of legitimate and productive play. Thersites enters and reports that Ajax, in anticipation of his sport with Hector, has become so boastful that he “raves in saying nothing” (3.3.248). Thersites then performs “the pageant of Ajax” to his appreciative audience (3.3.267). When Achilles entreats Thersites to be his ambassador to the Trojan camp, Thersites seizes the opportunity to extend his imitation, inviting Patroclus to play along. Patroclus, here playing himself, addresses Thersites who hums and haws in Ajax’s voice, wearing “his tongue in’s arms” and all three have a good laugh at Ajax’s expense (3.3.269–301). The reader/viewer is immediately reminded of Ulysses describing Patroclus and Achilles, only now we have it in real time with Patroclus playing himself and Thersites as the mimicker. Achilles is once again the audience and the effect is dizzying. Hector’s (and implicitly Ajax’s) “good play” is challenged by Patroclus’s and Achilles’ “bad play” and Patroclus and Achilles, with Thersites’ assistance, win the contest between the two games. Hector will, a few scenes later, claim that he is being read “like a book of sport” (4.5.238). It would be more accurate to claim that he is being played.25 “Good play” in Troilus and Cressida very quickly becomes “bad play” and vice versa. Addressing the inversions proposed by forms of play, including paradox, Susan Stewart asserts that vertiginous reversals of meaning and signification are only possible when there is “a shared ordering of events, an organization of the world that constitutes the parameters of a culture shared by a given set of members.”26 For the early moderns, one version of this shared order is expounded by Ulysses, whose proclamation on “degree, priority and place” is all about progress. If the proper hierarchies are observed, the world just works. But “take but degree away” and “the pace goes backward with a purpose.” Orthodoxy will lose ground and “right and wrong,/ Between whose endless jar justice resides,/ Should lose their names, and so should 25 For an alternative discussion of reported scenes see Stamm, “Glass of Pandar’s Praise.” 26 Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 80.

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justice too” (1.3.82–128). Ulysses’ imitation of Patroclus’s imitation of the Greek chain of command upends his own common-sense “designs,” turning them into nonsense: “what is or is not, serves/ As the stuff for these two to make paradoxes” (1.3.182–183). If the orthodoxy in Troilus and Cressida is that war is an obligatory and rational means for moving forward, then Achilles’ and Patroclus’s play—styled as leisurely, pleasure-driven and irrational—is indeed a paradoxical bid for the feminized delights of inertia. Such a reversal of orthodoxy poses, as Stewart configures it, “a particular threat to hierarchy and direction. If we see everyday life as ‘getting somewhere,’ with an implication of progress, the reversal reminds us that what goes up must come down.”27 Paradoxes, like those played out by Patroclus and Achilles, push in the opposite direction of history. The account of Achilles and Patroclus playing “upon a lazy bed,” works as a theatrical anecdote that, in Ellen MacKay’s terms, theorizes “a stage that stops history in its tracks.”28 Though the kind of performance imagined by Ulysses’ account is not incendiary in the apocalyptic terms MacKay formulates for tragedy, the account is a textual record of a performance event that reflects what can be recognized as “the broad and deep perception that performance cannot be put in the service of an end.” Troilus and Cressida may not be “taking the precondition of its disappearance as the reason that it matters,”29 but it is letting us know that the stakes of this unsettling game called “comedy” are not those formulated by the theatre’s most ardent early modern defenders. What we enjoy in this drama (if “enjoy” is even the right word) is, I think, a very different kind of truth that emerges, paradoxically, in games and play. Troilus’s statement—“Troilus shall be such to Cressid as what envy can say worst shall be a mock for his truth, and what truth can speak truest not truer than Troilus” (3.2.90–92)—is one of the most convoluted bits of writing in the drama. It is often cited as an extreme example of the drama’s investment in tautology and as further indication of the degree to which truth has become “tired with iteration” (3.2.166). It is indeed astonishing, therefore, that a text that seeks at every turn to undermine the idea of truth provides access to truth not in mimesis but in a kind of gameplay that introduces rifts between what is spoken and what is seen; what is known to be true of the past and what unfolds in the present; between what is found on the stage and what is missing from it. The paradoxes that emerge undermine the epic story the play is supposed 27 Ibid., 68. 28 Ellen MacKay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 19. 29 Ibid., 196.

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to be telling, and these games themselves become the only truths that can be articulated. Perhaps this is so because “truth, like queerness,” writes Lee Edelman, “irreducibly linked to the ‘aberrant or atypical,’ to what chafes against ‘normalization,’ finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good.”30 Troilus and Cressida is not a drama that hopes to make people be—or even feel—good. Its affective catalogue locates pleasure in the entertaining play of contempt, enmity, antipathy, irritation, envy and paranoia—all feelings that Sianne Ngai describes as “ugly emotions” that are “explicitly amoral and noncathartic” and that offer “no satisfactions of virtue […] nor any therapeutic or purifying release.” And yet these kinds of emotions are useful, Ngai argues, for thinking through predicaments of “obstructed agency” (outcomes “void of general good” in Edleman’s terms) in which human actors (like Shakespeare’s Trojans and Greeks) find themselves stuck or unable to move. In their artistic manifestations, these predicaments can be thought of as allegories for “an increasingly resigned and pessimistic understanding of [art’s] own relationship to political action” or indeed to history.31 Troilus and Cressida does unfold in just this kind of space of inaction and stagnation. The war has come to a standstill; no one is capable of the action expected of them or of producing noble feelings in the hearts of other characters and spectators. Consistently, the drama operates on a discursive level—full of rhetoric rather than acts. These are the aesthetic conditions that produce what Ngai calls “meta-feeling”—the phenomenon “in which one feels confused about what one is feeling” and which constitutes an affective register that is “weaker in intensity”, “tonally ambiguous”, and characterized by “emotional illegibility”.32 Importantly, Achilles’ pleasure (and thus our own) is derived entirely from Patroclus’s ability to get it “right” for Achilles—and only Achilles—not from, as Nestor thinks, any sense that the impersonations are politically useful or productive. What Ulysses brings to the stage is a private, intimate and deliberately wasteful, neglectful and unproductive play—play that opposes 30 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6. For further discussion of the value of truth, see Lawrence D. Green, “‘We’ll dress him up in voices’: The Rhetoric of Disjunction in Troilus and Cressida,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 1 (1984): 23–40; Gayle Greene, “Language and Value in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature 21, no. 2 (1981): 271–285; and David McInnis, “Repetition and Revision in Shakespeare’s Tragic Love Plays,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 25, no. 2 (2008): 33–56. 31 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3, 6. 32 Ibid., 14, 10.

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itself not just to work but also to history. Perhaps it is this sense of play that the Qb epistle is getting at in its exchange with its reader. The writer also understands the comedy as a more exclusive or intimate affair—a game played between the right sort of spectators or, even better, between witty readers. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton, in their influential anthology Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, challenge scholars to resist utilitarian approaches to history in their scholarship—that is, to apply some pressure to readings of history deemed valuable because they are virtuous or useful to us in some way.33 It seems to me that Troilus and Cressida anticipates this challenge in its interrogation of purposive conceptions of historical and theatrical value. Achilles and Patroclus are not seeking what Guy-Bray calls elsewhere “a real world end,” and their return to the stage, in Ulysses’ voice, echoes the drama’s general refusal to get the literary teleology right by toying cheekily with non-cathartic, non-ethical, rather intriguing counter-pleasures that challenge pretty much all received truths, even those claimed by the defenders of the stage.34 I find it fitting, in this sense, that Troilus and Cressida is a stageplay virtually without performance history. The writer of the Qb epistle gets his way for a time as, after the hypothetical performance of the drama at The Globe, there is no record of performance in England until the twentieth century. The text is spared “the palms of the vulgar” and the “smoky breath of the multitude” while the “ever reader[s]” thank fortune “for the scape it hath made.” But is it also the case that the pleasures on offer here—the decadent pleasures that come of intimate play-acting—are inseparable from those of the theatre. The stage haunts any reading of this drama—supplementing all of its “report[s]” with the stuff to make paradoxes of us all.35

Works Cited Asp, Carolyn. “Transcendence Denied: The Failure of Role Assumption in Troilus and Cressida.” Studies in English Literature 18, no. 2 (1978): 257–274. Bredbeck, Gregory W. “Constructing Patroclus: The High and Low Discourses of Renaissance Sodomy.” In The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse 33 Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton eds., Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–2. 34 Stephen Guy-Bray, Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 24. 35 Special thanks to Eve Preus, Erika Lin and the anonymous reader for the press for their insightful readings of early drafts of this essay.

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and Politics, edited by Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle G. Reinelt, 77–91. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. 1961. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Chalk, Darryl. “Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theatre as Plague in Troilus and Cressida.” In “This Earthly Stage”: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Worthen, 75–101. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Charnes, Linda. “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 413–440. Cleto, Fabio. “Introduction: Queering the Camp.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto, 1–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Cole, Douglas. “Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1980): 76–84. Deavere Smith, Anna. “Inside the Political Mimic’s Fun-House Mirror.” New York Times, 16 August 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/16/arts/cultural-viewinside-the-political-mimic-s-fun-house-mirror.html. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Everett, Barbara. “The Inaction of Troilus and Cressida.” Essays in Criticism 32, no. 2 (1982): 119–139. Green, Lawrence D. “‘We’ll dress him up in voices’: The Rhetoric of Disjunction in Troilus and Cressida.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 1 (1984): 23–40. Greene, Gayle. “Language and Value in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” Studies in English Literature 21, no. 2 (1981): 271–285. Griffin, Andrew. “The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida.” Early Modern Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 12, https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/12-2/grifbana. htm. Guy-Bray, Stephen. Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “‘The Enterprise is Sick’: Pathologies of Value and Transnationality in Troilus and Cressida.” Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 3–37. Hillman, David. “The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1997): 295–313. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

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Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Kendall, Paul M. “Inaction and Ambivalence in Troilus and Cressida.” University of Virginia Studies 4 (1951): 131–145. Kermode, Frank. “‘Opinion’ in Troilus and Cressida.” 1983. Reprinted in Critical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2012): 88–102. MacKay, Ellen. Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Maguire, Laurie E. “Performing Anger: The Anatomy of Abuse(s) in Troilus and Cressida.” Renaissance Drama 31 (2002): 153–183. McInnis, David. “Repetition and Revision in Shakespeare’s Tragic Love Plays.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 25, no. 2 (2008): 33–56. Mead, Stephen X. “‘Thou art chang’d’: Public Value and Personal Identity in Troilus and Cressida.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 2 (1992): 237–259. Minton, Gretchen E. “‘Discharging Less than the Tenth Part of One’: Performance Anxiety and/in Troilus and Cressida.” In Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, edited by Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, 101–119. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Nardizzi, Vin, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton, eds. Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Newlin, Jeanne T. “The Modernity of Troilus and Cressida: The Case for Theatrical Criticism.” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969): 353–373. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. Edited by Kenneth Muir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Sinfield, Alan. “The Leather Men and the Lovely Boy: Reading Positions in Troilus and Cressida.” In Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Madhavi Menon, 376–384. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Spear, Gary. “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1993): 409–422. Stamm, Rudolph. “The Glass of Pandar’s Praise: The Word-Scenery, Mirror Passages, and Reported Scenes in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” Essays and Studies 17 (1964): 55–77. Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

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Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Suzuki, Mihoko. “‘Truth Tired with Iteration’: Myth and Fiction in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” Philological Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1987): 153–174. Swanston, Hamish F. G. “The Baroque Element in Troilus and Cressida.” Durham University Journal 19 (1958): 14–23.

About the Author Patricia Badir is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her book, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700, was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. She is also the co-editor, with Valerie Traub and Peggy McCracken, of Ovidian Transversions: Iphis and Ianthe: 1350–1650 (2019). Her research focuses on the literary afterlives of biblical saints and the creative output of seventeenth-century religious communities. She is also working on short book that thinks through the implications of studying the early modern past from the West Coast, and she is finishing a book on director Roy Mitchell and the matter of the theatrical archive.

6. Bowling Alone, or The Whole Point of No Return Paul Menzer

Abstract The anonymous Look About You of 1600 calls for a game of bowls that dilates upon the sport’s propensity to run away with itself. In the midst of a game at bowls played in prison, one character excuses himself for a moment. At that point the other borrows his clothes and escapes in his guise, leaving his competitor “bowling alone,” a victim of social isolation. This chapter argues that bowling offers early modern theatre a theory of isolation but also proximity, velocity, and writing. Indeed, bowling materializes theatre’s sense of its proxemics and ultimately theatricalizes the relationship between dramatic fiction and space, and even offers a plangent metaphor for the role of the writer and his hopes for a return. Keywords: bowling; Look About You; velocity; proxemics

To give you the moral of [bowling], it is the emblem of the world. ‒ Charles Cotton 1

“Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,/ Our bending author hath pursu’d the story,” writes Shakespeare—the least sincere line of his most insincere drama, Henry V.2 But how far is “thus far”? Is it a time or a place, a duration or a location? Shakespeare is definitely thinking about space since the Chorus complains about close quarters—“In little room confining mighty men” (epil.3). “[L]ittle 1 Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester in Three Parts (London: J. Hodges, 1745), 224. 2 William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), epil.1–2. Subsequent citations will be in the body of the text.

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room” is clear enough, then—the place, elsewhere, of “great reckoning[s]” (As You Like It, 3.3.15). It’s the cramped quarters of the “cockpit” (Henry V, prol.11) into which the writer has confined his work. Maybe that’s why he’s bending. “Thus far” is a place, then. The line’s a workplace gripe about a tiny office. But an instant later the epilogue mentions the “[s]mall time” in which this “star of England” lived (epil.5, 6). “Small time”? Like you could slap a handle on time and stow it in the overhead. “Brief” would have scanned, but here the temporal duration of this history play is deliberately spatialized, and vice versa. The notion, at the end, is that you’ve come along way without getting anywhere. Little room, small time: “thus far” is both a geographical and chronological span, the one the other in a form of theatrical synesthesia. In a marginally less well-known history play, James IV, Robert Greene has King Arius announce that “thus far the English peeres have we displayed/ Our warring ensigns with a happy warre.”3 In The Devil’s Charter, Charles boasts, “Thus far with much applause in ioyfull martch,/ With good successe and hopefull augurie.”4 In The tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey or Cæsars reuenge, Cassius brags, “Thus far wee march with vnresisted armes,/ Subduing all that did our powres with-stand.”5 And so forth. This is the more common use of “thus far” on the English Renaissance stage. “Thus far we’ve marched” is the sort of thing military leaders say to indicate that they’ve arrived. The idea is that they’ve been marching for days to arrive onstage just at the moment when the drama needs them most (what were the odds?). It conjures an imaginary elsewhere—the notion that the soldiers have been on the march rather than backstage playing Ruff and Honor and complaining about their wages. While there are more explicit comments about stage architecture and its limits—William Shakespeare’s “wooden O” (Henry V), Benjamin Jonson’s “cheese trencher” (The Devil is an Ass)—when a playwright announces that we’ve arrived “thus far,” they are telling us something about the space of the stage, its extensions, its limits, its elasticity, and its end. They are also telling us something about writing, and the way that dramatic narrative elasticizes both the imaginative and actual parameters of theatrical space and the time and pace required to fill it. They are also just possibly thinking about bowling. *** 3 Robert Greene, The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth (London, 1598), sig. Iv. 4 Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, in Materialien zur Kunde des alteren englischen Drama, vol. 6 (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1904), TLN 865. 5 George Chapman, The tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey or Cæsars reuenge Priuately acted by the students of Trinity Colledge in Oxforde (London, 1607), 5.1.

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In his best-selling book from 2000, Robert Putnam used “bowling alone” both as title and a totem for social isolation.6 Yet on the stages of the English Renaissance, bowling served as a figure for social contact, usually of the erotic kind. Wordplay on “rubs” and “kisses” puns off the contact that bowled balls made against the “jack” (early modern bowling resembled modern bocce—or the other way around—though there were pin-knocking varieties in early England as well). It could even serve as a figure for heteronormative erotics, as Sebastian comforts Olivia that although she has “been mistook […] Nature to her bias drew in that” (Twelfth Night, 5.1.259–260). However queer the pitch, things will end up going straight. More often still, bowling offered metaphors to characters prospecting their fortunes, as when Richard’s queen responds to an offer to play at bowls with “’Twill make me think the world is full of rubs,/ And that my fortune runs against the bias” (Richard II, 3.4.4–5). Contrast this with the insanely optimistic Henry in Henry V, who “doubt[s] not now/ But every rub is smoothed on our way” (2.2.187–188). (It’s like he’s read ahead, at least thus far.) In these terms, bowling offers a way to conceptualize the future, a way of getting ahead of yourself and thinking about the lag between the what-is and what’s-to-come and how you will fill the space between. While the early English stage often hosted figures of bowling—rubs, nibs, pins, balls—it didn’t often host figures bowling. This is understandable. There is a short list of things that cannot be choreographed: fire, water, animals, and balls. Furthermore, actors who bowl are not pretending to bowl. They are bowling. What they are pretending to do is adjudicate the outcome. In other words, the outcome of onstage bowling is fixed, even if the balls aren’t (which is one more way in which bowling resembles the event of drama). While bowling features frequently in the figurative language of Renaissance drama, then, its inherent resistance to choreography limited its dramaturgical utility onstage. The problem is fairly clear: once a character starts to bowl, how do you get them to stop? In some respects, you cannot block bowling, you can only hope to contain it. At the same time, the limited utility of onstage bowling is also an opportunity. For just a moment, the play threatens, or promises, to spin out of control, or roll right off the stage. It is tempting to think of this as a moment where the “reality” of bowling—this is actually happening, they are really bowling—within a dramatic fiction might reify the one and falsify the other. It is tempting, in other words, to focus upon the difference between 6 Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (London: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

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play and “play,” to see the way that a staged game points up the disparity between sport and mimesis. I think, however, that onstage bowling puts a more complex spin on the matter, serves as a complex figure for a fiction playing out in real time and in real space. I think, in one stageplay, Look About You, at least, we see the writer(s) working out a complex idea, even a theory of mimesis, motion, and dramatic space, by staging a game at bowls. How, in short, does one bowl “thus far”? The particular subject of this essay, the anonymous Look About You (1600),7 calls for a game of bowls that levies the sport’s propensity to run away with itself as a key element in an escape scene. In the midst of a game at bowls played in prison, one character excuses himself for a moment. At that point the other borrows his clothes and escapes in his guise, leaving his competitor “bowling alone,” the ultimate victim of social isolation. A remarkable drama in a number of respects—it features two kings, two hermits, a stuttering messenger, and Robin Hood in drag—Look About You goes where few stageplays dare: it builds into its dramaturgy a fundamentally uncontainable game and then contains its meaning within its theatrical and thematic program. Rather than meditating on dramatic space by going only “thus far,” Look About You’s anonymous author/s goes/go too far, and goes/go too far by going bowling. In this essay, I argue that bowling offered the early modern stage a theory of isolation, proximity, intimacy, velocity, and writing. Bowling extends its players beyond themselves rather than staging face-to-face confrontations, as in cards or dicing. It also carries them offstage—or threatens to do so, as their spherical proxies career towards the stage’s limit—thus extending the stage beyond its own limitations in a form of theatrical brinksmanship. Bowling therefore materializes theatre’s sense of its own proxemics, between character and character, actors and audience, and the figurative and literal space where “onstage” begins and “offstage” ends. Bowling turns space into a metaphor for space, forces upon the audience a form of vertigo, where the actual space of playing expands to its conceptual limit, and the conceptual infinitude of space contracts to a few bare yards of boards. Bowling ultimately theorizes, then, the relationship between dramatic fiction and space, and even offers a plangent metaphor for the role of the writer and his hopes for a return. It is a form of ekphrasis to stage a playwithin-a-play, and the play-within-a-play in Look About You is a game in deadly earnest since, at least within this stageplay’s dramaturgy, bowling offers a theory of space and what might happen when you try to transcend 7 Anonymous, A Pleasant Comedie called Look About You (London, 1600).

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it. It ultimately serves as a velocity theory of early modern performance, a way to determine how fast or slow you need to go to reach the point of no return, which is just one more step beyond thus far. *** In Look About You, the characters play a form of bocce, still seen at beaches and elsewhere today, in which a player tosses a small ball that early moderns called the “jack,” and others try to reach it with their “bowls” (the name of the game is the stuff you play it with, like “cards,” but also the action of its exercise, like “skiing”). And Skink and John—the two bowlers in Look About You—seem to be straight-up bowling, no funny stuff with what Charles Cotton calls “byassed” balls: spheres slightly flattened so the ball has an oblate and a prolate side, which makes the balls roll in a spiral rather than straight. Nor are they playing at “Kayles,” a game with ninepins, with its center pin, the “kingpin,” slightly larger than the eight surrounding pins. (Look About You is a play with two kingpins, and the logic of the game states that only one can remain upright.) The mechanics of bowls are simple. One man throws the jack, and then the two take turns rolling a ball as close as possible to it. A “game” of bowls can be as brief as one round, or it can go on forever since rounds have no ends. Almost inevitably, then, the game is about time and space—and though the pitch may be described by the length of the alley, the space of the game is always circumscribed or expanded by how far, or short, the jack is tossed. A bowling alley or green might seem to predetermine the limits of the game, but it doesn’t. The players do. (This is just one more thing bowling and stageplays have in common.) In this respect, bowling challenges Roger Caillois’s influential determination that There is place for play: as needs dictate, the space for hopscotch, the board for checkers or chess, the stadium, the racetrack, the list, the ring, the stage, the arena, etc. Nothing that takes place outside this ideal frontier is relevant. To leave the enclosure by mistake, accident, or necessity, to send the ball out of bounds, may disqualify or entail a penalty.8

In bowling—at least bowling that takes place elsewhere than an alley—there is no “out of bounds” since every toss of the jack determines them anew. 8 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (1961; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 6.

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In this respect, the game enjoys an elastic space and might appeal as a figure to a playwright since it is a game without borders, play without end. The space of the stage might seem predetermined—even architecturally deterministic—but the space of the play is a toss-up. It’s simply a matter of pitch. In Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester (written in 1674 but largely a regurgitation of material that Gervase Markham pursued much earlier in the century), bowling prompts the writer to think about elastic space as well. He complains about “rooks,” or gamblers, who pester “Bowling-Greens, Bares, and Bowling Alleys” and make the game less “commendable” than it might otherwise be. The most successful rooks, Cotton gripes, can make “so small a spot of ground yield them more annually than fifty acres of land shall do elsewhere about the city.”9 Something about bowling draws the mind to the relativity of acreage. Whether you’re a rook or a writer, profit begins in the imaginative capacity to find limitless potential in a little room.10 However lucrative, the sport was widely considered morally profitless in the years leading up to the composition of Look About You around the turn of the sixteenth century. Lawrence Humphrey, in The Nobles or of Nobilitye (1563), merely adumbrates what other writers suggest when he distinguishes between play and sport. The latter—“whirling, leaping, casting the darte, wrestling, running”—are forms of martial preparation and therefore manly and useful. But play—“dise, chesse, or tennes”—is more dubious.11 He does not mention bowling by name, but it is certain that it fell into the category of idle play in the period. Henry VIII banned the game altogether since it interfered with more martial pursuits, such as the practice of archery. John Stow laments the neglect of archery for idle play when he describes the area around the Shoreditch theatres, an area “of late years inhabited (for the most part) by Bowyers, Fletchers, Bow-string makers and such like, now little occupied; Archery giving place to a number of bowling Allies, and Dicing houses, which in all places are increased, and too much frequented.”12 Bowling 9 Cotton, Compleat Gamester, 322. 10 Bowling has a long history of being wrapped up in gambling. In “‘Fuck It, Let’s Go Bowling’: The Cultural Connotations of Bowling in The Big Lebowski,” Bradley D. Clissold points out that before bowling “became synonymous with wholesome family values in the twentieth century,” it was associated with criminal activity. In fact, “bowling alleys” refers to the hidden alleyways and barroom basements where illegal games were bet on (Clissold, “‘Fuck It, Let’s Go Bowling’: The Cultural Connotations of Bowling in The Big Lebowski,” The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, ed. Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009], 295–320, at 297–298). 11 Lawrence Humphrey, The Nobles or of Nobilitye (London, 1563), sig. A2v. 12 John Stow, Suruey of London (London, 1598), sig. Aa1v.

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seems to be, in Henrician edicts against it, the opposite of archery, despite the similarity of the sports’ morphology: an agent, a target, velocity, and volition. But to Henry at least bowling seemed to be archery without a point. The period’s most famous bowling bout frames the distinction between idle play and martial sport, and does so by the most specious form of history, the anecdote. Sir Francis Drake was apocryphally playing at bowls on Plymouth Hoe when warned of the approach of the Spanish fleet. Unruffled by the impending invasion, with the amateur insouciance beloved of English mythology, he remarked that there was plenty of time to finish the game and still beat the Spaniards.13 He casually finished out the game and then—unhurried—finished off the Spanish Armada. Drake’s bowling is not a military exercise but an expression of sprezzatura. Bowling was what Sir Francis Drake was doing instead of walloping the Spanish Armada, not in preparation to do so. Bowling is not just a game without a point, it is the opposite of pointed. By the turn of the century, the monarchical idea of bowling had swerved a bit. James I, who had his own biases, showed a “tempered advocacy” for the sport since it seemed to him, along with running and other games, a healthful recreation.14 For that matter, the details of legislation against bowling—often lumped in with other games during various Sabbatarian controversies—morphed from one period to the next, so that if it interfered with military preparedness in the one period, it interfered with godliness in the next (though this may be a distinction without a difference). Indeed, ordinances in the 1640s “[f]or the better observation of the Lords-Day” systematically proscribe against bowling and, as Semenza points out, seem particularly concerned with the communal nature of the game, its propensity to draw a crowd, much like theatre, bear-baiting, processions, and executions (the strictures do not mention fishing or other forms of solitaire).15 While calling bowling an “undertheorized cultural practice,” Clissold notes that it “has always staged the ironic tension between the assertion of individuality and the maintenance of community.”16 Bowling, in short, has a history of drawing crowds, so that, even in the year 2000, Putnam’s “bowling alone” can seem an obvious, plangent oxymoron. 13 The period witnessed the rise of the “myth of the amateur.” See John McClelland and Brian Merrilees, eds., Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation Studies and Renaissance Studies, 2009). 14 Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 88. 15 Ibid., 88. 16 Clissold, “Fuck It, Let’s Go Bowling,” 315.

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In a general sense, sporting activities in the early modern period—howsoever rude their origins—were often reintegrated into elite values because humanists emphasized the benefits of physical activity to the gentlemen’s health, soul, and military preparedness.17 In some respects, however, bowling remained an unassimilated game, hard to defend as a form of martial preparation or physical readiness (not least because you can play it, like all advanced games, with a drink in hand). While bowling might seem a harmless diversion, that was precisely the problem. It is hard to weaponize bowling. In historical terms, the game might serve as an exemplar of what Caillois calls “pure waste”—“nothing has been harvested or manufactured […] no capital has accrued”18—and as an investment of effort without an obvious return; it bothered Henry VIII to the same extent that it appealed to the rare playwright willing to embrace it as a systematic critique, or celebration, of the ways that stageplays can take up space without getting anywhere. *** John Earle, in his Microcosmographie (1628), speaks of bowling alleys as places where people and things get carried away. A bowling green is a place where “three things are thrown away besides Bowls, to wit, time, money and curses.” To this short list let’s add a fourth: narrative. This is probably what our “bending author” meant when we hear that he has “pursu’d his story,” since bowlers think, according to Cotton, that “the running after it”—the ball—“adds to its speed.” (“O well bowlde, when John of London throwes his bowle, he will runne after it, and crie rub, rub, rub,” according to Martin Marprelate.19) The bowler both propels and pursues the ball, imagining that pursuit makes it pick up speed or, in crying “rub,” hoping for it to slow down. (Consider the tranced concentration of today’s bowlers who try to influence the ball by contorting their body after it has left their hand, muttering all the while, “[o]ur thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own” [Hamlet, 3.2.213].) It’s hard to think of a better image for a playwright who both plots the fiction and pursues it. Bowling, like writing, is like playing catch with yourself. Putnam is on to something other than an oxymoron when he speaks of “bowling alone” since there is something inherently solipsistic 17 McClelland and Merrilees, Sport and Culture. 18 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 5–6. 19 Martin Marprelate, An Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House (London, 1588), 54.

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about the game. Of course, if we consider the ball a reified projection of the bowler’s will—an inert lump of intention given velocity and momentum in the hopes of a return—one can never be completely alone when bowling. Bowling theorizes the dilation of space, then, but also of actor and plot, since the ball serves as an extension—and the limit—of an actor’s influence upon events. Earlier I suggested that actors cannot pretend to bowl, but of course that’s not quite right (and not just allowing for the fact that an actor could always, horribly, mime it). To return to Caillois, and to take him, for the moment, at his word, gaming is incommensurate with scripting, for “An outcome known in advance, with no possibility of error or surprise, clearly leading to an inescapable result, is incompatible with the nature of play.”20 As noted above (or was it “earlier”?), while the actors playing Skink and John may not be able to control the target of their bowls, the outcome of the game is never in question. Stage-players do not “play” in Caillois’s sense since the outcome is predetermined, howsoever liable to error and surprise acting might be. Acting isn’t playing, however playful it might seem. To “play” a character that is playing a game is a very strange thing to do, therefore, since it teeters on the threshold between the contingent and the determined. Furthermore, bowling is a game that requires some ability, even some acquired skill that may be greater or lesser than the actor possesses. (This matter is not confined to bowling. It extends to other skilled practices within a dramatic representation—fencing, archery, dancing—and a mastery of skillful practices always applies pressure to the mimetic enterprise, though the fact that bowling is a game in a way that dancing is not wrinkles the conflation of these various skills.21) How, in short, could an actor “play” a bowler who’s a better bowler than he is? This is a different question than asking about an actor performing a character who is smarter, or more devious, or more calculated than he or she is. These are, yes, actions that a “man might play” (Hamlet, 1.2.84). Bowling isn’t. One cannot “seem” to be a good bowler. One either is or is not. However skilled or unskilled a bowler, the actor called upon to bowl is not doing so for fun but on demand. So while he may be a player in a dramatic fiction, he is not a player in a game of bowls, because he’s bowling under duress. Caillois stresses that play is “free,” by which he means that “playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous 20 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 7. 21 See Evelyn B. Tribble, ed., “Forum: Skill,” special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015); see also Evelyn B. Tribble, Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

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quality as diversion.”22 In other words, since actors are obliged by the script to bowl (perhaps even contractually bound to do so), that means they are not bowling. They are just actors rolling balls across the stage. These actors aren’t playing the game of bowls when they play the game of drama. This all might seem self-nullifying were it not that the self-nullifying tension between play and game becomes the point of the bowling scene in Look About You. The author is pursuing his fiction and isn’t getting anywhere (where do you go once you’ve come thus far?). For a moment the question flickers: is this a stageplay with a bowling scene in it or a game at bowls with a fiction wrapped around it? The scene poses the question but does not answer it, since the question is the point of this game without a point, of a game at bowls that never ends. *** Most references to bowls on the early modern stage are about the kind you drink from, not throw, the sort from which characters “quaff carouses” or what have you after they’ve marched all day and arrived thus far. In other words, most bowls brought upon the early modern stage are meant to contain fluidity not project it. The limited dramatic utility of bowling was outlined above, but the auto-antonym of “bowls”—one arrests motion, the other introduces it—dilates the dilemma if not the diminished returns of working this variety of play into plays. Few stageplays in the period even bother to stage the game, but the handful that do suggest that the game’s primary horizon of associations is an amatory one. John Day’s The Isle of Gulls stages a game of ninepins that gives Lisander the chance to court Violetta under her parents’ noses.23 The rigid propriety of a rule-bound game provides the rare occasion when an unmarried man and woman can take part in a sanctioned, mixed-sex event.24 In fact, the scene’s appeal to Day seems mainly to have been the ripe vocabulary of bowling terms—“bias,” “match,” “stands,” “kiss,” “game,” “winnings”—on which he relentlessly puns across roughly fifty lines.25 In 22 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 9. 23 John Day, The Isle of Gulls: It Hath Been Often Acted in the Black-Fryers, by the Children of the Revels (London: Thomas White, 1831). 24 “This is not ’Nam, this is bowling. There are rules,” Walter suggests in The Big Lebowski. 25 The extent of them tellingly exhausted the editor of the 1831 edition of the play, who rather than gloss each pun excuses himself with a blanket footnote at the first use of “bias”: “This, and many other terms, in the scene, belong to the noble art of bowling; but to explain them all, even if practicable, would occupy much room to little purpose.” Something about the “noble art of

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these terms, mixed-sex bowling in early modern drama serves the same function as ice-skating in old Hollywood films, an occasion for contact deemed compulsory by the game that simultaneously provides a metaphor for the slippery footing of budding romance. As often, a character brings on bowls—or brings up bowling—to highlight the extent to which he isn’t bowling, in one case because he’s too heartsick to bowl, as though the noble game’s typical association with the noble art of love is more than a man can stand. In Nathan Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock, scene 3 opens with Sir Abraham Ninny entering and “throwing down his Bowls” (3.3.1) and saying, Bowl they that list, for I will bowl no more. Cupid, that little bowler, in my breast Rubs at my heart, and will not let me rest. [Within: Rub, rub, fly, fly Ay, ay, you may cry “Rub, fly,” to your bowls, For you are free […].26

Leaving aside the bizarre image of a bowling Cupid (bowling and archery again sharing imaginative space since both are sports of targeting and extension), the game is complicit in social isolation. Ninny is not bowling alone; he is alone, not bowling. If, as noted earlier, the propensity of bowling is to draw a crowd, it can therefore serve to point up the opposite. If to bowl is to be, perforce, among the numbers, to be seen not to bowl is to be the only one. At the start of the scene, Ninny throws down his bowls, but he isn’t bowling; he isn’t bowling. In fact, bowling is easier not to stage than to dramatize, or, it is far easier to stage bowling offstage than on. The cries within—“rub rub, fly fly”—suggest that there are characters close by, bowling together. The scene irresistibly suggests not just that characters are bowling elsewhere but that there are actors bowling just backstage. Rowley taps a similar vein in A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed with a stage direction that calls for “A noise below in the bowling-alley of betting and wrangling.”27 The noise prompts the Host to ask, “How now, my fine trundletails; my wooden cosmographers; my bowling”—even when it comes to glossing—prompts a comment on spatiality and pure waste. One can imagine Henry VIII grousing that bowling occupies “much room to little purpose.” Glossing and bowling have this in common. 26 Nathan Field, A Woman is a Weathercock (London, 1612), 3.3.2–7, in The Plays of Nathan Field, ed. William Perry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950), 111. 27 William Rowley, A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed (London, 1612), 2.37 s.d.

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bowling-alley in an uproar?” Bowling is a game better heard than seen, since it is easily invoked by its characteristic cries of “rub rub” or “fly fly.” Offstage bowling lets the actor and audience in on what they’re missing—the stageplay is not the only game in town, there is a playful elsewhere. So often the dramaturgy of early modern drama privileges the actor alone onstage, as does the critical heritage, which celebrates the soliloquy as the exemplary expression of sovereign individuality. An isolated actor monologuing at the audience offers unprecedented access to a character’s mythologized subjectivity. This rare spectacle of Sir Anthony Ninny late come from the bowls offers an alternate reading, even a challenge to this tradition. A lone actor onstage is bowling alone, missing out on the offstage action. Even when an entering actor doesn’t throw down his bowls, he is still out there playing with himself. And he is missing something, as is, just possibly, the audience, whose minds might for an instance flicker over the contingency, partiality, incompleteness of the spectacle they’ve paid to see and wonder just what might be going on, just backstage, or through the theatre doors.28 One thing that might have been going on just outside the theatre doors— other than purposeful life, not meaningful waste—was bowling. As Callan Davies has recently argued, “bowling alleys and playhouses were materially, politically, and culturally connected for individual Londoners beyond the performative rebukes of print, pulpit, and proclamation.”29 Sharing both literal and perceptual space, alleys and playhouses were, above all, places in the admonitory literature of the age where people went to waste time. Henry Chettle complains, or brags, that, “While plays are used, half the day is by most youths that have liberty spent upon them […].”30 Worse than the money spent there, then, it’s the time that’s lavished that most offends. The anti-theatrical tract Newes from the North (1579) “call[s] to witness the Theaters, Courtaines, Heaving houses, Kissing booths, Bowling alleys, and such places where the time is so shamefully misspent.”31 Playhouses and bowling alleys are naughty clocks, where time is lost and nothing gained but waste. But it is as a figure for motion and mobility, not isolation, that bowling on the early modern stage is of most interest to me—the way the game offers a 28 See Peter Womack, “Off-stage,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 71–92. 29 Callan Davies, “Bowling Alleys and Playhouses in London, 1560–1590,” Early Theatre 22, no. 2 (2019): 39–66, at 53. 30 Henry Chettle, Kind-Harts Dream (London, 1590), sig. C3r. 31 T.F., Newes from the North (London, 1579), sig. F4r.

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figure for the velocity of fiction, and the frictions that retard it. In Thomas Heywood’s 2 Edward IV, for instance, Jocky and Jeffrey hope to relieve Jane Shore’s privation by bringing her some forbidden food. They enter “with a bottle of ale, cheese, and half penny loaves, to play at bowls,” and Jocky discloses that “Now must I, under colour of playing at bowls, help till relieve my gude maistress, maistress Shore.”32 He and Jeffrey “play towards her, and Jocky often gives her pieces of food.” Jocky is shortly “apprehended by the Officers,” who remark that, “he bowls that way to help her.” We assume that “he bowls that way” refers to the direction not the style in which Jocky bowls. Jocky purposely propels and then pursues his bowl across the stage, prescribing and describing the course that he—and the narrative—will follow. The script will ultimately arrest him, of course, will check his charitable bowling. For a moment, however, the roll of the ball across the stage predicts to the audience the course of the actor. He will pursue it thus far. The bowl gives away the plot. Bowling as destiny. At the same time, its unpredictability opens up a space for surprise, for error, for rubs. It is the stageplay Look About You that most fully articulates a bowling theory of early modern performance, however, a velocity theory of time and space. In Look About You, it is not the punning potential or the amatory associations of the game that makes it instrumental to the author. It is the game’s complex sense of space and time, since Look About You is a play of motion. Its central action comprises a prolonged chase from London to Blackheath and back again as various figures run hither and yon in pursuit of one another in various disguises. The totemic figure for the drama’s interest in motion is a character named Redcap, whose tongue stutters but whose feet do not. His repeated rejoinder to himself is to “Ru ru run Redcap,” which sounds like the title to a Chuck Berry song. At one point, he starts to rush offstage—Redcap, not Chuck Berry—before he’s received the salient information, a familiar enough gag in the Renaissance theatre. A character checks him, with the assistance of a stage direction, which reads, charmingly, oxymoronically, amazingly, “Still runnes” (sig. B3r). (Only the compositor is able to rub his progress, inserting a full stop after “runnes.”) It’s always impossible to know what precisely a stage direction intends, records, invites, or instigates, but it’s just possible here that Redcap is meant to run in place while he receives his message, a figure for the way that drama is always trying to move but never gets anywhere. Perhaps the best buried joke in a stageplay full of held motion is that even the prison is called the “Fleet.” 32 Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 4.3.

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Speaking dramaturgically and of buried jokes, it is worth speculating over the possibility that the only thing that might slow down a ball on the early modern stage was called a “rush.” And the question is a practical, material one about the staging of bowling, since the rushes might be the only rubs a bowled ball would encounter onstage. It’s not clear if the early modern theatre always laid rushes, but there is ample textual support that at least on occasions the stage was laid with dried bulrushes, the genus Juncus that grows in abundance along English rivers. Floor-strewn rushes were common in households in the period, laid to trap mud and other daily waste as well as to give comfort. Erasmus gives a typically colorful description of the practice in a letter to “Francis,” physician to the Cardinal of York: The floors are generally spread with clay and then rushes from some marsh, which are renewed from time to time but so as to leave a basic layer, sometimes for twenty years, under which fester spittle, vomit, dogs’ urine and men’s too, dregs of beer and cast off bits of f ish, and other unspeakable kinds of f ilth. As the weather changes, this exudes a sort of miasma which in my opinion is far from conducive to bodily health.33

The practice apparently translated to the stage, though hopefully stage rushes were changed more often. Like the word “rub,” the word “rush”—which could also mean “hurry” in early English usage (OED, 1a)—features frequently in the dramatic idiom of the day, though it often implied a material practice rather a figural locution. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Valentinian, Phorba calls out to the household in expectation of a guest, “Where is this stranger? Rushes, ladies, rushes!”34 Similarly, in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, before the king arrives we hear a call for “More rushes, more rushes” (5.5.1). Perhaps most tellingly, Nashe has Will Summer point out that, “You might have writ in the margent of your play-booke, Let there be a few rushes laide in the place where Back-winter shall tumble, for feare of raying his cloathes.”35 Here, rushes are deployed to cushion a bout of tumbling. If not a certain material 33 Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 1534 (1523–1524), trans. R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell, vol. 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 471. 34 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Valentinian, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1996), 2.4. 35 Thomas Nashe, Summers Last Will and Testament, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald McKerrow, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), TLN 185–186.

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stage practice—rushes might have been occasional, not inevitable—there is a slight chance that in Look About You the game of bowls took place on a pitch matted with reeds, so that the speed of the balls bowled in the Fleet was arrested only by rushes. Bowling is a game of “still runnes,” a skilled negotiation between delivery and surface tension (much like an academic conference). In Look About You, it becomes an occasion for deliverance, since it provides an opportunity not just for escapism but escape. For openers, Prince John tells his visitor Skink (disguised as Gloster) that he, unlike his fellow prisoners, is not interested in mumbling orisons. Instead, he suggests that he and Gloster have a bout: John: […] We’ll play a game at bowles, what saith thou Gloster? Skink: I care not if I doe John: You doe not care, Let olde men care for graues, we for our sportes, Off with your gowne, there lies my hatt and Cloake, The bowles there quickly, hoe?

There is dramatic expediency at work here even before the first ball is thrown. In some respects, John has lost before he begins since he divests himself of his hat and cloak (he’s taken to the cleaners before he even starts). John needs to disencumber himself before they play so that Skink can steal his clothes and escape from the Fleet just a few moments later. Skink cannot follow suit since—as is customary in the drama of the period—to divest himself of his disguise would reveal his true identity. To further dizzy the blurred boundaries of play and a play, the actor performing Skink not only has to pretend to bowl, he has to pretend to bowl the way that another character might bowl. There are simple pleasures in life, but theatre—and bowling—are not among them. At this moment in the 1600 quarto of Look About You, a stage direction indicates, “Enter Porter with bowles.” I will pause here and ask a question that no audience member would ever bother with, which is what kind of prison keeps a set of bowls on hand? More pertinently, we might ask what a theatre company is doing with a set. Are they prop bowls or actual bowls, and what, in any event, would be the difference? Perhaps they are the company set, since a pit devoid of audience members would make an excellent alley after rehearsal, a way to waste more time. In any event, interrupting the scene to ask the question highlights the ludicrous offstage life of props; these “bowles” have been backstage just waiting for their big break.

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Prince John suggests “A pound a game,” heavy stakes, but as Cotton reminds us, the point of bowling is not just recreation but to convert a little space into hearty acreage. As I’ve argued throughout, what’s at stake for the writer is to expand a little plot into something more expansive. At this moment in Look About You, the theatre is a prison, but one of infinite space. “Gloster” (the disguised Skink) agrees to the wager, and John bowls first, crying “Rub rub rub.” A bowler crying “rub” conventionally means that the bowler wants the ball to check up, to slow down. In B.E.’s A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew, the definition for “Rub-rub” indicates that it is “us’d on Greens when the Bowl Flees too fast, to have it forbear, if Words wou’d do it.”36 (There’s a gorgeous plangency here to the recognition that words are unlikely to have any effect on a bowl once it’s left the players’ hands.) Possibly, John has tossed the “jack” but thrown too hard; or his subsequent bowl threatens to run beyond the jack, and possibly off the stage. Once the jack, or the bowl, has come to a stop (or rolled right off the stage), John calls out, “Play Robin, run run run.” John’s reference to “Robin” is puzzling here, since he’s bowling with Gloster, not Robin Hood (referred to in this play as “Robert Hood” or “Huntington”). “Robin” is probably some diminutive of “Robert Gloster,” a name John affectionately gives to Gloster in the spirit of gaming. Just possibly, however, “Robin” is the name that John gives to his second bowl. The implication is tentative, but possible: early modern men named their balls. In any event, it’s Skink’s turn to bowl, and this opening round reminds Skink of the point: Skink: Far enough and well, flye one fotte more, Would I were halfe so far without the doore.

John has bowled “far enough and well,” and, prompted by John’s wish—or prediction—that his ball should “run run run,” Skink wishes he were as far gone. The trajectory, velocity, and space of play here prompts Skink to imagine a place “without the doore,” a fantasy of escape into an unknown elsewhere, not just offstage but onto the larger stage outside the prison, outside the theatre. Above all, Skink is thinking himself into—imagining his 36 B.E., A new dictionary of the of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (London, 1698), quoted in Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, ed. Paul Beale (London: Routledge, 1984), 994.

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immediate future through—the motion of a rolling ball: “Would I were gone, make after as you may.” “After” means, in this case, both chronologically later than and also spatially subsequent to. Here the running of the balls “after” one another meditates upon the drama’s whirligig of chases and pursuits but also returns us to the opening question about spatialized duration. The play has come thus far, but still has some ways to go. Just as this staged game vertiginously expands and contracts the place of the stage and the space of performance, it dilates upon time, since bowling has no built-in time limit. The dramatic narrative seems somewhat aware of this, since it introduces a clumsy device to excuse John from the stage: John: Well sir tis yours, one all, throw but the Jacke While I goe talke with Moorton: Ile not stay, Keepe Cloake and hat in pawne Ille hould out play […].

The scoring is obscure, though this line indicates that John and Skink are tied after the first round. John invites Skink to toss the jack and open the second frame while he exits to speak with “Moorton.” The actor could either toss the jack or not, since John’s departure represents the end of the game, which concludes in a tie. As such, it represents play without end, or a game that ends up where it started, with nothing gained and nothing lost, much like the “pure waste” of theatre itself. The scene shifts at this point with Skink’s escape and transitions into John’s outraged discovery that the Porter has let Skink (whom he took to be Gloster) sneak off in his guise. Prince John abandons the game since princes presumably do not bowl alone (and neither does Skink, who, unlike the theatre, has no time to waste). The scene ends but the game has not, and indeed no explicit provision is made for the removal of the jack and bowls, which lie idle on the stage while the scene unravels. The balls are left to shift for themselves. Perhaps they are fetched off by the Porter or a supernumerary. In any event, someone cleared the bowls at scene’s end, but before they did the inert balls sat quietly upon the stage, representing arrested motion, checked volition, stored momentum, held velocity, living up to the stage direction that stopped Redcap in his tracks a bit earlier: “still runnes.” A ball at rest is an emblem of “still runnes,” since a ball at rest is still always in motion, a sign for all those radical possibilities, contingent potentialities, endless options that plays—that play—pretends to have. They are, in sum, an emblem not just of mobility but motility, the uncanny ability of a stageplay to move seemingly without an effortful agent, surging along

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under the steam of its own metabolic energy, with the bending playwright in hot pursuit.37 *** Before the automatic ball return, bowling was a tragedy. Now it is a romance. Today, everything you roll away eventually comes back, and comes back automatically. Before 1936, when Gottfried Schmidt invented the mechanical pinsetter, return required human agency, most often low paid “pinsetters” or “pin monkeys” who lurked in the alleys to make everything all right again.38 With early bowls, you had to pick up after yourself. “John of London” runs “after it, and crie[s] rub, rub, rub” because we all harbor a fantasy that we can correct what we set in motion after it’s out of our hands. It is impossible not to hear Hamlet when we hear “rub,” not to think of a character spotting a hitch in his plans to sleep a dreamless sleep. The word comes from the game of bowling, particularly the outdoor sort where a “rub” can be an impediment in the pitch that might throw things out of joint. A character running after a ball and telling it to “rub” might, therefore, seem to be looking for trouble, perversely hoping that things go wrong. But the intransitive sense of the imperative verb “run” indicates that the bowler wants everything to slow down, that what he’s set in motion is getting carried away. I spoke earlier of the poignancy of bowlers who contort their bodies in the hope of influencing the course of things after they’ve gotten out of hand. But in the dialectical dynamic of John’s “run run” and “rub rub,” we locate the poignancy of drama, which knows it’s finished before it has started, anticipates its resources of time and space running out on themselves as the play goes on and on only to end up right back where it began. The wistful jubilance of game—or more generally “play”—is that it might go on forever, whereas the meaning of every theatrical play is that it ends. Stageplays only ever get thus far. Building a game into a stageplay momentarily concertinas theatre, expands the sense of space and time, throws a flat spin into the rush and run of narrative drama. We might even 37 When pressed, students often describe events in drama as “moving the plot along,” an interesting phrase that I think recognizes that a stageplay is a kind of perpetual motion machine with seemingly no one at the wheel. 38 Steven A. Riess, ed., Sports in America from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2011), 187–188.

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locate in “run run” and “rub rub” the wonder or the worry of a playwright thinking through the pure waste of the endeavor, of all he’s set in motion and where, and when, it may or may not ever return.

Works Cited Anonymous. A Pleasant Comedie called Look About You. London, 1600. Barnes, Barnabe. The Devil’s Charter. In Materialien zur Kunde des alteren englischen Drama, vol. 6. Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1904. B.E. A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew. London, 1698. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Valentinian. In The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, edited by Fredson Bowers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. 1961. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Chapman, George. The tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey or Cæsars reuenge Priuately acted by the students of Trinity Colledge in Oxforde. London, 1607. Chettle, Henry. Kind-Harts Dream. London, 1590. Clissold, Bradley D. “‘Fuck It, Let’s Go Bowling’: The Cultural Connotations of Bowling in The Big Lebowski.” In The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, 295–320. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Cotton, Charles. The Compleat Gamester in Three Parts. London: J. Hodges, 1745. Davies, Callan. “Bowling Alleys and Playhouses in London, 1560–1590.” Early Theatre 22, no. 2 (2019): 39–66. Day, John. The Isle of Gulls: It Hath Been Often Acted in the Black-Fryers, by the Children of the Revels. London: Thomas White, 1831. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 1534 (1523–1524). Translated by R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell. Vol. 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Field, Nathan. A Woman is a Weathercock. In The Plays of Nathan Field, edited by William Perry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950. Greene, Robert. The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth. London, 1598. Heywood, Thomas. The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV. Edited by Richard Rowland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Humphrey, Lawrence. The Nobles or of Nobilitye. London, 1563. Marprelate, Martin. An Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House. London, 1588.

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McClelland, John, and Brian Merrilees, eds. Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation Studies and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Nashe, Thomas. Summers Last Will and Testament. In vol. 3 of The Works of Thomas Nashe, edited by Ronald McKerrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905. Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Edited by Paul Beale. London: Routledge, 1984. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. London: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Riess, Steven A., ed. Sports in America from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2011. Rowley, William. A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed. London, 1612. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Shakespeare, William. Henry V. Edited by Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Stow, John. Suruey of London. London, 1598. T.F. Newes from the North. London, 1579. Tribble, Evelyn B. Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. –––. ed. “Forum: Skill.” Special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015). Womack, Peter. “Off-stage.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 71–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

About the Author Paul Menzer is Professor and Director of the Shakespeare and Performance Graduate Program at Mary Baldwin University, where he is also Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Recent works include an edition of Doctor Faustus for New Mermaids (2018), a performance edition of Romeo and Juliet for Arden, and the books Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center (2016) and Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (2015), both for Arden. He is currently writing a biography of Shakespeare for the Arden 4 Shakespeare editions and a history of Shakespearean animus called Shakespeare’s Enemies.

7.

Playing (in) the Streets Games and Adaptation in The Merchant of Venice Marissa Greenberg Abstract This essay examines key moments in the history of the “jailor scene” (act 3, sc. 3) in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to make the case for games and especially dicing as an epistemological lens for the operations of adaptation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s account of the double movement of dicing, it argues that games offer not simply a metaphor for rules and free play but also a flexible model for different networks of control and resistance. These networks are on display in the dramatic f iction of Shakespeare’s Merchant and in the play’s theatrical legacy including medieval Passion plays, Restoration and Victorian productions, and modern and postmodern adaptations. Keywords: The Merchant of Venice; dicing; adaptation; passion plays;

Marowitz, Charles; Variations on the Merchant of Venice

I In 2011 the curtain rose on Rupert Goold’s Las Vegas–themed The Merchant of Venice to reveal gamblers throwing dice at a craps table.1 Forty years 1 According to Patrick Stewart, who played Shylock in Goold’s production, “[t]he craps table […] is the first thing the audience sees.” Tom Gorman, “Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ Feels More like ‘Merchant of Vegas,’” Las Vegas Sun, 17 June 2011, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2011/ jun/17/shakespeares-merchant-venice-takes-lot-las-vegas/ (accessed 14 September 2018). In the UK, a gaming table with chips and cards set the scene in a casino (Rupert Goold, dir., The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, prompt., 2001, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, RSC/SM/1/2011/MER1). I am grateful to Philippa Vandome, reader services assistant at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for helping me to secure access to the promptbooks for this and Hands’s productions.

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch07

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earlier Terry Hands’s production “began with the fantastical spectacle of toy galleons being moved about the patterned stage floor according to the fall of the dice thrown by Antonio and his companions in what looked like a giant game of snakes and ladders.”2 These moments of performance materialized the motif of high-stakes gaming in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. When Antonio and Bassanio hazard all they have on maritime ventures and the casket test, the drama taps into early modern fascinations with financial risk and its prospect of upward social mobility. The repeated references to “hazard” evoke widespread associations between hazard and dicing 3 as well as a specif ic synonymy: “the game at dice called hazard”4 was the most popular dice game in England from the Middle Ages through at least the nineteenth century.5 Games of dice not only evoke the drama’s thematic investments; as Hands’s and Goold’s productions suggest, they also characterize its theatrical history. This essay examines key moments in this history to make the case for games and especially dicing as an epistemological lens for the operations of adaptation. A crucial point of contestation in recent theories of Shakespeare and adaptation concerns regulation and license. Scholars present disparate understandings of the extent to which political, legal, economic, social, and cultural forces do or do not control adaptation. On the one hand, post-structural models present adaptation in terms of center and margin. Margaret Jane Kidnie argues, for example, that adaptation at once delimits and challenges the integrity of the work, which she defines as “non-identical examples of a text or performance” that are nonetheless “recognized as 2 “The Stage History of The Merchant of Venice from the Time Shakespeare Wrote It to the Present Day, and a Look Back at Some RSC Productions,” Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www. rsc.org.uk/the-merchant-of-venice/about-the-play/stage-history (accessed 14 September 2018). 3 For example, George Whetstone, A mirour for magestrates of cyties (London, 1584), sig. H4v, describes the “hazard of dice,” and James I, Basilikon dōron (Edinburgh, 1603), 123, lists dicing among “games of hazard.” 4 John Florio, A World of Words (1598), s.v. “zara,” and Richard Perceval, A Dictionary in Spanish and English (1599), s.v. “azár en el dado,” in Lexicons of Early Modern English, ed. Ian Lancashire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/University of Toronto Library, 2006–), http://leme.library. utoronto.ca. See also Thomas Blount, Nomo-lexikon, a law-dictionary, s.v. “hazarders” (Savoy, 1670), and Elisha Coles, An English dictionary explaining the difficult terms that are used in divinity, husbandry, physick, phylosophy, law, navigation, mathematicks, and other arts and sciences (London, 1677), s.v. “hazarders,” s.v. “hazard.” 5 Rhiannon Purdie, “Dice-Games and the Blasphemy of Prediction,” in Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 167–184, at 170; Roger Munting, An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 8.

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‘the same.’”6 The “problem” of adaptation, Kidnie proposes, is its audacious refusal to conform to standards of what constitutes “Shakespeare” as a body of work and, by extension, its capacity to call into question the legitimacy of those standards. On the other hand, semiotic models present adaptation as organic and distributed. Debunking “the illusion that (re)producers of Shakespeare engage directly and primarily with originary Shakespearean texts,” Douglas Lanier describes “a much more inchoate and complex web of intervening adaptations or, just as important, with the protocols—formal and ideological—of genres and media that have little to do with the Shakespearean text.”7 This essay presents an alternative model of adaptation that accounts for regulation and license, centralization and decentralization. Games, I argue, offer not simply a metaphor for rules and free play but also a flexible model for different networks of control and resistance. Toggling between rigid strictures and “whatever you can get away with,”8 games shed new light on the dynamics of force in Shakespeare and adaptation. The dice game exemplif ies these dynamics. Drawing on Nietzsche’s account of indef inite recurrence, Gilles Deleuze proposes that dicing “capture[s] the double movement that governs the economy of repetition, whereby necessity and chance, being and becoming, are simultaneously affirmed in their constitutive difference.”9 Daniel Conway breaks down this double movement, explaining that for Deleuze “[t]he dice that are thrown represent the affirmation of chance, while the combination they form upon falling back to earth represents the affirmation of necessity.”10 However, immanence and determination relate not as a strict binary. In the eternal return of the throw and fall of the dice, we find a differential course of action in which being and becoming are in constant but varied repetition. The same dynamics are evident in the extended history of Shakespeare and adaptation. Every performance and text, like each throw 6 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7. 7 Douglas M. Lanier, “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value,” in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 21–40, at 23. 8 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012 [2006]), esp. 7–8; Mark Fortier, “Wild Adaptation,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3, no. 1 (2007): n.p. 9 Daniel W. Conway, “Tumbling Dice: Gilles Deleuze and the Economy of Répétition,” in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson (London: Routledge, 1997), 73–90, at 73. Deleuze expounds on the dice-throw in Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 10 Conway, “Tumbing Dice,” 77.

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of the dice, generates an opportunity to revise, rather than reinscribe, relations that eventually reify, as when the dice fall, in the consolidation of authority—only for subsequent rolls, if we continue the analogy, to repeat this double movement. “Shakespeare” as a body of work thus decentralizes and recentralizes again and again (and again). More than a convenient analogy, dicing is a useful heuristic for the untimely interplay of freedom and fixity, limitless possibility and restrictive control, in the operations and constitution of adaptation. I take Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a litmus test for dicing as a methodological model for adaptation. Specifically, I focus on act 3, scene 3, for its enactment of gamelike dynamics as multiple characters hazard for institutional and spatial control. This scene—which has received scant attention from scholars and often been cut from performance—is brief enough to be quoted in full: Enter [Shylock] the Jew, Solanio, Antonio, and the jailor Shylock: Jailer, look to him. Tell not me of mercy. This is the fool that lent out money gratis. Jailor, look to him. Antonio: Hear me yet, good Shylock. Shylock: I’ll have my bond. Speak not against my bond. I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond. Thou call’st me dog before thou hadst a cause, But since I am a dog, beware my fangs. The Duke shall grant me justice. I do wonder, Thou naughty jailor, that thou art so fond To come abroad with him at his request. Antonio: I pray thee hear me speak. Shylock: I’ll have my bond. I will not hear thee speak. I’ll have my bond, and therefore speak no more. I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield To Christian intercessors. Follow not. I’ll have no speaking. I will have my bond. Exit Solanio: It is the most impenetrable cur That ever kept with men. Antonio: Let him alone. I’ll follow him no more with bootless prayers. He seeks my life. His reason well I know: I oft delivered from his forfeitures

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Many that have at times made moan to me. Therefore he hates me. Salarino: I am sure the Duke Will never grant this forfeiture to hold. Antonio: The Duke cannot deny the course of law, For the commodity that strangers have With us in Venice, if it be denied, Will much impeach the justice of the state, Since that the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all nations. Therefore go. These griefs and losses have so bated me That I shall hardly spare a pound of flesh Tomorrow to my bloody creditor. Well, jailer, on. Pray God Bassanio come To see me pay his debt, and then I care not. Exeunt11

At first blush, this scene participates in the drama’s representation of legal procedure, not financial or bodily hazard. It is set in motion in an earlier scene, when Shylock formally instigates Antonio’s arrest: “Go, Tubal, fee me an officer. Bespeak him a fortnight before” the debt is due (3.1.104–105); and its dialogue anticipates the trial scene in act 4, in which the Duke adjudicates according to “the course of law” (3.3.26). Moreover, the silent yet palpable presence of the jailer, who most likely carries the keys of his office, suggests a strictly judicial context.12 Yet the scene represents relations, at once sanctioned and unregulated, that are available to what we might call corruption or negotiation or play. In this scene, to which I will refer as the jailor scene, the “particular and contingent relationships among individuals […] that could, and often did, conflict” inside the early modern prison are revealed to be even more provisional and contested outside the prison.13 Early modern English jailors were not employees of the state but free agents who made their living by 11 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 3.3.1–36. All in-text citations refer to this edition. Early printed versions of this scene name different characters—quartos 1 and 2 (1600 and 1637) list Salerio, fol. 1 (1623) lists Solanio—but are otherwise virtually identical. 12 Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 100, and Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 151, and chap. 8, passim. 13 Molly Murray, “Measured Sentences: Forming Literature in Early Modern Prisons,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2009): 147–167, at 149.

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collecting fees from creditors and especially from debtors, who paid for every aspect of their incarceration. The officer arrests Antonio on Shylock’s dime and direction, but the epithet “naughty jailor” (3.3.9) and repetition of “Jailor, look to him” (3.3.1, 3) imply that the jailor in this scene is no longer in Shylock’s employ. The jailor would not accompany or “come abroad with him [Antonio] at his request” (3.3.9–10), as Shylock accuses. Instead, the jailor would demand a fee for this service, just as his historical counterparts charged for entry and egress as well as food, drink, private lodging, furniture, and bedding.14 The scene suggests, however, that Antonio cannot offer the jailor immediate compensation: that Antonio lacks sufficient funds or credit from friends to purchase even adequate nourishment is indicated by his lament that “griefs and losses have so bated me/ That I shall hardly spare a pound of flesh/ Tomorrow to my bloody creditor” (3.3.32–34). If Antonio is leveraged to the hilt such that he cannot feed himself in prison, how has he hired the jailor to accompany him out of prison? Perhaps Antonio, although deeply in debt, has just enough money to pay for this service. Perhaps his friends have cobbled together the necessary fee. Most likely, given the merchant’s proclivity for risk, Antonio offers the jailor future payment for present service. This gamble does not pay off, of course. Shylock refuses to listen to Antonio’s appeal, and at the end of the scene, jailor and debtor return to the prison. Like other scenes of hazard, the jailor scene represents financial and bodily risks. Yet these hazards operate like rolls of the dice, as characters gain and lose control of the scene’s quasi-legal operations. What also distinguishes the jailor scene from The Merchant of Venice’s other scenes of hazard is its mise en scène. On the Rialto and in Belmont fortunes are lost and made according to the mysterious operations of Fortune, whether understood as chance or providence.15 Not so in the undifferentiated urban thoroughfare where Shakespeare sets the jailor scene. Here, neither cosmic forces nor divine intervention holds sway. Instead, control is thrown up for grabs, then momentarily adheres, and is released again in the manner of a dice game. The staging of the jailor scene crystallizes this 14 Murray, “Measured Sentences,” 152; Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 51–74; and Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 68–113. 15 My understanding of Fortune in early modern England is indebted to Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Fortune’s Empire: Chance, Providence, and Overseas Ventures in Early Modern English Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). In The Merchant of Venice “play[ing] at dice” is mentioned once and elided with “fortune” and “chance” (2.1.32, 34, 38).

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gamelike ebb and flow by mapping the characters’ hazarding for authority in the street. When Shylock tells Antonio to “Follow not” (3.3.16), the scene cues Shylock’s direction of Antonio’s pedestrian movements, and Antonio’s response, “I’ll follow him no more with bootless prayers” (3.3.20), reflects an attempt to reclaim control of his own steps. It is tempting, however, to interpret bootless as a verbal-visual pun that registers Antonio’s restricted mobility. Antonio does not follow Shylock because he recognizes the futility of further appeals, but he may also lack the footwear necessary for pursuit, having forfeited or sold his boots to cover prison costs. With that said, when Antonio cues his and the jailor’s exit (“Well, jailor, on,” 3.3.35), the scene shows that Antonio exercises provisional control over his and another’s activity. As each character momentarily directs movement in the street, the jailor scene enacts the consolidation and release of institutional authority as the command and loss of spatial authority. The dice game–like dynamics of determination and potentiality in the jailor scene also characterize The Merchant of Venice’s theatrical legacy. Adapters of Shakespeare’s stageplay beginning in the eighteenth century were enabled, as Tiffany Stern shows, by “the notion that no one was doing other than Shakespeare himself had done. He had altered his works; he had borrowed his stories.”16 Shakespeare’s jailor scene features prominently in a legacy of flowing energies, as well—a legacy that extends from medieval Passion plays to late twentieth-century productions of The Merchant of Venice. Approaching this history chronologically does not “reduce the adaptive process to a linear teleology.”17 To the contrary, proceeding from past to present highlights starkly different dynamics of serial yet nonsequential patterns of performance. By examining these gamelike dynamics in Shakespeare’s jailor scene and its extended history, we can better see how games and specifically dicing shed light on the more general workings of theatrical adaptation.

II We need not assert that Shakespeare was “influenced by the Passion Plays he must have seen as a boy in Stratford” to approach The Merchant of Venice 16 Tiffany Stern, “Shakespeare in Drama,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 141–158, at 152. 17 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 38, describing the journey as a motif for adaptation.

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as an adaptation.18 Before becoming a master narrative, The Merchant of Venice adapted Christian scripture, the same master narrative as medieval Passion plays.19 Shakespeare’s presentation of Antonio as a Christ figure, for instance, reaches a climax in the trial scene. Here, Shylock becomes the “wolf” (4.1.72, 133) to Antonio’s “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.113) and Antonio embraces death as payment for his beloved’s debt and a release from worldly suffering. This Christological language and imagery are established earlier in the jailor scene. Shylock accepts the epithet “dog” and warns Antonio to “beware [his] fangs” (3.3.6–7); Antonio ascribes Shylock’s hatred to his (Antonio’s) delivery of suppliant debtors; and he anticipates his judicial death as ransom for one man, concluding with a prayer not for life but for a witness. As we have seen, the jailor scene also entails a mercenary penal agent and a street setting. Each of these features appears in medieval plays of the Passion. Jesus’s crucifiers are vicious, often bestial, sometimes Jewish, and they bind him in the manner of a sacrifice. Jesus willingly dies to save both on- and offstage spectators, whom he beseeches to witness his sacrifice. In medieval Passion plays, this crucial moment in Christian history is staged through actual games of dice played by quasi-judicial figures and usually in the street. The basis for these dramatized games is biblical. According to John 19.23–25 (KJV): When the soldiers had crucified Jesus they took his garments and made four parts, one for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was without seam, woven from top to bottom; so they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.” […] So the soldiers did this.

What do the soldiers do when they “cast lots” for Jesus’s seamless tunic? In medieval England the answer to this question varied not only from cycle to cycle but also within cycles—that is, groups of plays about principal events in Christian history, often delivering lessons for salvation and designed for public performance.20 The Towneley cycle stages this biblical episode twice: in Crucifixion Jesus’s torturers draw cuts for the sought-after garment, 18 Charles Marowitz, Recycling Shakespeare (New York: Applause, 1991), 29. 19 Grahan Ley, “Cultural Adaptation,” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 8, no. 1 (2015): 23–38, at 29. 20 As Beatrice Groves notes, medieval cycles “extend the Gospel accounts, and turn almost all Christ’s torments and humiliations into games” (Groves, “‘Now wole I a newe game beynne’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 [2007]: 136–150, at 142).

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and in The Play of the Dice they and Pilate roll for it. So too the York cycle Crucifixio Christi concludes with the soldiers drawing cuts; yet evidence suggests that prior to 1422 the cycle included another stageplay in which a game of dice determined who got Jesus’s clothes.21 The Chester Passion features only a dice game, in which the four Jews who torment and crucify Jesus roll for possession of his coat. The dramas of dicing in the Towneley and Chester cycles enact two distinct relations between regulation and license. Matthew Sergi, who examines the representations of power and chance in these stageplays, argues that the Chester Passion locates “prophecy and fulfillment in the medium of drama itself, aligning the divinely preordained with the theatrically pre-scripted, and opposing both to the limited logic of worldly happenstance.”22 In the Towneley Play of the Dice too the outcome is pre-scripted, but Sergi demonstrates that tyranny rather than divinity subjugates chance. Although Pilate’s roll of thirteen is trumped by the final dicer’s fifteen, the Roman governor takes Jesus’s coat anyway because, well, he can. However egalitarian chance may appear in the Towneley play, the staging of the dice game performs its subordination to politico-legal fiat. The Towneley cycle indicates more complex operations, as well. In its two plays featuring Jesus’s tunic, power does not wholly quell chance and control is consolidated and then released over and over. In the Towneley Crucifixion, the Third Torturer, reluctant to tear “this mantyll,” proposes: “But assent thou to my saw,/ lett vs all cutt draw,/ And then is none begylt.”23 The drawing of cuts follows, at which point the Fourth Torturer, who ends up winning Jesus’s seamless coat, asserts: how so befallys now wyll I draw! This is myn by comon law, Say not ther agayn. (510–512)

Common “assent” and “comon law” soon yield to the “man of law” who arrogates all power to “his will” (558). When the torturers’ attention turns to the sign beneath the cross that identif ies Jesus as King of the 21 Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays, Early English Text Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 582. 22 Matthew Sergi, “Dice at Chester’s Passion,” in The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change, ed. Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 65–78, at 66. 23 Stevens and Cawley, eds., Towneley Plays, lines 502, 507–509; hereafter cited in text by line number.

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Jews, they complain to Pilate, who summarily dismisses them. Collective deliberation and distribution of power appear to fall before the tyrant’s absolutism. If Pilate commands total control within the dramatic representation, resistance emerges in performance and effectively throws authority up for grabs again. Earlier in the Towneley Crucifixion, Jesus speaks from the cross, calling out to pedestrians to observe his suffering: “I pray you pepyll that passe me by, […] Behold, if euer ye sagh body/ Buffet & bett thus blody,/ Or yet thus dulfully dight” (233, 236–238). In doing so, the stageplay asks spectators, as Sarah Beckwith argues about the York Crucifixio Christi, “to bear a terrible witness as we ourselves are addressed as participants at the scene of crucifixion.”24 Jesus does not speak during the drawing of cuts, but his silence should not be confused for disconnection from the game that drives the theatrical action. As Jesus’s tortured body continues to demand attention, collective compassion challenges totalitarian “law” and tyrannical “will” as the drama’s dominant force. The Towneley Crucifixion thus positions audiences as not only spectators to the games playing out onstage but also participants in the gamelike flow of authority’s consolidation and release. Compounding this effect were the streets in which these dramas of dicing were staged. The Towneley cycle’s performance conditions remain obscure. It is therefore instructive to look at comparable stageplays from the Chester cycle, which has been the subject of site-specif ic analysis. Robert W. Barrett and others have shown that Chester’s five performance spaces, or stations, which were erected in thoroughfares, intersections, and open squares, exposed fault lines in “the civic community’s obligatory fantasy of unity.”25 On the one hand, as the dramas required approval from the mayor, their public staging extended the reach of top-down authority throughout the cityscape. On the other hand, the freemen who staged the dramas may have deviated from the official text, effectively asserting their authority in and over Chester’s streets during performance.26 The cycle thus revealed that “civic authority is not complete” and “spatial control is itself 24 Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 70, original emphasis. 25 Robert W. Barrett, Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 86. See also Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), and Catherine A. M. Clarke, ed., Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester, c. 1200–1600 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). 26 Rice and Pappano, Civic, 31.

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contestable.”27 The streets also became the site of contestations for authority between the city and the state. The Chester Passion, to take an especially striking example, was staged at the Prentice, the city’s administrative and ceremonial center and principal site of discipline.28 Yet if the stageplay were set indoors, as Sergi posits, its performance of dicing would enact local opposition to national decrees against gaming in private homes and halls.29 Even as the Chester Passion represents Christ’s divinity to be unavailable to chance, the drama in performance reveals irregular fluctuations in civic regulation and freedom. Returning to the Towneley cycle, we can see how The Play of the Dice drives home these dynamics. The torturers explain that they have just arrived “[t]o this towne […] ffrom the mownt of caluery” (77–78). There, they “taght [Jesus] a newe play” (127); here, “ar we […] A new gam forto begyn” (157–158). The stageplay thus taps into a medieval lexicon of game to link dramatic episodes and historical spaces. In the distant biblical locale of Calvary, the game focuses on Jesus’s physical suffering, as enacted in The Buffeting and The Scourging and culminating in his crucifixion. In the familiar contemporary locale (“this towne”), dicing evokes medieval gaming practices and contributes to an immediate experience of this pivotal moment in Christian history. By locating the action in streets that are at once first-century Calvary and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cities, this and other medieval cycles position playgoers as participants in, rather than merely observers of, the non-identical repetitions enacted within and by dramas of dicing. In dramatizing Jesus’s torment and crucifixion, medieval Passion plays adapted the Gospels and other religious texts and images, in particular aids for affective piety, to local history and custom, including gaming practices. Although The Merchant of Venice does not include actual dicing, it retains the energies of the game in its rendering of power’s hazardous variability. Highlighting this connection is the street as a dramatic setting for semiotic and experiential alterations of authority. In Shakespeare’s stageplay and in medieval dramas of dicing, playing (in) the street enacts rival jurisdictions—legal, institutional, material, affective—that are not autonomous or absolute but subject to non-redundant, serial affirmations of potentiality and necessity. 27 Barrett, Against All England, 86. 28 Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 141–143. 29 Sergi, “Dice at Chester’s Passion,” 75–77.

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III The Merchant of Venice’s jailor scene registers a double movement that, in medieval Passion plays, appears through scenes of actual dicing. Later adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama shut down these gamelike dynamics. At the same time, they activate other senses of game and play to localize institutional and spatial control. From the eighteenth through the late twentieth century, the jailor scene contributes directly to dramatic accrual of control to either an agent, who holds and exercises power as a condition of office or tradition, or a target of that agent’s power. Even as these adaptations foreclose dicing’s varied repetitions within their own narratives and performance, they manifest immanence and determination as constitutive of adaptation itself. George Granville’s The Jew of Venice, which “held the stage” from 1700 to 1742, shuts down the gamelike dynamics of Shakespeare’s jailor scene by introducing significant changes.30 In particular, Granville moves the jailor scene from the street to “a Prison in Venice” (29 s.d.).31 In this enclosed space of presumptive state power, Shylock exercises questionable control over both Antonio and the jailor. Rather than exit alone mid-scene after attempting to dictate the jailor’s movements, as in Shakespeare’s drama, Shylock remains onstage to enforce his verbal orders—“Jailor, look to him,” “Jailor, I say, look to him” (29, 30)—through physical violence: he “Thrusts him [Antonio] after the Jaylor” (30 s.d.). Granville’s changes to the jailor scene reflect Restoration dramatic tastes. Clearly this is one of the “Scenes in […] rough Native Dress” that Granville “improv’d with nobler Lustre,” as the ghost of Shakespeare acknowledges in the prologue (n.p.). More strikingly, these changes adapt the energies of Shakespeare’s jailor scene to an emergent economic and social context. Moving the scene from the street to the prison facilitates the vilification of Shylock as a predatory financier, a player in “The modern Trade, or rather Game, called Stock-Jobbing,” as Gentleman’s Journal in 1692 dubbed speculation in joint-stock ventures (OED). In 1697 30 John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Vintage, 1994 [1992]), 91–92. Charles Edelman’s claim that Gross overstates the case (Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 7) is supported by evidence of only 42 performances between 1701 and 1754 (Frans De Bruyn, “Reference Guide to Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Ritchie and Sabor, 349–436, at 392). 31 All quotations from George Granville [Baron Lansdowne], The Jew of Venice: A Comedy; as It Is Acted at the Theatre in Little-Lincolns-Inn Fields, by his Majesty’s Servants (London, 1701), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, are cited in-text by page number.

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Parliament attempted to curb abuses by limiting the number of investment dealers in London to one hundred, including twelve Jews and twelve other “aliens.”32 Granville’s stageplay seems poised to similar purpose: “To day [sic] we punish a Stock-jobbing Jew” (prol., n.p.). Granville’s Jew thus gives the gamelike dynamics of Shakespeare’s Merchant a new name (stock-jobbing) and local habitation (the prison). Beginning with Charles Macklin’s revival of Shakespeare’s drama at Drury Lane in 1741, the jailor scene returned to the street. Yet productions from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries did not revive the gamelike dynamics of The Merchant of Venice so much as adapt Granville’s representation of questionable penal force. Victorian adaptors claimed to repair the ruins of Restoration Shakespeare by staging the “original” dramas with historical accuracy. On the one hand, these projects overlapped ideologically. England’s renowned poet and venerable history became mutually reinforcing sources of national unity and pride.33 On the other hand, they were at odds pragmatically. To make time for verisimilitudinous tableaux of state spectacles, the adaptors cut significant portions of the play-texts.34 In the case of The Merchant of Venice, this combination of textual cutting and spectacular expansion constitutes a process of becoming and being akin to the double movement of dicing. Victorian stagings of the jailor scene epitomize the relational repetition with difference evident in Shakespeare’s drama and its history of adaptation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the jailor scene witnesses a proliferation of jailors and an expansion of their function that effectively traces an increasingly intrusive police state and transforms the street into a vestibule for the courtroom. Charles Kean’s immensely popular Merchant of Venice, like many of his productions, eliminates dialogue to introduce lengthy presentations of quotidian and ceremonial street activity. While reducing the jailor scene by eight lines, Kean adds spectacular evidence of penal power. Notations by George Ellis, prompter, in an 1846 copy-text indicate the addition of a second jailor: “2 G[aoler]s.”35 A later promptbook shows blocking in which four jailors flank the main action (Fig. 1). Kean’s 32 Edelman, ed., Merchant, 7. 33 On contestations to this centralization, see Gail Marshall, introduction to Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–15, at 2, and Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 138. 34 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare | Cut: Rethinking Cutwork in an Age of Distraction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 35 Charles Kean, arr., Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare ([London], 1807), 63, FSL, prompt. Merch. 17.

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Fig. 1 Jailors flanking the main action in a promptbook for The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s play of The merchant of Venice/ arranged for representation at the Princess’s Theatre, with historical and explanatory notes by Charles Kean, F.S.A., as first performed on Saturday, June 12th, 1858, 2nd ed. (London, 1858?), FSL, prompt. Merch. 20.

production influenced Charles Calvert, who staged Merchant in Manchester in the 1870s. Calvert transformed the jailor scene into a public procession set at the “Exterior of the Foscari Gate.” At the end of the scene, Shylock exits “into the Palace,” and the next scene is the hearing before the Duke.36 Still following Kean in the early twentieth century, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree opened the jailor scene with “Trumpeters in procession—gaolers pushing people back.”37 The violent displacement of the people from the street anticipates the trial scene, which is dramaturgically linked to the jailor scene by a “procession of Doge &c through street.”38 In these productions, the jailor is no longer a single, independent agent but part of an official structure tasked with the constitution, exercise, and display of state power. Due to the number and position of these state agents, the street ceases to be a space in which regulation and license are equally available and becomes a place dominated by political hierarchy and legal violence. Operating in the service of an authoritative “Shakespeare,” these Victorian-era productions of The Merchant of Venice reduce the economy of repetition operative in London’s streets to a single movement of necessity onstage. Events of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust, reactivated the potentiality of The Merchant of Venice. In many adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama since mid-century, the proverbial dice fall with the effect of concentrating the force of necessity in the hands of historically oppressed groups rather than traditional authority f igures. This roll is especially 36 Charles Calvert, arr., The Merchant of Venice by William Shakspere; arranged for representation at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, by Charles Calvert (Manchester, 1871), 49, FSL, prompt. Merch. 10. 37 Handwritten notation in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, arr., The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare (s.l.e.a.), 96, FSL, prompt Merch. 44. 38 Ibid., 98.

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evident in Charles Marowitz’s Variations on the Merchant of Venice. Set in Palestine near the end of the British Mandate, Marowitz’s Variations dramatizes colonial and oppositional forces vying for control of the streets of Jerusalem. At the same time, the production sets Shakespeare against other dramatists, both early modern and modern, for control of the stage. The cumulative effect is to expose the British colonial narrative, in which “Shakespeare” played a critical role, to the dynamics encapsulated by the throw and fall of dice. Variations became the inaugural production at the Open Space Theatre in 1977. Marowitz with Thelma Holt founded the Open Space Theatre with the purpose of staging violent encounters between classic stageplays and modern audiences. In pursuing these aims, Marowitz alters The Merchant of Venice significantly. He removes and moves lines, adds others from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and introduces a Brechtian frame replete with visual and acoustic effects. The intended purpose of these changes, what Marowitz calls collage, was to undermine the authority of Shakespeare’s text. This textual-cultural project plays out in the war of liberation that is fought in the streets of Jerusalem. Variations opens with images of the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and a voice-over reporting the deaths of Jewish fighters by British soldiers in “skirmishes” in “the old part of the city” (227).39 Lights come up on Shylock silently praying over the body of one of these dead fighters, and then he speaks lines written for Marlowe’s Barabas. Subsequent scenes are set at an “outdoor cafe [sic],” which resounds with the “rumble of distant explosions, and occasional rifle-fire” (230 s.d.), and along a “bank” (236; Merchant, 5.1.53), where the romantic rendezvous between Jessica and Lorenzo, now a British officer, literalizes the trope of colonization as sexual conquest.40 These street scenes make Shakespeare’s text, as opposed to Marlowe’s lesser-known drama or Marowitz’s Brechtian additions, complicit in colonialism’s disproportionate power structure. Theatrical and legal control of playing (in) the streets is overturned in the jailor scene. The only change from Shakespeare’s text is the omission of three lines: “I oft delivered from his forfeitures/ Many that have at times made moan to me./ Therefore he hates me” (Merchant, 3.3.22–25).41 By cutting Antonio’s 39 In-text citations refer to Charles Marowitz, The Marowitz Shakespeare (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1978). A few months before opening in London, Variations premiered in Stockholm. 40 These scenes possibly evoke events in 1970s Jerusalem, including a series of bombings in and around Ben Yehuda Street and the West Bank. 41 In the typescript of Variations housed at the V&A (GB 71 THM/271/15/30), as in Marowitz, Marowitz Shakespeare, Antonio’s lines end in a semicolon: “He seeks my life—his reason well

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explanation of Shylock’s mercilessness, Marowitz highlights the historical specificity of his adaptation—and in a way that aligns Shakespeare’s text with the colonial project that Variations aims to disrupt. Marowitz identifies Antonio with Erwin Bevin, foreign secretary under Clement Attlee, whose Middle East policy “severely restricted immigration to Jerusalem, thereby forcing hundreds of thousands of escaping Jews to return to Europe and the concentration-camps that awaited them.”42 Less like Christ than the jailors of medieval Passion plays, Marowitz’s Antonio is a hard-hearted bureaucrat in the service of a totalitarian state and whose actions produce tragic results for millions of people. Marowitz’s jailor scene also repeats with difference the power relations that play out in the street. In earlier scenes, British officials assume their administration of Jerusalem’s streets is legitimate and definitive. Shylock’s directive “Follow not” (260; Merchant, 3.3.16) in the jailor scene undermines this confidence as the subaltern affirms authority to restrict the steps of an agent. Moreover, the Jew retains spatial control despite the counter-efforts of the colonial administration. The iconoclastic text and colonial context of Variations thus combine to throw open Shakespeare’s jailor scene to unprecedented signification. In The Merchant of Venice and its Restoration and Victorian adaptations, the state reasserts or re-enforces top-down power relations in the trial scene. Not so in Variations. At the moment that the Duke’s “mercy” turns to “wrath” (281) in the version of the trial scene that concludes Variations, “An EXPLOSION is heard outside” (282 s.d.). The blast cues the Jews in the courtroom to reveal guns and execute British officers and civilians alike, but not before Shylock recites his famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech (282). Slides of the King David Hotel bombing then resume, and the accompanying voice-over concludes with the British response to the Jewish assault: “all border posts have been shut, all street-corners are blocked with armoured cars and barricades, and a curfew is in force throughout Jerusalem” (283). Even as the production comes full circle theatrically, returning to the Brechtian devices with which it began, dramatically it ends with colonial administrators no longer assured of—and, in fact, desperately trying to ensure—control of the streets. Moreover, Marowitz denies audiences the comic resolution of The Merchant of Venice and the promise of historical resolution, such as would seem within reach in 1978 when Egyptian President I know;” (260; cf. Merchant, 3.3.21). The punctuation, not the omission of lines, then, would appear erroneous. I am grateful to an anonymous archivist at the V&A Theatre & Performance collections for assistance. 42 Marowitz, Recycling, 25.

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Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize and signed the Camp David Accords. Produced the year before these historic events, Variations remains defiantly open-ended, with spatial control up for grabs and cultural and political authority available to revision. This selective history of adaptations of The Merchant of Venice reveals a series of high-stakes power plays. The jailor scene, in particular, enacts the rise, fall, and resurgence of various controlling agents over centuries of British imperialism. Some adaptations resist the textual authority of “Shakespeare” in the context of extralegal or revolutionary violence. Others sanctify Shakespeare’s text (ostensibly, at least) as part of a concerted effort to advance an expansive autocratic state. The movement among these adaptations is neither teleology’s clear-cut progression, nor a smooth, predictable cyclical return, nor an amorphously evolving web. Rather, it ebbs and flows—or, more precisely if less colloquially, leaps and jolts—in the irregular, often surprising repetitions paradigmatic of the dice game. *** As an epistemological lens for Shakespeare and adaptation, games and especially dicing offer a conceptual framework for dramatizations of authority that resist paradigms of exceptionalism and unidirectionality. Medieval Passion plays and late sixteenth-century performances of The Merchant of Venice use games, either actual dicing or its essential energies, to enact the negotiation of relations—legal, economic, social, and cultural—that then settle in various ways. Later adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama close down this negotiation by imposing definitive ideas about what relations, in particular textual and political relations, are or should be. What emerges from the theatrical relations among these adaptations, however, is dicing’s double movement of becoming and being. Each adaptation manifests the way a stageplay’s meaning is opened up and shut down, reimagined and reified. The street is an optimal place for this double movement. Returning to the productions of The Merchant of Venice with which this essay began, we f ind spaces in which being reigns absolute and becoming is merely an illusion. In the casino setting of Goold’s production, the house always wins. The game is no less fixed on the world stage of Hands’s production, where chance or providence scripts all roles. As Antonio says, handing the dice to Gratiano, “I hold the world but as […] A stage, where every man

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must play a part.”43 By contrast, the street may constitute a level playing field for all stakeholders. In theory if not in practice, as we have seen, the street remains available to myriad uses and competing authorities. From the medieval thoroughfare to the modernist stage, the street represents an open space in which games of adaptation may be played. 44

Works Cited Archival Sources Calvert, Charles, arr. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakspere; arranged for representation at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, by Charles Calvert. Manchester, 1871. FSL, prompt. Merch. 10. Goold, Rupert, dir. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. Prompt., 2001. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, RSC/SM/1/2011/MER1. Hand, Terry, dir. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. Prompt., 1971. V&A, RSC/SM/1/1971/MER1. Kean, Charles, arr. Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. [London], 1807. FSL, prompt. Merch. 17. Marowitz, Charles. Variations on the Merchant of Venice. Typescript. V&A, GB 71 THM/271/15/30. Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, arr. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. s.l.e.a. FSL, prompt. Merch. 44.

Printed and Electronic Sources Bailey, Amanda. Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Barrett, Robert W. Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Clarke, Catherine A. M., ed. Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester, c. 1200–1600. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. 43 Terry Hand, dir., The Merchant of Venice, prompt., 1971, V&A (RSC/SM/1/1971/MER1), 1.1.77–78 and manuscript s.d., 6a. 44 The author would like to thank Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Erika T. Lin, and Elizabeth Williamson for their invaluable feedback on this essay at various stages.

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Conway, Daniel W. “Tumbling Dice: Gilles Deleuze and the Economy of Répétition.” In Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, 73–90. London: Routledge, 1997. De Bruyn, Frans. “Reference Guide to Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century.” In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 349–436. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Degenhardt, Jane Hwang. Fortune’s Empire: Chance, Providence, and Overseas Ventures in Early Modern English Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Dessen, Alan C. Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. –––. Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Edelman, Charles, ed. The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Fortier, Mark. “Wild Adaptation.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3, no. 1 (2007): n.p. Gorman, Tom. “Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ Feels More like ‘Merchant of Vegas.’” Las Vegas Sun, 17 June 2011. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jun/17/ shakespeares-merchant-venice-takes-lot-las-vegas/. Granville, George [Baron Lansdowne]. The Jew of Venice: A Comedy; as It Is Acted at the Theatre in Little-Lincolns-Inn Fields, by his Majesty’s Servants. London, 1701. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gross, John. Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. London: Vintage, 1994 [1992]. Groves, Beatrice. “‘Now wole I a newe game beynne’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 136–150. Howard, Jean E. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. James I. Basilikon dōron. Edinburgh, 1603. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2009. Lanier, Douglas M. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, 21–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Lerud, Theodore K. Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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Lexicons of Early Modern English. Edited by Ian Lancashire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/University of Toronto Library, 2006–. http://leme.library.utoronto.ca. Ley, Grahan. “Cultural Adaptation.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 8, no. 1 (2015): 23–38. Marowitz, Charles. The Marowitz Shakespeare. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1978. –––. Recycling Shakespeare. New York: Applause, 1991. Marshall, Gail. Introduction to Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Gail Marshall, 1–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Munting, Roger. An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Murray, Molly. “Measured Sentences: Forming Literature in Early Modern Prisons.” Huntington Library Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2009): 147–167. Purdie, Rhiannon. “Dice-Games and the Blasphemy of Prediction.” In Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, edited by J. A. Burrow and I. P. Wei, 167–184. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000. Rice, Nicole R., and Margaret Aziza Pappano. The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Sergi, Matthew. “Dice at Chester’s Passion.” In The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change, edited by Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich, 65–78. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Smith, Bruce R. Shakespeare | Cut: Rethinking Cutwork in an Age of Distraction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. “The Stage History of The Merchant of Venice from the Time Shakespeare Wrote It to the Present Day, and a Look Back at Some RSC Productions.” Royal Shakespeare Company. Accessed 14 September 2018. https://www.rsc.org.uk/ the-merchant-of-venice/about-the-play/stage-history. Stern, Tiffany. “Shakespeare in Drama.” In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 141–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stevens, Martin, and A. C. Cawley, eds. The Towneley Plays. Early English Text Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Whetstone, George. A mirour for magestrates of cyties. London, 1584.

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About the Author Marissa Greenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and the recipient of fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Greenberg has published articles in journals including English Literary Renaissance, Genre, Modern Language Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Bulletin. In addition to projects related to equitable and inclusive pedagogy, Greenberg is currently at work on a book-length study of embodied motion in the writings of John Milton.

8. The Moods of Gamification in The Tempest Ellen MacKay

Abstract While demonstrating how The Tempest’s magic island serves as an artificial training environment, this essay draws on diverse examples and critiques of neo-liberalism’s gamified work-life to query the relation between the challenges that the play’s characters face and the social roles they are primed to occupy. In the histories of the Bermuda wreck that inspired The Tempest, the sheltered climate and collective endeavor that “seasoned” colonists for the New World were treated as a wonder and a miracle. But this felicity is unsettled by the limited capacity for optimization that the play assigns to certain character types. The Tempest’s regime of gamification is therefore a means of constituting capitalism’s “civilizing” mission as well as a resource for accosting the flaws in that nascent regime. Keywords: artificial training environment; social optimization; grind; settlement; capitalism

Games as Attunement Prospero: How now? Moody? What is’t thou canst demand? (1.2.290–291)

What is gamif ication, exactly? I open with this question not merely to promise some clarification of the slippery term at the center of my essay, but also to establish a central claim: that a concept so much in dispute is also necessarily a moody one. In the first “academic attempt” to shed the “negative connotations” of its industry jargon, Sebastian Deterding, Rilla Khaled, Lennart E. Nacke, and Dan Dixon narrow gamification to mean

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“the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities.”1 Discussing its centrality to the history of skepticism and the eighteenth century’s ludic assays upon the certainty of knowledge, Sarah Kareem enlarges it to encompass taking any “nongame activity as if it were a game.”2 Jane McGonigal exalts gamification for “teaching and inspiring and engaging us” by “providing rewards in ways that reality [does] not.”3 Ian Bogost denigrates it as “marketing bullshit, invented by consultants” to “domesticate” videogames for service to “the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business.”4 In sum, in terms of its temperament, value, and scope, gamification is an emotive subject, a referendum on gaming aesthetics, individual choice, social optimization and the meaning of fun. Less often debated, though, is its moment of origin. By common accord, it “is a comparatively new phenomenon.”5 Deterding et al. make it just under a decade old; Woodcock and Johnson tie it to the late-developing “economic relations of neoliberal capitalism,” and their signature melding of “affective life” with “processes of commodification.”6 Given the ambit of this volume, it will not be surprising that my essay pushes back that date of onset. Following studies that seek to attach emergent technologies to longer conceptual histories, I read The Tempest as a harbinger of gamification’s present use and moody disposition.7 My aim, though, is not to trace a straight line of descent, but to show how Shakespeare seems to seize on gamification as a tool for historical transformation.8 By 1 Sebastian Deterding, Rilla Khaled, Lennart E. Nacke, and Dan Dixon, “Gamification: Toward a Definition,” paper presented at CHI 2011, Vancouver, BC, http://gamification-research.org/ wp-content/uploads/2011/04/02-Deterding-Khaled-Nacke-Dixon.pdf (accessed April 2021). 2 Sarah Kareem, “Flimsy Materials, or What the Eighteenth Century Can Teach Us about Twenty-First Century Worlding,” Critical Inquiry 42 (2016): 374–394, at 377, 393. 3 Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011), 4. 4 Ian Bogost, “Gamification is Bullshit,” transcribed podcast, Atlantic, 9 August 2011, https:// www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/gamification-is-bullshit/243338/ 5 Jamie Woodcock and Mark R. Johnson, “Gamif ication: What It Is, and How to Fight It,” Sociological Review 66, no. 3 (2018): 542–558, at 543. 6 Ibid.; Ben Anderson, “Neoliberal Affects,” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6 (2016): 734–753, at 737. 7 Some works that undertake this form of intellectual history include Timothy Murray, The Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kareem, “Flimsy Materials”; and Veronica Alfano and Andrew M. Stauffer, eds., Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 8 Woodcock and Johnson, “Gamification,” 542.

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dramatizing a community’s conditioning for an as-yet-unknown “brave new world,” The Tempest not only illustrates how New World settlement calls out for gamified management, but dwells in the qualmy affective climate that results from the instrumentalization of human subjects in service to a larger, corporate goal. There are several features to The Tempest that invite this interpretation. At the broadest and most preliminary end of the list is the theatre’s intrinsically gamelike condition. On the spectrum that Roger Caillois devises of “paidia” to “ludus,” or free to rule-bound play, the stage is the most disciplined and “civilizing” example in the category of mimetic games.9 Arguably, The Tempest is the play of Shakespeare’s that is most conscious of this civilizing mission, as well as the play whose pre-devised and oddly mechanical scenarios give the impression of an uncommonly gamey environment. Its happiest revelation is of a couple “playing at chess” (5.1.171 s.d.).10 Its climax is set in motion when Prospero “traces a circle,” a traditional portal of premodern gameworlds (5.1.32 s.d.). More allusively, its giddy Butler (“Prithee, do not turn me about” [2.2.112]) and its Jester’s costume–based lazzi (the “siege” of the “mooncalf” [2.2.104, 105], the donning of “frippery” [4.1.227]) suggest the “whirling” and disguising that come high on the list of Caillois’s taxonomy of vertiginous and imitation games.11 Lastly, as the play that makes mention of the word “freedom” and its collocates more than any other, it is uncommonly emphatic in marking its own cessation as a release from conditions of constraint (“As you from crimes would pardoned be/ Let your indulgence set me free” [epil.10]). The thraldom and captivity that are underscored by their casting-off convey the other reason the play smacks of gamification: its powerful vacillations in mood. All this is key to the distinctiveness of The Tempest, which derives in no small measure from its project of setting itself apart. According to Johan Huizinga’s foundational definition, play depends upon “its secludedness”; as he explains, All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. 9 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 36, 27. 10 All quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 11 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 36. Caillois’s name for games of vertigo is “ilinx” (Greek for whirlpool).

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[…] The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.12

This boundary-setting is a featured business of The Tempest. If every stage is a space reserved for play, The Tempest reinforces this perimeter first by isolating its action to an enchanted isle, and then by enclosing its denouement within Prospero’s specially drawn magic circle (5.1.33 s.d.). If every play is constrained by a time limit (as in the “two hours’ traffic” promised and likely overstepped in Romeo and Juliet [prol.12]), The Tempest is one of only two works by Shakespeare to observe the unity of time, and the only one to hasten its action forward with an unexplained and absolute requirement that all “art” cease “ere suppertime,” as if in a race to beat the clock (3.1.95). This extravagant parameterizing, coupled with a thematic investment in games and game properties, sets the stage for The Tempest to represent—perhaps the better word is expose—a gamified world. The more secluded and immersed its “players” are shown to be within their respective artificial, taxing and timed environments, the more visibly the play brings out its likeness to a synthetic training ground, designed to build, test, and badge the castaways’ readiness for a life to come. In its real-world deployments, no less than in Prospero’s, gamified training is serious business, undertaken for “decidedly un-playful motivations.”13 Simulated combat is often raised to illustrate this point. For decades, the US Department of Defense has developed and employed “absorbing, interactive, computer-mediated experience in which a person, or persons, perceives and interacts […] with a synthetic (i.e. simulated) environment, and with simulated objects in it, as if it were real.”14 These war-games often borrow their locus and interface from the “commercial market” and vice versa; examples of some durable formats that cross both spheres include the flight simulator and the f irst-person shooter.15 Given the extent of this “dual-use” paradigm, some media and cultural critics have identified combat simulations as a root cause of the metastasis of “militainment,” a commingling of combat training and amusement that refashions war into 12 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 13. 13 Woodcock and Johnson, “Gamification,” 546. 14 United States Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Virtual Reality and Technologies for Combat Simulation (Washington, DC: Office of Technology Assessment, 1994), 1. 15 Ibid., 3.

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an exercise in gamesmanship.16 Still, the fact that warfare is pervasively gamelike is collocated with, but not identical to, the notion that war training is pervasively gamified. To return to Bogost’s derisive account, gamification involves adhering “incidental properties” like “points and leveling” to a non-game activity with the object of deploying playful incentive structures to promote and even automatize non-playful tasks. Military applications render the resulting blurred line between skilled and managed behavior a topic of special concern. In the graphic novella “From Battlezone to America’s Army,” for instance, Jackie Winston juxtaposes panels of gamers and soldiers going through identical motions to show how their gameworlds’ skill trees, experience points, buff ing mechanisms, and unlockable content have turned combat into a mindless practice that the state commandeers for its own use and profit.17 In more mundane circumstances, the same gambit applies: gamification stakes the corporate profit of mechanical habituation against the player’s loss of executive control. This compromised autonomy is suggestive of The Tempest’s distinctive ludic habitat. Much like Winston’s gamers, the castaways on Prospero’s island navigate challenge environments under conditions and for outcomes that are withheld from their understanding. And among them too, a marked moodiness sets in. To be sure, shifts in mood are a feature of gameworlds in general. Every human environment is suffused in “Stimmung”—Heidegger’s term for “being-in-the-world” that is often translated as mood and likened to “sound or weather.”18 Playgrounds point up this shared “experience of presence” by cordoning off a zone it does not occupy; their “special rules” offer a reprieve from the pre-extant sense of “thereness” that pervades the real world.19 But gamif ication turns the dial in the other direction, by devising a reality that is leveraged or meddled with. The resulting disruption to the subject’s sense of self-sovereignty is central to the conceptualization of mood. As Steven Mulhall argues, the philosophers for whom Stimmung is a driving concept (e.g. Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Cavell) use it to expose the “conditionedness of human freedom,” meaning the impossibility of securing a life independent from what others “put into circulation” in the 16 Ibid., 1; Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-Entertainment Complex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 12. 17 Jackie Winston, “From Battlezone to America’s Army,” preface to Lenoir and Caldwell, Military-Entertainment Complex, n.p. 18 Hans Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 4. 19 Ibid., 7; Jonathan Flatley, “How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” New Literary History 43, no. 3 (2012): 503–525, at 506.

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world.20 The moods that they are particularly interested to discuss tend to serve as barometers of this “conditionedness.” Chief among them is freedom, which Mulhall believes is a feeling based in restriction, triggered only when immersion in “present arrangements” is so total it eclipses other ways of being.21 Uncanniness results whenever the subject sees past the “horizon” of their domed experience to glimpse at the possibility of living otherwise.22 And skepticism is distrust directed at a world that discloses its indifference to the “free exercise of will and cognition.”23 Whereas games permit players to try out what is possible when we “choose the world in which we find ourselves,” gamified environments both dangle and revoke this emancipating promise by toggling between these three moods .24 Scholars’ attitudes toward gamification depend on whether they feel their freedom is conditioned or not. At one end of the spectrum is an enthusiast like McGonigal who argues that by replacing with synthetic experience a situational knowledge often earned at a steep cost, gameworlds rescue their players from real-world perils. In high-risk workplaces such as airplane cockpits, surgical theatres, and combat zones, gamification therefore feels like progress toward an existence that, because safer, is more free. At the other end is a skeptic like Bogost who finds that the translation of work into play signals at least a category mistake, and at most a deliberate and exploitative masking of the conditions of labor. This sensibility is rooted in the cardinal rule of Johan Huizinga’s 1938 treatise on play: that it is “an activity connected with no material interest” from which “no profit can be gained.”25 As Callois elaborates: A game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play. It would become constraint, drudgery from which one would strive to be freed.26

While advocates of gamification point to disasters averted thanks to hours logged in artificial training environments (like the Hudson River landing 20 Steven Mulhall, “Can There Be an Epistemology of Moods?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 41 (1996): 191–210, at 205; Rita Felski and Susan Fraiman, introduction to “In the Mood,” special issue, New Literary History 43, no. 3 (2012): v–xii, at vii. 21 Mulhall, “Can There Be an Epistemology of Moods?” 205. 22 Ibid. 23 Felski and Fraiman, introduction to “In the Mood,” vi. 24 Flatley, “How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” 506. 25 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 16. 26 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 6.

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of a US Airways jet by Chesley Sullenberger in 2009), its critics note the glut of work simulations that seem designed only to indoctrinate employees in preferred corporate behavior. An illustrative example is Filament Games’ Black Friday Simulator at the Walmart Academy, which uses an Oculus Rift headset to immerse employees “in a variety of real-life scenarios” of holiday consumer frenzy, “requiring users to make on the spot decisions which are evaluated in real time by both training supervisors and their peers.”27 By mechanizing the player to optimize profitability, this genre of game is less a training system than what Steven Conway calls a tool of “zombification”: it leaves the “user mindlessly driven by the company’s needs, perhaps at the cost of her own.”28 There is a third position that keeps clear of these polarized moods, however. From Derrida’s usage of jeu, meaning the kind of “play” found in the slack of a fishing line, David Golumbia extrapolates an unpredictable “looseness” in rules-based games.29 Even high-stakes gamifications show evidence of this “give,” from which “creation” can then “develop.”30 In Simming, Scott Magelssen offers an apt illustration of this phenomenon in his case study of The Box, an elaborate re-creation of the War on Terror’s Middle Eastern theatre at Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert.31 Just like its virtual or video-based analogs, this artificial training environment is designed so that every act taken by trainees is recorded and assessed, rewarded or penalized. Ammunition is “tracked”; hits are tallied by a laser-tag counter; medical evacuations are strictly timed and scored as either a loss or a save.32 Yet Magelssen finds that there is an improvisational freedom that infiltrates The Box’s civilian and insurgent roles, loosening up some slack in the line of duty, and transforming war-games’ historically “closed” simulations into “co-produced narratives.”33 At Fort Irwin, this capacity to revise the contest 27 James LaPierre, “Virtual Reality in Corporate Training,” Filament Games, last modif ied 9 September 2020, n.p., https://www.filamentgames.com/blog/virtual-reality-corporate-training/ (accessed 2 May 2018). 28 Steven Conway, “Zombification?: Gamification, Motivation, and the User,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (2014): 129–141, at 134. 29 David Golumbia, “Games without Play,” New Literary History, 40, no. 1 (2009): 179–204, at 181. 30 Ibid., 183. 31 Scott Magelssen, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 155. In 2007, when Magelssen visited, the site stood in for both Afghanistan and Iraq, alternating its ground every two weeks. 32 Ibid., 160. 33 Peter Radonyi and Elyssebeth Leigh, “Assessment and Evaluation of Learning via Simulation,” in Intersections in Simulation and Gaming: 21st Annual Simulation Technology and Training

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it merely imitates is gamification’s unforeseen effect, but in creative circles, jeu is seized on as a transformative benefit. In his “Advice for Urban Gaming Simulators,” the philosopher Ernesto Bencivenga reminds his readers that even when conducted under the “strictest of rules,” simulation games enable “our trying out novel forms of behavior (glimpses of a possible future) that might turn out to be useful.”34 These uncanny slips into alternative ways of living equip communities not merely to survive, but also to effect “dramatic, unpredicted transformations.”35 I argue that within and betwixt these three moods—I call them safe/free, skeptical and slackened/uncanny—The Tempest stakes out its game. Devised to pre-acclimate the community of castaways and exiles to Prospero’s reinstatement, the sojourn on the isle is deeply invested in the moody practice of social conditioning—both its orchestrated successes and its lapses into unpredicted registers. The next section of this essay treats the Virginia Company history from which Shakespeare derives Prospero’s gameful art: the loss and recovery of the Sea Venture and the plantation life that this castaway episode optimizes. The last asks what kind of future The Tempest games out. Among its blinkered freedoms, is there any slack to be found?

Gaming the Virginia Colony Antonio: What impossible matter will he make easy next? (2.1.90)

It must first be admitted that in its relationship to real-world circumstances, The Tempest is an evasive play. Though it is the least silent work in a commercial repertoire that has surprisingly little to tell and even less to show about England’s traffic with the New World, The Tempest is still “heralded as the American play of the period” not for what it dramatizes but for what it conjures forth.36 Its scholars and adapters have repeatedly shown the play to be a veritable image bank of white supremacist depredation; among its tropes and types are a “drunk Indian,” a slave hunt, a (begrudging) capitulation to the white man’s burden (“this thing of darkness/ I acknowledge Conference, 2016, edited by Anjum Naweed, Marcin Wardaszko, Elyssebeth Leigh, and Sebastiaan Meijer (Cham: Springer, 2018), 116–133, at 121; Magelssen, Simming, 173. 34 Ermanno Bencivenga, “Play and Games: Advice for Urban Gaming Simulators,” Common Knowledge 21, no. 3 (2015): 379–389, at 384, 382. 35 Ibid., 382. 36 Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2.

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mine” 5.1.275–276), a defense of racism developed from an accusation of attempted miscegenating rape, a repudiation of slave literacy, and in Ariel, a “colonial collaborator.”37 They have also demonstrated that the play takes its inspiration from the Bermuda “wreck and redemption” of the Sea Venture, the flagship of the 1609 Virginia Company expedition to replenish the languishing colony of Jamestown.38 Accounts of this remarkable history were available in Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas otherwise called the Isle of Devils (1610), Richard Rich’s versified Newes from Virginia: The Lost Flocke Triumphant (1610), and especially William Strachey’s True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption (circulated in manuscript in 1610, published in 1625), of which Shakespeare is said to display “almost certain familiarity” by the editors of the latest Arden edition of the play.39 A close examination of shared terms and circumstances corroborates this claim, but it is the sea change effected by the Bermuda episode that seems to catch Shakespeare’s strongest interest. While The Tempest stages something very like the tempest that stranded mariners, prospective settlers, and assorted Virginia Company elite on an uninhabited, allegedly devil-plagued island, this resemblance is preliminary to its elaborate playthrough of Bermuda’s training environment. As not quite and not yet the Virginia Company’s colonial destination, the island provides Shakespeare with a real-world example of a gamelike space in which to test and boost fitness for the mission ahead. This take turns out to have a long tail. As a tide-turning episode in America’s foundation narrative, the Sea Venture’s catastrophe and “triumphant” resurrection have become an adventure that is often rehearsed. It is by now a touchstone of the heritage pageants and performances presented at Virginia’s archeological and commemorative sites, Historic Jamestowne and the Jamestown Settlement, as well as on the reconstructed Deliverance harbored in St. Georges, Bermuda. 40 Alongside popular histories that cel37 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), 70; G. Wilson Knight, “Caliban as a Red Man,” in Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, edited by Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 205–220, at 212; Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (1987): 557–578, at 573; Hollis, Absence of America, 2. 38 William Strachey, A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas, in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives; Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas, ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, University Press of Virginia, 1964). 39 Vaughan and Vaughan, introduction to Shakespeare, The Tempest, 41. 40 Historic Jamestowne is principally an archeological site and its occasional Living History presentations are limited to performed testimonies by actors playing historical persons like

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ebrate “the castaways who rescued Jamestown” or “the shipwreck that saved Jamestown,” this culture of re-enactment takes the shipmates’ survival as a basis for the construction of a hardscrabble, resilient American subjectivity, suitable for reassertion in civics-minded Living History environments.41 Yet to Shakespeare too, the episode was presented as socially formative, albeit to England’s glory. Certainly this was the view proffered in Rich’s ballad, which holds up the return of the “Lost Flocke” as proof that the “Adventurers” will “plant a Nation/ where none before hath stood.”42 In Rich’s account, survival confers fitness for the imperial mission, and not without reason. In Jamestown’s typhus-infested outpost, where most settlers were not properly “seasoned to the Countrie,” as Governor John Smith wrote, and either died on arrival or barely survived, “sicke almost to death,” the Bermuda interim shored up the colony precisely when it seemed most at risk of collapsing. 43 Thanks to the interposition of its detour, a community was built that could at last hold down the Virginia fort. In his promise to detail the “manner of [the voyagers’] distresse in the Iland of Devils,” Rich makes this community-building seem a kind of purgatory, its hardships a refining fire. 44 But in fact, the time spent in Bermuda proved a comparatively painless interim, notable for the ease of its durance. In a subtropical climate, on land that was shaded by cedar trees and stocked with turtles, hogs, fish, and birds that, thanks to their unfamiliarity with humans, seemed to offer themselves to be killed, the shipwrecked Englishmen and -women ate well, slept easily, and gradually built the boats that would convey them to their original destination. By contrast, the other six ships in the fleet that the Sea Venture fronted made it to Jamestown but lost most of their supplies in the hurricane that marooned their flagship. They arrived in Virginia at the tail end of the growing season, stocked with sick, hungry and exhausted passengers ill-suited to the hard labor required for retrenchment and survival, and bereft of provisions. While the settlement’s leaders vied and squabbled and Governor Smith was felled in a suspicious William Strachey. The Jamestown Settlement is a Living History experience, where a more generalized version of plantation life is performed. 41 Hobson Woodward, The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (New York: Viking, 2009); Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2008). 42 Richard Rich, The Lost Flocke Triumphant (London, 1610), sig. B2r. 43 John Smith, The Description of Virginia by Captain John Smith, in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia, and Admiral of New England, 1580–1631, pt. 2, ed. Edward Arber, rev. A. G. Bradley (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), 421. 44 Rich, Lost Flocke Triumphant, title page.

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gunpowder accident, an unprecedented drought overtook the region. Within weeks, the new settlers had devoured the corn Smith had planted to tide them over the winter season, and the “starving time” set in. When at last the Sea Venture’s passengers and crew rejoined their cohort, in May of 1610, nearly 9 of every 10 colonists had died, and the roughly 60 persons still alive were in desperate shape. So baleful was the state of things that Governor Gates, now finally arrived in the territory under his authority, began his tenure by ordering its abandonment. For two days, from 7 to 9 June 1610, Jamestown was a defunct experiment, as forsaken as Roanoke, while the English colonists sailed down Chesapeake Bay and toward the Atlantic. Only the fortuitous arrival of De LaWarr’s supply fleet, which broke the horizon just as the colonists made for the open sea, caused Gates to reverse his course, securing Virginia’s status as the foundational English settlement. Strictly speaking, the saving effect of the Sea Venture’s Bermuda wreck was thus its insulation of 150 colonists (and one dog) from the hardships suffered over the deadly Virginia winter of 1609–1610. The delay of their arrival, which almost perfectly coincided with De La Warr’s reprovisioning of the fort, allowed England’s colonial project to succeed, making Jamestown the first continuously held territory in English-speaking North America, and therefore the precedent and paradigm for future colonies in Plymouth and elsewhere. What interests Shakespeare, however, is not this lucky timing—save perhaps the “auspicious star” that Prospero says occasions the action of the play—but the application of an island environment to effect regulation and redress (1.2.182). To the playwright, and to the English public more largely, Jamestown’s survival was a direct result of the Sea Venture’s hiatus, rendering the voyagers’ island work-life the condition for mission success. Bermuda was well-suited to this use. A terra incognita deemed uninhabitable for its treacherous shoals, it supplied an empty space between the old world and the new in which to practice in safety for challenges ahead (2.1.40). To an early modern audience, a precedent for this type of stint was Jonah’s captivity in the whale. Traditionally, the story of Jonah teaches a memorable lesson on God’s inexorable will: after three days trapped inside the whale’s belly, the prophet takes up the mission he had at first spurned and teaches the people of Nineveh to repent. But Jonah’s story also demonstrates how God acclimatizes an unwilling envoy to a hostile work environment. It is true that the inside of a whale does not exactly replicate Nineveh’s moral turpitude, but the fact that Jonah prays for deliverance within a foul and strange place would seem to have some bearing on his ability, once spat out, to pray for the deliverance of a place he once thought too foreign and

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foul to deserve God’s mercy. The lesson of Jonah is therefore also a lesson in what a synthetic training environment can do. Not only can it amend a recalcitrant subject, but it can redeem a failing state. Jonah exits the whale newly willing and newly able to save Nineveh, and Nineveh is saved. If like Jonah, the Sea Venture’s castaways were captives to their training environment, the reason was that like Nineveh, Jamestown cried out for rescue. To the “scandal” of the enterprise, the Virginia Company generally failed to stock its expeditions with the “gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers-up of trees’ roots” that Governor Smith asked for. According to John Stith (fl. 1656–1691), an early historian of the settlement, the 1609 convoy consisted of men “fitter to spoil or ruin a commonwealth than to raise or maintain one.”45 The Bermuda sojourn therefore supplied a means to discipline the castaways in necessary trades, transforming the “weake and unskilfull bodies” of “indigent younger brothers” (in later accounts, “lily-handed youths”) and other “lewed and lazy fellows” into capable “husbandmen” by gentle degrees, via low-barrier, low-stakes versions of the duties awaiting them at the colony proper. 46 To produce the hardy plantation folk sought at Jamestown, Bermuda provided both a vaccine and a boot camp: a milder expression of the colonial experience, suitable for conferring readiness for the real thing. Shakespeare’s play employs a similar organizing concept. The difference is that unlike the versions of the wreck told by Rich and his Virginia Company ilk, The Tempest does not hand off the task of social optimization to mysteries of providence.47 It features instead a visible agent in the magician, Prospero, and just as important, what it features of him is the devising, implementation, and supervision of a series of socially corrective scenarios. Other scholars have noticed the play’s refining impulse. Elizabeth Fowler has shown how The Tempest enjoins the rehelming and recrewing of a 45 Quoted in George Stillman Hillard, The Lives of Alexander Wilson and Captain John Smith, in vol. 2 of Jared Sparks, ed., The Library of American Biography (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Co., 1834), 338. 46 William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia, 1663, ed. Thomas Stewart (Norwalk, CT: William H. Smith, 1914), “Forward,” 7; John Smith, “Captain John Smith to the Treasurer of the Council of Virginia,” in The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter 1606–1609, ed. Philip Barbour (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, Cambridge University Press, 1969), 1:244; L. H. Sigourney, Pocahontas and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Bros., 1841), 7.3, 15; John Smith, Description of New England, in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:338. 47 The Virginia Company hastened to publish Robert Rich’s poem, The Lost Flocke Triumphant, and Silvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas with the aim of repairing damage done to the brand. See Glover and Smith, Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown, 215–226.

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“drifting ship of state” via a process of “ethical habituation.”48 Paul Cefalu has discussed Prospero’s prodigious exertion of “control” over the play’s expressions of “labor, movement, mastery and servitude” to effect “economic transformation.”49 And Patricia Akhimie has detailed the “careful process of cultivation” that Prospero employs to groom his fellow islanders to their plantation roles.50 But if the training work of the play is a recognizable feature, its execution is an oddly gamey business, orchestrated at distance but under Prospero’s design and close supervision. A hallmark of this business is the strong use made of the “curtain,” a term of art in gaming that designates a compulsory division, both physical and informational, of players from the controller or puppet master. In The Tempest, Prospero so zealously guards the curtain of his gameworld that to keep from telling his own child the “reason” for “raising” the “storm,” he charms her into unconsciousness (1.2.210). From nearly all the castaways, he keeps himself concealed, setting courses, obstacles, tasks, and traps via the invisible “toil” of his tamed spirit, Ariel (1.2.242). And to Ferdinand, the one member of the shipwrecked party to whom he does appear, he acts a part within his own gameworld, performing the role of jealous king to interpose an obstacle to the marriage he has just arranged, in order (he says) to strengthen the attachment. Only at the play’s culmination does he orchestrate his reveal, lifting the curtain and inviting the dazzled lords to “look in” on his hidden “cell” (5.1.167, 166). In the time limit arbitrarily fixed for his mission’s success, “’twixt” “two glasses” and “six” (1.2.240), The Tempest clocks Prospero’s strict enforcement, and final flamboyant casting-off, of a steeply asymmetrical knowledge environment. Similarly gamelike are the challenge environments Prospero sets up for each of the play’s three distinct character classes to occupy: the courtier-conspirators, represented by Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio, the lover-prince, a role particular to Ferdinand, and the servant-clowns, the lowest order of the three, to which Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban are relegated. Gonzalo and Adrian, characters for whom the island’s “grass” already looks “green,” stand apart from this regime as witnesses to the island’s transformative workings, apparently already won over to Prospero’s 48 Elizabeth Fowler, “The Ship Adrift,” in The Tempest and its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 37–40, at 40. 49 Paul Cefalu, “Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 85–119, at 109. 50 Patricia Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2018), 152.

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mindset (2.1.55). Their “amazement” is therefore freed to point up the “maze”like conditions in which the rest of the company struggle to make their way (5.1.104; 5.1.242). A quick summary of these conditions includes the log-lugging of the Prince, the troubled wandering of the guilty courtiers, and the similarly perambulatory humiliation of the servant-clowns as they sink in a standing pool, snag on “toothed briars” and flee invisible hounds (4.1.180). Stuck for most of the play’s duration on the treadmill of their distinctive gameworlds, these three character groups populate the three levels of Prospero’s training game.

Alienated Labor Ariel: You said our work should cease. (5.1.5)

Of course, the catch is that while Prospero’s island is administered and designed like a game, nobody knowingly plays it. Given the belatedness of the curtain’s drawing and the political self-interestedness of Prospero’s puppet mastery, its program of social reform comes across as a strategy of political enforcement. The play highlights its abrogation of player consent when Ferdinand and Miranda are discovered playing at chess, and the reassembled voyagers are told to await an account of the sport they had unknowingly undergone. The tallying of gains—to Ferdinand, “a wife”; to Prospero, “his Dukedom” (5.1.210, 211)—reveals the playground across which the rest of the characters have been maneuvered only retrospectively, once the score has been settled. One way of describing the ludic structure of the island, then, is that it puts play in the service of a non-play agenda, rendering it “drudgery from which one would strive to be freed.” And indeed, in keeping with this illiberal condition, the gameplay of The Tempest is manifestly not fun. By taking the form of repetitive motions that are forcibly and emptily undergone, the play portends the gamified indoctrination that Conway calls zombielike. The exemplary case is Ferdinand’s, surely the winner among The Tempest’s tiered players, but only because he is put through the motions of a victory that has been preselected for him. The sole challenge this character must clear, once he is made to think that he alone has survived the wreck, is to fall in love with Miranda. This task done, and with conventional comic alacrity, Prospero puts him to work piling logs as the price (he tells Ferdinand) for encroaching on his property to “spy” on and “usurp” him, but really as a “trial” (he tells the audience) to make the marriage stick, since he believes

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that hard-won gains will be less easily relinquished (1.2.456). As a made-up punishment for a non-existent crime, and as the pretense of a paternal obstacle where none exists, Ferdinand’s labor is qualified from the start, as free from hardship as the play’s opening shipwreck is free from “harm” (1.2.16).51 It is also elaborately, ostentatiously pointless. Caliban, who is tasked with carrying a whole “burden of wood” in contrast to Ferdinand’s single “log,” enters the play asserting that “[t]here’s wood enough within” (2.2, 1.1.376 s.d.). Whether or not his count is true, he is right inasmuch as a magical locale in which tables laden with cooked viands can be summoned in a “twink” does not require any earthly fuel-logs point to a workaday world that is simply not in force (4.1.43). Therefore to “remove/ some thousands” of them and “pile them up” must be accounted a wasted effort, especially when the company is set to depart the island the next day (3.1.10, 11). Yet precisely because it is “an activity connected with no material interest,” Ferdinand’s labor is intriguingly redolent of contemporary game design. His repetitious, time-consuming and valueless task-work is in essence grinding, an activity plateau that a player’s avatar must occupy until its progress bar fills and it can level up. Ferdinand anticipates the grind by first getting stuck in a meaningless chore and then by exiting this impasse only when an external authority (Prospero) deems it discharged. In dramatizing this process, the play raises the question that dogs all challenge-based games, namely, what is the point of simulated task-work? As one of the “incidental” game “properties” that Bogost says is exploited by gamification, grinding ought to bring to the “grey” world of business some form of amusement. Instead, writes Golumbia, players’ seemingly limitless willingness to participate in its “extremely boring process,” no less than their unsportsmanlike hacks for passing the grind onto a poorly paid surrogate or a bot, suggests that “many of the programs we call video games today much more nearly resemble work.”52 Golumbia’s conclusion, which is also his critique of first-person-shooter and role-playing games like World of Warcraft, is that their markedly “repetitive” and “mechanistic” gameworlds “do not merely resemble capitalist systems of domination,” they “directly instantiate them.”53 The adhesion of incidental game properties onto non-game activities demonstrates the pervasiveness of this inuring. Even something as prosaic as filling in a spreadsheet is now 51 The implications of this establishing condition are explored by Ben Jeffery in his dissertation, “An Image on Water: A Reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2020. 52 Golumbia, “Games without Play,” 179, 197. 53 Ibid., 190, 194.

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incentivized by the “snapping” sense of “algorithmic completeness” that office software builds into its “hierarchical tasks.”54 In Golumbia’s skeptical assessment, grinding is the form that economic oppression takes in order to pass for freedom. Yet the same “blurring” of “economics and games” can be a spark to uncanny recognitions too. As Patrick Jagoda writes, gamification can supply the means to “reflect upon and intervene […] in the systems that make up a regime of cognitive capitalism,” and even to point out the “structural, procedural, and experiential aspects of [its] failure.”55 This capacity is historically conditioned, of course. Gamif ication has become a resource of critique because a pervasively “networked world” has taken games for its common “interface.”56 But I want to transport back to the first decade of the seventeenth century Jagoda’s notion that gamification is the idiom of capitalist lifeworlds by suggesting that it might usher in their onset no less than it saturates their late-stage etiolation.57 I believe The Tempest, a drama based on the acclimatization to settler colonialism, is in Jagoda’s expansive sense a gamified work: a means for both constituting capitalism’s civilizing mission and for accosting the flaws in that nascent regime. Across the range of its character types, the play tests the automaticity of early colonial socio-economic attunement by shaping climates and striking moods that bring out the conditionedness of Prospero’s emancipating promise, “Thou shalt ere long be free” (5.1.87). Unsurprisingly, the most expansive mood struck in the course of the play’s gamified task-work belongs to Ferdinand, who levels up in the fourth act from suspected rival to tendered son-in-law (3.1.4). Once his grind of log-piling has been endured, if not in any clear sense completed, assets are dropped like manna upon him by the goddesses in Prospero’s masque, including “Honour,” “riches,” and “foison plenty” (4.1.106, 110). It is worth noticing that these are advantages won, not done; as in the gameworlds that Golumbia criticizes, Ferdinand’s “barns and garners” are not stocked because he acquired or applied any agricultural expertise.58 This accomplishment gap between Ferdinand’s hollow task-work and the status effects that come of it evokes the alienation of labor that is endemic to its gamed simulation, in which “diegetic” or “expressive acts” (running, fighting, digging for gold) bear little relation to “operator acts” (the manipulations of controller buttons, screens, 54 Ibid., 190, 191. 55 Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2, 40, no. 2 (2013): 113–144, at 116, 122, 126. 56 Ibid., 121. 57 Felski and Fraiman, introduction to “In the Mood,” vii. 58 See Golumbia, “Games without Play,” 192.

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or sticks), and therefore abet the mystification of the practical conditions of working life.59 Grinding replicates this game structure and intensifies it, masking dematerialized production as play. But Ferdinand’s advocacy for the virtues of “baseness” when “nobly undergone” further heightens the emptiness of his gesture. By baldly espousing that “labour” brings “delight” and “poor matters / point to rich ends,” he takes a lesson from the Virginia Company’s playbook, and then undercuts its teaching by his preposterously feeble acquaintance with the effort of settlement (3.1.2, 3, 3–4). For the colonists, after all, reward is said to alight in the usual way on those who genuinely work for it. In his promotional poem, this is the economic system Rich invites his readers to pray for: Where they unto their labour fall, As men that meane to thrive; Let’s pray that heaven blesse them all And keep them long alive.60

For Ferdinand, who is a character in a dramatic imitation of Bermuda’s ersatz Jamestown, genuine work is not on offer. Instead, it is his assertion of happy compliance with his simulated grind that unlocks “wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and peas”—the same “stores” that in Rich’s description of Virginia are to be cultivated on each settler’s “garden plot,” but that Ceres and Juno just sing into being (4.1.61).61 As crown prince and victor of Prospero’s gamified training environment, Ferdinand’s role is thus not really to “endure,” but merely to sample and then expressly to choose his “wooden slavery,” romanticizing something very like the labor of New World settlement as a “light” and joyous indenture before he is exempted from its “baseness.” The result is a scenario of outrageously naïve liberation. In terms reminiscent of Mulhall’s description of freedom—as a mood that is felt only when an immersion in “present arrangements” effaces the many possibilities for living otherwise—Ferdinand embraces his captivity as superior to emancipation: All corners o’th’earth Let liberty make use of; space enough Have I in such a prison. (1.2.492–494) 59 This terminology is Alexander Galloway’s in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 25. 60 Rich, Lost Flocke Triumphant, sig. B2r. 61 Ibid., sig. B3r.

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Ensconced in log-play that is an absurd reduction of the lifeworld it imitates, Ferdinand enjoys rewards that reality does not offer. Safe from the New World’s dismal conditions, he is free to misunderstand how bondage works. The play’s less successful character groups suffer their mastery and rehabilitation with none of Ferdinand’s good cheer. Antonio, Sebastian, and Alonso, the “three men of sin” who are the play’s characters in strongest need of reform, are forced into a biblical grind (3.3.53). Yanked off their primrose paths to dalliance by the opening shipwreck, they are led by Ariel across the island’s steep and thorny “forth-rights and meanders” to the point of collapse; Gonzalo bears witness to this exertion: “By’r larkin, I can go no further, sir;/ My old bones ache: here’s a maze trod indeed” (3.1.3, 3.1.1–2). Such outward conformity to the hard and “narrow way” of a righteous life works no inward repentance, however (Matt 7:13 KJV). At every instance that their “frantic” motions stop (5.1.66 s.d.), Antonio takes the occasion to incite Sebastian to regicide/fratricide, and even boasts of his insensibility to any compunction on this score: I feel not This deity in my bosom: twenty consciences, That stand ’twixt me and Milan, candied be they And melt ere they molest! (2.1.277–230)

Amid such professed and unwavering obduracy, the gamelike conditioning of the middle tier of players is revised into a strategy of containment, in the form of the brain fog that Prospero imposes on its members: “mine enemies are all knit up / In their distractions; they now are in my power” (3.3.90). Only by zombification, it seems, can Prospero ensure the safety of his civic training ground and preserve the guilty Alonso from his younger brother’s brandished sword. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that Antonio and Sebastian never confess anything of the kind, Prospero then takes this state of mental “affliction” as penitence achieved: “they being penitent,/ The sole drift of my purpose doth extend/ Not a frown further” (5.1.12, 33). Desolated by the apparent loss of his son, Alonso alone offers to plead for “forgiveness,” but this gesture cannot relieve the dissonance struck by his companions’ dissimilar mood (5.1.198). The state of completion Prospero confers upon such an uneven machination of remorse suggests that here again, only more so, empty motions, unconsentingly gone through, stand in for the fulfillment of Prospero’s “project” (5.1.1). And therefore here again, only more so, the gamelike scheme

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itself seems held up to question. The lack of reforming efficacy reflects not just on Prospero’s island, but also on the “brave new world” for which the island provides attunement. As “prodigal and riotous younger brothers,” Antonio and Sebastian are excellent representatives of the louche type for which Virginia was notorious, as its mid-seventeenth-century governor William Berkeley admits: “none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives” were said to “go thither.”62 However, Berkeley is quick to add that such folk do not remain long in so dissipated a mood. Altogether in the vein of the Gospel-like paces that Antonio, Sebastian, and Alonso are put through, he describes a Virginia that draws directly from Matthew’s Parable of the Workers to inculcate a Weberian ethos of labor-as-godliness: we find there [on our Plantations] that if we will be provident and industrious for a year or two, we may provide for our Posterity for many Ages; the manifest knowledge of this makes men industrious and vigilant with us, who elsewhere having no Vineyards to dresse, stood idle in the Market-place till the eleventh hour.63

To sustain this vision of a place whose inhabitation “quickens our industry, and bridles our intemperance,” younger brothers of the most idle and “corruptest” variety are necessary to Virginia’s messaging. In The Tempest, however, this “bridl[ing]” fails outrageously.64 The prospect of “foison plenty” never takes fire for Antonio and Sebastian. When the “subtle, tender and delicate temperance” of the isle is raised to their notice as an excelling climate, ideal for the cultivation and redemption of wastrel aristocrats, it is swiftly reduced by Antonio to a bawdy joke: “Temperance was a delicate wench” (2.1.45, 46). By their sarcastic contradiction of the Stimmung, or being-in-the-world, that is orchestrated for them, both men demonstrate that the island’s capacity for social transformation is vulnerable to their withheld consent to act as players within it. Skeptics through and through, they exploit the world’s “capacity to answer to our conceptions” by countering the play’s “majestic vision” with their own view of a stinking patch of “tawny” ground (4.1.118, 2.1.56).65 For Sebastian and Antonio, Prospero’s gamification is surprisingly evocative of Bogost’s “bullshit.” 62 n>Berkeley, Discourse and View of Virginia, “Forward,” 3. Berkeley serves as governor from 1641 to 1652 and from 1660 to his death in 1677. 63 Ibid., 3–4. 64 Ibid. 65 Mulhall, “Can There Be an Epistemology of Moods?” 208.

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The f inal tier of the island’s players seems at a glance to harmonize more fully with Prospero’s reforming intent.66 Compared to Ferdinand’s witless embrace of toil, and Antonio and Sebastian’s skeptical resistance to younger-brother disciplining, Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano appear to be successfully transformed by the island, their intemperance decisively cured. This impression is partly the result of the free play that the three men seem to exercise when they plan to kill Prospero and rule the island as king and viceroys. It is also the effect of their failure to carry out that plan. Distracted first by the music of an invisible drum, and then by “trumpery” hung out on a clothesline, these men are tripped up by their own incompetence while carrying out a scheme of their own making (4.1.186). Prospero goes to considerable trouble to point out their independence from his stated project. As if to prove his uninvolvement and keep the blame for their humiliation squarely on their own shoulders, he brings to a sudden halt the dance of Nymphs and Reapers when he remembers that “[t]he minute of their plot/ is almost come” (139, 166, 141–142). Yet this framing of the servant-monsters as set free to fail is not borne out. Ariel describes “charming” the men’s “ears” with his “tabor” so that they cannot help but follow “calf-like” through “thorns” and into the “filthy-mantled pool” outside Prospero’s cell, a scenario that is pretty much identical to the biblical grind of the second tier of players, only more painful and more degrading (4.1.178, 175, 178, 179, 180, 182). It is by seeming to add some slack to the island’s gameplay, and by seeming to stand back as the servant-monsters hang themselves with it, that Prospero makes himself look justified when he finally pulls the line taut. The result is the exclusion of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo from the assembly of “precious winners” that typically concludes a romance (The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.165). Contra Gonzalo’s closing wish to “set down/ With gold on lasting pillars” that “all” have been restored to themselves, the three serving men are denied this self-possession and instead end the play either “marked” by their livery “badges” or “own[ed]” (5.1.208, 267, 275). As Patricia Akhimie argues, this outcome is not a failure of Prospero’s experiment, but a feature. If to lie above the reach of “improvement” is the privilege of the play’s aristocrats, to lie beneath it leaves Caliban, and those consigned to his category, “an uncultivatable underclass” suitable only for “subhuman” forms of “labor.”67 The regimen of pinches to which he is subject, and that bruise his skin to essentialize his difference, are 66 Berkeley, Discourse and a View of Virginia, “Forward,” 3. 67 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 152.

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in her account a systemic form of “physical and epistemological injury” designed to produce “abjection.”68 For this last class of player, then, the Jamestown-like simulations of The Tempest are not designed to cultivate fitness for a plantation economy, but rather to prove unfitness for any other but slavery’s brutal form of life. This last scenario demands stark reckonings. In light of Golumbia’s argument that games instantiate “capitalist systems of domination,” Prospero’s gamified island looks complicit in their most vicious practice, and effectual too. In 1619, ten years after the Sea Venture’s wreck, some twenty Africans were disembarked in the Chesapeake region and “bought for victualle,” an alteration to the population that is recorded in the region’s census and thereby marks the official start of America’s “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery.69 This is not to say that The Tempest recruited its audience to take part in Virginia’s slave-based economy. But limiting the play’s effects to so literal a concept of influence is a tack that is certain to ignore the ways that the theatre’s “civilizing” form of play can habituate its spectators to the “systems that make up a regime of cognitive capitalism” and white supremacy. Even a work that brings out the “structural, procedural, and experiential aspects” of its “failure” is not certain to throw a wrench into the inculcation of this regime. The fact that over the long production history of the play, the predetermination of Ferdinand’s success, the exemption of Sebastian and Antonio from their failed reformation, and the fallacy of Caliban’s free play have been readily assimilated to a comic climate would seem to indicate how acculturated audiences have become to the checkered freedom that Prospero orchestrates. What can be said for The Tempest, however, is that it is singularly interested in exposing its own process of attunement. What the audience feels is not left to linger in the background like “sound or weather.” Mood is forced into the open when Prospero closes the play by calling for his own release: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (epil.19–20). This plea to be reprieved from the theatre’s playground paints in a harsh light the artificial environment that the audience hedges in. In one fell swoop, the competing realities that make up The Tempest’s gamed environments are disclosed as a system of constraint. This revelation would seem to be a cause for skepticism. Yet by endowing the audience’s approbation with the capacity to revoke all present arrangements, the play makes its 68 Ibid. 69 Golumbia, “Games without Play,” 194; John Rolfe to Edwyn Sandys, 1619/1620, in Slavery and Emancipation, ed. Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 13.

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island regime uncanny. According to the liberatory mechanics of Prospero’s epilogue, it isn’t only the tread-milled lifeworlds of nascent capitalism, but also the pleasure of their dispelling that the play rehearses, training theatregoers to practice in safety the means to dramatic, unpredicted transformation.

Works Cited Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2018. Alfano, Veronica, and Andrew M. Stauffer. Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Anderson, Ben. “Neoliberal Affects.” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6 (2016): 734–753. Bencivenga, Ermanno. “Play and Games: Advice for Urban Gaming Simulators.” Common Knowledge 21, no. 3 (2015): 379–389. Berkeley, William. A Discourse and View of Virginia, ed. Thomas Stewart. Norwalk, CT: William H. Smith, 1914. Bogost, Ian. “Gamif ication is Bullshit.” Transcribed podcast. Atlantic, 9 August  2011. https://w w w.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/ gamification-is-bullshit/243338/ Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Cefalu, Paul. “Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy.” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 85–119. Conway, Steven. “Zombification?: Gamification, Motivation, and the User.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (2014): 129–141. Deterding, Sebastian, Rilla Khaled, Lennart E. Nacke, and Dan Dixon. “Gamification: Toward a Definition.” Paper presented at CHI 2011, Vancouver, BC. Accessed April 2021. http://gamification-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/02Deterding-Khaled-Nacke-Dixon.pdf. Fiedler, Leslie. The Stranger in Shakespeare. New York: Stein and Day, 1972. Felski, Rita, and Susan Fraiman. Introduction to “In the Mood.” Special issue, New Literary History 43, no. 3 (2012): v–xii. Flatley, Jonathan. “How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made.” New Literary History 43, no 3 (2012): 503–525. Fowler, Elizabeth. “The Ship Adrift.” In The Tempest and its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 37–40. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

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Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Glover, Lorri, and Daniel Blake Smith. The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2008. Golumbia, David. “Games without Play.” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 179–204. Gumbrecht, Hans. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature. Translated by Erik Butler. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Hollis, Gavin. The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge, 1998. Jagoda, Patrick. “Gamif ication and Other Forms of Play.” boundary 2 40, no. 2 (2013): 113–144. Jeffery, Ben. “An Image on Water: A Reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2020. Kareem, Sarah. “Flimsy Materials, or What the Eighteenth Century Can Teach Us about Twenty-First Century Worlding.” Critical Inquiry 42 (2016): 374–394. Knight, G. Wilson. “Caliban as a Red Man.” In Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter, 205–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. LaPierre, James. “Virtual Reality in Corporate Training,” Filament Games, last modif ied 9 September 2020, n.p., https://www.f ilamentgames.com/blog/ virtual-reality-corporate-training/ Lenoir, Timothy, and Luke Caldwell, eds. The Military-Entertainment Complex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Magelssen, Scott. Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Mulhall, Steven. “Can There Be an Epistemology of Moods?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 41 (1996): 191–210. Murray, Timothy. The Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Nixon, Rob. “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (1987): 557–578. Otto, Peter. Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Radonyi, Peter, and Elyssebeth Leigh. “Assessment and Evaluation of Learning via Simulation.” In Intersections in Simulation and Gaming: 21st Annual Simulation

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Technology and Training Conference, 2016, edited by Anjum Naweed, Marcin Wardaszko, Elyssebeth Leigh, and Sebastiaan Meijer, 116–133. Cham: Springer, 2018. Rich, Richard. The Lost Flocke Triumphant. London, 1610. Rolfe, John. Letter to Edwyn Sandys, 1619/1620, in Slavery and Emancipation. Edited by Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Sigourney, L. H. Pocahontas and Other Poems. New York: Harper & Bros, 1841. Smith, John. “Captain John Smith to the Treasurer of the Council of Virginia.” In The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter 1606–1609, vol. 1, edited by Philip Barbour. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, Cambridge University Press, 1969. –––. Description of New England. In The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, vol. 1, edited by Philip Barbour. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. –––. The Description of Virginia by Captain John Smith. In Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia, and Admiral of New England, 1580–1631, pt. 2, edited by Edward Arber, revised by A. G. Bradley. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910. Sparks, Jared, ed. The Library of American Biography. Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Co, 1834. Strachey, William. A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. In A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives; Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas, edited by Louis B. Wright. Charlottesville: Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, University Press of Virginia, 1964. United States Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. Virtual Reality and Technologies for Combat Simulation. Washington, DC: Office of Technology Assessment, 1994. Winston, Jackie. “From Battlezone to America’s Army.” Preface to Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-Entertainment Complex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, n.p. Woodcock, Jamie, and Mark R. Johnson. “Gamification: What It Is, and How to Fight It.” Sociological Review 66, no. 3 (2018): 542–558. Woodward, Hobson. The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” New York: Viking, 2009.

About the Author Ellen MacKay is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Performance Theory, Theatre

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Historiography, Feminism, and Digital Studies. She is the author of Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2011), director of the Folger-Luminary iPad app of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, head scholar of the Folger-NEH Teaching Shakespeare Institute, and (until recently) co-editor of Modern Philology. She is working on a book about the liquid audiences in early modern England, and she directs a digital project, Beshrew Me!, that highlights the techniques of “taming” practiced in common culture’s built environments.

9. Videogames and Hamlet Experiencing Tragic Choice and Consequences Rebecca Bushnell Abstract This chapter argues that videogames help us to see tragedy as a form of serious play, engaging the dynamics of choice and consequences in developing character and plot. It represents Hamlet as a gamelike play in the context of its adaptation into videogames, including Ryan North’s “To Be or Not to Be”: A Chooseable-Path Adventure; Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMPORG Features, Shaders and Product Placement; Robin Johnson’s The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (2003); and Elsinore (2019). Often now viewed as a paradigmatic early modern tragedy, it is also a powerful example of how games and tragic theatre can inform each other. Keywords: videogames; Hamlet; tragedy; choice; agency

In the videogame called The Stanley Parable, the player inhabits an avatar named Stanley, who punches computer buttons all day.1 A soothing voice with a British accent begins the game with a past-tense narration, telling the player that one day Stanley found himself unaccountably alone. The player starts by moving in concert with the narration, and Stanley emerges from his office to seek his absent colleagues, and thus embarks on an adventure, the nature of which will depend on the player’s choices along the way. The narrator leads the player early on to a room where the player must choose which door Stanley enters, the left or the right. The narrator says Stanley entered the left one, but the player can also go in the right door, in effect disobeying the narrator. If the player chooses the left door and conforms 1

The Stanley Parable (PC version), Galactic Café, 2013.

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with the narration throughout the short story, Stanley can escape the office building and its “mind-control machine,” and the player will be told Stanley is “free” and that he has achieved happiness. If the player disobeys the narrator at any point, those choices can lead to many different endings, where, for example, Stanley might die, stay in a broom closet, get lost in an infinite loop, go mad, or even enter another game.2 The Stanley Parable thus not only parodies the mechanisms of choice that underlie most videogames but also exposes a fundamental tension at the heart of tragic theatre: the conflict between a narrative’s drive towards a satisfying conclusion and its need to imply that characters are free to make choices, however terrible. The Stanley Parable teaches the player that making the choices that follow the narration may seem to “free” you but only because you have conformed with the program; disobedience means death or never finding your way to the end. In this, I believe that games of consequential choice like those The Stanley Parable parodies can trace their origins to theatre that evokes tragic necessity; in so doing, however, they also expose the assumptions and mechanisms underlying the construction of character and plot in this kind of theatre. This essay starts from the premise that in their many versions enacted tragedies have established patterns for representing and experiencing choice and consequence in different media, and in this case, in the medium of the videogame.3 Proceeding from there, I argue in turn that videogames can offer insight into the workings of tragic action in early modern theatre, and especially Hamlet, by having us consider these early plays as both games and plots. 4 This approach obviously involves a kind of critical reading that 2 See, for example, this website that shows the different endings: James Fenner, “The Stanley Parable Endings Guide: The Definitive Ending Tree,” Guardian Liberty Voice, 27 October 2013, https://guardianlv.com/2013/10/the-stanley-parable-endings-guide-the-definitive-ending-tree/ (accessed 10 May 2016). 3 Some of the material in this essay has appeared previously in my book, Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): it appears with permission of the press. It also harks back to issues I was puzzling out in my very first book, Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 4 There has not been a significant amount of scholarship on the connection between videogames and theatre, while one would hope that situation is now changing: for example, there were workshops on “videogames and theatre” at meetings of the American Society for Theatre Research in 2016 and 2017. The major exception to this is Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River: Addison Wesley/Pearson Education, 2014); however, Laurel’s book is mostly focused on applying ideas from theatre (including Aristotelian concepts) to the design of the “human-computer interaction.” See also Dan Begin, “BrainExplode! Audiences and Agency through the Appropriation of Videogame Structures,” in The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual,

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works both backward and forward in time. It disrupts a critical narrative of historicism and linear time by suggesting that when story-based videogames adapt generic formulas derived from a long theatrical tradition, they also uncover structures of conflict and contingency that were always there and that surface in performance. The essay’s approach builds on the argument offered in my study Tragic Time in Drama, Film and Videogames: The Future in the Instant, which develops an analysis of the working of tragic action in time, weaving among Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and their adaptations, time-travel films, and videogames. There I make the general case for reading tragedy as a form of serious play, engaging the dynamics of choice and consequences for the development of character and plot. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on Hamlet as a gamelike play in the context of its adaptation into videogames, including Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be (2015, adapted from his 2013 novel), Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement (2010), Robin Johnson’s The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (2003), and Elsinore (2019). If for many people, Hamlet has become the paradigmatic early modern tragedy as viewed from the standpoint of modernity, it can thus become a powerful example of how games and tragic theatre can inform each other.

Videogames and Theatre In making claims for the intersection of videogames and tragic theatre, I should first clarify what kind of games I mean: narrative games in which Toward the Real, ed. Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan, and Néill O’Dwyer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 140–155. When it comes to videogames and Shakespeare, there has been a small but significant group of essays: Peter S. Donaldson, “Game Space/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor’s Titus,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 457–477; Katherine Rowe, “Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 58–67; Gina Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games,” in “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble, special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127; Laurie Osborne, “iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 48–57; Matthew Harrison and Michael Lutz, “South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, ed. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 23–40, and Geoffrey Way’s essay in this volume. The last two deal specifically with several of the videogames discussed in this essay, emphasizing issues involved with adaptation and literary criticism. Bloom also provides a useful summary of the considerable amount of scholarship to date on games in general and early modern theatre (126), and I am indebted to her and Erika Lin for their advice on this subject.

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the player is an actor, controlling the actions of an avatar and in this way producing a performance. When they involve graphical movement (often in three dimensions), they are not purely texts, although they may resemble written hypertexts in their narrative branching. They may then look like films at times, but they differ significantly from films because they are interactive. They are truly games, and the gameplay is central to their function. Their hybrid nature as narratives and games, or what some have called “ludonarratives,”5 generates a conflict like that Richard Schechner sees in participatory theatre between “narrative power and the tensions of a sporting match.”6 Videogames may lack live bodies to enact the story, but they resemble theatre when the avatar responds to the player’s commands and interacts with the game environment in what feels like real time. In such videogames the player is simultaneously a playwright, a director, a character, an actor bringing the character to life, and a spectator who observes the action unfolding. Some critics might want to argue that this significant interactivity differentiates videogames from theatre, which more formally separates the functions of author, actor, character, and audience. But as other essays in this volume have suggested, theatrical performance can often blur those boundaries, and videogames just take this kind of interactivity to the next stage. Like most plays, videogames are “scripted,” insofar as they are complex programs and not random assemblages of data. However, because they are meant to be games before anything else, videogames always embed the possibility for multiple versions to unfold as a result of the player’s actions. With multiple versions latent in the program, each iteration of the game may differ substantially from the next one. In some games, those choices might be “modular”7: that is, open to different versions of individual episodes or scenes affecting the process of playing, although the story will always end the same way. In other games, however, the player’s actions can significantly change the outcome. Further, whereas conventional theatre, tragic or otherwise, does not allow a “replay” when a character blunders, in most videogames at key points an erring player may try again with a knowledge of what the future brings. As The Stanley Parable demonstrates so brilliantly, videogames thus vividly reveal the workings of the machine of narrative necessity. 5 Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (New York: Vintage, 2010), 36–38. 6 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 53. 7 Schechner uses this word in describing variations in participatory theatre (53).

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The Wolf Among Us as Tragic Theatre To further clarify how a story-based games can engage with the dynamics of tragic necessity and possibility, I will offer a brief analysis of the videogame The Wolf Among Us, which echoes the conventions of early modern theatre of revenge while demonstrating the workings of choice and consequences within a defined story arc. Developed by Tell-Tale Games in 2014, The Wolf Among Us plays out a film noir–like narrative enacted in a half-real, halffantasy world called Fabletown, mapped onto a decaying but recognizable New York City inhabited by animals who can talk and people who can morph into fabled monsters.8 In this gameworld the city sheriff Bigby, a version of the “Big Bad Wolf,” pursues a mission to solve a mystery of the murders of two women and eliminate the “Crooked Man,” the source of the city’s corruption. While seeking justice in this dysfunctional society of misfits, Bigby grapples with his own violent or literally “wolf-like” nature. In this context, the player must make decisions about how he or she will act through Bigby, whether in the spirit of combat or conciliation. Through the five episodes of The Wolf Among Us, the player must constantly make dialogue and action decisions to guide Bigby’s interaction with the other non-player-controlled characters (NPC’s) programmed to respond to the player’s choices. As these choices move the game forward they also shape Bigby’s moral character and relationships. The overall ending of the game is predetermined, insofar as if you play through to the end, solving puzzles and overcoming your antagonists, Bigby will always survive and capture the Crooked Man. The cumulative power of all these decisions surfaces at the conclusion, when the game’s characters gather as a community to consider the punishment of the Crooked Man: will they attempt some sort of judgment by the rule of law, or will it be done in the spirit of mob violence and revenge? The player can then choose whether to have Bigby kill the Crooked Man or send him to prison for life.9 At specific moments in The Wolf Among Us, the player can also replay events, while at other points choices are irreversible; in both cases, actions have consequences for the shaping of characters and episodes. When Bigby fails to get the necessary information or to defeat his opponent in a fight, you must repeat moves for the game to continue. For example, in an early 8 The Wolf Among Us, Playstation 3, Tell-Tale Games, 2014. 9 A current YouTube video records the three ways of dealing with the Crooked Man in The Wolf Among Us: GameQubes, “The Wolf Among Us—All Endings,” YouTube, 9 July 2014, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=N8jHQKMwOZ0&ab_channel=GameQubes (accessed 4 March 2017).

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episode, Bigby has to fight a troll engagingly named Grendel. Because of my incompetence, when I played the game Bigby died multiple times, but each time the game automatically reset to let me try again. So Bigby died, and died again, until I learned how to defeat this antagonist. However, after Bigby finally overcame Grendel, I had to choose quickly between Bigby’s tearing off the troll’s arm or letting him go. In fear and frustration, I rashly tore off Grendel’s arm, but then I was not permitted to redo that move. For the rest of the game Grendel held that aggression against Bigby. In this game, even minor decisions or actions can thus shape the evolution of Bigby’s character as a violent enforcer of justice or rational negotiator. When choosing between a diplomatic or violent response to a threat or situation, the player often cannot tell if the game can progress without Bigby’s becoming more aggressive. For example, when Bigby is interrogating a suspect, he can either offer water or hit him, without knowing what will produce the needed answer. While such choices do not ultimately impact the ending, they do influence how other members of the Fabletown community treat Bigby. When trying to “be” Bigby, I took the non-violent route whenever I could, except when I had to defend Bigby from attack, and it appeared that I had no alternative. When I had Bigby tear off Grendel’s arm rather than letting him go, it was certainly not a rational decision. To my surprise, in that instant the “wolf” in me, and thus the wolf in Bigby (the “Big Bad Wolf”), came out. This rashness affected how the other characters present at that encounter interacted with Bigby for the rest of the game (the game often informs the player that this or that character will “remember that”). In A Wolf Among Us, sometimes the player has no choice, if the story is to go on, and this does not control the development of the character at all. One must gain the necessary information to solve the mystery, and one must f ight, because that is either what the game developers think the player expects from the game or what such a revenge story demands. While an avatar’s character may first be mapped according to the player’s values and abilities, the figure may thus take on a life of its own. Further, even where there are choices, the player’s own interests in the game may be contradictory, affecting the gameplay accordingly. In writing about choice in games, Peter Mawhorter and his co-authors lay out how players might bring different needs to a game and thus choose accordingly, including “diegetic motives” (e.g. achieving a goal), “semi-diegetic motives” (e.g. sympathy for a character), and “extradiegetic motives” (e.g. playing for an audience).10 10 Peter Mawhorter, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Arnav Jhala, “Towards a Theory of Choice Poetics,” Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital

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Many games offer incentives in the form of awards, points, or trophies for actions that do not necessarily have anything to do with the story or its moral concerns. It may also be that the player may not want to have an avatar mirror him or herself, if experimenting with another identity and just looking to feel what it is like to be a “wolf.” In videogames the construction of an avatar’s moral character may thus be complexly determined by the tension between the player’s “projected identity” and performance and the game’s inherent structure of demands, rewards, and challenges.11 The player must constantly make choices at critical moments in time, choices that are “free” while also constrained by the options the game offers and by the game’s need to move a narrative forward. In this way, videogames reveal how dramatic character and consequences are constructed through choice in real time, when the player participates in a process in which moral character explicitly emerges from decision-making and pathways to the end change. Sometimes choice is deliberative, but sometimes the player is not fully in control, whether acting rashly or needing to conform with the narrative. Through the interaction of player and game, videogames thus complicate the notion of the control of moral choice and action itself. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, a seminal study of what was still a new medium in 1998, Janet Murray argues that in videogames “the interactor is the author of a particular performance within an electronic story system, or the architect of a particular part of the virtual world, but we must distinguish this derivative authorship from the originating authorship of the system itself […] This is not authorship but agency.”12 Videogames seem to grant a player significant “authorship” through the ability to determine a course of action at selected moments, affecting the overall outcome or at least changing its dynamics. However, at the same time, to “win” the player must proceed within the program’s structure.13 Games like A Wolf Among Us thus expose a familiar tension in tragic narrative between the experience of agency and the demands of storytelling. Jean-Pierre Vernant argues that tragedy and a sense of “tragic responsibility” emerged in ancient Greece “at a point when, in Games, 3–7 April, 2014, Fort Lauderdale, FL, n.p., http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_19. pdf (accessed 23 April 2021). 11 On “projected identity” see James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chap. 3. 12 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 153. 13 See Toby Smethurst and Stef Craps, “Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game,” Games and Culture 10, no. 3 (2015): 269–290.

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human action, a place is given to internal debate on the part of the subject, to intention and premeditation, but when this human action has still not acquired enough consistency and autonomy to be entirely self-sufficient.”14 Narrative videogames like A Wolf Among Us let us experience exactly that kind of duality as a story unfolds as a state of dynamic uncertainty.

Hamlet as a Game What happens if one comes to Hamlet after playing a videogame like A Wolf Among Us? One might first notice just how much games feature in this play. Hamlet himself is the consummate player, the actor who mimes his own madness, who deploys theatre as a cat-and-mouse game with Claudius, and who spars with his antagonists, either verbally with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius or physically with Laertes. Joseph W. Meeker refers to this as “Hamlet’s gamesmanship,” where “Hamlet tries at every opportunity to convert actions into words, violence into argument, murder into games.”15 In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard cleverly pulled out these aspects of gaming in Hamlet by inventing the coin toss the two characters play incessantly, wondering as they do whether they are operating “within un-, sub- or supernatural forces.”16 As Roger Caillois reminds us, such games are partially defined by conditions of uncertainty, when we never really know if the coin will come up heads or tails.17 While a traditional view of Hamlet focuses on the outcome as Hamlet’s assenting to his destiny to avenge his father’s death and accept his own, a focus on gaming in Hamlet refracted through videogaming can make us look again at how Hamlet might be operating in a more open rather than closed world, defined by uncertainty rather than fatality.18 14 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 21. 15 Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Scribner, 1972), 74–75. 16 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 17. 17 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001; translated from Les jeux at les hommes, 1958), 9–10. Also see Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 18 See my Tragic Time, chap. 2, for further discussion of Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. For a brilliant discussion of gaming, wagering, and Hamlet, see also Shankar Raman, “Interrupted Games Interrupted Games: Pascal, Hamlet, Probability,” in “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble, special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 179–207.

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Hamlet is a play obsessed with the process of choosing to act—or not—in time. It holds up to the light what happens when a character hesitates to act in a crisis; or acts rashly and make a mistake; or chooses not to choose, submitting to an idea of destiny. The play moves forward strangely through dilated scenes, stops and starts, or what Claudius calls its countless “abatements and delays” (4.7.118).19 In a typical revenge tragedy, the protagonist does delay acting, but only because he is looking for just the right moment to achieve that revenge (and of course if he did not delay, it would be a very short play). Hamlet seems to either miss the right moment, for example, failing to kill Claudius while he is praying, or to just misfire, when he rashly stabs Polonius. As Frank Kermode has put it simply, if Hamlet himself is a player and an actor, “sometimes the play makes him a bad one.”20 Where the choice to act is thus delayed, or done in error, the construction of tragic character through choice is not subject to order or control. As I have suggested, a videogame like The Wolf Among Us foregrounds an ongoing, interactive process for character-building in the context of a revenge drama: each choice that the player makes for the character, whether deliberate or not, shapes that character, and in turn, that protagonist’s interaction with the NPC’s in the story. When Hamlet defers choosing to act, he disrupts that kind of process. His not killing Claudius while he is praying defers the question of what or who Hamlet is, and Hamlet himself cannot explain his own delay, as he confesses: “I do not know/ Why yet I live to say, this thing’s to do,/ Sith I have cause, and will and strength, and means/ To do’t” (4.4 42–45). His mistaken killing of Polonius also leaves the question open—who is he? Does his rash stabbing of Polonius make him a murderer? Is that really “Hamlet” as he commits a murder that is both intentional and unintentional? Indeed, later Hamlet says to Laertes that it was not “Hamlet” who killed Polonius: “Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet./ If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,/ And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes/ Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it” (5.2.211–214). Hamlet himself thus separates himself, his “character,” from that action, splitting open the idea of character itself, and reducing it to a state of radical contingency or uncertainty. 19 All citations from Hamlet unless otherwise noted are from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). 20 Frank Kermode, introduction to Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1139. See also James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin, “Chronos, Kairos, Aion: Failures of Decorum, Right-Timing and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 165–186.

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Rethinking the tragic problem of choosing through the lens of gaming not only lets us thus see how the notion of a fixed character can be derailed, but it also makes us ask how such choices are made, if they are not solely driven by the impulses of some pre-existing deep-seated self. Are we to understand that the tragic protagonist’s choices are instead predetermined by a power that human beings have variously called the gods, providence, fate, or destiny, a power identified with the shape of the story as it has always been told? If we recall Murray’s distinction between authorship and agency in videogames, to what extent do we imagine that the protagonist is a free agent when choosing in a story that has already been written? In his study of Hamlet, Eric Levy observes that “Hamlet himself is intimately associated with hypothetical alternatives,” with wishing and wondering and deferring, persisting in the “subjunctive mood.”21 Like his rewriting Claudius’s commission, the moment when Hamlet “defies augury” both opens up and closes off the possibilities that the story could end differently. There would, Hamlet imagines, be many alternative paths to the end, yet, however or whenever, he says, “it will come” (5.2.200). Wylie Sypher has also noted that Hamlet’s end comes in a game, the fencing match with Laertes, a fiction of combat which turns out to be real combat, while of course, it is also a part of a play.22 It is a game that appears to be one of skill, matching two combatants, but it also is a murder plot, entailing Claudius’s back-up plan to poison Hamlet if the envenomed foil does not work. The structure of a game implies that within the rules of the game, the outcome is open-ended, depending only on skill and perhaps chance. But this match is also a plot composed by Claudius and Laertes. Here open-ended gameplay thus collides with narrative purpose. In that collision, the rules are broken, the game turns deadly, and Claudius’s plot is foiled indeed. While this catastrophe is usually understood to reaffirm that “rashness” or “indiscretion” serves the ends of “divinity” when “our deep plots do fall” (5.2.7–10), the rapidity and the chaos of the scene reinforce the sense that, for that single moment, any outcome seems possible: as Shankar Raman observes, then “[n]o matter what the odds or initial expectations, the future refuses to be de-futurized, chance has its word.”23 21 Eric P. Levy, Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2008), 167–168. 22 Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), chap. 4. Sypher comments on the play’s “as if ” nature: with improvisation and “taking the moment as it comes, […] [Hamlet] finds that fulfillment and freedom arise not by designing the future or even understanding the past, but instead, by conceding to the surprising possibilities that open from the present” (89). 23 Raman, 202.

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Hamlet Games The link made here between Hamlet and videogames does not have to remain speculative, for over the past two decades the play itself has been adapted into several videogames that develop different dimensions of character and consequences. Geoffrey Way has noted that Shakespeare plays have not generated as many videogames as one might expect. He attributes this lack of games based on the plays to the challenges of making a Shakespeare-based game that operates well both as a videogame and as a recognizably Shakespearean experience.24 How open to variation should a canonical play like Hamlet be? Perhaps quite a lot, for as Margaret J. Kidnie has reminded us, “precisely what constitutes authentic Shakespeare is a question that can never finally be resolved since there is no a priori category that texts or staging are a production of.”25 In commenting on the difference between interactive fiction and tragedy, Mark Bernstein and Diana Greco have asserted that “if you make Hamlet a game, it has to be rigged so that actions taken by a reasonable and sane reader-protagonist—not to mention a wildly inventive one—do not derail the train of events that must ensure this is to be Hamlet.”26 But, as Laurie Osborne rejoins, this assessment assumes a kind of stability for the text and plot of Hamlet that has been shown not to exist.27 If we move from a focus on Hamlet seen as a game, what does it mean in turn to transform Hamlet into a game? The best-known early Hamlet digital game, Hamlet: A Murder Mystery, produced in 1997 in connection with Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play, sets the course for gaming Hamlet.28 An anonymous account on “mobygames” describes it as follows: 24 See Way’s essay in this volume. See also Harrison and Lutz, on how “Hamlet games present worlds that promise action in our limited sphere but which, in a hypermediate shift, continually reveal the occasions that inform against us” (30). On the relative lack of scholarship on the subject, see Bloom, 114. 25 Margaret J. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 9. 26 Mark Bernstein and Diana Greco, “Card Shark and Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004),167–182, at 178. 27 Osborne, 52. 28 Hamlet: A Murder Mystery, EMME Interactive, Castlerock Entertainment, 1997. Unfortunately, today it is now almost impossible to f ind this game, and so I was not able to play it myself. However, I have managed to derive a sense of the game from online reviews and players’ reports. Harrison and Lutz discuss a much earlier version, Charles Crayne’s Castle Elsinore (1983). They also discuss Tomas Pudlo’s Gamlet (2004).

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As young Hamlet, you must avenge the death of your father and become the new King of Denmark. You enter the court of Elsinore Palace to find clues about the mastermind that is behind the corruption in Denmark. Your task is to kill the murderer but to prevent the deaths of innocents. That provides an interesting take on the original play giving the ability to change the course of events and save some important characters. That includes actually killing rats instead of Polonius and saving Ophelia from madness and ultimate death.29

The game thus promises the player the opportunity to remake Hamlet’s plot and circumvent the tragedy. As one reviewer, Steven Ramsey, admits cheerfully, “I confess I never much liked what happened to Ophelia, so being able to change it was rather good.”30 At the same, in order to accomplish her goals, in Hamlet: A Murder Mystery the player must solve a set of puzzles, like the clue-solving in a game like The Wolf Among Us: as Ramsey also notes, “Game-wise, the puzzles are the thing. Progression through the game is about as linear as you get.” The puzzle-solving strategy thus constrains the player in moving forward, creating an implicit conflict with the open-endedness otherwise embedded in its offering the player options to change the play’s outcome. The game also incorporates 40 clips from Branagh’s film, which become part of the gameplay: for example, the player is given an opportunity to put these “film strips” in “right order” as a puzzle to be solved.31 As an early entrant in the field, Hamlet: A Murder Mystery thus sets the precedent for two directions in Hamlet videogaming, which one can see as analogous to the conflicting impulses of the play itself: gameplay driven by directed puzzle-solving constraining the player, and gameplay involving choice in an adventure that allows for the possibility of alternative endings. Alawar Entertainment’s 2010 Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMPORG Features, Shaders and Product Placement takes the route of constraint, 29 See description of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Murder Mystery (Windows), MobyGames, https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/william-shakespeares-hamlet-a-murder-mystery (accessed 11 May 2016). 30 Steven Ramsey, review of Hamlet: A Murder Mystery, in Metzomagic, n.p., http://metzomagic. com/showArticle.php?index=580 (accessed 11 May 2016). 31 Osborne, 51. Further, as Osborne notes, the game thus exploits film in a mixed way, because the clips themselves are fixed elements of Shakespeare’s story: “The gamer’s other successes are rewarded only by variations on Branagh’s film: Ophelia survives by ‘undrowning’ as the clip runs backward, and the gamer/Hamlet takes his seat on the throne upon winning with a clip from the f ilm’s second scene. Shakespearean f ilm both enables and disables the interactive potential of the game.”

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displacing Hamlet’s role entirely and focusing on the player’s completion of tasks to get to the game’s end and win.32 A Shakespeare scholar playing this game will quickly be literally puzzled. The game opens by implying that this is Hamlet’s story, but you find soon that it is not: In a kingdom, somewhere, at some point in time, the evil Claudius, acting with his assistant Polonius, killed the king and queen and seized the crown. He then decided to force Ophelia, Hamlet’s girlfriend, to marry him. Having returned home from a long journey, the valiant Prince Hamlet vowed to revenge the death of his parents and rescue Ophelia. However […] At that moment, a man from the future arrived on a research mission and accidentally landed precisely where Hamlet was standing. Now the new Hero must arrange for the death of Hamlet and rescue Ophelia. If he fails, the fabric of the universe will unravel due to the difference between past and present.

After this introduction, the player must immediately solve the first puzzle, calculating how to perform the right sequence of point-and-click actions in order to enter Polonius’s house. As Joseph Viney has described the gameplay from then on: “Unfortunately for our hero his quest is not easy. Rather, it is littered with 25 separate stages, each more maddening than the last. Too many times will you find yourself simply staring at the screen, mouth agape and wishing you’d paid attention in school, particularly the ‘How to Kill a Guitar Wielding Bad Guy with Just a Rubber Duck and an Outlet Pipe’ lesson.”33 The player soon learns that this game has nothing to do with choice or character. Rather, it demands following a prescribed series of actions that allows the player to “win” at each stage and thus progress to the next episode. As Geoffrey Way notes, while this game is structured in terms of “acts,” parodying a play, it thus reorients Hamlet’s plot from a “revenge play” into something more like a “quest narrative,” which also embeds a “‘save the princess’ structure.”34 The revenger Hamlet is ironically displaced by the anonymous time-traveling scientist Hero, who must save Ophelia. Given the conventions of the quest narrative, the game thus assumes that the outcome demands preventing a total catastrophe: Claudius must be killed 32 Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement, Alawar Entertainment, 2010. This game is discussed in more detail in Way’s essay in this volume. 33 From Joseph Viney’s review in Alternative Magazine Online, 29 June 2010, https://alternativemagazineonline.co.uk/2010/06/29/game-review-hamlet/ (accessed 4 March 2017). 34 Way, this volume, p. 262.

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but Ophelia will be rescued. While in Hamlet: A Murder Mystery, the player has options in “winning” when it comes to the outcome, in this game there is only one way to win, one which both affirms one outcome of Shakespeare’s play (the death of Claudius) but also undoes other deaths. While Robin Johnson’s 2003 The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark also employs puzzle-solving, it does so by interweaving those tasks with elements of Hamlet’s plot, while the player acts as Hamlet.35 The adventure’s episodes, narrated in a kind of adolescent modern English, do allow extensions of Hamlet’s plot. The website playfully advertises its appeal: “Who really killed Hamlet’s dad? Can the Prince ever ‘get’ Gertrude, or is that just wrong? What does Richard III want with a horse anyway? And where did the gravedigger get that gorgeous pink dress? Avenge your father, defeat your evil uncle, and ascend the throne of Denmark in this faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s seminal work.” From the beginning there is no mystery as to who killed Hamlet’s father: very early in the game, Hamlet encounters first the ghost and then Claudius, who confesses quickly to the murder. But the game will not allow Hamlet to kill Claudius at this moment; it demands the completion of all the puzzles to achieve that end. As its cheeky description suggests, Johnson certainly gave himself a lot of freedom in constructing this game, while that freedom is not extended to the player: as Harrison and Lutz comment, “the game’s puzzles serve to reproduce Hamlet’s original delay while humorously drawing attention to the player’s own inability to just do what they want, or what they know they’ll have to do eventually.”36 Its plot is loosely linked to Hamlet, but it meanders far and wide to episodes in England where Hamlet encounters other twisted Shakespearean characters, who, as Osborne notes, function mostly as obstacles to the completion of the adventure. They often protect or possess objects that the player must gather to progress through the game. So, for example, early on you must pick up scissors in Ophelia’s room that will allow you later to sever the thread on which Macbeth’s dagger is hanging, since you need that dagger to kill Claudius. As with other puzzle games, while you appear to be able to wander freely (and often in great confusion without the help of the online “walkthrough”37), you must still accumulate objects 35 Unfortunately, since I began this essay, this game has now disappeared from the Internet, but for the purposes of this account I will refer to it in the present tense. 36 Harrison and Lutz, 32. 37 Walkthrough by David Welbourn, “The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet—Solution,” http://www.plover.net/~davidw/sol/hamlet.html (accessed 11 May 2016).

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and perform actions in the right sequence. So, for example, at the game’s end I tried to see what would happen if I did not offer Gertrude the chalice of poison (which I had received from Macbeth’s Witches in exchange for a can of hairspray obtained from Desdemona, trapped in Macbeth’s tower). However, if I did not kill Gertrude, I could not kill Claudius, and I could not kill Laertes without killing Claudius first. As in the case in Hamlet, or The Last Game, the only way to “win” is to comply with what the game demands. “Winning” The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, however, does not mean that Hamlet survives; rather, it means getting to the end by playing effectively, with the reward of the game’s esteem of the player’s (and thus indirectly, Hamlet’s) character. When attempting to kill another character, Hamlet can die at any point in the game, but if the player does get to the end and kills Laertes, the game informs her: After three bouts of exhilarating combat, you successfully kill him! Hurrah! And all you got was a scratch! This scratch really stings though. Wait a minute! The cheating sod’s been using a poisoned blade! So you die too. But to be honest, it comes as a bit of a relief. Maybe death will be a nice change. The undiscovered bourn and all that. Anyway, … “The rest is silence …”

At this point the player is told: “You completed 100% of this adventure. Horatio rates you as the very ecstasy of love.” If Hamlet dies after having only completed part of the story, Horatio’s admiration is far more tempered. The game’s light tone may thus undercut the notion of the tragic necessity, but it thus ultimately endorses the player’s adopting the revenger’s role and identity and accepting a tragic death, that is, becoming the ultimate Hamlet. The game To Be or Not to Be takes the opposite tack in pitting the player against Shakespeare’s Hamlet and offering both a critique of choice and character development. Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be began as a print novel published in 2013,38 but in 2015 Tin Man Games transformed it into a text-based illustrated digital game.39 As it is described on the marketing webpage, in this game: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has finally been restored to its original second-person non-linear branching narrative format. I know! What took 38 Ryan North, To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-path Adventure (Breadpig Press, 2013); the text was recently reprinted in an amply illustrated version (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016). 39 Ryan North, To Be or Not to Be, Tin Man Games, 2015. For a more in-depth reading of this game as adaptation see Way’s essay in this volume.

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so long, am I right? Now it’s up to YOU to decide what happens next. Play as Hamlet and revenge your father’s death. Play as Ophelia and make scientific discoveries. Play as King Hamlet, Sr. and die on the first page!40

Its comic premise is that Shakespeare’s Hamlet itself adapted this “gamebook” (claiming that it is the “earliest recorded example of the ‘book as game’ genre”). It invites the player to “Steel yourself to experience the magic of Shakespeare as it was meant to be experienced: in a non-deterministic narrative structure where you end up thinking maybe you made the wrong decision so you mark the page you were just on so you can always go back and make a different choice if you die for some dumb reason”: “to be or not to be, that is the adventure.” That adventure is all about choice aligned with character and consequences in a deconstructed narrative. To begin, the player is given the option to act as Hamlet, Hamlet Senior, or Ophelia. As you proceed, you then may select among several dialogue or action options, producing “3,001,181,439,094,525” possible different “adventures.” In contrast to the events of Johnson’s game, many of these amount to positive scenarios: for example, if Hamlet goes directly from the meeting of the ghost to kill Claudius, it all ends well, and he reigns effectively thereafter; or if Hamlet and Ophelia decide to bring Claudius to justice, he is condemned in a court of law. Choice soon emerges here as operating in conflict with Hamlet itself. The game marks “the choices Shakespeare himself made when he plagiarized the book back in olden times” with a skull, so you can try to follow Shakespeare’s script if you wish. However, if you proceed that way, it becomes clear that the game’s narrator is not pleased with you. As Carter Dodson notes in his review: “You can play through the story much as it was intended to go by following the skull icons that pop up, which serve as a handy way to sort of just follow the directions. This is far from the boring path, as Ryan North does have plenty to say about the story, and he somehow manages to make Hamlet as it played out seem quite ridiculous in and of itself.”41 In particular, North creates a tension between what it means to follow through the plot in the “Shakespearean way” versus what his Ophelia would do, where assumptions about character are continually questioned. North has transformed Ophelia into a university-trained, independent-minded 40 The Gamebook Adventures webpage for “To Be or Not to Be,” https://gamebookadventures. com/gamebooks/to-be-or-not-to-be/ (accessed 4 March 2017). 41 Carter Dodson’s review of “To Be or Not to Be” on Touch Arcade, n.p., https://toucharcade. com/2015/03/18/ryan-norths-to-be-or-not-to-be-review/ (accessed 11 May 2016).

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scientist who wants to invent central heating (this is in contrast to The Most Lamentable Text Adventure’s Ophelia, who has been dumbed down into an irritating and empty-headed teenager). If you attempt to follow Shakespeare’s script for Ophelia, the narrator makes fun of your bad decisions, for example protesting that “I didn’t even give you a choice about saying that or not, because you keep choosing the stupid options,” and later pleading, “Please, I beg you, do not choose that option.” Finally, if you continue this way, the narrator concludes, “I’m going to cut our losses here: you are not allowed to be Ophelia for a while,” and the game forces you to take over Hamlet’s role instead. This strategy thus reverses the kind of “save the princess” theme set up in Hamlet or The Last Game, where the player must collaborate with the narrator in saving Ophelia through her own agency. To Be or Not to Be thus has its own agenda of undermining Hamlet’s ethics and gender politics to the extent of not allowing the player to choose, while it also judges the character of the player’s choices. Throughout, the game rewards the player with evaluative points, for example, between “justice” and “adventure,” where the more ethically satisfying action is also judged to be less “adventurous” and vice versa. For example, if you bring Claudius to be judged in a court of law, the game does rate you for choosing this outcome, for which you get one hundred “justice points,” but only three “adventure points.” It makes you ask whether through your game choices you are shaping your own and your avatar’s character as a renegade or law-abiding citizen. To Be or Not to Be thus acknowledges how difficult it is to balance the different values and satisfactions attributed to both tragic narrative and games, and it asks the question of what audiences really want from both the process and the outcome of tragic performance: What does it really mean to win? Who are we in winning? The ethical force of the feminist subtext of To Be or Not to Be anticipated the most recent independent videogame based on Hamlet, the game Elsinore developed by Katie Chironis and designed by Connor Fallon and their team at Golden Glitch. In this game the play’s avatar is Ophelia, who is given the opportunity to avert Hamlet’s catastrophes. As the website describes the game: On a summer night, the Danish noblewoman Ophelia awakens from a terrible vision: in four days, everyone in Elsinore Castle will be dead. Even worse, she’s been thrown into a time loop from which she cannot escape. Forced to relive the same four days over and over again, Ophelia determines to do everything in her power to change the future. Elsinore is a time-looping adventure game set in the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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Elsinore combines strong social simulation elements, a dynamic story that reacts immediately to player decisions, and a world full of diverse characters with secrets to uncover. Can Ophelia prevent the tragedy that lies before her?42

Elsinore thus remakes the world of Elsinore, where Ophelia and Laertes are now bi-racial, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are female scholars of color, and Othello is available to assist Ophelia, but also to transform tragedy itself by crossing it with gaming. 43 As Chironis has commented on the game’s origins, when she was both reading tragedies in school and playing games she thought, “What if we combined this concept of the power fantasy where all you do is win win win, with a tragedy where all you do is lose lose lose?”44 Chironis argues that Ophelia’s minor role in Hamlet makes her the right choice to enact a new kind of balance between tragedy and the “power” of games, as “the ideal stealth character.”45 As Carolyn Petit describes the gameplay, “In Elsinore, you don’t change the course of events by poisoning people’s goblets or stabbing them in the back with daggers, though your actions might get other people to do such things. You do it by gathering information—often by eavesdropping on conversation—and then deciding when and with whom to share that information.” Petit recounts how the game’s engineer Eric Butler once said that “What we wanted to do with 42 From the Elsinore website, Golden Glitch Studios, https://elsinore-game.com/ (accessed 4 March 2017). Elsinore was released by Golden Glitch in July 2019. For reviews since that release see Julie Muncy, “Elsinore Smartly Reimagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the Hero,” Wired, Culture, https://www.wired.com/story/elsinore-review/; Cass Marshall, “Elsinore Revisits a Classic Political Drama—with a Time-Loop Twist,” Polygon [videogame website], 23 July 2019, https://www. polygon.com/reviews/2019/7/23/20703825/elsinore-game-ophelia-shakespeare-hamlet-timeloop-golden-glitch-review; Sergio Solórzano, “Elsinore Review: To Play or Not to Play? (Definitely Play),” The Gamer, 25 November 2019, https://www.thegamer.com/elsinore-review-pc/. 43 In a blog post on Gamasutra on 2 March 2015 entitled “’But It’s Not Historically Accurate’: Diversity in Elsinore,” Chironis argues on the basis of her team’s historical research that this is more what the world of Elsinore was “really like”: “We decided that Ophelia’s mother, now deceased, could easily have been descended from a line of Spanish-African women; she would have come to Denmark as a servant, part of another (Hapsburg) character’s retinue. She then married into her husband Polonius’s family line, giving Ophelia a higher social status”, http://web.archive. org/web/20150303135713/http:/www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KatieChironis/20150302/237689/ quotBut_Its_Not_Historically_Accuratequot__Diversity_in_Elsinore.php (accessed 16 May 2021). 44 Katie Chironis, “Shaking up Shakespeare’s Balance of Power in the Upcoming Game Elsinore,” interview by Carolyn Petit, Feminist Frequency, 11 April 2016, n.p., https://feministfrequency. com/2016/04/11/shaking-up-shakespeares-balance-of-power-in-the-upcoming-game-elsinore/ (accessed 1 May 2016). 45 In videogaming a “stealth character” is an avatar who navigates the game by hiding and avoiding conflict.

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Elsinore is to make some of it a simulation instead of a standard chooseyour-own-adventure. So, what we have is kind of a melding of these two; it’s not just a branching narrative and it’s not a wide-open simulation where you’re playing in a sandbox. What you’re doing is influencing parameters that then make certain events possible, certain events impossible, eventually changing the outcome.”46 Thus Ophelia herself does not so much act as share information with the NPC’s, which then triggers their actions to further the plot. In this sense, Elsinore’s developers saw that in designing the game they were rethinking the whole concept of the gamer’s agency. While they do want to grant Ophelia some kind of agency they also wanted to undercut what they call the “power fantasy” of gaming, and thus winning. While Ophelia may give the NPC’s information, it does not mean she masters the situation. In the words of engineer Kristin Siu, “It’s very disempowering for the player but for us, it’s pretty satisfying. It also fits in very nicely with this idea of tragedy. Tragedy is all about watching characters that you empathize with do things you don’t want them to do. You can try to present all this information to characters but they may not necessarily behave in the way that you want them to behave. And so part of experiencing the tragedy is seeing them take the information that you gave them and twist it into something terrible.”47 At the same time, the principle of the game is still that Ophelia may save Elsinore, and the time-loop mechanism allows for the possibility for actions to be repeated, so Ophelia may take what she has learned about the consequences of her own choices to try a different strategy. Elsinore thus grapples in a fresh way with the conflicting forces inherent in both gameplay and tragedy, which brings us back to Hamlet and gaming itself. All of the Hamlet videogames I have discussed participate at some level in questions of the player’s character and agency reflecting those of Hamlet himself. As Mark Wolf has described how interactivity works in videogames: The very “rules” and cause-and-effect logic that dictate the events of the videogame’s diegetic world contain an imbedded world view which matches actions with consequences and determines outcomes, and it is here that an author can best guide a player into a particular way of thinking (and acting). Goals and obstacles, choices and their consequences, and 46 Chironis, Petit interview. 47 Ibid.

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the means and ends with which the player is provided; these become the tools that shape narrative experience, and the real narrative becomes the player’s own passage through the narrative maze of branching storylines and events. 48

However, a skeptic would note that, like a tragedy, a game has a story to tell, in which the illusion of choice is an essential part of its ideological framework, or in Espen Aarseth’s words, a structural feature of “the prisonhouse of regulated play.”49 In Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost follows how videogames function as a form of “procedural rhetoric,” that is, as a way of making a point, or making something happen, through the gamer’s experience of a sequence of procedures.50 So in this context, “choices are selectively included and excluded in a procedural representation to procure a desired expressive end.”51 Thus, while the player feels involved in the game, expressing herself because he or she is free to choose, the choices themselves are ultimately part of the plan. Hamlet videogames, and videogames in general, thus offer an important insight into the ways in which the play itself negotiates the balance between the “player” Hamlet’s character and agency and the “procedures” of its plot. For the play to be like a game, choice must be felt to be open, and the play explores all the ways in which Hamlet’s choosing—or not choosing—to act, must be seen as both “free” and consequential. At the same time, audience and characters alike operate in the context of awareness that there is a story to be told, and that the pleasures of the play also are generated by narrative closure and a sense that all the pieces of the plot have fallen into place in a recognizable way.52 In the “freedom ending” of The Stanley Parable, after 48 Mark J. P. Wolf, “Narrative in the Video Game,” in The Medium of the Video Game, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 93–111, at 109. See also Smethurst and Craps: “In order to acknowledge the fact that during gameplay, it is not only the game that reacts to the player but also the player who reacts to the game, we amalgamate interactivity and reactivity into a third term: interreactivity” (273). 49 Espen J. Aarseth, “I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player,” in DiGRA ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference; Situated Play, Authors and Digital Games Research Association, 2007, 130–133, at 133, http://digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digitallibrary/07313.03489.pdf (accessed 2 April 2016). 50 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), x. 51 Ibid., 45. 52 See Harrison and Lutz on how Hamlet videogames, like all games, erect boundaries, whereby “the fantasy of free play is bounded by the constraints of the created environment that makes it possible” (36).

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the player has conformed with the narrator’s instructions, the narrator says that Stanley recognizes that he now leaves the office building with many puzzles still unsolved. Yet he realizes that “it was not knowledge that he was seeking, or even power, but happiness”: “perhaps his goal had not been to understand, but to let go.” When faced by Osric’s invitation to the fencing match with Laertes, Hamlet notoriously also finally chooses not to choose. He replies (in the folio version): “Not a whit, we defie Augury; there’s a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it bee not to come, it will bee now: if it be not now; yet it will come; the readinesse is all […].”53 Paradoxically, he thus resists the prophetic inkling of his own death by accepting that he will die eventually. In the second quarto the lines are “The readines is all, since no man of ought he leaves, knowes what is’t to leave betimes. Let be” (as edited in Arden text, 5.2.200–201). The last words of the quarto text, “Let be,” are surely the answer to “To be or not to be.” In this formulation, the agonizing binary structure of game choice is resolved through acceptance of any way to the end, a win in the consummation of the adventure, while at a great cost. However, as I have suggested, this is not the last word of the game that is Hamlet. This is the point to remember that in Hamlet’s source texts, Saxo Grammaticus and François de Belleforest’s translation in Histoires tragiques, Hamlet does not die as he achieves his revenge. Rather, he violently severs his usurper uncle’s head from his body, burns down the palace, and lives to reign as king. Thus, it is entirely possible to think that Hamlet does not have to die when he achieves his revenge, since that was not, in fact, the way that the story had always been told. In contrast to Hamlet’s shaping divinity, Horatio’s report to Fortinbras at the end emphasizes instead the contingent nature of all the play’s events, of all the “mischaunce” (5.2.3378), “of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters./ Of deaths put on by cunning and for no cause,/ And in this upshot purposes mistook/ Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads” (5.2.369). The impression he leaves us with at the end is less the image of that “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and more of an open world of cunning and casual slaughter, where force and accident collide. Looking at Hamlet from the perspective of gaming thus draws our attention to the way in which both character and plot in the play can be seen as unfixed and contingent, while at the same time the machine grinds on. 53 William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies [first folio 1623], facsimile edition prepared by Helge Kökeritz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 280.

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Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. “I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player.” In DiGRA ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference; Situated Play, 130–133. Authors and Digital Games Research Association, 2007. Accessed 2 April 2016. http://digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/07313.03489.pdf. Baumlin, James S., and Tita French Baumlin. “Chronos, Kairos, Aion: Failures of Decorum, Right-Timing and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” In Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, edited by Phillip Sipora and James S. Baumlin, 165–186. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Begin, Dan. “BrainExplode! Audiences and Agency through the Appropriation of Videogame Structures.” In The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual, Toward the Real, edited by Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan, and Néill O’Dwyer,140–155. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Bernstein, Mark, and Diana Greco. “Card Shark and Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan,167–182. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Vintage, 2010. Bloom, Gina. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through TheaterMaking Games.” In “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble. Special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Bushnell, Rebecca. Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. –––. Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 2001. Chironis, Katie. “’But It’s Not Historically Accurate’: Diversity in Elsinore.”Gamasutra, 2 March 2015, n.p. Accessed 4 March 2017 and 16 May 2021. http://web. archive.org/web/20150303135713/http:/www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KatieChironis/20150302/237689/quotBut_Its_Not_Historically_Accuratequot__Diversity_in_Elsinore.php. –––. “Shaking up Shakespeare’s Balance of Power in the Upcoming Game Elsinore.” Interview by Carolyn Petit, Feminist Frequency, 11 April 2016, n.p. Accessed 1 May 2016. https://feministfrequency.com/2016/04/11/shaking-up-shakespearesbalance-of-power-in-the-upcoming-game-elsinore/ Costikyan, Greg. Uncertainty in Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

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Dodson, Carter. Review of To Be or Not to Be, by Tin Man Games, based on the graphic novel by Ryan North. TouchArcade, 18 March 2015, n.p. Accessed 11 May 2016. https://toucharcade.com/2015/03/18/ryan-norths-to-be-or-not-to-be-review/. Donaldson, Peter S. “GameSpace/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor’s Titus.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, 457–477. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Elsinore. PC version. Golden Glitch Studios, 2019. Elsinore website. Golden Glitch Studios. Accessed 4 March 2017. https://elsinoregame.com/ Fenner, James. “The Stanley Parable Endings Guide: The Definitive Ending Tree.” Guardian Liberty Voice, 27 October 2013. Accessed 10 May 2016. https://guardianlv. com/2013/10/the-stanley-parable-endings-guide-the-definitive-ending-tree/ Gamebook Adventures webpage for To Be or Not to Be. Accessed 4 March 2017. https://gamebookadventures.com/gamebooks/to-be-or-not-to-be/ GameQubes, “The Wolf Among Us—All Endings.” Streaming video. YouTube, 9 July 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8jHQKMwOZ0&ab_channel= GameQubes. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hamlet: A Murder Mystery. EMME Interactive, Castlerock Entertainment, 1997. Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement. Alawar Entertainment, 2012. Harrison, Matthew, and Michael Lutz. “South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 23–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Johnson, Robin. The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 2003. Videogame, currently unavailable. Kermode, Frank. Introduction to Hamlet. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al., 1135-1140. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Kidnie, Margaret J. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2008. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Addison Wesley/ Pearson Education, 2014. Levy, Eric P. Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2008. Marshall, Cass. “Elsinore Revisits a Classic Political Drama—with a Time-Loop Twist.” Polygon [videogame website], 23 July 2019. Accessed 16 May 2021. https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/7/23/20703825/elsinore-game-opheliashakespeare-hamlet-time-loop-golden-glitch-review.

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Mawhorter, Peter, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Arnav Jhala. “Towards a Theory of Choice Poetics.” Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 3–7 April 2014, Fort Lauderdale, FL, n.p. Accessed 23 September 2014. http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_19.pdf. Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribner, 1972. Muncy, Julie. “Elsinore Smartly Reimagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the Hero.” Wired, Culture, 8 August 2019. Accessed 16 May 2021. https://www.wired.com/ story/elsinore-review/. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. North, Ryan. To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-path Adventure. Breadpig Press, 2013; rpt. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016. _______. To Be or Not to Be. Tin Man Games, 2015. Osborne, Laurie. “iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film.” In “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble. Special issue, Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 48–57. Raman, Shankar. “Interrupted Games: Pascal, Hamlet, Probability.” Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 179–207. Ramsey, Steven. Review of Hamlet: A Murder Mystery. Metzomagic, September 2003, n.p. Accessed 11 May 2016. http://metzomagic.com/showArticle.php?index=580. Rowe, Katherine. “Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 58–67. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2016. –––. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Facsimile edition prepared by Helge Kökeritz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Smethurst, Toby, and Stef Craps. “Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game.” Games and Culture 10, no. 3 (2015): 269–290. Solórzano, Sergio. “Elsinore Review: To Play or Not to Play? (Definitely Play).” The Gamer, 25 November 2019. Accessed 16 May, 2021. https://www.thegamer.com/ elsinore-review-pc/ The Stanley Parable. PC version. Galactic Café, 2013. Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Sypher, Wylie. The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981.

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Viney, Joseph. Review of Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMPORG Features, Shaders and Product Placement. Alternative Magazine Online, 29 June 2010. Accessed 4 March 2017. https://alternativemagazineonline.co.uk/2010/06/29/ game-review-hamlet/. Welbourn, David. Walkthrough of “The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet—Solution.” Accessed 11 May 2016. http://www.plover. net/~davidw/sol/hamlet.html. “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Murder Mystery.” Description at MobyGames. Accessed 11  May  2016. https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/ william-shakespeares-hamlet-a-murder-mystery. The Wolf Among Us. Playstation 3. Tell-Tale Games, 2014. Wolf, Mark J. P. “Narrative in the Video Game.” In The Medium of the Video Game, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 93–111. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

About the Author Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisers Emerita Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays; Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance; A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice; Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens; and Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant. She has also published A Companion to Tragedy and Tragedy: A Short Introduction. Her newest book, The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing before 1700, appeared in 2021. She is currently working on a project on theatre and videogames. She served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2014.

10. Shakespeare Videogames, Adaptation/ Appropriation, and Collaborative Reception Geoffrey Way

Abstract This essay analyzes two Shakespeare-based video games to revisit longstanding assumptions regarding Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation. In it, I pay close attention to the role of the player to explore reception as a collaborative process in order to better understand the complex relationships that exist between source text, game, and player, and to expand the scope of what works are considered within Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation studies. Through a discussion of the two games, I argue that adaptation and appropriation need to be considered on a spectrum that accounts for how audiences play an active role in defining and redefining what Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations are and can be. Keywords: Shakespeare; adaptation; appropriation; videogames; reception

As we move further into the twenty-first century, we continue to witness that, “[w]hen innovative communication platforms emerge, new Shakespeare use appears almost on point with the arrival of the new medium.”1 However, the appearance of new uses of Shakespeare does not always culminate in a critical mass that runs parallel to the spread of a new medium. Such is the case with videogames—a medium over 60 years old—to which Shakespeare studies has only begun to turn its attention. Though some 1 Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes, eds., The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1.

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch10

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Shakespeareans may be familiar with older titles such as Ted Castranova’s Arden (2008), Charles Crayne’s Castle Elsinore (1983), or EMME Interactive’s almost impossible to obtain Hamlet: A Murder Mystery (1997), over the past decade we have witnessed a minor explosion in the number of Shakespearebased videogames.2 Recently, Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted into videogames such as Romeo and Juliet- and Tempest-inspired games in the Globe Playground section of the Shakespeare’s Globe website; Golden Glitch Studios’ Elsinore (2019), in which the player enters the fictional world of Hamlet by controlling a time-looping Ophelia in an attempt to “prevent the tragedy that lies before her”; and the two games that are the focus of this essay, Alawar’s Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement (2010) and Tin Man Games’ To Be or Not to Be (2015).3 Videogames thrive on the interactivity between the game and the player, and as such, they present an opportunity to rethink our approaches to studying Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation. Shakespeare-based videogames reveal a collaborative process of creation and reception that evolves from players interacting with creators’ embedded narratives to creating new narrative experiences rooted as much (if not more than) in videogames as in Shakespeare. In this process of reception that involves both game designers’ content and players’ experiences with the game, we can see how our discussions of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation must account for the collaborative exchange between creators and users. In recent years, the study of adaptation and appropriation has pushed against theorizing adaptation through f idelity, though not always far enough. For instance, Linda Hutcheon has argued that our focus on 2 Additionally, there has been an increase in scholarly attention on Shakespeare-based videogames. See Laurie Osborne, “iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 48–57; Gina Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games,” in “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble, special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127; Rebecca Bushnell, Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone, “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10, no. 1 (2016): n.p.; and Matthew Harrison and Michael Lutz, “South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play,” in Shakespeare User, ed. Fazel and Geddes, 23–40. My thanks to Harrison and Lutz for sharing their piece in advance of its final publication. 3 The Globe Playground games were formerly accessible at https://www.shakespearesglobe. com/learn/playground/. For more on the Globe Playground, see Courtney Lehmann and Geoffrey Way, “Young Turks or Corporate Clones? Cognitive Capitalism and the (Young) User in the Shakespearean Attention Economy,” in Shakespeare User, ed. Fazel and Geddes, 63–79. For more on Elsinore, see the Elsinore webpage, Golden Glitch Studios, https://elsinore-game.com/#about (accessed 14 September 2020).

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adaptation should pertain not just to the product, but also to the processes of creation and reception.4 Although Hutcheon importantly moves us away from centralizing the original work as the origin point, she does not clearly distinguish between the processes of adaptation and appropriation. Julie Sanders has discussed the two as separate yet related practices; for Sanders, adaptation, though not neutral, is defined by transitioning narratives across media or genres, whereas “appropriation frequently affects a more decisive journey […] into a wholly new cultural product and domain.”5 However, such a separation still has its roots in notions of fidelity, using a work’s relationship to its source material to determine its identity as adaptation or appropriation. Moreover, attempting to maintain separation between the concepts of adaptation and appropriation raises questions about who determines where and how to draw lines between what qualifies as adaptation or appropriation while also assuming some sort of fixed ontological category for each. One fallout over these sorts of approaches to adaptation or appropriation is that scholars focus primarily on distinctions between individual works rather than on the larger processes at play. To avoid this problem, Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar argue that rather than see them as opposing concepts, we should “put adaptation and appropriation […] on a larger continuum with one another” to “explore the oscillation between these concepts as attitudes toward artistic production, consumption, and social regulation.”6 Thinking of adaptation and appropriation as a spectrum or continuum emphasizes how our conceptions of these terms are constantly changing. For any Shakespearean studying the connections between performance and adaptation, this instability should be familiar. As Margaret Jane Kidnie has rightfully argued, “a play, for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of an enduring stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.”7 While Kidnie’s argument is mainly concerned with the study of drama, my approach in this essay opens up Kidnie’s focus on process by including Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations across media. To study Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation is to continually 4 Linda Hutcheon, with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7–8. 5 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 19, 26. 6 Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, “Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will,” Shakespeare 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–10, at 7, 8. 7 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.

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unpack the processes of creation and reception that shape Shakespeare’s plays, the media those plays are adapted or appropriated into, and the users that engage with both. I follow Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes, who argue that by incorporating use and reception as a major part of the study of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation, we can “acknowledge the role that affective experience, non-human agents, and digital practices play in thought production, and recognize that academic criticism has indeed plenty of room for speculative thinking and creative production.”8 Considering the underlying processes of creation and reception can reveal much about Shakespeare-based videogames and their relationships to both their source materials and players. Videogames invite a deeper consideration of the role of reception in the adaptive/appropriative process because of their interactive nature. In this, they are much like theatre, and there is much to be gained by recognizing a “more reciprocal relationship between gaming and theater.”9 As Susan Bennett argues, “Theatre as a cultural commodity is probably best understood as the result of its conditions of production and reception. The two elements of production and reception cannot be separated, and a key area for further research is the relationship between the two for specific cultural environments, for specific types of theatre, and so on.”10 Building on Bennett, I argue the relationship between production and reception (and the conditions that shape both) are at the heart of understanding the interactive relationship between the game and the player in videogames. As is true for studying theatre, the study of Shakespeare-based videogames as adaptations and/or appropriations requires a medium-specific but not medium-isolationist approach.11 This approach is necessary to not only account for the ways in which elements of Shakespeare’s plays (characters, narratives, etc.) are worked into videogames, but also what effects players’ familiarity with Shakespeare and his plays have on the gameplay experience. Shakespeare-based videogames pull on histories and traditions from not only Shakespeare, but also multiple genres of videogames. Considering reception means understanding players’ multiple experiences when playing videogames and the roles they occupy in the process. As Rebecca Bushnell observes, a videogame player is “simultaneously a playwright, a 8 Fazel and Geddes, eds., Shakespeare User, 5. 9 Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 123. 10 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 106. 11 Katherine Rowe, “Medium-Specificity and Other Critical Scripts for Screen Shakespeare,” in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2008), 34–53, at 37.

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director, a character, an actor bringing the character to life, and a spectator who observes the action unfolding.”12 Bushnell shows some of the often unacknowledged connections between videogames and theatre, and an awareness that players do not approach videogames as primarily narrative experiences. The same holds true for Shakespeare-based videogames in particular, as players tend not to approach them as Shakespearean narrative experiences first. Even when players do approach such games as primarily Shakespearean narratives, the connections to Shakespeare or his plays are often tenuous, as the practices and traditions of game culture often overtake and supersede Shakespearean elements. Much like Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations in other media, Shakespeare-based videogames participate in the long tradition of making Shakespeare “fit” with audience expectations defined not just by videogames as a medium, but also by the wide range of videogame genres. Though there are many important elements when studying videogames as adaptations or appropriations, I am attentive to two types of narratives that are central to the gameplay experience: embedded and emergent narratives. As defined by game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, embedded narratives consist of “pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player’s interaction with the game,” whereas emergent narratives arise “from the set of rules governing interaction with the game system.”13 Embedded narratives are where we can see the results of the process of creation; for videogames, this means how elements, including (but not limited to) graphics, characters, settings, music, narratives, and play styles, all map onto recognizable videogame structures defined by the medium’s interactive nature and the conventions of specific genres. While it is easy to see the embedded narrative’s relevance for studying Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation, the emergent gameplay narrative is equally important, as it is through players’ interactions with the game that new narrative experiences emerge. Aspects such as players’ familiarity with Shakespearean texts, the medium of videogames, and different videogame genres all influence the gameplay experience. As will become evident through my analysis of two different Shakespeare videogames, creators’ embedded narratives and players’ emergent narratives are intertwined with one another, revealing a collaborative process of adaptation/appropriation that is first crafted by creators and then received and made into something different and new by players. 12 Bushnell, Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames, 66. 13 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 383.

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Alawar’s Puzzling Hamlet To delve deeper into the collaborative processes of creation and reception found in embedded and emergent narratives, I want to start with a focus on the process of creation and how game designers build embedded narratives for players to interact with. To do so, I will discuss two Shakespeare-based videogames: Alawar Entertainment’s Hamlet, or The Last Game and Tin Man Games’ To Be or Not to Be, an adaptation of Ryan North’s choose-your-own adventure book of the same name. In Alawar’s Hamlet, or The Last Game, a puzzle game based loosely in the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the player controls a nameless time-traveling Hero, who has inadvertently landed on the valiant Prince Hamlet, rendering him incapacitated and unable to rescue Ophelia from her captor, Claudius.14 Claudius, the main villain, is an evil murderer that killed both of Hamlet’s parents and captured Ophelia with the intent of marrying her. Alawar makes Polonius Claudius’s faithful lackey, willingly offering Ophelia’s hand to Claudius against her will, and makes Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Laertes all outright villains. Thus, the Hero must defeat Claudius and the others, save Ophelia, and reunite her with Hamlet. The game is not designed for the player to identify with Hamlet but with the Hero; thus, the embedded narrative begins by framing the Hero/player as someone who must save Prince Hamlet, and in the process perhaps also Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As a puzzle-based videogame, the Hero’s/player’s task in Alawar’s Hamlet is to solve puzzles ranging from wordplay to sequencing events to ensure Hamlet and Ophelia’s “happily ever after.” Alawar’s game contains some aspects that are drawn from Shakespeare’s play, such as structuring the game into five levels/acts, with each level ending in a “boss” showdown against one character that the Hero/player must defeat. The game’s levels broadly mirror Shakespeare’s narrative structure, but much of what players might recognize as Shakespeare’s narrative is relegated to cutscenes with comic book–like panels offering context at the beginning of each level. The Shakespearean elements of Alawar’s Hamlet are clearly secondary to the videogames elements in the embedded narrative, with exposition relegated to brief text descriptions of the Hero’s goals and the aforementioned cutscenes. The other elements of the embedded narrative are interactive, revealed to players as 14 Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement, Alawar Entertainment, Alexandria, VA, 2010. Originally published by Alawar and subsequently available on platforms including PC, iPhone, and iPad, Alawar’s Hamlet has since been distributed by Big Fish Games.

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they guide the Hero through various puzzles. As with many other puzzle games, players progress linearly from one puzzle/narrative point to the next, with narrative complication arising mainly in the form of the different puzzles. It is through players’ interaction with the game’s various elements that we see individual aspects of the embedded narrative come together, a combination of textual, visual, and interactive elements that provide the frame for and inform the arc of players’ gameplay experiences. Rather than keeping our focus solely on individual Shakespearean elements, an approach common to Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation studies, we must take the game’s embedded narrative as a whole. To shift our view from just the Shakespearean elements to the larger embedded narrative requires understanding how Alawar’s Hamlet is more invested in the medium and genre of videogames than in Shakespeare. This investment in videogames over Shakespeare is most evident in the elements found in Alawar’s Hamlet that have long defined quest and puzzle games. Hamlet, or The Last Game weds several recognizable yet displaced and disoriented elements from Shakespeare’s play to a quest-narrative structure that is quite common in videogames, usually requiring the player to follow the basic impetus to defeat the villain/monster/boss, like in games such as Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers series or Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series.15 As with many quest-based games, the opening cutscene of Alawar’s Hamlet establishes the setting and conflict for the player; though characters such as Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia, and Polonius are recognizably Shakespearean, the game itself is not set in Denmark but in “a kingdom, somewhere, at some point in time.” In one sense the setting is meant to be humorous and irreverent, but it also acknowledges the common trend of attempting to reinvigorate Shakespeare’s plays by resituating them in alternative settings. Instead of relocating the game to a specific place, Alawar creates an open-ended setting, paying homage to the fact that a defined locale is unnecessary. The embedded narrative for a twenty-first-century Hamlet is everywhere and nowhere: it is so familiar as to be “somewhere, at some point in time.” Alawar’s Hamlet pushes against simple classifications 15 In games such as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, Bethesda’s Skyrim, and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, quests are part of the larger gameplay experience, as players complete them to advance their character through the game or gain levels and skills to make the character stronger. For more on quests in games, see Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Jeff Howard, Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives (Wellesley: A. K. Peters, 2008); and Faltin Karlsen, “Quests in Context: A Comparative Analysis of Discworld and World of Warcraft,” Game Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): n.p., http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/karlsen (accessed 20 September 2020).

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regarding its Shakespearean identity, complicating its Shakespearean status while also placing it in dialogue with other contemporary Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations. This initial complexity of the game’s setting stands in stark contrast to the linear game progression Shakespeare’s narrative is mapped onto. Alawar’s Hamlet eschews narrative complexity in favor of clear purpose and sequential progression; instead of maintaining fidelity to Shakespeare, Alawar maintains fidelity to quest and puzzle games, adapting Hamlet by situating select moments, characters, and events from the play within an embedded quest narrative designed for players familiar with these videogame genres. Alawar’s game asserts its identity as a puzzle game in much the same way it identifies as Shakespearean. At one point, to escape the ship’s cargo hold and battle Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Hero must enlist the help of a monkey by beating it in a card game. By looking past its initial presentation as a card game, players discover they are actually playing rock-paper-scissors. An even clearer example of such influence occurs where the Hero/player attempts to sneak into Castle Elsinore and stop Claudius. The level’s visual layout is a reference to Where’s Waldo, the popular children’s puzzle book series in which readers must locate Waldo clad in his iconic red- and white-striped shirt and hat. The player has to find the Hero hidden in a mass of people, with one character in the scene dressed in Waldo’s iconic outfit as a clear allusion to the character. As is evident in these examples, Alawar’s game has no problem with jamming characters, settings, and plot points into a quest narrative in an attempt to take on a somewhat Shakespearean identity, but the game’s embedded narrative privileges the videogame elements that are of greater interest to players. From simplifying the motivations of characters along the lines of “good” and “evil” to the use of a “save the princess” structure (made ubiquitous in videogames by Nintendo’s 1985 Super Mario Brothers console game), Alawar’s Hamlet removes the ambiguity and narrative complexity around the play’s main characters to provide the Hero/player clear motivation to complete Hamlet’s quest.16 Unsurprisingly, Alawar rewrites Shakespeare’s ending to give Hamlet and Ophelia their “happy ending,” having players thus restore order to the world and the narrative of Alawar’s Hamlet to beat the game. Though it can be argued that Alawar’s embedded narrative represents an incredibly simplified version of Hamlet, such a label fails to recognize how 16 Jesper Juul notes “Quests in games can actually provide an interesting type of bridge between game rules and game fiction in that the game can contain a predefined sequence of events that the player then has to actualize or enact” (see Juul, Half-Real, 32).

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shifting Shakespeare’s narratives to the medium of videogames requires a necessary reimagining. Since videogames are designed to have players interact with embedded narratives, embedded narratives that strictly adhere to Shakespeare’s Hamlet are of little interest for players. Alawar’s Hamlet is already a game that does not offer much in the way of excitement or replay value; indeed, the game did not find much of an audience in the decade since its release. So any attempt by Alawar to create a straightforward retelling of Shakespeare’s narrative would have resulted in a gameplay experience even less enjoyable for players. By incorporating certain Shakespearean elements while privileging quest- and puzzle-game conventions, Alawar at least allows players to have a mildly interesting one-off gameplay experience. Nonetheless, Alawar’s choice to privilege videogames over Shakespeare in the embedded narrative points to the potentially fertile ground available to videogame adaptations and appropriations. Throughout Alawar’s Hamlet, the Hero/player must restore order to the vaguely Shakespearean narrative world they have entered, a narrative world ultimately defined by quest- and puzzle-game conventions. By intertwining Shakespeare and quest and puzzle games, Alawar creates two types of adaptive narratives discussed by Douglas Lanier: an “interpolated narrative” that has the Hero’s introduction dovetail with Shakespeare’s plot, and a “revisionary narrative” achieved through altering Hamlet’s plot, narrative structure, and genre.17 Even in a simple game such as Alawar’s Hamlet, we can see how videogames and Shakespeare’s play exist in a complex relationship to one another within the game’s embedded narrative.

To Be or Not to Be: You Choose Unlike Alawar’s struggle to find an audience, Ryan North’s crowd-funded choose-your-own-adventure book version of Hamlet, To Be or Not to Be, garnered enough audience interest upon its initial announcement that after the book’s subsequent success, Tin Man Games studios later turned it into a videogame.18 Both North’s book and Tin Man Games’ videogame allow players to follow one of three characters through their branching 17 Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 83. 18 To Be or Not to Be, Tin Man Games, 2015. Tin Man Games exclusively produces Gamebook Adventures, which they describe as “compelling adventure stories where you [the player] get to choose how the adventure unfolds.” See http://gamebookadventures.com/ (accessed 20 September 2020).

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narratives: “emo” Hamlet, “resourceful” Ophelia, or “heroic” Hamlet Sr.19 North’s book was a perfect match for Gamebook Adventures, and Tin Man Games’ To Be or Not to Be replicates the contents of North’s book, which has the reader (now player) choose a character and continually make choices to follow various paths down a multitude of branching narrative options. North’s introduction establishes the sheer number of paths that the reader/ player can take: “each time you read this book you can go on a different adventure, assuming you don’t read the book 3,001,181,439,094,525 times at which point the adventures will start to repeat and they’ll probably seem familiar long before then anyway.”20 The game’s narrative choices mirror the ones in North’s book, and so Tin Man Games’ To Be or Not to Be initially establishes itself as a game with a high replay value. As players progress through the potential narratives, the book and game both highlight Shakespeare’s “original” narrative choices with images of tiny Yorick skulls, allowing the reader/player to follow the play’s narrative arc if they choose. As To Be or Not to Be provides a faithful replication of the contents of North’s book, I refer to the game’s narrative as North’s, and address specific changes made by Tin Man Games separately. Because Tin Man’s To Be or Not to Be is a replication of North’s chooseyour-own-adventure book, gameplay is extremely simple and arguably even less interactive than in Alawar’s game, as the player progresses through the game by clicking on their choice and either reading through the next portion of text or listening to voice-over narration. However, To Be or Not to Be’s promise for its players is in its more complex emergent narratives. When compared to the linear gameplay of Alawar’s game, To Be or Not to Be offers seemingly infinite narrative potential for the player. As does North’s book, To Be or Not to Be begins by informing the player that “William Shakespeare (1564 ad—whenever he died) was well known for borrowing from existing literature when writing his plays,” presenting Romeo and Juliet as an example of such borrowing. Immediately following this, the game’s player, again like the book’s reader, encounters a reversal: “as recent Shakespeare scholarship has established, the famed play William Shakespeare Presents: Hamlet! was lifted wholesale from the volume you are about to enjoy, To Be or Not to Be.” In its opening moments, the game attempts (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) to switch the player’s view of the relationship between the game’s embedded narratives and its Shakespearean source material while inviting 19 “Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be,” Gamebook Adventures website, Tin Man Games, http:// gamebookadventures.com/gamebooks/to-be-or-not-to-be/ (accessed 20 September 2020). 20 Ryan North, To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure (New York: Breadpig, 2013), 1.

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the player to take charge and follow different embedded narrative paths to create new emergent narratives. The introduction even acknowledges how many players approach such choose-your-own-adventure games, allowing them to “go back and make a different choice if you die for some dumb reason.” From here, To Be or Not to Be maps North’s narrative onto common choose-your-own-adventure elements, inviting the player to choose their avatar from Ophelia, Hamlet, or Hamlet Sr. and begin progressing through the game’s embedded narratives. Similar to Alawar’s Hamlet, To Be or Not to Be presents Claudius as the narrative’s main villain, though other characters such as Gertrude, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and even Fortinbras can become either friend or foe depending on the player’s choices, offering a lot more narrative potential for players than Alawar’s game. To best explore this narrative potential, an overview of player’s narrative progression is more helpful than a catalogue of individual choices and differences. After players read through a section of text, they are presented with choices for how to proceed. In some instances, there is a single choice, shutting down any opportunity to deviate away from the intended narrative, whereas in others, there are many options (in some cases four or even five, though most commonly two or three). As previously mentioned, players can follow the Yorick skulls through Shakespeare’s “original” narrative (as retold by North’s narrator) or avoid them to depart from it completely, giving players greater autonomy to determine the paths they navigate and characters they interact with. Unlike Alawar’s linear quest narrative, players create new emergent narrative experiences in each encounter they have with To Be or Not to Be’s embedded narrative. Down one path, players might choose to make Hamlet turn into the Incredible Hulk. In another, they may guide Ophelia to seek revenge for Hamlet’s death by facing off against Gertrude in a chess match. As the ghost of Hamlet Sr., players could leave Denmark altogether and become a renowned ghost marine biologist. The numerous narrative paths and radical changes to Shakespeare’s plotline mapped onto a choose-your-own-adventure structure contribute to the game’s identity as a multiform story, “a written or dramatic narrative that presents a single situation or plotline in multiple versions, versions that would be mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience.”21 For players, there is seemingly endless narrative potential in the three quadrillion paths, and many narrative paths depart from Shakespeare’s play in ways both subtle and absurd. Even within the “original” path, players encounter a Hamlet both similar to and strikingly different from Shakespeare’s. One 21 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 30.

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obvious example is North’s addition of scenes involving the pirates only referenced to in Shakespeare’s play, something North emphasized during the Kickstarter campaign to fund the book: “You get to f ight PIRATES. With SWORDS. And yes OF COURSE you can choose which body part you cut off. Why would you write a book where you can’t do that is my question.”22 The playful, irreverent tone of North’s narrator is present throughout the game, whatever paths players may take, and the plurality of options allow the game to fall under any number of Lanier’s adaptive narrative practices: extrapolated, interpolated, remotivated, revisionary, reoriented, or hybrid.23 As a multiform story with a constantly shifting narrative determined by the player’s choices, To Be or Not to Be tempts us to try to determine whether it should be defined as an adaptation or appropriation. However, in both its narrative potential and instability, To Be or Not to Be reveals that the game’s classification is not where we should focus our efforts. Instead, our attention should be on how players interact with the game’s embedded narrative, and what we can learn about the relationship between the embedded narrative and new emergent narratives created during the process of play. Though they are able to continually choose what narrative paths they follow through North’s embedded narrative, players do not have control of what happens in between those choices. Players may begin a playthrough selecting one character as their avatar, but their choices may result in an avatar switch mid-narrative, revealing in the process how the player’s autonomy is constrained by their choices. For example, when following North’s version of Shakespeare’s original narrative, once Hamlet chooses to wait until nightfall to investigate the ghost, the narrative automatically shifts to Ophelia’s perspective. Switching viewpoints in the narrative occurs down certain paths to various effects, with players even having the chance to step into the narratives of characters such as Claudius or Horatio, though such moments occur only as brief divergences from the viewpoints of the game’s main three characters. The narrative paths themselves vary wildly in length (in true choose-your-own-adventure fashion, it is possible to die on your first choice in the game), and often overlap or return to one another. To Be or Not to Be’s embedded narrative presents players with a potentially staggering number of narrative experiences, but even within the freedom of exploring the game’s 22 Ryan North, “To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure,” Kickstarter website, n.p., https:// www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadpig/to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-adventure (accessed 14 September 2020). 23 Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 83.

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branching narrative, not every choice significantly impacts the player’s narrative experience. Some choices offer partial or complete divergences away from a path, while others provide only momentary departures before returning. But as they are able to choose between the massive number of potential paths in the game’s embedded narrative, players actually work with North’s narrative to create new emergent narrative experiences, a process I will return to in the next section. As with Alawar’s game, there are several different influences at play in To Be or Not to Be, coming not only from Shakespeare and videogames, but also from choose-your-own-adventure books. Gameplay in many ways mirrors the experience of reading North’s book, but Tin Man Games has added several recognizable elements from mainstream videogame culture to their adaptation of this literary genre. Notably, Tin Man Games’ additions do not expand on North’s narrative options as much as they enhance players’ interactions with them. In line with videogames, when players make choices, they unlock different achievements. For instance, upon first selecting to play as Ophelia, players are awarded the “To Be She” achievement.24 North’s narrator may also reward players with random amounts of points based on their chosen path, and Tin Man prominently features them within the gameplay, such as displaying “Creepy Uncle Points” after Claudius calls Hamlet “son” or a grade of “C+” for the player’s choices when “completing” North’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. Such moments serve as parodies of videogame and mainstream gaming conventions emphasizing that the game’s value lies in the choices players make as they navigate through new narrative paths. Yet even as the game mocks mainstream gaming conventions, it also defers to them. For instance, a “Haml-o-meter” (accompanied by the ghost of Hamlet Sr.) appears each time players reach an ending. Though at first glance the Haml-o-meter appears as another moment of parody mocking players for following Shakespeare’s narrative too closely, it lacks the sarcasm found in the narrator’s commentary and rebukes. In the process of measuring how closely the player’s narrative choices match the game’s version of Shakespeare’s original narrative, the Haml-o-meter asserts a win-state for players that echoes a desire for fidelity to Shakespeare’s play (or in this case, North’s revised version of it). As the Haml-o-meter disappears and the game invites players to start again, its presence ironically insists that in an embedded narrative with over three quadrillion possible paths, there 24 The game has 33 total achievements; when using platforms like Steam, players’ earned achievements are posted to prof iles visible to the Steam community, adding a small social dynamic to the game.

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is still a way to “win,” and that winning means returning to Shakespeare’s play, or at least as close to it as North’s narratives allow.

A Collaborative Reception Whether by relegating Shakespeare’s narrative to the margins (as Alawar does) or by offering three quadrillion possible narrative paths while still oddly placing Shakespeare’s play as the narrative standard (as Tin Man Games does with the Haml-o-meter), both of the games I have discussed exhibit a complex relationship with their Shakespearean source material. Keeping the focus solely on the process of creation behind the two games, though, leaves us with an incomplete picture, and the specter of fidelity can continue to loom large. Because videogames are meant to be played, we need to consider what emergent narratives players can create with these games, as well as the Hamlets or Shakespeares they encounter within them. Rather than eject fidelity from the conversation altogether, we should account for how fidelity is but one part of the framework shaping players’ emergent narratives. Christy Desmet argues for such an approach, calling for “a dialogic concept of appropriation that is based on the act of recognizing Shakespeare in another writer or text; recognition, in turn, is an ethical gesture rooted in both technical fidelity and fealty, or responsibility to and for another, either text or person.”25 Addressing various practices including direct citations and quotations, recycling, appropriations that create tension “between fidelity and infidelity” throughout, and accidental appropriation, Desmet underscores the complexity that can arise in what may seem to be straightforward acts of appropriation, concluding that “what matters is less what the author intended than how a connection to Shakespeare is recognized.”26 Building on Desmet, I want to pay greater attention to moments of Shakespearean recognition in players’ emergent narratives, and the interactions that occur between players and games in such moments. In the case of these two games, and given the cultural ubiquity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it stands to reason that many players will recognize at least some embedded Shakespearean elements in both Hamlet, or The Last Game and To Be or Not to Be, and that this recognition will in part shape their emergent narrative experiences with the games. 25 Christy Desmet, “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation,” in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 41–57, at 41. 26 Ibid, 50, 55.

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While changes made to a game’s embedded Shakespearean narrative(s) provide significant influences on players’ emergent narratives (many of which I have discussed in the previous two sections), moments in which both games employ unaltered Shakespearean elements stand out. In Alawar’s Hamlet, there are two such moments where, although the contexts of these allusions are altered, they are nonetheless so deeply rooted in our contemporary cultural knowledge of Hamlet that they transcend the game and are recognizably Shakespearean. The first allusion occurs after the player defeats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Upon the defeat of the two bosses, a thought bubble appears above the Hero’s head stating “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead!” This is one of the rare moments in the game when a line from Shakespeare’s play is used verbatim, although it is not only the use of his language but also the cultural ubiquity of the line (as emphasized by Tom Stoppard’s play and film) that move this citation beyond adaptation or allusion into the realm of homage. Homage occurs at one other point in the game. When encountering the description of the game’s final act, players see an image of the Hero looking at a skull that says, “To be or not to be.” Like the reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s deaths, the use of (arguably) Shakespeare’s most well-known line operates as a moment of homage not only to Shakespeare’s work, but also to the line’s ability to permeate popular culture in disparate cultural contexts. These moments of Shakespearean homage within Alawar’s Hamlet exemplify the complex nature of adapting and appropriating Shakespeare’s works in other media. Alawar may fit Shakespeare’s narrative into a videogame, shifting the context, narrative structure, medium, and genre in the process, yet these two moments still mark the game as recognizably Shakespearean for players familiar with those lines. In To Be or Not to Be, the relationships in such moments are even more complex. While the player decides what paths to follow down North’s narrative, the narrator often intervenes and restricts players’ agency, regularly protesting decisions made by Shakespeare’s original characters in the process. For example, when players choose to follow Shakespeare’s narrative and “Sit at Ophelia’s feet, ask to lay in her lap (in the sexy sense), and remind her that she has genitals” in North’s reworking of act 3, scene 2, the narrator interjects with “When you write your own book, you can fill it with all the ‘let’s have sex in front of my mom and dad’ and ‘hah hah women have different parts than men’ jokes you want, but this is my book and I’m unilaterally deciding, right now, that you don’t get to do this.” In such moments when the narrator takes agency away from the player, it draws attention to how in the collaboration between game and player, the dynamic between the two is not always equal. These moments also reveal that, as Jennifer Roberts-Smith,

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Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone observe, “emergent gameplay exists in closed systems, but creates the illusion of an open system by making available a very large number of possibilities.”27 Even as players are offered a massive number of choices to take them down three quadrillion different narrative paths and create new emergent narratives, the player must make these choices within the narrative and gameplay structures of the game. As Bushnell argues, “games are different [from drama] insofar as we enter into the game with the expectation that our actions can make a difference for the outcome.”28 To Be or Not to Be reveals that despite its promise to players that they can choose their own adventure, choices are collaborative, bound within a system designed by North and Tin Man Games. Though videogames are bound systems, there is value in exploring how players interact with those systems, creating new emergent narratives through the act of gameplay. As Matthew Harrison and Michael Lutz state, “One promise of play in a narrative world is the pleasure of discovery […] In the case of Hamlet, this is also the pleasure of rediscovery, as the familiar and unfamiliar collide in novel ways.”29 Players familiar with Shakespeare’s drama can tap into that pleasure of rediscovery, and their knowledge of and familiarity with Hamlet shapes their gameplay experience with To Be or Not to Be, especially when following North’s revised version of Shakespeare’s play. However, while such knowledge may shape audiences’ pleasure in recognizing Shakespearean elements in adaptations and appropriations in other media, in videogames this knowledge becomes an active part of the emergent narrative, as players’ knowledge can directly influence how they play the game. Although players do not need to know Shakespeare’s Hamlet to play To Be or Not to Be, coming to the game with knowledge of Shakespeare’s drama influences players’ interactions with the game’s embedded narrative. Players may make decisions to navigate towards or away from certain choices based on what they personally identify or recognize as Shakespearean. In To Be or Not to Be, the narrator’s interruptions and critiques of players’ (and Shakespeare’s) choices become part of this collaborative process, positioning players in relation to both North’s narrator and Shakespeare in the process. North’s reworking of Shakespeare does this in many places, swinging between irreverence and critique, but To Be or Not to Be also contains moments that are recognizably Shakespearean for both the narrator and players. When players reach the moment when Hamlet is about to deliver “To be or not to be,” they are offered 27 Roberts-Smith et al., “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games,” n.p. 28 Bushnell, Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames, 77. 29 Harrison and Lutz, “South of Elsinore,” 32.

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two options: “To be” or “Not to be.” By selecting the first option, Hamlet recites Shakespeare’s original version of the soliloquy, which is followed by “Man. NICELY DONE, Hamlet!” Even as North’s narrator rails against many decisions originally made by Shakespeare and his characters, such iconic moments are still reproduced (if players chose the right option) and recognized for their cultural value and resonance, albeit in a casual and irreverent way. Such moments of homage in both games offer clear-cut references to Shakespeare’s work, but they also showcase the complex nature of twentyfirst-century Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations. While it may be easy to argue that Hamlet or, The Last Game and To Be or Not to Be are not Shakespearean given their obvious differences from Shakespeare’s play, we need to resist that impulse and pay attention to how players interact with embedded narratives to create new emergent narrative experiences. To return to and expand on Kidnie’s theorization of “the work,” our discussions of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation need to address how what counts as the work is “continually redefined over time by the activity and debates that take place at the work’s constantly shifting edges.”30 When we pay attention to what is happening at those shifting edges, though, we need to account more fully for the active roles of player/user/audience. Because of the profoundly interactive nature of videogames, they are an ideal genre through which to rethink debates about the adaptation/appropriation spectrum. The Shakespeare-based videogames I have discussed demonstrate the multiple ways players collaborate with a game’s embedded narrative. This collaboration, this process of reception that is also creation, offers deeper insight into how audiences shape the relationships between works, the media they are adapted or appropriated into, and the users that engage with such adaptations or appropriations. By integrating a collaborative notion of reception into our larger conversations regarding Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation, not only can we better understand the myriad ways the cultural status of Shakespeare and his plays are reworked and renegotiated for audiences within different cultural-historical moments, but we can also interrogate the active and dynamic roles of audiences. To consider adaptation and appropriation as a spectrum can help us to embrace the instability of both terms, though to fully understand the influences continually reshaping that spectrum, reception and the audience have to be part of the conversation.31 30 Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 8. 31 An earlier version of this piece was written with Ayanna Thompson’s guidance, and I am forever grateful for her mentorship. I also want to thank Gina Bloom, Vanessa Corredera, Valerie Fazel, Louise Geddes, and Kathryn Vomero Santos for their insightful feedback on this piece.

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Works Cited Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1997. Bloom, Gina. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through TheaterMaking Games.” In “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble. Special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127. Bushnell, Rebecca. Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Desmet, Christy. “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, 41–57. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. “Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will.” Shakespeare 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–10. Elsinore website. Golden Glitch Studios. Accessed 14 September 2020. https:// elsinore-game.com/#about. Fazel, Valerie, and Louise Geddes, eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Gamebook Adventures website. Tin Man Games. Accessed 12 September 2020. http://gamebookadventures.com/. Hamlet, or The Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement. Alawar Entertainment, Alexandria, VA, 2010. Harrison, Matthew, and Michael Lutz. “South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 23–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley: A. K. Peters, 2008. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Karlsen, Faltin. “Quests in Context: A Comparative Analysis of Discworld and World of Warcraft.” Game Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): n.p. Accessed 20 September 2020. http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/karlsen. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2009. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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Lehmann, Courtney, and Geoffrey Way. “Young Turks or Corporate Clones? Cognitive Capitalism and the (Young) User in the Shakespearean Attention Economy.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 63–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2017. Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. North, Ryan. To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure by Ryan North, William Shakespeare, and YOU. New York: Breadpig, 2013. –––. To Be or Not to Be. Tin Man Games, 2015. –––. “To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure.” Kickstarter website. Accessed 15 August 2017. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadpig/to-be-ornot-to-be-that-is-the-adventure Osborne, Laurie. “iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 48–57. Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone. “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10, no. 1 (2016): n.p. Rowe, Katherine. “Medium-Specif icity and Other Critical Scripts for Screen Shakespeare.” In Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 3, edited by Diana E. Henderson, 34–53. New York: Routledge, 2008. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

About the Author Geoffrey Way is the Manager of Publishing Futures for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, where he serves as the managing editor for The Sundial. He is also the co-founder and co-host of the podcast Remixing the Humanities with Devori Kimbro and Michael Noschka. He has published on Shakespeare, digital media, and performance in Shakespeare Bulletin, Borrowers and Lenders,  Journal of Narrative Theory, and Humanities, as well as the collections Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn and The Shakespeare User. He has work forthcoming in the The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Adaptation and is currently co-editing two collections: Rethinking Shakespearean Appropriation in the Twenty-First Century with Vanessa Corredera and Shakespeare at the Intersection of Performance and Appropriation with Louise Geddes and Kathryn Vomero Santos.

11. Shakespeare, Game, and Play in Digital Pedagogical Shakespeare Games Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho

Abstract Shakespeare games are emerging as legitimate objects of study and pedagogy, but a survey of such games reveals that the marriage between “Shakespeare” and “game” is conceptually problematic, offering relatively narrow understandings of what a play by Shakespeare might be. We briefly identify two broad trends in digital pedagogical Shakespeare games before discussing how their reliance on the act of “play” and their favoring of Shakespeare as a textual ontology ignores the complexity of theatrical performance. We identify three overlooked complexities, the first giving rise to the other two: the audience’s contribution to theatre’s ontology, the different kinds of work that actors and spectators undertake in performance, and the primacy of collaborative ontogenesis in theatre over artifactual ontology. Keywords: Shakespeare; game design; digital pedagogy; ontology; ontogenesis

The Game’s Afoot Gina Bloom has recently observed that since 2008, “the field of Shakespeare gaming has exploded.”1 Shakespeare games are emerging as legitimate

1 Gina Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games,” in “Forum: Skill,” ed. Evelyn B. Tribble, special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127, at 114; in addition to the games she cites, we have also surveyed Silent Hill 3 (Konami, 2003), Super Scribblenauts (5th Cell, 2010), Mario’s Time Machine (Nintendo, 1993), Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? (Brøderbund, 1989), Mabinogi (devCAT, 2004), Crypto Logic—Shakespeare

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_ch11

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o­ bjects of study in our field2 at a time when the broader field of game studies has firmly established game design as a legitimate form of pedagogy.3 Although popular Shakespeare games—even those with pedagogical goals—still largely aim merely to capitalize on the cultural currency of the Bard, Shakespeare scholars are increasingly thinking of games—in particular digital games—as opportunities to engage pedagogically with students and theatre audiences about Shakespeare’s works for the theatre. To date, we are aware of two broad trends in digital pedagogical Shakespeare games designed by Shakespeare scholars, each taking a distinct approach to scaffolding deep engagements with Shakespeare’s play-texts. The first—which we think of as gamified textual analyses—aims to develop students’ analytical skills by setting completion conditions that can only be achieved through detailed engagement with the language, plot, characters, and/or themes of Shakespeare’s plays; E. B. Hunter’s Something Wicked4 and Katherine Acheson et al.’s Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?5 take this approach. The second category—staging games, pioneered in digital form by Larry Friedlander in 1991 with TheatreGame—positions players as theatre-makers in variations on sandbox games that simulate the decision-making processes involved in staging a play; Staging Shakespeare,6 Places, Please!: Hamlet (Bruzas, 2011), The Sonnets: Confounded (Static Void, 2013), and Angry Bards (Static Void, 2013). See also Geoff Way’s extended discussion of Alawar’s Hamlet, or The Last Game in this volume. 2 Gina Bloom notes that most work prior to hers has centered on games and Shakespeare film and social media (Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 124, n. 2). Geoff Way’s essay in this volume makes an important contribution, as does Courtney Lehmann and Geoffrey Way, “Young Turks or Corporate Clones? Constructing the (Young) User in the Shakespearean Attention Economy,” in The Shakespeare User: Creative and Critical Appropriation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 63–79. 3 The seminal text is James Paul Gee, Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); more recent work includes Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and Sasha Barab, eds., Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Burke, Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 4 Elizabeth Hunter, “Something Wicked: The Macbeth Video Game,” Fabula(b), https:// ebhunter.wordpress.com/portfolio/something-wicked-the-macbeth-video-game/ (accessed April 2021). 5 Katherine Acheson, Matthew Gaster, et al., Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?, 2013, unpublished computer game designs. 6 We discuss this working pre-production prototype in Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone, “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design,” in “Social Media Shakespeare,” edited by Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill, special issue, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation 10, no. 1 [2016]: n.p.).

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Edition,7 and Play the Knave8 are all examples. In combination, these games constitute what we think of as an emerging indie pedagogical game design industry of the kind Constance Steinkuehler imagines in her call for “games as Trojan horses for progressive pedagogy.”9 Our aim in this chapter is not only to document the existence of this field—which is currently so “indie” that many of these games exist only in unreleased prototype form—but also to contribute to its strength and sustainability by positioning it as research, capable of being subjected to the familiar standards of contestability, defensibility, and substantiveness.10 There are two threads to our discussion. First, since what we teach is embedded in how we teach it, and how we teach implicates us in far more than the object of study apparently at hand, one thread of this chapter is concerned with the ethical implications of the games we design, at all the levels at which they are meaningful. At a minimum, games teach representationally, through the images, sounds, and words they inscribe; procedurally, through their rule systems;11 and performatively, through the intellectual, affective, and embodied work that their representations and procedures ask of their players.12 In each of these domains, our games make arguments not only about Shakespeare, but also about the values that underlie our pedagogy; one of the ways that games can be effective as teaching tools is to offer coherent experiences, aligning their representational, procedural, and hence performative values. But the performative domain in particular—what the representations and procedures in our games ask students to do—also has immediate, concrete implications outside the parameters of the games as well as inside.13 So, our analysis of existing games attempts to continue the effort 7 Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, Places, Please! 2016, unreleased mobile game prototype. 8 Gina Bloom, Evan Buswell, Nicholas Toothman, Colin Milburn, and Michael Neff, Play the Knave (ModLab, 2020), open access at https://www.playtheknave.org/download.html (accessed 24 May 2021). 9 Constance Steinkuehler, “Videogames as a Serious Medium,” On the Horizon 24, no. 2 (2016): 177. 10 Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2008. 11 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT), 2007. 12 Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2011. 13 Ibid. In the discussion that follows, we focus mainly on procedural and performative meaning-making; for preliminary discussions about representation, see Bloom et al.’s comments on avatar choices and means of presenting text in Play the Knave (Gina Bloom, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell, “‘A whole theater of others’: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave,” Shakespeare Quarterly

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we began in our reflections on our own first game, Staging Shakespeare, and admire in Gina Bloom et al.’s more recent, and in our view, more successful, Play the Knave of attending to the issues foundational to the theatre of embodiment, materiality, agency, and work (by which we mean both work of art for the theatre and also the work of bringing that work into being). The most surprising finding of our analysis is that, despite their ambition and success in leveraging game conventions to teach Shakespeare responsibly and effectively,14 all of the digital Shakespeare games we have surveyed implicitly adopt relatively narrow, text-centric understandings of what a play by Shakespeare might be, in comparison to more complex articulations in the broader field of Shakespeare text and performance studies. In response to that finding, the second thread of this essay asks, what is it about the adaptation of Shakespeare to game, or the reconceptualization from theatre to gaming, that has so far made it difficult for us to engage with what we think of as Shakespeare as richly as we would in other contexts? One salient characteristic of all of the games we have surveyed is that they privilege the act of playing—that is, of interpreting and performing a text, as a critic or theatre-maker would—over the act of spectating. As a result, they take an as-yet under-interrogated approach to the relationship between player and spectator in theatrical performance. This is perhaps unsurprising in the context of both historical and current discourses whose analogies between theatre and games hinge on role-play; since role-play is also a familiar, analogue pedagogical strategy in Shakespeare studies,15 it has provided a welcoming context in which we could feel licensed to begin the project of exploring how to teach Shakespeare through digital games. The characterization of the Shakespeare student as player also makes our 67 [2016]: 408–430) and ours on avatar, text, and voice in Staging Shakespeare (Roberts-Smith, DeSouza-Coelho, et al., “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games”). There is much more work to be done on representation in Shakespeare games. 14 To our knowledge, no systematic study of the effectiveness of any of these games to enhance learning outcomes in secondary or undergraduate classrooms has yet been conducted, using methodologies that would normally be expected in the disciplinary context of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This is in part a consequence of the enormous physical, financial, and human resources required to develop digital games (many of our examples exist only as designs or prototypes); and in part a result of disciplinary differences between humanities and SoTL methodologies (the latter tending to privilege social sciences research norms). Our goal in this chapter is not to make claims for the substantive pedagogical contributions that any game we discuss has demonstrably made to the learning outcomes of any actual group of students; but rather to leverage the humanities’ capacity for self-critique to enrich the potential of pedagogical game design in our field. 15 Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 114.

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games appealingly cognate with two important and related current aesthetic movements that characterize the receivers of cultural content as actors. On the one hand, gamers engaged in metagaming 16 treat game systems like theatrical texts, using them the way actors “us[e] writing to make something else,”17 to turn games into something else in the playing. On the other hand, immersive theatre elides the distinction between spectator and actor by making performance experiences dependent upon things that spectators do. As Gina Bloom points out, a premise of immersive theatre is that theatre will be made “more pleasurable by making it more playable.”18 If the commercial success of the immersive theatre movement’s flagship production, Sleep No More, is any indication, playable Shakespeare is very pleasurable indeed. The same premise underlies the investments major Shakespeare festivals have made in using digital games for youth audience development.19 Nonetheless, our nascent indie industry’s focus on one salient similarity between theatre and games has so far limited our ability to teach about other similarities and also about important differences between the two media; in particular, for us, it has not yet provided an opportunity to teach about Shakespeare as works of performance generated by the simultaneous (but differing) work of both performers and spectators. In response, we suggest that clearly differentiating Shakespeare from game—something that is essential to the process of making digital Shakespeare games anyway, since that is a process of adaptation between genres and media20 —may be a productive first step towards more complex, and also more intentional, transparent, and ethical pedagogical engagements with both concepts.

Shakespeare Games To return to the question of games, then, and how we teach Shakespeare in them: most digital Shakespeare games—even those that do not purport 16 See Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 17 W. B. Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies),” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2011): 303–339, at 333. 18 Gina Bloom, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Theater: History/Text/Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 4. 19 See Ryan Nelson, “Developing a Digital Strategy: Engaging Audiences at Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, ed. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 202–211; Roberts-Smith, DeSouza-Coelho, et al., “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games”; Lehmann and Way, “Young Turks or Corporate Clones?” 20 See also Geoff Way’s comments in this volume.

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explicitly to be pedagogical—are loosely so in the sense that they participate in what Douglas Lanier calls the “reciprocal legitimation”21 made possible by the persistence of Shakespeare in standard curricula, which drives the market for collisions between Shakespeare and popular aesthetic forms. The trend is fueled by the capitalist imperative to preserve a cultural status quo: “by recasting Shakespeare in terms of mass media and genres,” Lanier argues, “producers could at once supply a readymade market (schools), use pop Shakespeare to reinforce modes of mass-cultural reception, and minimize the extent to which Shakespeare might actively conflict with or interrogate mass culture.”22 Lanier’s example is the production of graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare for classroom use,23 but the same argument could be made about film adaptations (whose widespread adoption as teaching tools in high school and undergraduate classrooms Lanier traces to the 1990s), or, we propose, about digital Shakespeare games.24 One of the challenges, then, of designing a pedagogical Shakespeare game—in resistance to this deadening market pressure—is to build robust and coherent opportunities for Shakespeare to be explored in all of the game’s domains of meaning-making: the representational, the procedural, and the performative. Most of the popular games we have surveyed do the opposite, limiting Shakespeare to clichéd references at the representational level. Whether references are brief (such as the textual references in Silent Hill 3 or the playable Bard avatar in Super Scribblenauts) or more extended (entire chapters of Mario’s Time Machine and Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?), Shakespeare tends not to be permitted to enter the procedural domain, much less the performative.25 In Mabinogi’s “Avon,” for example—one of the add-ons available in the greater Mabinogi Massively Multiplayer Online world—a player’s goal is to help Shakespeare complete his play.26 To achieve that goal, however, players use their avatars to do battle with enemies (giant rats, spiders, etc.) just as they do everywhere else in the game. Mabinogi’s Shakespeare, then, can be understood as one of a potentially infinite number of cultural icons that Maginogi could absorb into its consistent, unrelated, 21 Douglas Lanier, “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 104–113, at 112. 22 Lanier, 105. See also Lehmann and Way on Shakespeare games and “cognitive capitalism.” 23 Lanier, 112. 24 See also Geoff Way’s comments in this volume on Alawar’s Hamlet, or The Last Game. 25 Silent Hill 3, Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, 2003; 5th Cell, Super Scribblenauts, W. B. Games, Bellevue, WA/Konami, 2010; Mario’s Time Machine, Nintendo, Kyoto, 1993; Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? Brøderbund, Eugene, OR, 1989. 26 DevCAT, Mabinogi, Nexon Korea, Eugene, OR, 2004.

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procedural structure. By doing just that, the game claims to supersede all cultural constructs other than Mabinogi; the lack of congruity between the representational (Avon) and procedural (kill spiders) levels of meaning in Mabinogi reveals a greater interest in the market economy than in teaching Shakespeare. There are some popular Shakespeare games that engage the cultural concept Shakespeare more fully as a representational trope that can function metaphorically to comment on the game’s unrelated procedures, largely by construing Shakespeare as a kind of normative discourse against which to make an ironic comparison to expected gameplay. In Angry Bards, for example, a player takes on the role of a somewhat customizable Bard, equipped with a lute capable of firing musical notes, in a top-down perspective, at wave after wave of oncoming knights and sorcerers.27 In its source game, Asteroids, the player, in top-down perspective, manipulates a spaceship, and must destroy wave after wave of oncoming asteroids and enemy UFOs.28 By exchanging the spaceship for a lute and asteroids for knights, the game’s imagery invites players to adopt a kind of two-way ironic perspective on the act of killing enemies and the normative cultural reverence for the clichés “Bard,” “lute,” “knight”; but because the game’s actual gameplay affordances remain stable (shoot oncoming enemies), this is a means of contextualizing the game’s procedural argument rather than making a substantive argument about Shakespeare, or even interrogating the values implicit in the game’s rule system. Some explicitly pedagogical digital games are also games of this type; Daniel Fischlin’s ’Speare: The Literacy Arcade Game is an early example, a shooter game based on Space Invaders, with a Shakespeare quiz, incidental to gameplay, overlaid.29 Many of the games currently listed on the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre website are similarly crosswords, math puzzles, and so on.30 These games generally aim to increase Shakespeare literacy in students by using game structures to incentivize the introduction or recall of textual information drawn from the plays. However, because they use the popular “Bard” game strategy of inserting Shakespeare references into an incongruous procedural context more fundamental to the game experience, 27 Static Void, Angry Bards, iTunes App, 2013. 28 Asteroids, Atari Inc., Sunnyvale, CA/Taito, 1979. 29 Daniel Fischlin, ’Speare: The Literacy Arcade Game, Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, 2007, www.canadianshakespeares.ca/speare.cfm (accessed 2 February 2017); Space Invaders, Taito/Midway, 1978. 30 “Playground,” Shakespeare Globe Trust, 2017, www.shakespearesglobe.com/playground/ play (accessed 1 May 2018).

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they implicitly value the procedural context of the game structure more highly than the Shakespeare they aim to teach. Consequently, their designs paradoxically teach the premise that games are more interesting than Shakespeare’s plays, revealing an anxiety that Shakespeare—when that concept is understood as Shakespeare’s works for the theatre—does not actually have the cultural capital that non-pedagogical games aim to leverage; hence, in Lanier’s terms, the impulse to “reciprocal legitimation” tends to work more in the game’s favor than in Shakespeare’s.31 While pedagogical games that fall into this category may be effective as delivery systems and even mnemonics for textual information, they may not ultimately do the work of teaching a Shakespeare that opens up possibilities for creativity and critique. The important contribution that Shakespeare scholars are making in this context is to design digital pedagogical games that deliver more complex representations of Shakespeare grounded in attention to the language of his plays and engage players in more coherent procedural structures that scaffold their developing expertise as textual analysts. In Something Wicked, for example, E. B. Hunter scaffolds textual analysis principally by means of a rich explanatory illustration of act 1, scene 2, of Macbeth. Citing Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s 2013 stage production and Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film as precedents, Hunter characterizes her approach to textual illustration as cognate with illustrative stage and film techniques that help audiences with difficult descriptive textual passages essential to understanding the stage action that follows them: the solution is to enact the content described rather than merely reporting it.32 Her approach to representing Shakespeare’s text here is both thoughtfully grounded in the imagery of Macbeth and the aesthetics of the Bayeux tapestry,33 and also executed at a level of aesthetic expertise that fully transcends the reductive, cliché forms of representation so often encountered in digital games (including our own Staging Shakespeare and Bloom et al.’s Play the Knave). However, Hunter’s game also, as she explains it, differentiates ludic illustration from filmic and/or theatrical illustration in the sense that Something Wicked “requires players to enact the battle themselves,”34 in a procedural mechanic whereby players manipulate an avatar of the protagonist in a 2D side-scrolling action 31 Lanier, “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation,” 112. 32 Elizabeth Hunter, “Why Start with 1.2?” Something Wicked website, 30 July 2016, https:// shakespearevideogame.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/why-start-with-1-2/ (accessed 14 May 2018). 33 Hunter, “Something Wicked: The Macbeth Video Game.” 34 Elizabeth Hunter, “Something Wicked: Macbeth Enters the Digital World,” interview by Sofie T. Taubert, Im Spielrausch: Streifzüge durch die Welten des Theaters und des Computerspiels,

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platformer. On one level, then, the game operates as a “skin” game, extending Macbeth 1.2 as a representational trope over familiar mechanics such as “kill” and “move,” and like the most interesting “skin” games, it leverages the tension between its image system and expected conventions to make an argument. The conventional “health bar,” for example, is characterized here as a “blood meter” as a means of articulating what it takes to be successful in Macbeth’s world. However, Something Wicked also adds a mechanic that specifically binds the gameplay experience to the textual experience of act 1, scene 2, of Macbeth: in this game, it is impossible to lose, because we learn that Macbeth has won the battle in act 1, scene 2, of the play; so, when Macbeth’s blood runs out, the player must return to the beginning of the game and keep wading through blood until they defeat the rebel Macdonald.35 In summary, Hunter is deeply enough invested in teaching Shakespeare as play-text that she designs a complex representation of that text; selects a game type whose procedures are analogous to the events in the textual narrative; and adapts those procedures to conform with the narrative’s determined outcome. Curiously, Hunter’s explicitly articulated design mandate does not do her game justice: fully invested in reciprocal legitimacy as a means of rescuing Shakespeare—construed here as Shakespeare’s difficult textual passages—from being “confusing, boring, [and] antiquated,”36 she aims to make Shakespeare more engaging by applying a Macbeth “skin” over a familiar game type; this is “Shakespeare […] for the digital generation.”37 But her game itself slants the legitimation in the other direction: it makes Shakespeare’s difficult textual passages more interesting than the conventional game procedures it leverages. A final gesture that Something Wicked makes toward valuing and incentivizing attention to textual detail is to reward Macbeth geeks with multiple winking references to other textual moments in the play; the more into Macbeth you are, the more fun you’ll have.38 If, as an approach to scaffolding textual analysis, Hunter’s game leverages representation and some procedural mechanics to explain one scene and entice players to engage with the rest of the text of Macbeth (perhaps edited by Benjamin Beil, Philipp Bojarh, and T. Sof ie Taubert (Glücktadt: Werner Hülbusch, 2017), 97–101, at 97. 35 See Hunter, “Something Wicked: Macbeth Enters the Digital World”; Hunter, “Something Wicked: The Macbeth Video Game.” 36 Hunter, “Something Wicked: The Macbeth Video Game,” n.p. 37 Hunter, “Why Start with 1.2?” n.p. 38 See Geoff Way’s comments in this volume on the possibility that players’ prior knowledge of Hamlet results in emergent narratives during gameplay in Alawar’s Hamlet, or The Last Game.

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arguing, “if you read the play carefully, you’ll understand more cool stuff like this”), Katherine Acheson, Matthew Gaster, et al. have proposed a game that organizes its entire gameplay procedure around the act of textual analysis. Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?—an unpublished, early-stage design developed by Acheson’s undergraduate students—gamifies the process of textual interpretation by defining gameplay and completion conditions that can only be achieved through detailed engagement with plot, character, setting, and theme in the play as a whole. In Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?, “the player assumes the role of a gumshoe detective who is enlisted by Prince Escalus to ‘go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.’”39 The player’s specific goal is to “determine which character(s) are most culpable in the suicide deaths of Romeo and Juliet,”40 an analytical question that requires the review, synthesis, and interpretation of a large sampling of textual detail from the play. The textual details players examine are rendered as clues, in the form of 3D models of places and objects and conversations with witnesses, who are characters from the play. Much of the evidence is discovered in mini “skin” games with familiar structures that operate either as analogues to the play’s plot, such as the Footprint game, which reminds us which characters were present in which scenes; or as explorations of the play’s themes, such as the Feed the Ego game, in which players must identify from a list of statements only those that fit into Lord Capulet’s worldview. The game ends when the player “report(s) their findings back to Prince Escalus, by ranking the characters in order of culpability.”41 Incorrect rankings are possible and receive corrective feedback. At the level of representation, Who Killed Romeo and Juliet? guides players through various ways of thinking about individual and systemic responsibility for the tragic deaths of the play’s protagonists; at the level of game procedures, it argues for the value of active critical textual analysis by scaffolding and rewarding the gathering and interpretation of evidence; this similarly operates as an incentive, perhaps, to future, more independent engagements with Shakespeare, which is here construed as rich-text-that-rewards-study. Other digital pedagogical games manifest a similar commitment to articulating the value of Shakespeare as text by organizing their analytical gameplay procedures around the act of rendering Shakespeare’s texts on a stage, positioning students as vicarious theatre-makers in order to enrich their understanding of the “language, themes, plots, and characters”42 of 39 Acheson et al., Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?, 5.3.307.1. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 121.

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Shakespeare’s plays. Their pedagogical approach, as Gina Bloom points out, is analogous to an activity long popular among Shakespeare teachers: having groups of students perform scenes from a Shakespeare play. Scene performance activities offer a practice-based research method through which students discover variations in the way a play can be interpreted. Students consider the many variables that go into a production (such as setting, costume, line delivery, and casting), and this process of working out how to represent a scene through theatrical performance prompts students to debate the meaning of the scene as well as the larger drama of which it is a part. 43

The earliest Shakespeare-focused digital pedagogical “theater-making” game (to use Bloom’s term44) is Larry Friedlander’s aptly titled TheatreGame. 45 It allows students to make audio recordings of scenes, program synchronized stage action in a 2.5D graphical interface, and play back the virtual “scene” they have created. 46 Because it positions the audio performance of text as only one element of a multimodal staging, TheatreGame also presents text not principally as difficult, a barrier to understanding or engagement, but rather as a useful tool that enables creative agency. Michael Best, Stuart Arneil, and Martin Holmes’ 2002 Scenario makes similar claims about text, and invests more fully in a representation of the Elizabethan theatre, by enabling students to create blocking tableaux of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays in a two-dimensional perspective drawing of a stage similar to the Globe. 47 Each frame can be annotated with explanatory notes, a function that adds a layer of self-consciousness about the acts of textual interpretation required in the staging process. Our own more recent digital pedagogical games fall into this category as well: in Staging Shakespeare, a working preproduction prototype, players take on the (anachronistic) role of a director to stage scenes from Romeo and Juliet by manipulating avatars and objects 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 115. 45 See Larry Friedlander, “The Shakespeare Project,” in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 257–272. 46 In Friedlander’s game, the computer-game trope might actually be considered a “skin” on the procedural rhetoric of staging, since the interface’s pseudo-3D or three-quarter perspective is used commonly in first-person-shooter computer games. This makes the intriguing argument that staging Shakespeare is even more thrilling than shooting aliens, an encouraging pedagogical premise. 47 Michael Best, Stuart Arneil, and Martin Holmes, Scenario, Half-Baked Software, University of Victoria Computer-Aided Language Learning Laboratory, Victoria, BC, 2002.

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in three-dimensional space. Staging Shakespeare “aims to communicate a basic understanding […] of the fact that if you speak words or move bodies or objects in different ways on stage, they mean different things.”48 In Places, Please!, an unreleased prototype, “four players take on the roles of each of the four production departments (Acting, Crew, Stage Management, and Tech) […] [and must] work together to perform simulated versions of the real life, individual and collaborative duties required of [these departments] to ensure the smooth running of the shows.”49 Like cognate analogue games, however, these games are limited in their ability to teach about the text analysis required to stage a play in the sense that while their procedures do engage players intellectually and creatively in imagining how a play might be rendered on a stage, they do not engage them at an embodied level in rendering it.50 As Bloom puts it, there is an “incompatibility between the bodily mechanics of theater-making the games represent and their own game-play mechanics, which call for largely untheatrical gestures such as pushing buttons, flipping cards, moving counters, and so forth.”51 Bloom’s point implies an important distinction between the rule systems of games—the procedures that are normally thought of as making arguments, in the sense Bogost developed52 —and bodily game mechanics, which can be thought of as another kind of procedure, potentially equally persuasive. Since mechanics are operational at the material interfaces between player and game technology—“buttons, cards, counters, and so forth”—they impart values to both to the material interfaces and to the bodies of players, values that form part of our pedagogy, whether or not we acknowledge them as such. Perhaps even more importantly, because bodily game mechanics are publicly performative (something players do that can be seen, as opposed to the cognitive intellectual and creative work that might be fully interior), they have potentially signif icant implications for players’ health and relationships. In pointing out the misalignment between the mechanics of our Shakespeare games and their pedagogical aims, then, Bloom raises the helpful and important ethical questions, what do we want to teach about the materiality of Shakespeare, and how do we want to leverage Shakespeare to teach about materiality? Insofar as TheatreGame, Scenario, 48 Roberts-Smith, DeSouza-Coelho, et al., “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games,” n.p. 49 DeSouza-Coelho, “Towards a Poetics of Narrativized Gameplay and Beyond,” 84. 50 See Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 117–119. 51 Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 115. 52 Bogost, Persuasive Games.

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Staging Shakespeare, and Places, Please! exclude the material delivery systems of their games from the range of procedures explicitly leveraged to teach, they miss an opportunity to engage with that question. However, Bloom’s own game, Play the Knave, begins to answer it by organizing its procedural principles around “an immersive, embodied experience of staging a scene from a Shakespeare play.”53 In Play the Knave, players speak text from scenes by Shakespeare while gesturing in front of a Microsoft Kinect camera to control an on-screen avatar. Play the Knave, then, argues that textual analysis can be an embodied practice (in speech and gesture) as much as a cognitive one, and also values players’ bodies as instruments of textual knowledge production. Similarly, Play the Knave differs from other performance games developed for Kinect in that it does not include a scoring mechanism.54 As a result, players seek feedback from other players and spectators, who are in turn “empowered to give such feedback because their views are in no way superseded by the authority of the machine.”55 In this sense, Play the Knave engages explicitly with the social consequences of gameplay at the performative level.

Gaming Shakespeare As we have said above, we see the contributions that Shakespeare scholars are making to Shakespeare game design as enormously important interventions into a landscape of popular digital Shakespeare that can sometimes be reductive; we also see this work as making significant contributions to the fields of digital pedagogy and game studies more broadly. All of that said, however, we are struck by the extent to which all of our games—even the theatre games—lean heavily on a conception of Shakespeare’s plays as ontologically more textual than performative. The case is clearest in Something Wicked and Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?, which do not undertake to engage with an understanding of what a text in play form is at all. A play in both games is implicitly characterized as a literary text in dialogue form, synecdochically, the complete texts represented by the excerpts selected for remediation in these games. The complete texts themselves—Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet—are understood to be capable of interpretation independent of performance, the entire set of evidence relevant to our understanding 53 Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 119 54 Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 189. 55 Ibid.

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of the works that are our objects of study in these games.56 In other words, it is incidental to both games that the texts in question are plays; the same approaches to scaffolding textual analysis could be applied to any kind of literary text.57 Although TheatreGame, Scenario, Staging Shakespeare, Places, Please!, and Play the Knave do define Shakespeare’s plays as texts intended for presentation on a stage, their pedagogical orientation toward scaffolding textual analysis means that they conceive of the performance of a Shakespeare play as, to use W. B. Worthen’s phrase, a “representation of the fiction encoded in the dramatic text.”58 Like the representational illustrations adopted in Something Wicked, virtual and embodied stagings are based as entirely on textual evidence as the literary-critical activities in Who Killed Romeo and Juliet?; as such, they constitute acts of textual analysis intended to redirect our attention back to the words of the play, positioned as ontologically secondary to text. Even in Play the Knave, embodied performance points to text. As Bloom et al. write, “players are eager to see their avatars move, and so, without prompting from the game, they seek out and discover cues for gesture that Shakespeare’s language provides.”59 This conception of performance “as a means for the enunciation of writing,” although effective for teaching text analysis and consistent with long-standing currents of scholarship and teaching in Shakespeare 56 It may be possible to argue, with reference to Something Wicked, that the need to illustrate Shakespeare’s text at all demonstrates exactly the opposite position: i.e. that Shakespeare’s plays cannot be understood without reference to performance, but there are widespread precedents for illustration as a means of textual exegesis of literary texts, including illustrations that use timebased media (see Roberts-Smith and the SET research team). Douglas Lanier (“Recent Shakespeare Adaptation”) sees this “illustrational style” in the work of 1990s filmmakers such as Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrman, and Peter Greenaway as a step towards a “definitively post-textual” conception of Shakespeare in later, freer film adaptations, such as Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate about You (1999), which do not use Shakespeare’s words at all (106). While we accept that the work of Luhrman and Greenaway in particular demands enough “visual literacy” (ibid.) of its audiences that image competes with text, we are less convinced that their films “push hard against […] the notion that Shakespeare’s essence is to be found in the particularities of his language” (ibid.); or, if they did, the revolution was only a partial one, since the films Hunter cites as influences on Something Wicked date from almost 20 years after Lanier’s examples. In use as pedagogical aids in particular—and they still occupy as important a place in secondary-school education as they did when Lanier was writing in 2010 (“Recent Shakespeare Adaptation,” 106)—these film adaptations seem to us not only to be founded on a textual conception of Shakespeare, but also to be driven by the conviction that Shakespeare’s text cannot be taught as text; in other words, without the idea that Shakespeare consists of difficult textual passages, the films have no pedagogical function. 57 See also W. B. Worthen’s argument (Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms”) that although literary texts can be interpreted, plays in performance cannot; we take this up further below. 58 Ibid., 319. 59 Bloom, Kemp, et al., “Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship,” 419.

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studies, nonetheless “defines writing as literary that exceeds the stage’s presentational practices or capacity,” making it ontologically primary and precedent to performance.60 This is odd, not because it is not good pedagogy on its own terms, but because at least some of the game designers practicing this pedagogy seem otherwise inclined to agree with W. B. Worthen that characterizing Shakespeare as a literary playwright is the “paradigm that provides the most significant obstacle to thinking our way toward a powerful conception of Shakespeare performance studies.”61 It is at odds with our other work, in which, as we have acknowledged elsewhere, we have operated with a working definition of play that is indebted to rather starkly contrasting theoretical positions; these include Worthen’s own characterization of play-text as a technology co-opted for uses unforeseen by its author(s) in performance;62 Diana Taylor’s prioritization of the practice of performance over the textual archive;63 Peggy Phelan’s observation that performance comes into being through disappearance;64 Thomas Postlewait’s acknowledgement that the ontology of a past performance event is interpretive;65 and M. J. Kidnie’s interest in theatrical “works” as perceived retrospectively through “instances” whether textual or performed.66 A preliminary attempt to express our usual way of thinking might look something like this: A play is the set of potentialities retrospectively manifest in the repeatable sequence of embodied practices understood by a witnessing audience to have been a production of that play.67 60 Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms,” 319, 320-21. It is worth mentioning, in the context of the idea that text exceeds performance, that both Staging Shakespeare and Play the Knave offer only reduced versions of scenes from Shakespeare for performance: even in Play the Knave’s advanced “full” texts, “the text is still edited somewhat to make for an enjoyable gameplay experience” (Play the Knave website, https://www.playtheknave.org/ [accessed 31 July 2018]). Indeed, all of the digital pedagogical games we have surveyed select, rearrange, and recontextualize text as part of the process of remediation to game. 61 Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms,” 328. 62 W.B. Worthen, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 21–22. 63 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 64 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). 65 Thomas Postlewait, “Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer with Twelve Cruxes,” Theatre Journal 43, no. 2 (1991): 157–178. 66 M. J. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 67 By this definition, a play-text could be a play (in material rather than conceptual form), but only after it has been enacted. We are attempting here to exclude the medieval understanding

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This is an imperfect and burdensome definition, but it attempts to capture two things: first, the ways in which, as Worthen puts it, “the unscripted repertoire of performance practice constantly reshapes the potentialities of the archive, the capabilities of the text as an imagined instrument of performance,”68 and second, the ways in which plays—both during performance and afterwards in retrospection—exist primarily in the minds of their audiences. In other words, plays are normally, for us, sites where performance is ontologically prior to text and spectatorship is as active as (though different from) performance in what Brian Massumi calls the “ontogenesis” of the work.69 Nor does this understanding of what a play is seem to us to be essentially anachronistic to Shakespeare’s theatre, given the def initional challenges raised by the well-attested volatility of the relationships among textual and performed instances of Shakespeare’s “works” in his own time.70 The sheer scale of the distribution of performance over text in Shakespeare’s theatre—as Erika T. Lin puts it, Shakespeare’s plays were, in “99 percent of early modern encounters” with them, performed for audiences71—makes it likely that in Shakespeare’s time, just as in ours, of plays as “literature in the dramatic mode” and the modern category of closet drama, while also allowing for the existence of plays that do not have prior texts. We also acknowledge that our definition does not differentiate between a production and a performed adaptation; in our view, so long as a sequence of practices is performed and recognized as a play, the distinction between production and adaptation is one of scale rather than of kind; alternatively (following Kidnie), the distinction is one of perception by the production’s interpreters and is therefore unlikely to be a stable one. 68 Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms,” 319, drawing on Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire. 69 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 9; see Roberts-Smith, DeSouza-Coelho, et al., “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games.” 70 For recent commentaries, see Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); James Purkis, Shakespeare’s ‘strayng’ manuscripts,” Shakespeare and Textual Studies, eds. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 39-53. 71 Erika T. Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 14. On the limited distribution of playbooks, see Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 33–50; on the blending of textual and performative modes of spectatorship, see, for example, Tiffany Stern, “Watching as Reading: the Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare’s Playhouse,” in How to Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, ed. Laurie E. Maguire (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 136–159; Worthen’s discussion (Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms,” 325–326) of Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Paul Menzer, “Character Acting,” in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 141–170.

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“the work [did] not exist somewhere […] but always ‘survive[d]’ somewhere else.”72 Indeed, the spirit of participatory, embodied play that continued to pervade the early modern London theatre industry, and provided the richly meaningful audience engagements that Bloom traces in her most recent work,73 seems to us to depend, not upon the textuality of the theatre, but upon its performativity and conceptuality.74 For us, “theater is not a vehicle for textual transmission,”75 and never has been. But if that is the case, why are we as scholars of Shakespeare’s theatre designing games that are just such vehicles? This is not what we thought we wanted to teach. It may be that at this early stage in the development of an indie digital pedagogical Shakespeare game industry, our ability to gain traction has necessitated sidestepping the difficulty that seems to us endemic to any conception of Shakespeare performance studies, namely: if the moment of performance is unstudyable, as a long line of theorists assert (including our influences: Postlewait, Phelan, Taylor), where do we locate Shakespeare in it? Even Worthen, in the same essay that calls for “a powerful conception of Shakespeare performance studies,” emphasizes that it is impossible for spectators to engage in acts of interpretation during a performance. As he puts it: “the performance may be based on a prior interpretation, and on differing interpretations that develop over the course of the production’s rehearsals and run. But here and now, during the performance, ‘interpretation’ is set aside: they are making a performance in which we participate, ‘interpretively’ perhaps. An ‘interpretation’ happens only when we withdraw from the performance.”76 The more we want to explore a historicized Shakespeare performance studies, the harder it is to stabilize Shakespeare: the fragmentary record of the early modern theatre industry is largely made up of evidence of systemic elements—that is, of documents, objects, and practices that were preserved or repeated from one performance event to another—and our evidence of individual performance events or incidents is almost non-existent. In that landscape, the Shakespeare we can most easily point to is a text (albeit one artificially stabilized by modern editorial practices). Similarly, teaching Shakespeare demands that we have something stable to study, such as the films Lanier is reticent to authorize as Shakespeare because of their distance from both historical 72 Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 153. 73 Bloom, Gaming the Stage. 74 We do, however, see Bloom’s argument as textualizing performance, a point we take up below. 75 Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms,” 332. 76 Ibid., 333.

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text and live performance.77 As designers of Shakespeare games, we have so far construed game design as pedagogy and game playing as a learning activity by construing both as methods of studying the one pseudo-stable Shakespeare we can point to: the surviving texts of plays attributable to a historical person of that name. One substantive benefit of this stance, in the project of convincing our field that games can be good learning activities, is that it provides space for an opening offering of role-playing games that mimic familiar approaches to teaching Shakespeare.78 The analogy is most obvious in our staging games, but E. B. Hunter bases her claim for the pedagogical effectiveness of Something Wicked on the same premise: the game teaches by “requir[ing] players to enact the battle themselves.”79 Staging games also have the persuasive advantage of fitting comfortably within the influential analogy between digital design and theatre-making introduced by Brenda Laurel in her seminal Computers as Theatre80 and still current not only in game studies81 but also in the gaming industry. Gina Bloom’s acute analysis of the resonances of Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox Kinect demonstrates that theatre—and specifically Shakespeare—is still actively legitimizing new computational devices and software in commercial markets.82 But the legitimization is reciprocal, and Bloom herself leverages it elsewhere. In an argument that goes so far as to disassociate the term “digitality” from the computational, she and her co-authors characterize the digital as a description of the gesture vocabularies in declamatory acting techniques documented as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and use those in turn to legitimize the exaggerated 77 Lanier, “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation.” 78 Bloom, “Videogame Shakespeare,” 121. 79 Hunter, “Something Wicked: Macbeth Enters the Digital World,” 97. 80 Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River: Addison Wesley/Pearson Education, 2014). 81 See, for example, Gary Alan Fine’s work on the identities “person,” “player,” and “character,” which game players experience during gameplay (Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds [Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002]). More recently, Sonia Fizek’s framework for the analysis of player-characters (Fizek “Pivoting the Player: A framework for Player Character Research in Offline Computer Role-Playing Games,” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 6, no.3 [2014]: 215–234) and David Owen’s book-length study of players’ affective identifications with avatars (Owen, Player and Avatar: The Affective Potential of Videogames [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017]), describing themselves as drawing on, respectively, Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins, ed. Jean-Patrick Debbeche and Paul J. Perron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), and Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947). The Artaudian concept Owen cites—“a body without organs”—coined by Artaud (in that work) is better known via Deleuze’s appropriations in The Logic of Sense (1969) and later works. 82 Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 179-80.

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gestures that players of Play the Knave must make—in order for the system’s “lower-cost” motion-capture technology to function.83 If digital design can be theatrical, then theatre-making can be digital. However useful these moves may be (both our game design moves and our rhetorical moves) at this stage of our indie industry’s game, they leave a lot of room for us to address at least three things that stand out as importantly missing from our text-oriented games, even the theatre-making games. The first of these gives rise to the other two: we have not yet acknowledged that audiences are essential to the ontology of theatre. When we characterize student players as theatre-makers, whether actors, directors, or stage managers, we locate the work of textual interpretation they are doing, not in the moment of performance, but in the process of rehearsal. Second, and as a result, our games are not yet able to acknowledge the different, but equally important, kinds of work that actors and spectators undertake in the moment a live performance is made. To return to Worthen, who distinguishes the “we” of an audience from the “they” of actors when he says that “they are making a performance in which we participate”: the work of actors is that, “in a crucial sense actors don’t deliver ‘words’ to their offstage auditors: they do things with them, entreat, condescend, wound, instrumentalize the verbal text as one of many means to creating acts in the event of performance.”84 The work of audiences, on the other hand, is the work of “agents—witnesses, in Freddie Rokem’s terms—within a complex event, between the interinvolvement of present acting and represented action onstage and its reciprocal incorporation and reflection of the behavioural world beyond the stage, both the world of the theatrical audience and the larger social world toward which it extends.”85 In other words: theatre in performance is, ontologically, a process of creative representation consisting of both acts (provided by actors) and contexts (provided by audiences). It is, minimally, an ontogenesis effected in real time by two distinct kinds of agents. It follows that the third thing missing in the current landscape of digital pedagogical Shakespeare games is any exploration of the work of theatrical performance as a collaborative ontogenesis, rather than a stable, artifactual ontology. Ontology is tricky in the theatre: it does not sit comfortably within 83 Bloom, Kemp, et al., “Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship,” 410, 413, 425–426. Bloom is not an apologist for this technology, however, and her point that the Microsoft Kinect, like other new peripherals with theatrical potential, have so far failed to take advantage of it (Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 178, 191) is well-taken. Play the Knave makes a significant contribution to developing it. 84 Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms,” 333, 334. 85 Ibid., 334, citing Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 155–160.

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any theoretical frame yet articulated. For example, the fact that the representations co-created by actors and audiences are ontologically complete in theatrical performance—the whole point—makes theatre distinct from the kinds of everyday performances that by definition bring new realities into substantive social being, such as those of interest to performance theorists like Goffman, Austin, Schechner, and Butler.86 This eluding of theories that arose from it (and we might include dramaturgical theories of computational design here) may be one of the ways in which theatrical performance can be characterized as an art form, but the works of representation in that art form are nonetheless equally elusive. After a performance experience, we may remember the representation we helped make—“the play”—but that memorial “play” is, in retrospect, an ontology rather than an ontogenesis. And to complicate matters further, it is unlikely that we will remember our contributions to the making of it. One productive approach has been to theorize audiences’ roles in the ontogenesis of performance-making as metaprocesses, as Worthen and Rokem do, and as Bloom does in her analogy between early modern theatre spectatorship and the playing of “playable media” and “metagaming.”87 But even here, Bloom’s argument in Gaming the Stage depends upon another incongruous conceptual stabilization: if the work of spectators is like playing or gaming, the work of actors is like playable media or games; in other words, the contribution actors make to early modern works of theatre is like the closed and stable computational systems in the digital games that metagaming critiques as a theory and resists as a practice.88 Ultimately, Bloom’s compelling arguments about the meanings of specific scenes in Shakespeare’s plays on the early modern London stage are convincing not because acting in the early modern theatre was like a game, but because she uses the analogy of games to stabilize the idea of performance in way that allows textual evidence from the plays to stand in for the ontogeneses we can never recover. Her book is a brilliant work of theatre history, but it doesn’t solve the problem of how an analogy to games can teach an understanding of ontogenesis. Can the closed systems of digital games help us teach or understand the ontogenetic nature of theatrical works? We do see a way forward in 86 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1956); J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990). 87 Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 4, 5. 88 Boluk and Lemieux, Metagaming.

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what might seem like an oxymoron of an ambition: keep designing digital Shakespeare games, and invite our students to make them, too. As Constance Steinkuehler puts it, in her foreword to Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke’s book about the pedagogical benefits of making games: “to make a game is to make a model of a system, to understand that system. Deeply.”89 In addition to work in game studies—to which Kafai and Burke’s book is an important contribution—there is a robust body of literature in design and the digital humanities to support that claim, including Stan Ruecker’s work on prototyping as a form of knowledge production90 and the emergence of the field of “provotyping,” which creates prototypes that embody provocative ideas.91 Often, modeling a system also requires simplifying it, which can be a useful means of analyzing and critiquing it; as McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory suggests, games can be good at that kind of essentializing clarity.92 Games can also be just as intellectually productive in very lowfidelity prototype form as they are when they are professionally produced.93 Acheson et al.’s Who Killed Romeo and Juliet? is a vivid example, and our own experience of making prototypical Shakespeare games is that it has been the means by which over several projects, we have come to understand that for us, the concepts Shakespeare and theatre are closely related, while also clarifying our understandings of each. We have also, in that process, become better able to articulate the ways in which our understandings may differ from others’. In a pedagogical environment, this is especially important: so long as we are transparent about the fact that what we are doing when we make a game is reducing something complex to a model for the purposes of understanding it—and that the model could be made in different ways, according to different understandings—game design can be 89 Constance Steinkuehler, foreword to Kafai and Burke, Connected Gaming, xi–xiii, at ix. 90 See Alan Galey, Stan Ruecker, and the INKE Research Group, “How a Prototype Argues,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 4 (2010): 405–424; Stan Ruecker and the INKE Research Group, “A Brief Taxonomy of Prototypes for the Digital Humanities,” Scholarly and Research Communication 6, no. 2 (2015): 1–11; Stan Ruecker and Jennifer Roberts-Smith, “Design Research: Objects, Procedures, and New Understanding,” Technology | Architecture + Design 2, no. 1 (2018): 11–14; Stan Ruecker and Jennifer Roberts-Smith, “Concept Models for Design Practice,” Bitacora 27, no. 4 (2017): 11–18. 91 Laurens Boer and Jared Donovan, “Provotypes for Participatory Innovation,” paper presented at DIS: In the Wild, 11–15 June 2012, Newcastle; Deger Ozkaramanli and Pieter M. A. Desmet, “Provocative Design for Unprovocative Designers: Strategies for Trigger Personal Dilemmas,” paper presented at the Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference: Future-Focused Thinking, 27–30 June 2016, Brighton. 92 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 93 See Galey, Ruecker, et al., “How a Prototype Argues”; Ruecker and Roberts-Smith, “Concept Models”; and Ruecker and Roberts-Smith, “Design Research.”

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an excellent teaching activity. To cite Steinkuehler again: “games, like any other media […] are only as smart as the practices that surround them.”94 We see an additional intellectual benefit to designing games, however, in its demand that we understand not just the system we are modeling, but also the system we are modeling in. To design a Shakespeare game is not just to model Shakespeare, but also to learn to manipulate the medium of game to express the model we intend as expertly as we do all the other media that are our currency in academia: lectures, books, and critical essays, for example, and for some of us, performances. If we want to teach Shakespeare through game design, we need to understand and value games as highly as we do Shakespeare. In some sense, when we make a Shakespeare game, we are modeling game in Shakespeare; game is the complexity and Shakespeare is the simplification. Lastly, of course, the reality that we need to learn game in order to gamify Shakespeare (or Shakespeare in order to Shakespearify game) points to an ontological difference between the two. In order to leverage Shakespeare and game for a richer pedagogy than reciprocal legitimation—and make visible the work required to develop that pedagogy—which is in itself a third ontology: digital pedagogical Shakespeare game—we also need to develop discourses that license the incongruities between Shakespeare and game as well as their congruities, valuing those differences as intellectually productive.95

Works Cited 5th Cell. Super Scribblenauts. W. B. Games, Bellevue, WA/Konami, 2010. Acheson, Katherine, Matthew Gaster, et al. Who Killed Romeo and Juliet? 2013. Unpublished computer game designs. Asteroids. Atari Inc., Sunnyvale, CA/Taito, 1979. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1966]. Best, Michael, Stuart Arneil, and Martin Holmes. Scenario. Half-Baked Software, University of Victoria Computer-Aided Language Learning Laboratory, Victoria, BC, 2002. 94 Constance Steinkuehler, “Parenting and Videogames,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 59, no. 4 (2016): 357–361, at 357. 95 We are deeply indebted to Gina Bloom for her robust and generous critique of the f irst version of this essay. This research was supported by an Ontario Early Researcher Award, a Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship, and by the Stratford Festival of Canada.

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Blayney, Peter W. M. “The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks.” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 33–50. Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. Theater: History/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. –––. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.” In “Forum: Skill,” edited by Evelyn B. Tribble. Special issue, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 114–127. Gina Bloom, Evan Buswell, Nicholas Toothman, Colin Milburn, and Michael Neff, Play the Knave (ModLab, 2020), open access at https://www.playtheknave.org/ download.html. Accessed 20 May 2021. Bloom, Gina, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell. “Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67 (2016): 408–430. Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. –––. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Kindle file. Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick Lemieux. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Boer, Laurens, and Jared Donovan. “Provotypes for Participatory Innovation.” Paper presented at DIS: In the Wild, 11–15 June 2012, Newcastle. Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research, 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Bruzas, John A. Crypto Logic—Shakespeare. iTunes App, 2011. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. DeSouza-Coelho, Shawn. Places, Please! 2016. Unreleased mobile game prototype. –––. “Towards a Poetics of Narrativized Gameplay and Beyond.” MA thesis, University of Waterloo, 2015. devCAT. Mabinogi. Nexon Korea, Eugene, OR, 2004. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002. Fischlin, Daniel. ’Speare: The Literacy Arcade Game. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, 2007. Accessed 2 February 2017. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/speare.cfm.

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Fizek, Sonia. “Pivoting the Player: A Framework for Player Character Research in Offline Computer Role-Playing Games.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 6, no.3 (2014): 215–234. Friedlander, Larry. “The Shakespeare Project.” In Hypermedia and Literary Studies, edited by Paul Delany and George P. Landow, 257–272. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Galey, Alan, Stan Ruecker, and the INKE Research Group. “How a Prototype Argues.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 4 (2010): 405–424. Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1956. Hunter, Elizabeth. “Something Wicked: Macbeth Enters the Digital World.” Interview by T. Sofie Taubert. In Im Spielrausch: Streifzüge durch die Welten des Theaters und des Computerspiels, edited by Benjamin Beil, Philipp Bojarh, and T. Sofie Taubert, 97–101 (Glücktadt: Werner Hülbusch, 2017). www.ebhunter.f iles.wordpress. com/2019/11/e.-b.-hunter-sample-something-wickedmakk-catalogue.pdf. –––. “Something Wicked: The Macbeth Video Game.” Fabula(b), n.p. Accessed 14 May 2018. https://fabulabsite.wordpress.com/portfolio/something-wicked. –––. “Why Start with 1.2?” Something Wicked website, 30 July 2016, n.p. Accessed 14 May 2018. https://shakespearevideogame.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/ why-start-with-1-2/. Kafai, Yasmin B., and Quinn Burke. Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Kidnie, Margaret J.. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2008. Lanier, Douglas. “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 104–113. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Addison Wesley/ Pearson Education, 2014. Lehmann, Courtney, and Geoffrey Way. “Young Turks or Corporate Clones? Constructing the (Young) User in the Shakespearean Attention Economy.” In The Shakespeare User: Creative and Critical Appropriation in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 63–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Mario’s Time Machine. Nintendo, Kyoto, 1993. Lin, Erika T. Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Menzer, Paul. “Character Acting.” In Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern, 141–170. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Olson, Glending. “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1995): 195–221. Owen, David. Player and Avatar: The Affective Potential of Videogames. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. Ozkaramanli, Deger, and Pieter M. A. Desmet. “Provocative Design for Unprovocative Designers: Strategies for Triggering Personal Dilemmas.” Paper presented at Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference: Future-Focused Thinking, 27–30 June 2016, Brighton. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. “Playground.” Shakespeare’s Globe, Shakespeare Globe Trust, 2017. Accessed 1 May 2018. www.shakespearesglobe.com/learn/playground/. Postlewait, Thomas. “Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer With Twelve Cruxes.” Theatre Journal 43, no. 2 (1991): 157–178. Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, and Toby Malone. “Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory of Theatrical Game Design.” In “Social Media Shakespeare,” edited by Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill. Special issue, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation 10, no. 1 (2016): n.p. Rokem, Freddie. Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Ruecker, Stan, and the INKE Research Group. “A Brief Taxonomy of Prototypes for the Digital Humanities.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6, no. 2 (2015): 1–11. Ruecker, Stan, and Jennifer Roberts-Smith. “Concept Models for Design Practice.” Bitácora Urbano Territorial 27, no. 4 (2017): 11–18. –––. “Design Research: Objects, Procedures, and New Understanding.” Technology | Architecture + Design 2, no. 1 (2018): 11–14. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Silent Hill 3. Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, 2003. Space Invaders, Taito/Midway, 1978. Static Void. Angry Bards. iTunes App, 2013. –––. The Sonnets: Confounded. iTunes App, 2013. Steinkuehler, Constance. Foreword to Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, by Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Baker, xi–xiii. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. –––. “Parenting and Videogames.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 59, no. 4 (2016): 357–361.

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–––. “Videogames as a Serious Medium.” On the Horizon 24, no. 2 (2016): 175–178. Steinkuehler, Constance, Kurt Squire, and Sasha Barab, eds. Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stern, Tiffany. “Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare’s Playhouse.” In How to Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, edited by Laurie E. Maguire, 136–159. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Ubersfeld, Anne. Reading Theatre. Translated by Frank Collins. Edited by JeanPatrick Debbeche and Paul J. Perron. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Weimann, Robert, and Douglas Bruster. Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? Brøderbund, Eugene, OR, 1989. Worthen, W. B. Drama: Between Poetry and Performance. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2010. –––. “Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies).” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no.3 (2011): 303–339.

About the Authors Jennifer Roberts-Smith is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Waterloo and director of the qCollaborative, a critical feminist design research lab housed in the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute (www.qCollaborative.com). Her research and creative practice focus on performance and digital media, with particular emphasis on theatre, history, pedagogy, and design for social justice. Jennifer currently leads the Aesthetics for Accessibility project and the virtual reality development cluster of the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project (DOHR.ca). Her past work includes Staging Shakespeare (a pedagogical Shakespeare game), the Simulated Environment for Theatre (a 3D staging environment), several research-based productions of early modern plays, and Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (co-edited with Janelle Jenstad and Mark Kaethler; Routledge, 2018). Prototyping across the Disciplines: Designing Better Futures (co-edited with Milena Radzikowska and Stan Ruecker) is forthcoming in 2021 from Intellect Books.

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Shawn DeSouza-Coelho is an author, illustrator, scholar, and theatre artist based in Toronto, Canada. His second book, Whenever You’re Ready (ECW Press, 2018), is the first published biography of a theatrical stage manager. DeSouza-Coelho has contributed essays to several edited collections, including Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn (Iter Press, 2016) and Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere (University of Alberta Press, 2015), and has published an article in The Shakespearean International Yearbook. Most recently, as CAD designer and dramaturg, he contributed to the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project. Through funding provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, Shawn is currently illustrating his third book, 90 Days: Sex, Pornography, Recovery, a graphic novel about sex and pornography addiction.



Epilogue: Field of Play Gamifying Early Modern Theatre and Performance Studies Natasha Korda Abstract If the study of early modern theatre and performance takes as its object the study of “play,” this epilogue asks: What are the rules of the game? How does conceptualizing early modern theatre and performance as gamelike shift the field in which we work and the turf upon which we play? Where are the parameters that delimit the field drawn, and how do they determine what is considered to be in or out of bounds? Surveying how these essays variously work with and play upon disciplinary rules and boundaries, I suggest how other models and modalities of early modern play might open the field to new modes of inquiry. Keywords: archive; discipline; doll house; gamif ication; gender; Wunderkammern

Les jeux sont faits The cry of the croupier in roulette as the wheel is set in motion announces, like an epilogue, that play is done: rien ne va plus, a point of no return has been reached as the bets are placed, the stakes set. Yet this end also marks a beginning, an opportunity to survey where the chips lie and anticipate the upshot of the game, a task to which this epilogue now turns.

The rules of the game Let us begin with a pivotal question prompted by this prescient collection of essays: if the field of early modern theatre and performance takes as its

Bishop, T., G. Bloom, E.T. Lin (eds.), Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463723251_epi

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object the study of “play,” what are the rules of the game? At stake in this question, and in the essays collected here, which variously model its implications, is not only the scope of what counts as “play” in the historical past (i.e. the resemblance of stageplays to other sports, games, entertainments, and pastimes), but the gamification of the field’s archives and methods of study in the present, and the disciplinary future this gambit portends: how does conceptualizing early modern theatre and performance as gamelike shift the field in which we work and the turf upon which we play? Where are the disciplinary parameters that delimit the field drawn, and how do they determine what is considered to be in or out of bounds? This epilogue considers some of the ways in which the essays collected here work with and play upon the rules and boundaries governing the study of theatre and performance in the early modern period, and suggests still other ways in which gamifying our archives and discipline might open the field to new modalities of work and play, and new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between these activities.

Play, games, and innovation Despite their dismissal as trivial or insignificant, play and games have historically been crucial drivers of cultural and technological innovation, as evidenced not only by modern “playable media,” such as videogames and virtual-reality interfaces, but by their immersive, programmable, and interactive forebears in the early modern period.1 That early modern playwrights themselves perceived (not uncritically) connections between theatrical and other forms of (commercialized) cultural and technological innovation is demonstrated by Heather Hirschfeld’s contribution to this volume, an astute analysis of Richard Brome’s satire of the culture of late-Caroline capitalist “projects,” patents, and monopolies in The Court Beggar. Her felicitous focus 1 For example, immersive magic-lantern projections and anamorphic optical devices; programmable pinned-cylindered music boxes and automata; and interactive proto-“pop-up” books and toy theatres with movable trapdoors, scenic effects, and machines. For a wide-ranging history of play, games, and cultural and technological innovation, see Steven Johnson, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016); on “playable media,” Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Playable Media and Textual Instruments” Dichtung Digital: A Journal of Art and Culture in Digital Media (2005): n.p., http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2005/1/Wardrip-Fruin/ index.htm (accessed 14 January 2020); on early modern interactive print media, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Interactive Books: Playful Media Before Pop-Ups (New York: Routledge, 2018); on early modern stage technologies, Lily B. Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance: A Classical Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923).

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on this understudied dramatic text participates in an ongoing loosening of the almost monopolistic grip Shakespeare continues to hold on the study of early modern theatre and performance. Although Hirschfeld does not directly discuss the role played by Richard Brome Online in this loosening, and in the renewed attention the playwright has received subsequent to this digital platform’s launch in 2010,2 it is worth mentioning here for its dynamic, interactive, and indeed playful design affordances—including “digital video clips of performances, parallel linked texts and pop-up annotations” that allow users to toggle between editions, critical materials, a gallery of performance clips, a centralized bibliography and master glossary, and essays on the dramatic texts and related topics3—which together contribute to what we might call a gamification of the archive, reimagined as a lively, ludic space that renders non-canonical dramatic texts newly accessible, while enabling new modes of interacting with and producing knowledge about them.

Gamifying the archive and discipline The study of early modern ludic activities requires not only attending to the facts of such activities assembled in archives using traditional disciplinary methods, but reconceptualizing our archives and disciplinary methods as themselves shaped and reshaped by the activity of play. For if plays of whatever variety are facts (les jeux sont faits), they are also artifacts (assemblages of ludic techniques and technologies), whose affordances enable performance events that are continually made and remade in the present. The “ontogenesis” of a stageplay (as Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho argue here in their collaborative essay on the pedagogical dimension of digital Shakespeare games) happens relationally and collaboratively in time and space between actors and audiences, whether real or virtual. Certainly, recovering the facts of play in historical archives may itself be a playfully subversive act: counting the sales figures for tennis balls over two centuries in London, as David Kathman meticulously does in his contribution to the collection, situates the regulation 2 Prior to the launch of Richard Brome Online, as Brett D. Hirsch notes in his review of the platform, Pearson’s 1873 facsimile reprint was the most recent edition of many of Brome’s 15 non-collaborative plays and there were only 92 scholarly studies of his work from 1884 to 2010 as compared with 36,464 of Shakespeare’s; see Hirsch, “Richard Brome Online, by Richard Cave,” Early Theatre 13, no. 1 (2010): 137–153, at 138. In the decade since the platform’s launch, there have been some 55 new studies of Brome’s work according the MLA International Bibliography (accessed 7 August 2020). 3 Hirsch, “Richard Brome Online,” 140.

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and licensing of theatre in surprising relation to other popular, “unlawful games.” Deploying conventional archival methods in an unconventional archive to produce new knowledge, he demonstrates (as Shakespeare does in Henry V) that tennis balls are not impertinent to the play of history. Indeed, tracing the facts of play by following ludic artifacts and events as they move through historical time and archival space tends to lead us in wayward and unpredictable directions, along a bias or an off-kilter bounce (as does Paul Menzer’s “bowling theory of early modern performance”), challenging static modes of contextualization that affix text to context. In the process, the material affordances of play technologies shape and are shaped by kinetic techniques around which the rules and boundaries of the game are drawn and redrawn. Inherently unpredictable, play and games tend to destabilize fixed boundaries of period and place upon which historical contextualization relies. “Games have a wonderful ability to cross borders,” Steven Johnson maintains in his history of ludic innovation, which traces the migratory histories of games as they emerge within networks of play across national boundaries.4 His provocation serves as an invitation to think less insularly about the migratory forms of early modern stageplays and playing. Ludic historiographies also tend to coalesce around times of change and unpredictability, as Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals in her study of games of chance in morality dramas during the religious upheavals following Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Sometimes they unspool over longues durées that span period divides, as does Stephen Purcell’s study of playful, collaborative dramaturgy at the Globe, where theatre practice-as-research in the present becomes a speculative portal to the past. At other times, they hazard anachronistic leaps, offering new conceptual paradigms through which to understand the untimeliness of dramatic and digital adaptations of Shakespeare, analyzed here by Marissa Greenberg and Geoffrey Way, respectively.

Politics of play Games continually test the parameters of rule-bound, boundary-setting, disciplinary activity. They refuse to stay put within the playground or “magic circle”5 conceived by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, a space purportedly cut 4 Johnson, Wonderland, 200–1. 5 Huizinga evokes the “magic circle” among several examples of “play-grounds” that are “isolated” from everyday life in Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950 [1938]), 10. The “magic circle” is further elaborated from

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off from everyday life.6 Play tends to stray beyond bounds in performance, and to test the rules that govern it, revealing its parameters to be always in flux. We must therefore ask not only “What are the rules of the game?” but also “How is the game actually played, and by and for whom?” Why and how are its official or scripted rules redrawn in the ongoing act of performative play? Far from being removed from daily life, games continually play upon the conventions, systems, and procedures that govern the everyday. At any moment, the act of play may morph into counterplay7 or playing “against the grain,” as game theorists Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard argue in Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, a volume that explores the political potential of alternative, minoritarian, and progressive games to resist “everyday and systemic violences within everyday cultural engagement,” and thereby to become “spaces of disruption, interruption, and transformation.”8 This is not to suggest that games are inherently progressive: gaming cultures past and present are often rife with xenophobic, racist and misogynist bigotry and violence. The power of play is imbricated with our colonial past, as Ellen MacKay’s reading of The Tempest demonstrates, just as it is with our post-/neo-/settler-colonial, military-industrial present.9 It is therefore crucial that any move towards gamification on the disciplinary game board of early modern theatre and performance studies actively addresses the political stakes of this move, and by and for whom it is being made in a given instance, for in failing to do so we risk replaying the violence and oppression of gaming cultures past and present.

Play and counter-play What counts as (legitimate) play? And whose ludic activities are deemed to be in or out of bounds within the field? Such questions determine which Huizinga by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 95, and has since become influential. 6 On Huizinga’s “magic circle,” see further Gina Bloom, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 25. 7 See Alan F. Meads, Understanding Counterplay in Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2015). 8 Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard, “Introduction: Not a Post-Racism and Post-Misogyny Promised Land; Video Games as Instruments of (In)justice,” in Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, ed. Gray and Leonard (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 3–23, at 4, 18. 9 See, for example, Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2009); Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-Entertainment Complex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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facts and artifacts of play survive in historical archives. Gender, status, and race inscribe ideologies of play, just as they do ideologies of work (with which they are inextricably intertwined). The game of wit played by Patroclus and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida is thus cast by Ulysses as “feminine and frivolous,” Patricia Badir argues, in contrast to what are deemed to be consequential games of masculine contest. Counter-histories of gaming culture that seek to recover ways of playing “against the grain” that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives have therefore had to assemble unofficial, counter-archives documenting how the rules of games are altered and modified in the performance of gameplay. In her revisionist history of Monopoly, for example, Mary Pilon assembles surviving examples of the “official” Parker Brothers game’s forerunners and recounts how the original game board and rules of play evolved over time as it was taken up by different players, revealing its origin as an anti-monopolist recreation called the Landlord’s Game. Devised during the Progressive Era by poet, stenographer, suffragist, and sometime actress Lizzie Magie, its intended purpose was to provide an interactive, gamified medium through which to teach the progressive economic theories of Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty (1879).10 Pilon links Magie’s insight into the power of games to transform everyday roles and rules to her work as an actress who favored breeches parts and therefore “understood the power of drama and the potency of assuming roles outside of one’s everyday identity” to provide “a respite from the often-dreary conditions of daily life.”11 If stageplays and performances are gamelike, as this volume demonstrates, Pilon’s work reveals gameplay to be inherently performative and indeed theatrical in producing space for role-play and counter-play in everyday life.

Scales of play and the production of space What determines the temporal and spatial scope of play? How does the scale of play differ in accordance with one’s access to leisure time and space? How large (or small) must the “magic circle” of play be for its ludic activities to warrant documentation within (or dismissal from) the archive and disciplinary f ield of early modern theatre and performance? The examples of “play” cited by the Oxford English Dictionary to illustrate its 10 Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), esp. 18–42. 11 Pilon, Monopolists, 33.

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earliest definition as “Exercise, brisk or free movement or action” reflect the broader scope afforded to male bodily activity during the period (e.g. “f ighting, fencing […] leaping”), underscoring the degree to which play requires “opportunity, or room for action; scope for activity” (OED, “play, n.,” I.1a, 5a), and thus, what Henri Lefebvre calls the “production of space,” however small.12 Spatial and temporal opportunities for play are also limited by the exigencies of work as determined by gender, status, race, etc. The unending cycle of women’s work, conceived since the early modern period as “never done,” for example, may leave little space or time for play. What small-scale modalities of play and performance in everyday life might have been available to early modern subjects without access to larger stages or ludic arenas? And where might we find evidence of such activities in historical archives? Michel de Certeau’s examination of the “miniscule” and “quotidian” practices through which those who, lacking the means to challenge a dominant social order, have historically “escaped it without leaving it” suggests that the parameters of early modern theatre and performance studies might paradoxically be expanded by shrinking our conception of what constitutes a stage, a playscape, or indeed, a theatre or performance archive. The scale of what counts as a “stage” is, after all, historically variable: in the mid-sixteenth century, the term came to mean a “platform in a theater,” but for almost a century prior to this it also referred to “shelves […] in a cupboard” or cabinet, as in the phrase “A Cupperd of .xii. stages” (OED, “stage, n.,” I.5a, I.1f). Such cupboard-stages included Wunderkammern (wonder cabinets)—viewed by contemporary media archaeologists as forerunners of modern digital interfaces13—but also less well-known display cabinets that bore a far closer resemblance to theatrical stages in their display of miniature “scenes” replete with props, painted sets, and even costumed personae, mimetically arranged into microcosms of everyday life, known as Kinder- or Puppenhäuser, or “baby” (i.e. doll) houses. Are these early modern cabinet stages (which ranged in size from 1.3 feet to as much as 8.5 feet in height, 3 to 6.4 feet in width, and 1.2 to 2.4 feet in depth) too small to warrant entry into the archives of theatre and performance historiography? Indeed, might we view such miniature collections themselves as constituting archives of play? If so, how might they help us to reconceptualize archives themselves as ludic spaces? 12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]). 13 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 35–36.

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Gyno ludens: a doll house redux In her counter-history of “The Dollhouse as Ludic Space, 1690–1920,” Frances Armstrong documents the subversive potential of (gendered) role-play and counter-play in doll houses since the late seventeenth century.14 Contesting the traditional conception of doll houses as primarily “place[s] where girls were required to practice the kind of domesticity and conformity expected of women,” she demonstrates that beginning in the early modern period both young and adult women used “dollhouses as their own ludic spaces, places dedicated to their own play, rather than as sites for training in compliance” to traditional gender roles.15 Drawing primarily on the textual evidence of literature for and about children, she argues that prior to the nineteenth century doll houses were most often depicted as ludic spaces “fraught with opportunities for sinful thoughts and behavior.”16 Far from functioning simply as tools of ideological indoctrination, she maintains, the ludic space of doll houses contained a “potential for drama,” and could be set “like a stage, with action frozen at a particular moment”—moments that included lapses in and subversions of domestic decorum.17 The modif ication of dolls and doll-house interiors, she further maintains, enabled dramatic narratives centering on class mobility and gender transformation, akin to those performed on larger stages.18 Early modern doll houses’ potential for drama, I have argued elsewhere, was grounded in their material affordances as remediated archives of everyday life and theatres of memory used by young and adult women of the middling sort as sites of imaginative play and interactive performance.19 Their hypermediated media ecologies produced effects of immediacy or media transparency—i.e. of presence, realness, and 14 Frances Armstrong, “The Dollhouse as Ludic Space, 1690–1920,” Children’s Literature 24 (1996): 23–54. Although Armstrong’s analysis begins in the late seventeenth century, the history of early modern doll houses extends back to the mid-sixteenth century in northern European documentary sources, and the earliest extant (German) doll house dates to 1611. See Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls’ Houses: Four Centuries of the Domestic World in Miniature (London: Cassell & Co., 1954); Leonie von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature: Four Centuries of Dolls’ Houses, trans. Vivien Greene (New York: Viking, 1980). 15 Armstrong, “Dollhouse as Ludic Space,” 24. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Ibid., 38–39. 18 Ibid., 45. 19 Natasha Korda, “Gyno Ludens: A Doll House Redux,” in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, ed. Tracy Davis and Peter Marx (New York: Routledge, 2021), 65–85; see also Natasha Korda, “Gyno Ludens: Small Work and Play in Everyday Archives,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 1 (2017): 173–182.

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even of liveness or immersion in a virtual reality—through the play of light across lustrous surfaces such as tiny, polished pewter plates and pitchers; the dramatic effect of kinetic movement by scaled-down technologies with workable (and indeed “playable”) parts; and a wide range of optical effects and distortions of linear perspective. Together, these effects produced an immersive, hypermediated, virtual-reality play space. Far from unifying space, as does the transparent window of two-dimensional perspectival paintings, the three-dimensional space of early modern doll houses fragments and multiplies it by immersing the user in a media environment that is itself windowed, as each scene is replete with other media (e.g. mirrors, trompe l’oeil windows and doors, maps, illusionistic paintings, etc.). Their layered mediation of frames within frames contributes to and heightens the “meta” quality of the doll house as a house-within-a-house, which does not merely reflect or reproduce the world that contains it but produces space within which to reflect upon and thereby, potentially, remake it. In this respect they are—as Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen argue of architectural and theatrical models—inherently performative in their “potential for cosmopoiesis, or world-making” in miniature.20

From cosmopoiesis to cyberdrama How might including the “ludic architecture” of early modern women’s doll houses and other game spaces or playgrounds, however small, within the disciplinary parameters of theatre and performance studies diversify our definition of what counts as a “purpose-built” playhouse and thereby open the field to new players and modalities of play by recognizing the cosmopoetic potential of producing space for play in everyday life?21 And how might expanding the repertoire of videogames evoked to shed light on the history of play beyond militarized games of masculine conquest and combat to include more open-ended forms and genres of play allow us to conceptualize the (progressive) potential of gamifying the field of early modern drama? What might we learn, for example, from a game like The SIMS (2000), which Janet Murray has called “the breakthrough text of cyberdrama” in that it creates “a multivariant world of rich events and 20 Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen, The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture (New York: Methuen Drama, 2018), 1. 21 On the “ludic architecture” of play and games, see Steffen P. Walz, Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University/ETC Press, 2010).

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complex character interactions that is open to endless exploration and extension”?22 In spite of the extraordinary popularity of this platform, described as a “virtual doll’s house” that has attracted millions of players not previously interested in digital gaming, The SIMS is often not considered to be a game at all due to the flexibility of its rules and focus on everyday life: “There is no one way of playing The SIMS,” Tanja Sihvonen argues, as players “select the functions (rulesets) of their own game and create the stylistic and thematic elements they want to play with.”23 In addition to allowing for “multiple play styles and preferences,” Sihvonen maintains, The SIMS is also unusual in its active encouragement of game modification or “modding,” a practice that extends the boundaries and redefines the aims of prescribed play to include myriad forms of counter-play.24 Sihvonen’s counter-history of The SIMS illuminates the ways in which games in general, and specific gaming cultures in particular, are shaped by interactive modding practices (including “cheats, tricks and hacks”) that remediate gameplay and reveal the extent to which what games mean is bound up with how they are used—or with what Sihvonen calls the “game-as-process” rather than the “game-as-product.”25 Pavel Drábek identif ies the open-ended repurposing that in his view def ines play as integral to its world-making or world-modelling capacity, termed heterotelic insofar as such repurposing is “bound to an ulterior telos through the use to which they [games-as-models] are put.”26 Jacqueline Reid-Walsh likewise emphasizes the heterotelic and even subversive potential of open-ended, interactive play in her media archaeology of The SIMS as a remediation of earlier interactive media forms, such as harlequinades (flap books that featured harlequin and other commedia dell’arte characters), paignons (paper doll-house play sets), and toy theatres (equipped with miniature stage-traps, fly-wires, and grooves that enabled horizontal motion), games that encouraged continual refashioning of their own rulesets, making the 22 Janet Murray, “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama,” Electronic Book Review (1 May 2004), n.p., par. 9, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/from-game-story-to-cyberdrama/ (accessed 11 August 2020). Murray argues that “Games are always stories” or what she terms “cyberdramas” (par. 2). 23 Tanja Sihvonen, Players Unleashed! Modding “The Sims” and the Culture of Gaming (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 9, 11. 24 Sihvonen describes The SIMS modding scene as “a relatively unparalleled form of collaborative action particularly among female players” (ibid., 12). 25 Ibid., 7, 15. 26 Pavel Drábek, “Modelling the World through Play: An Exploration in Repurposing, Representation, and History-Writing,” in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, ed. Tracy Davis and Peter Marx (New York: Routledge, 2021), 399–417, at 401.

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player “a collaborative ‘interactor’ participating with and critiquing” the structures of everyday life via playable “microcosms.”27

Heterotelic replay The heterotelic play and ongoing modification of the rules of the game encouraged by The SIMS renders it (in the words of its inventor Will Wright) like “a doll-house come to life” and, the more one plays, like the activity “of a director on a set. You’re trying to coerce these actors into doing what you want them to do, but they’re busy leading their own lives,” an effect driven by “the illusion of their separate existence.”28 Crucial to the narrative potential of games and theatre alike, as Rebecca Bushnell argues in this volume, is the tension or “conflict between a narrative’s drive towards a satisfying conclusion and its need to imply that characters are free to make choices, however terrible”—a tension she finds to be particularly keen in tragic theatre. This tension between tragic necessity and contingency is likewise central to The SIMS, where, as Janet Murray maintains, the “time clock pushes relentlessly forward, with every day a workday,” but at any moment “[d]uplicitous neighbors and morbid clowns” may “come to visit and destroy the happiness of the household,” and the “neglect of a pet can lead to the death of a child.”29 Yet the intrusion of death, and the uncanny contingencies of everyday life, into the world of play produces the possibility of a “replay story” in which the protagonist “gets the chance of a ‘do-over’” that reveals “the multiple possibilities of a single moment” and allows us “to experience all the possibilities of a moment,”30 and thereby “to imagine ourselves as creatures of a parameterized world of multiple possibilities.”31 As material artifacts of play, doll houses, like other purpose-built playgrounds and game spaces past and present, real and virtual, thus function not only as models of everyday life, but as polychronic and polychoric models for imagining life otherwise and effecting social transformation. By reproducing space, however small, to re-enact the multiple possibilities of a single moment they reveal that les jeux ne sont jamais faits, and that when rien ne va plus 27 Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, “Harlequin Meets The SIMS: A History of Interactive Narrative Media for Children and Youth from Early Flap Books to Contemporary Multimedia,” in The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (London: Sage, 2008), 71–86, at 84. 28 Ibid., 83, 84. Wright is quoted on p. 83. 29 Murray, “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama,” par. 9. 30 Ibid., par. 15. 31 Ibid., par. 17.

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there is always the possibility of replaying the game and redefining what is out of bounds ( fort) or in (da).32

Works Cited Armstrong, Frances. “The Dollhouse as Ludic Space, 1690–1920.” Children’s Literature 24 (1996): 23–54. Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Brejzek, Thea, and Lawrence Wallen. The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture. New York and London: Methuen Drama, 2018. Campbell, Lily B. Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance: A Classical Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Drábek, Pavel. “Modelling the World through Play: An Exploration in Repurposing, Representation, and History-Writing.” In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, 399–417. New York: Routledge, 2021. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Liveright, 1950 [1920]. Gray, Kishonna L., and David J. Leonard. “Introduction: Not a Post-Racism and Post-Misogyny Promised Land; Video Games as Instruments of (In)justice.” In Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, edited by Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard, 3–23. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Hirsch, Brett D. “Richard Brome Online, by Richard Cave.” Early Theatre 13, no. 1 (2010): 137–153. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. New York: Roy Publishers, 1950 [1938]. Huntemann, Nina B., and Matthew Thomas Payne. Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. New York: Routledge, 2009. Jacobs, Flora Gill. A History of Dolls’ Houses: Four Centuries of the Domestic World in Miniature. London: Cassell & Co., 1954. Johnson, Stephen. Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016. 32 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1950 [1920]).

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Korda, Natasha. “Gyno Ludens: A Doll House Redux.” In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, 65–85. New York: Routledge, 2021. –––. “Gyno Ludens: Small Work and Play in Everyday Archives.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 1 (2017): 173–182. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]. Lenoir, Timothy, and Luke Caldwell. The Military-Entertainment Complex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Meads, Alan F. Understanding Counterplay in Video Games. New York: Routledge, 2015. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO Industries, 2021. Murray, Janet. “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama.” Electronic Book Review (1 May 2004), n.p. Accessed 11 August 2020. https://electronicbookreview.com/ essay/from-game-story-to-cyberdrama/. Pilon, Mary. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World’s Favorite Board Game. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline. “Harlequin Meets The SIMS: A History of Interactive Narrative Media for Children and Youth from Early Flap Books to Contemporary Multimedia.” In The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, edited by Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone, 71–86. London: Sage, 2008. –––. Interactive Books: Playful Media Before Pop-Ups. New York: Routledge, 2018. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Sihvonen, Tanja. Players Unleashed! Modding “The Sims” and the Culture of Gaming. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. Walz, Steffen P. Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University/ETC Press, 2010. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. “Playable Media and Textual Instruments.” Dichtung Digital: A Journal of Art and Culture in Digital Media (2005): n.p. Accessed 14 January 2020. http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2005/1/Wardrip-Fruin/index.htm. Wilckens, Leonie von. Mansions in Miniature: Four Centuries of Dolls’ Houses. Translated by Vivien Greene. New York: Viking, 1980.

About the Author Natasha Korda is Director of the Center for the Humanities and Professor of English at Wesleyan University, and served as 2020–2021 President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is author of Shakespeare’s

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Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (2002) and Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (2011), and co-editor of Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (2002) and Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011). She is currently editing the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and writing a book on material ephemera, feminist counter-archives, and early modern theatre historiography.

Index Absolutism 118-119, 128-129, 187-188 Abundance (allegorical character) 101 Achilles (Troilus and Cressida) as audience 140, 146-147, 149-150, 152, 154 as transgressive 141-142, 144, 145, 151, 308 bad play 25, 144, 152 feminized 145, 150, 152, 153, 308 return to battle 144 Act of Parliament 1388 71 1572 69 Actor alone 170 approach 51-55, 57, 59 audience interaction 56-57, 59-60, 61 collaboration 58-59, 62, 286, 313 contemporary 17, 50-51, 52-54, 60-61, 63 early modern 50, 61-63, 64 “game-player” 42, 43 Globe 42, 50, 51-52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 improvisational 19, 52-53, 59 interview with 50, 51, 52-53, 54, 61 line-learning 62 performance 55, 57, 279, 289-290, 291, 293 pretense of play 25, 161, 167-168, 170 professional 85 regulation of 43, 85 Stanislavskian 21, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54-55, 59 training 17, 54, 60 Adaptation and contemporary culture 269-271 and dice 180, 181-182, 190 and revision 181-182 challenges of early modern to modern 49-50, 60-61, 63, 180-181, 193, 239 connected to appropriation 257-259, 271 contrary to text 244-245 definition 257 effect of Holocaust on 192-193 fidelity of 256-257, 262, 267, 268 flexibility 191-193, 239, 242-243 for new use 239, 256, 295-296 history of 26 media 258, 296 of religious text 189 opportunity to modernize 246 popular 191 problem of 181 text-centric 278 theatrical 190-195 to undermine authority 188-189, 193 unstable 271 See also Videogames Adopt an Actor interviews 50, 51, 52-53, 57, 59 Aesthetics 154, 204, 279, 280, 282

Agamemnon (Troilus and Cressida) 144, 145, 146, 150, 151 Agency and actor 64 and character 221, 237, 238, 243, 247, 248-249 and player 28, 229-230, 232, 233, 238, 244, 247-248, 267 implication of 230, 240 in the face of predetermination 238, 239 loss of 110, 207, 241, 245, 269 versus authorship 235 See also Choice Agōn 16, 147-148, 149 See also Competition Ajax (Troilus and Cressida) 151-152 Alea 16, 148, 149 Alfreds, Mike 51-52 Allegory dice 181-182, 184, 185 temptation 93 See Individual allegorical characters Alonso (The Tempest) 215, 220, 221 Anatomie of Abuses (1583) 43-44 Andrew Mendicant (The Court Beggar) and the floating theatre 123 as game player 121, 122 as hunter and hunted 115-116, 119-120, 129 Anglican Church 91, 98, 109 Anne Frankford (A Woman Killed with Kindness) 48 Antonio (Merchant of Venice) and gambling 92, 180, 184, 195 as Christ figure 186 as Erwin Bevin (Marowitz adaptation) 194 in Granville adaptation 190 jailor scene 182-183, 184-185 Antonio (The Tempest) 215, 220, 221, 222 Antony (Antony and Cleopatra) 48, 90 Antony and Cleopatra 22, 48, 55, 89, 90, 147 Appropriation and Shakespeare 257-258, 271, 295 connected to adaptation 256, 257-259, 271 definition of 257 media 258, 296 unstable 271 Archery early 70-71, 72 imaginative activity 169 longbow 81, 82 protection of 164 virtuous activity 71, 164, 165, 167 Ariel (The Tempest) 211, 215, 216, 220, 222 Artillery Act See Unlawful Games Act Audience all knowing 21, 46, 55, 151, 171

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and clown 19, 55, 56, 60 and power 61, 145-146, 223, 279 appeals to 42, 43, 57-58, 188 applause from 142 asides to 48, 56-57, 170, 216-217 as judge 93, 287, 289-290 as player 17, 28, 29, 232, 234, 271, 278-279 complicit 46, 56 denied 146, 147, 151, 170, 223 disdain for 140, 151, 173 early modern 19, 45, 49, 56-57, 61-62, 152, 213 engagement 291 familiarity with story 107, 259, 270 growth 85, 86, 263, 279 influence 58, 64, 279 instruction of 103, 127, 170 interaction 102, 120, 232, 271 lack of 173, 263 participation 30, 51, 55-56, 57-58, 59-60, 61-62, 188, 232, 291 perspective 93, 152, 162, 223, 248, 287 pleasure 52, 125, 154 role of 56-57, 58, 64, 289, 293 suspended belief 56, 131 Authority and imitation 141-143, 145-146, 152 civic 188-189, 191 figure 184-185, 187-188 of the script 18-19, 64, 181, 182 police state 191 Avatar choice of 13, 265, 266 control of 13, 20, 29, 234, 235, 287 in game 245, 266, 280, 281, 282-283 on screen 217, 229, 288 performance 232, 235, 285-286 Backgammon 48, 126-127 Barnabas (Nice Wanton) 93, 95 Bassanio (Merchant of Venice) 92, 106, 180, 183 The Battle of Alcazar 44-45 Beerbohm Tree, Herbert, Sir 192 Belle, John 76 Bermuda 28, 211-212, 213, 214, 219 Bird, Philip 53 Blindfolded play 30 Blocking 52-53, 62, 191-192, 285 Boal, Augusto 17 Bonner, Edmund (Bishop of London) 85, 94 Book of Sports (1618) 23 Bowling alone 161, 162, 165, 166-167, 169, 170, 175 and Sir Francis Drake 165 appeal of 164 as metaphor 161, 162, 171 as social contact 161, 165, 168-169 ball 163, 166-167, 172 bocce 161, 163 burning 82

byassed balls 163 challenge to space of stage 25, 162, 168, 164 cheating 163 cloish (closh) 71, 72 fixed outcome 161, 167 in plot 162, 163, 167, 169, 173-176 in prison 162, 173-175 kailes/kayles 71, 72, 100, 163 limited dramatic use 168-170 modern 176 morality of 164 not bowling 168, 169 offstage 162, 169-170 on early modern stage 161-162, 172-173 pointless 25, 165, 166 popularity 70 profit 85 puns 161, 168, 169-170, 174, 176 regulation 71, 72, 78-79, 81, 86, 164-165 rooks 164 royal license 83-84, 85 royal perspective on 164-165 scoring 175 skill 167, 173 space and time 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 171 staging 161-162, 167, 169, 172 superstition 166, 174, 176 under duress 167 See also Bowling alley Bowling alley and time 170 community space 163, 164, 166, 170 limits 163 operation of 71, 77, 78, 79-80, 82, 85 regulation of 71, 78, 79-80, 83-84, 85, 86 staging 169-170 See also Bowling Bradford, John 98 Branagh, Kenneth 239, 282 Brome, Richard and Erasmianism 132 and The Court Beggar 115-116 commentary on absolutism 118, 132 conflict 125 Richard Brome Online 305 satire 119, 304-305 Brugges, William 76 Burbage, Richard 47 Burgh, William 79, 80 Caillois, Roger 16, 18, 23, 147, 163, 166-167, 205, 236 Caliban (The Tempest) 215, 217, 222 Calvert, Charles 192 Calvinism as official religion 98 doctrine 96, 98, 107 morality play 95, 97, 99, 107, 109 predestination 91, 96, 97

Index

reprobate 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 109 sermon (1555) 96 skepticism of 107 theological framework 91, 92, 97 Cambyses, King of Persia 45 Camillo (The Winter’s Tale) 53 Capitalism acceptance by church 104, 105 and gambling 92 and gamification 28, 204, 217-218, 223, 224, 308 and play 126-127, 308 and risk-taking 91, 100, 104, 107-108 and status quo 280 anxiety caused by 100, 105 bankruptcy 107 civilizing mission 218 commercial society 85, 122, 304 conflict with religion 91, 100, 104, 105 consumption 122, 127, 130-131 corporate indoctrination 209 debtor 184 destruction of tradition 123 drama as product 127-128 early 22, 104, 107-108 effects on royal patents 118 investment 101 investment dealers and regulation 191 predatory financier 190 replicated in game structure 28, 92, 308 schemes 115, 122 venture capitalism 91, 104 work into play 204, 208 See also Projector Cards association with Catholicism 108 burning 81 corruption of priest 106, 108 gambling 121 gleeke (gleek) 121, 127 harmless amusement 121 regulation 81 risk 105 skill 95 use in deception 48 use on stage 105, 126-127 with a monkey 262 writing on 103, 104 Caroline period absolutism 118, 128-129 capitalism 22, 304 consumption 131 court 118 critics 118, 132 dramatic trends 120, 124-125, 130-131, 132 satire of 22, 304 water 130-131 Carroll, Tim 53, 55-56, 60 Cassandra (Troilus and Cressida) 145

319 Cassius (The Tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey or Cæsars reuenge) 160 Catholicism at odds with capitalism 100 criticism of 98-99, 108-109 doctrine 89, 99, 103 during Reformation 91, 98-99, 100 mass 105, 108-109 mockery of 108-109 morality play 90, 91, 97, 99, 100-102, 103 priest 105, 107, 108 writing 98, 99 Censorship 128-129 Characters and agency 230, 237, 242-243, 243-245, 247, 248, 269-270 and deception 46-47 and player 55, 232 development 53, 216-217, 243 motivation 49, 51, 53-54 relationship to audience 46, 55, 56-57 self-awareness 57 stealth 246 stock characters 63, 108 Charity 89, 91, 100, 101, 103n, 105, 109 Charissa (The Court Beggar) 115-116, 119 Charles I of England 23, 117, 118, 131 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 47, 48 Cheating and hypocrisy 90, 243 at games of chance 101, 103, 105, 163 videogame cheats 30, 217, 312 Chess in The Tempest 205, 216 in videogames 265 morality of 164 rules 18, 27, 163 skilled game 18, 95 used as metaphor 46-47 Choice and consequences 233-234, 235, 237, 246, 313 and play 229, 248, 264-265, 266-267 character development 53, 233, 234, 235, 243-244 choose your own adventure 247, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 270 illusion of 230, 231, 233-235, 238, 248, 313 in videogames 230, 233-234, 240, 244 loss of 234, 245 refusal 249 See also Agency Choreography 161 Class mobility 310 Class privilege exception to gaming regulation 81 games of chance 108 hunting 117-118 receipt of royal license 84

320 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

referenced in dice plays 90 wealth divide 102-103, 132, 223 Claudius (Hamlet) as videogame nemesis 236, 238, 241, 260, 262, 265 death of 242, 244 delayed killing of 237, 242, 243 role in videogame 241-242, 243, 244, 245, 265, 267 Shakespearean character 261, 266 Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra) 55, 147 Clown/clowning 12, 19, 54-55, 56, 60, 63, 313 See also Servant-clowns Coin toss 236 Colehazard (Impatient Poverty) 101-102 Collaboration 58-59, 259, 269-271, 286, 294, 313 Colonialism and capitalism 218 British imperialism 195 enslavement 211, 223 Jamestown 28, 211-213, 214, 219, 223 narrative 193-194, 211-212, 307 New World 205, 210, 219-220 plantation 210, 214, 215, 223 racist tropes 210 Sea Venture 28, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 223 starvation 213 unsuitable colonialists 211-214, 221 Combat See War Comedy allegorical figure 120 as game 155 commentary through 22, 105, 132, 140, 141, 153-154 pleasures of 141, 151 Shakespearean 139, 140, 155 transgressive 140 The Comedy of Errors 21, 52, 54 Commedia dell’arte 63, 312 Competition between characters 49 between Ulysses and Patroclus 150-151 for audience 57 Hector’s challenge 142-144 power and 48 rivalry on stage 61 romance and 12, 46, 47 spiritual 94 See also Agōn The Compleat Gamester 154, 164 Complicité (Théâtre de Complicité) 56 Consequence 132, 230, 233, 235, 237 Contest and performance 49, 59 and social structure 143, 144, 308 as game 12, 46, 60 Hector’s challenge 25, 142-144, 145, 152, 308

magical 45 training through 209-210 Copeau, Jacques 17 Corruption and familiarity 183 moral 43-44, 95, 106, 108, 109 political 233, 240 Costume 11, 41, 119-120, 285, 309 Cotton, Charles 159, 163, 164, 166, 174 The Court Beggar and games 115, 121, 122, 126, 127 and theatre 116 conflict 125 contemporary commentary 118, 125, 127-128, 129 economic concerns 22, 116, 122 floating theatre 116-117, 123, 125, 126, 129-130, 131-132 hunting 116, 118, 119, 120, 121-122, 127 plot 119-120, 120-121, 122, 129 projector/projects 116, 118, 122, 123, 126, 128-129 romance 118-119, 120-121 satire 119, 125, 130, 131, 304 structure 116 Courtiers 84, 125, 127-128, 129, 215, 216 Court-Wit (The Court Beggar) 127, 128, 129 Cressida (Troilus and Cressida) 47, 153 Cribbage 121, 127 Crowd-funding 263, 266 Crucifixio Christi (York cycle) 187, 188 Crucifixion (Townley) 187, 188, 189 Cuckold 47, 48 Cupid 169 Cupid (Cambyses) 45 Cymbeline 52 Dalila (Nice Wanton) 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100 Davenant, William 124, 125, 127, 128n Day, John 63, 168 Deception and colluding audience 21, 46 game as 44-45 in romance 11-12, 46-47, 121 in stageplays 21, 48, 148 Dekker, Thomas 46 Desdemona (Othello) 48, 243 Diana (All’s Well That Ends Well) 48 Dice and morality 21-22, 89, 94 and rise of capitalism 100, 180 and theological confusion 91, 100, 107 as allegory 184-185 as negotiation 195 association with Catholicism 108 at the crucifixion 186-188 burning 82 cheating at 101-102, 105 corruption of priest 105, 106, 107, 108

Index

“double movement” 181, 182, 190, 191, 195 houses 80, 164 in Passion plays 187-188, 189 in the street 189 loaded 97, 98 medieval 189 metaphor for fate 26, 90, 94, 110 nick 90, 94, 107 novem 106 playing on stage 21-22, 25-26, 92, 93-94, 98, 99, 105 portrayed as sinful 89, 93 redemption 96-97, 103 reflection of religious uncertainty 100, 101, 103, 105 regulation 71, 72, 81, 189 risk of financial loss 102-103, 105 writing on 94, 102-103, 104 See also Hazard Different Every Night 52 Digital pedagogy aims 286, 291-292, 294 approach to text 288 as trend 278, 279-280, 287-288 legitimation 282 limitations 286, 289, 293-294 specific games 281 See also Education Disguise 11-12, 45, 46, 171, 173, 174 Doll house 31, 309-311, 312, 313 Dormer, Michael (Lord Mayor) 85 Dove, John 53 Drake, Francis, Sir 165 Dramaturgy and games 22, 25, 50, 59, 129, 162-163 and performance 172, 192, 294 collaborative 306 early modern 22, 41, 50, 170, 59 unpredictable 107, 161 Duke of Florence (Women Beware Women) 46 Duke of York (Richard II) 147 Earle, John 166 Earl of Leicester’s Men 69, 86 Education and game design 277, 281-282, 289, 291, 295 and stageplays 50-51 and videogames 29-30, 277 for salvation 95-96 moral 97 See also Digital pedagogy Edward III 71 Edward IV 48 Edward IV 171 Edward VI 97, 98, 99 Elizabeth I of England performance for 130 proclamation 105

321 reign of 23, 105 religious reform 91, 98, 99 Elsinore (2019) 231, 245-247, 256 Emergent narrative and closed system 270 and gameplay 259, 266, 268, 270 and player 29, 259, 264, 268, 269, 270, 271 creation of 29, 260, 265, 267, 270 definition of 259 in iterations of Shakespeare 190, 268 Enobarbus (Antony and Cleopatra) 90, 147 Envy (allegorical character) 45, 101-102 The Ephemerides of Phialo 62 Erasmus 172 Escape from the social order 309 in Look About You 25, 162, 173-174, 175 in videogames 230, 245, 262 offered by floating theatre 130, 131 Ethics and design 277, 279 Fate and games 90, 93-94, 107, 132, 171 and punishment 121 conflict with 148 double predestination 93 uncontrollable 94, 109-110, 144-145, 238 unfair 90, 94 See also Choice Feedback 284, 287 Fencing 167, 238, 249, 309 Ferdinand (A Court Beggar) 119, 120-121, 122, 127, 129 Ferdinand (The Tempest) 215, 216-217, 218, 219-220 Fidelity 256-258, 268 Flexibility connecting play and games 19, 58-59, 60-61, 126 early modern to contemporary 60-61, 63-64 in adaptation 181-182, 190-194, 256-257, 268 lack of 278 of rules 312 Floating theatre and games 126, 132 appeal of 124, 130 as commentary 132, 129-130, 131 as project 22, 115, 117, 131, 132 escape 131 proposal 22, 116-117, 123 source 124, 126, 132 suspicion of 125 threat to professional theatre 126, 127-129 See also Playhouse, Theatre (early modern) Football analogy 58-59, 60, 61 education 50, 51

322 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

insult 61 regulation 71, 72 Forbes, Peter 53, 57 Foul play 48 Fourth wall 30, 56-57 Free play 181, 222, 223 Fulgens and Lucrece 43 Gabriel (The Court Beggar) 115-116, 119, 121 Gale, Mariah 51 Gambling and prayer 107 and redemption 97-98 and the rise of capitalism 92, 104, 180 as play 23 at the crucifixion 186-187 changing attitudes towards 104-105 cheating 101, 105 danger to merchant class 101, 102-103, 184 house 83 language of 89-90, 99, 110 metaphor 184 profit 85, 96, 102 recreational 92, 94, 97-98 regulation of 85, 105 royal license 83, 84, 85 with cards 121 A Game at Chess 47 Game design and pedagogy 276, 282-283, 289, 294-296 ethical implications 245-246, 277 simplification 295 sources 291-292 students 295 See also Games Game operators 75, 79-80, 82, 83-84, 85 Games allegory 89 and competition 46-47, 48, 49, 150-151 and gender 46-47, 142-143, 144, 168-169, 245, 308 and sexuality 25, 47-48, 161, 168-169 and students 30, 50-51, 276, 277, 281, 292, 295 as training 23, 204, 206, 215-216 as threat 25, 127 at the crucifixion 186-187 bed game 140 between actors 57 between characters 46-48, 54, 57, 161-162, 163, 168, 171, 173-175 between cuckold and lover 47, 48 cheating 101, 103, 105, 163, 217 commercialization of 84-85 conflict with religion 23 contest 46-47, 59, 60, 144, 152, 308 cultural impact 141, 304-305 definition 18, 23, 42, 44, 45, 46-47 digital 276-277, 278, 279-287, 294

distraction 97 dramatic representation 41-42 economics and 84-85, 96, 218 education through 29-30, 50-51, 277, 281-282, 294-295 euphemism 47 for honor 142-143, 218 for martial readiness 23, 25, 49, 117, 143, 164, 165, 166 freedom 216, 218, 219, 230 improvisation and 17, 19, 59, 62, 126, 132 in jailor scene 185 in performance 16, 50, 53-55, 286 legitimization 83, 292 leisure 23, 70, 71, 94, 121, 127 medieval 14, 15, 41, 42, 186, 189 metaphor 44, 48-49, 90 metatheatre 55, 59, 146 not fun 216 of wit 144, 145, 308 on stage 99, 105, 126-127, 161-162, 171 pedagogical 277, 281, 282-286, 287 player input 30, 232 plot and 45, 284 predetermined 161, 167, 174-175 private 141, 144, 147, 151, 154-155 procedural 281-282 royal involvement 80, 83, 84, 85, 86 rules-based 209, 277, 307 skill 95, 106, 107, 173, 238 social benefit 161, 216, 309 subversion 46, 141-142, 144, 145, 151, 307, 308 superstition 166, 174, 176 theory 147-148 through stagecraft 50, 93, 98 trickery 43 unlawful games 23, 81, 82, 83, 86 unpredictability of 25, 161 with audience 49, 55 within a game 11-12, 13, 46 without end 164, 175 See also Game Design, Gamification, Games of chance, Hunting, Quarry, Regulation, Unlawful Games Act, Videogames Games of chance and fate 94, 97-98, 144 and religious anxiety 97-98, 108, 306 as allegory 105, 98, 181 coin toss 236 danger of 98 over skill 106-107 perspectives on 21, 23, 91, 106, 181 profit 92 sign of sin 89 status 108, 122, 144 uncertainty 95, 107, 110 See also Games Gameworld and capitalism 217

Index

parameters 18, 205, 215-216, 233 separation from reality 207, 208, 218 Gamification and capitalism 28, 204, 209 and morality 27-28, 277 The Box 209-210 challenges of 215 corporate indoctrination 209 definition 203-204 education through 29-30 incentivizing 281, 284 limited environment 208, 215 military application 207 of sources 30, 31, 305-306 points, scoring, and levels 207, 209, 216, 218, 235, 267, 287 politics of 307 repetition 28, 216, 217 social conditioning 210, 216 study of 304 textual analysis 276, 282, 284, 285, 286 zombification 209, 216, 220 See also Grinding Gender battle of the sexes 12, 13 dynamics in game 46, 143-144, 168-169, 245 dynamics in play 308, 309 reversal 55, 152 role-play 310 roles 25, 47-48, 310 Gertrude (Hamlet) 90, 242, 243, 265 Globe (contemporary) actors 42, 50-51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58-59 audience 59 directors 51, 52, 60 practice 42 productions 20-21, 50, 55 Rylance era 52-53, 55 website games 256, 281 Globe Education 50, 51 Globe Research Bulletin 52 Globe (Shakespeare’s) physical space 160 productions 42, 50, 155 Gonzalo (The Tempest) 215, 220, 222 Good works 91, 95, 97, 100, 109 Goold, Rupert 179, 195 Gosson, Stephen 62 Granville, George 190, 191 Greene, Robert 45, 160 Griffeth, William 82, 84 Grinding 28, 217-219 See also Gamification, Videogames Guildenstern (Hamlet) 236, 246, 260, 262, 265, 269 Hall, Alleyn 78, 79 Hamlet (Hamlet) agency 248, 249

323 and hypocrisy 90 as avatar 244, 263-264 as character 237, 261 as player 236, 237, 264 delay by 242 injury to 260 portrayed by Mark Rylance 57 “rub” 176 Hamlet alternative setting 261 and choices 237, 243, 244, 249 and hypocrisy 90 familiarity with 270 traditional view 236 videogame adaptation 28-29, 230-231, 239-248, 256, 260-268 Hamlet (1996 film) 239-240 Hamlet: A Murder Mystery (1997) 239-240, 242, 256 Hamlet, or the Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders, and Product Placement (2010) as adaptation 29, 231, 240-242, 256, 261, 271 creation 260 medium over adaptation 261, 263 parody of choice 241 quest 261, 262 save the princess 241, 245, 262 Shakespearean 271 task oriented 241 winning 242 Hands, Terry 180 Hazard and movement 184-185 and religious anxiety 98-99 and winnings 49 as competition 182 in language 22 regulation 80 the game 93-94, 97, 98, 102, 106, 121, 180 to mean risk 89-90, 98, 106, 180, 183 See also Dice Hector (Troilus and Cressida) 25, 142-144, 151, 152 Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 47 Henry V (Henry V) 49 Henry V 12, 49, 159-160, 16, 306 Henry VI 48 Henry VIII of England ascension to throne 77 banning games 164-165, 166 issuing licenses 70, 83, 85, 86 playing tennis 80 royal proclamation 81 split from Catholic church 99, 306 Hermia (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 47, 52 Hero (Much Ado About Nothing) 51 Heteronormativity depiction of 12, 25, 143-144

324 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

in bowling 161, 168 in stageplays 48 rejection of 269 Honor 142-143, 218 Horatio (Hamlet) 243, 266 Huizinga, Johan 16, 126, 143n, 306 Humphrey, Lawrence 164 Hunter, Kathryn 52, 54, 56 Hunting and projects 117, 118, 119, 121 and sex 47-48, 121 and teamwork 61 as game 115, 116, 117, 121 for status 116 for wealth 116, 119-120 license 117 martial application 117, 118 of the hunter 117, 119, 120, 121, 129 replaced by indoor sociability 122 ritual 117, 118 satire 118-119 violence 119 See also Games, Quarry Ilinx 16, 148, 151 Imitation and power 140, 145-146, 152-153 limitations of 25, 145 Impatient Poverty (allegorical character) 100-102, 103, 105 Impatient Poverty 22, 45, 90, 91, 99, 100-105 Impersonation 12-13, 140, 145-146, 149, 154 Improvisation contest 17, 59 in games 30, 126, 132, 209 in theatre 19, 30, 49, 52-53, 63, 126 Inheritance of gaming space 75, 79, 82 Iniquity (allegorical character) 93, 94, 96 Injury (allegorical character) 45 Interactivity and education 282 and narrative 260-261, 262, 270 in theatre 232 in videogames 29, 232, 247, 256, 258-259 See also Videogames The Interlude of Youth See Youth, Interlude of Intimacy 140, 141, 144, 162 Ironmongers’ Company customers 74, 76, 77 discounted pricing 76 drop in sales 83 garden 77, 80, 83 hall 85 jump in sales 80-81 lack of sales 80 location of 72 rent 76-77, 83 sales records 70, 72, 73, 74, 75-78, 81 tennis court 72-73, 74-75, 76-77, 80, 83

Iser, Wolfgang 147-151 The Isle of Gulls 168 Ismael (Nice Wanton) 93, 94, 95-96, 98, 100 Jail See Prison Jailor (The Merchant of Venice) 182-184, 185, 190, 192 Jailor scene See The Merchant of Venice James I of England 23, 117, 165 James IV 160 Jamestown 28, 211-213, 214, 219, 223 Jane Shore (Edward IV) 171 Jeffrey (Edward IV) 171 Jessop, Melanie 57 Jesus Christ 186-188, 189 The Jew of Malta 193 The Jew of Venice 190 Jocky (Edward IV) 171 Jonah and the whale 213-214 Kean, Charles 191-192 Kneehigh 56 Lady Capulet (Romeo and Juliet) 57 Lady Strangelove (The Court Beggar) 120-121, 129 Laertes (Hamlet) as opponent 236, 238, 265 in videogames 243, 246, 260 with Hamlet 237, 238, 249, 265 Lazzi 63, 205 Lecoq, Jacques 17, 21, 54, 56, 60 Leisure activity and space 308 as feminine 144 condemnation of 103n, 127, 140 in theatre 15, 20, 116 mark of disreputableness 127 popularity 70, 73-74, 121 regulation of 70-71, 74, 78, 81, 105 threat of 93 Lever, Thomas 97 Line-learning 62 Livia (Women Beware Women) 46-47 Locus and platea 64 London Common Council bond 85 note 84 presentation to 83 regulation by 69-70, 71, 72, 74, 75 Look About You 25, 162, 163, 164, 168, 171-175 Lord Ambrose Dudley’s Players 43 Louis the Dauphin (King John) 48-49 Love’s Labor’s Lost 11-13, 17, 21, 24, 46 Ludus 15, 16, 41, 205 Macbeth 282, 283, 287 Magic circle 18, 206, 306, 308 Magni, Marcello 54, 56, 59, 62 Malvolio (Twelfth Night) 56

Index

A manifest detection of the moste vyle and detestable vse of diceplay 102-103 Mankind (allegorical character) 43 Mankind (c. 1470) 42-43 Manningham, John 47 Marlowe, Christopher 193 Marowitz, Charles 193-194 Marprelate tract 98-99, 166 Martial readiness display of 144 enforcement of 70, 71, 81 expectation of 70, 72, 166 from games 23, 144, 164, 207 from hunting 117-118 idealized 131 imitation of 143 interference with 165 Mary I of England 84, 91, 94, 98, 99, 100 Materiality 278, 286-287 May-games 41, 43, 46 Medieval plays 42-43, 126 See also Individual plays Melissa (Misogonus) 106, 107 The Merchant of Venice and games 179-180, 190 and risk 106, 180 and the Holocaust 192-193 as adaptation of scripture 186 Beerbohm Tree adaptation 192 Calvert adaptation 192 depictions of trade 92 Granville adaptation 190-191 implications of 22 jailor scene 25-26, 182-184, 190-192, 193-194 Kean adaptation 191-192 legacy of 185 Macklin adaptation 191 Marowitz adaptation 193-194 Victorian adaptations 191 The Merchant of Venice (2011 production) 179, 195 Merchants 92, 100, 101, 104, 191 Metagaming 279, 294 Metatheatre 55, 58, 59, 146 Microcosmographie 166 Middleton, Thomas 46, 47 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 47, 52 Milburn, John 78 Mimesis and games 16, 20, 141, 153, 161, 205 and performance 13, 24, 162, 289-290 framing device 17, 24, 25 theatrical tradition 20, 23, 141 Mimicry 16, 23, 146, 148, 150, 151 See also Mockery Mischief activity 45-47, 141 allegorical character 42 Misogonus 22, 91, 105-110

325 Misogonus (Misogonus) 105, 106, 107-108, 109 Misrule allegorical character 101-102 festive 41, 43 Mockery and competition 12 and games 44, 45, 63 language surrounding 46, 153 of Catholicism 108 performance 49 social commentary 130 See also Mimicry Mods (modifications) by players 30, 217 Morality and games 21-22, 43-44, 96-98, 100, 164 and sexuality 25 education 97 lessons 24 of gamification 27-28 See also Morality play Morality play early 89, 107 Calvinist 92-97, 98, 99 Catholic 90, 91, 99, 100-102, 103, 104, 105 formulaic plot 97, 106 gambling in 92, 94-95, 101, 102, 106-108 predestination 93, 99 Protestant 97, 105-109, 110 redemption 97, 103 See also Morality More, Thomas 49 Mosby (Arden of Faversham) 48 The Most Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (2003) 231, 242-243, 245 Motivation 49, 51-53, 60, 262 Movement 59, 175, 176, 184-185, 310-311 Much Ado About Nothing 46, 51 Murder 48, 233, 236, 237, 238, 242, 243 Narrative videogames adaptations of Shakespeare 239-247, 248, 249 and choice 264, 265, 266, 267-268 approach to 259, 267 definition of 231-232 embedded 259, 260, 262, 265, 266, 267 emergent 259, 260, 264-265, 267, 268-269, 270-271 flexible 266-267 Narrator authority of 229, 249, 264 humor 242, 244-245, 266 intervention 269 Nestor (Troilus and Cressida) and Hector’s challenge 143, 144 speaks against Patroclus 140, 154 target of game 141, 145, 146-147, 150-151 Newes from the North 170

326 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

Nice Wanton and dice 22, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98 and education 93 and redemption 97, 103, 109 Calvinist play 92, 95, 97, 107 context of 104 morals 100, 105 predestination 97, 98, 99 The Nobles or of Nobilitye 164 Non-player-controlled characters (NPCs) 233, 237, 247 Northbrooke, John 94-95, 97 Nurse (Romeo and Juliet) 57 Nykson, Thomas 82, 84 Oenophilus (Misogonus) 106, 109 Ontology and audience 290, 293, 294 and performance 287, 293, 294 difficulties 257, 289, 293-294 games 287, 288, 296 ontogenesis 29, 290, 293-294, 305 teaching 289 Open Space Theatre 193 Ophelia (Hamlet) agency of 245, 247 as avatar 244, 245-246, 256, 263-264, 265, 267 perspectives of character 240, 244, 245 reinterpreted 244, 246, 262, 264 saving 240, 241, 242, 260 Shakespearean 261 Othello (Othello) 246 Othello 48, 246 Pageantry of royalty 131-132 Paidia 16, 205 Passion (Chester) 187, 189 Passion plays and dice 186-187 influence on The Merchant of Venice 186 medieval 25, 185 street staging 188-189 Patroclus (Troilus and Cressida) as transgressive 145, 146, 149-150, 153, 308 bad play 25, 144, 152 playing 25, 140-141, 143-144, 154 Patronage 69, 86, 119 Peace (allegorical character) 100-101 Pedagogy and games 277, 296 and Shakespeare 281, 282, 287, 296 digital 283, 287, 296 game design as 276, 282, 289, 292 literacy 281, 282, 283, 284 progressive 277 scaffolding 283-284, 288 values 277, 282, 286 Peele, George 44, 45

Perdita (The Winter’s Tale) 57 Performance and characterization 63 and game 17-18, 24, 58-59, 176 and pedagogy 277, 285, 286, 288, 291 approach to 54-55 as tool 153 closed system and 29-30, 294 collaborative 58-59, 293-294 consideration of 20, 288-289 contemporary 50-51 disciplined 52 ephemeral 49-50, 289-290, 294 historical 27, 44, 50, 155, 288-289 improvisation 52-53, 59 influenced by sense of play 58 predetermined 63, 163, 167, 174-175 private 139, 141, 144, 154-155 scene performance as education 285 theory 64, 126, 289-290 Philogonus (Misogonus) 106, 109 Philomel (The Court Beggar) 129 Pirates 266 Placard See Royal license Places, Please!: Hamlet Edition (2016) 276-277, 286, 287, 288 Platea See Locus and platea Play act of playing 278 and choice 221, 264-268 and consumption 126-127 and morality 90, 93, 152 and power 140, 144, 145-146, 189, 190-194 and social anxiety 110, 152, 300, 309 and space 64, 164, 176 as education 24, 95-96, 277, 278, 280, 283, 284, 286 as threat to progress 141 as training 17, 205-206, 208-209, 216 as work 208 bad play 25, 144, 152 between actors 57 between characters 53, 57, 173 central to early modern theatre 16-18, 132 consequences of 233, 235 definition of 16, 24, 208 forced play 208, 215 good play 152 imitation of social structure 143, 310 influence on performance 58-59, 286, 288-289 metatheatre 58, 59, 146 on stage 23, 93, 98, 105 part of romance 121, 142-143, 168-169 private 25, 147, 154 public 25, 140, 142 rules of 24, 27, 181, 207, 303-304, 306-307, 308 subversive 31, 46, 148-149, 307

Index

suspended belief 56 to display wit 120, 140, 144, 308 unending 164, 175, 176 unproductive 154-155 versus war 24, 141, 151, 152, 206 videogames 26-27, 206-207, 232, 233-234, 235, 258-259 within a play 13, 173, 205 Players achievement of 207, 209, 235, 241, 267 agency 207, 229, 232, 233-234, 245, 248, 269, 270 and audience 17, 55, 56, 60, 151, 173, 278-279 and space 160, 206 as audience 271 as director 285, 288-289 behavior of 45, 81, 139-141 cheater 101, 103 collaboration 58, 269-271, 286, 313 definition 44 early modern 42, 49 experience of (stageplay) 44 experience of (videogames) 29, 30, 270, 287, 288, 292, 293 familiarity 270 feedback 284, 287 illusion of choice 221, 230, 233-234, 267, 270 in disguise 41, 45, 173, 174 input 30, 295-296 of a predetermined game 163, 167, 174-175, 313 professional 85, 90 redemption of 97, 103, 109-110, 220 royal 80 secluded 18, 206, 216, 308 self-aware 57 stage figure 56-57 superstition of 166, 174, 176 unaware 216 versus character 55, 167 videogames 28-29, 232, 258 Playground 205-206, 216, 223, 304, 306, 311 Playhouse and doll house 311 and games 126, 132 and time 170 audience 12, 13, 140 commercial 70, 85, 124, 125 production 123, 140 See also Floating theatre The Play of the Dice 187, 189 Plays See Stageplay Play the Knave (2020) and the text 287, 288 games and theatre 13, 277, 278, 282, 287 gestures 292-293 performance 288

327 Playwright and adaptation 181 as pseudo-director 62 defining time and space 160 depicted in stageplay 127-128 intentions of 43, 304 irreverence toward 266, 269 “never writer” 139 player as 232, 258-259 speaking through character 147 Plot 45, 283, 284 Poaching 117-118 Polixenes (The Winter’s Tale) 53, 57 Polonius (Hamlet) as nemesis 236, 241, 265 in videogame 240, 241, 260 killed by Hamlet 237, 241, 260 Shakespearean 261 Pontius Pilate 187, 188 Poverty (allegorical character) 102 See also Impatient Poverty Power abuse of 187-188 and colonialism 193-194 challenge to 189 display of 144 military prowess 144 Preston, Thomas 45 Prince John (Look About You) 163, 167, 173, 174-175 Princess of France (Love’s Labor’s Lost) 12, 21, 46 Prison bowling in 162, 171, 173 jailor scene (The Jew of Venice) 190 jailor scene (The Merchant of Venice) 25, 182-183 Privacy 141 Production 52-53, 62, 286 Professionalization and projects 125, 127-128 Caroline period 124-125, 132 economic pressure 128 government control of 69, 85 morality plays and 105 rise of 90, 105 rivalry 125 Projector and the hunt 115-116 defeat of 129 Prospero as 220 satire of 118, 119-120, 127, 304 scapegoat 123 scheme 123-124 See also Capitalism, Wealth Prosperity 102, 103-104 Prospero (The Tempest) and freedom 218, 222, 223 as trainer 28, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222

328 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

island of 207, 210, 216, 221, 222 perspective 203, 213, 215, 216, 220 project 219, 220, 222 setting boundaries 205, 206, 215, 219, 220 Protestantism and games of chance 108, 109 and theology 91-92, 98, 105 depictions of 109 education 97 royalty 99 work ethic 93, 95 See also Reformation Prototype 276, 277, 285, 286, 288, 295 Proxemics challenges of bowling 167, 168 control of space 190, 205-206, 304 expansion and contraction 175, 306 infinite space 174, 175 limited space and time 159-160, 176, 205-206 onstage versus offstage 162, 169, 171, 175 pathway across stage 171 “thus far” 160 time 163, 175, 176, 305 Punishment 93, 102, 120, 217, 233 Quarry 47-48, 116, 121 See also Hunting Queen’s Players 43 Rape 46-47, 121, 129, 211 Reading 139, 140, 148, 151, 264, 267 Records 43, 70, 72-74, 75-78 Records of Early English Drama 43 Redcap (Look About You) 171, 175 Redemption 96-97, 109, 220 Reformation and capitalism 105, 107-108 anxiety surrounding 97, 98, 99, 107-108 church hypocrisy 105, 107, 108-109 conflict 99 connected to rulers 99 of religion 9, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98 tension with Catholics 100, 108-109 Regulation and commercialization 84 and the Sabbath 43 bonds 78-79, 82, 84, 85, 86 failed 71, 74, 81, 85, 86, 105 from Parliament 70-71, 72 injunction 78 in London 71, 74, 81, 82, 86 of actors 43 of bowling 70, 71-72, 78, 83-84 of games 21, 23, 69-72 of Jewish investment dealers 191 of stageplays 69, 72, 85-86 parallel between games and stageplays 86

playhouses 70 proclamations 43, 72, 81, 82, 83, 105, 170 punishment 78-79, 98 royal license 83-84, 85, 86, 124, 305-306 tennis 70-72, 74, 78 through burning 82 Unlawful Games Act 72, 75, 84 use of injunction 78, 85 See also Games, Rules Rehearsal 51, 52, 62, 173, 293 Repetition economy of 181, 184, 191, 192 of line 184 of pattern 26, 181, 191 tasks and 216, 233-234, 247, 283 Reynolds, John 84 Rice, Emma 56, 60 Richard II 59, 147, 161 Richard III of England 49, 75 Richard III (Richard III) 47, 49 Risk acceptance of 100, 104, 107-108, 180 and capitalism 100, 107-108 avoidance 208 financial 22, 180, 184 gambling and 105 in games 21, 126 in play 126, 180 of damnation 97-99 of peril 49, 143 Rivalry 48, 61 Robin Hood 162, 174 Role-playing game 16, 217, 292 Romance and leisure activities 121, 150 as pursuit 45, 120-121 bowling and 161, 168-169 depictions of 11-12 through competition 142-143 Romeo and Juliet play 57, 206, 264, 285 videogame adaptation 256, 276, 284, 285, 287, 288, 295 Rosencrantz (Hamlet) 236, 246, 260, 262, 265, 269 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) 21, 236, 269 Royal license and profit 85 and theatre 128 annulment 124 for games 83-84, 85, 86, 305-306 for hunting 117 for stageplays 84, 85 Royal patent 69, 70, 86, 118, 119 Royal proclamation 81, 83, 105 Royal Shakespeare Company 51, 58 Rules 18, 247-248, 277, 304, 306-308, 312 See also Regulation

Index

Rushes 172-173 Rylance, Juliet 57 Rylance, Mark and football 58 in Hamlet 57 in interview 51-52, 53, 55, 58 with audience 59-60 Sabbath 43, 120, 165 Satire of character 115, 120 of court 118-119, 125, 304 of projectors 129-130, 131 Saykyn, John 76 Scene performance 285, 286, 289-290, 293 Script and space 159-160, 171 authority of 18-19, 25, 56, 168, 181, 188, 268-269 in performance 62, 97, 127, 168 in videogames 30, 244, 245 non-stable entity 27 predictable 109, 171 text play 147-149, 151 turned into play 63, 278 Sea Venture (shipwreck) 28, 210, 211, 212, 213-214, 223 Sebastian (The Tempest) 215, 220, 221, 222, 223 Sebastian (Twelfth Night) 161 Second Poets’ War 125 Servant-clown 215, 216 See also Clown/clowning Sex and games 25, 47-48 and morality 25 as recreational activity 47 illicit 48, 49, 60 sexuality 48 Sex work 48 Shakespeare adaptation of 179, 180, 190-195 and colonial narratives 193-194, 205, 210-212, 307 and games 14, 46, 54, 147, 190, 276-277, 279 and gamification 204, 276 and spacing 159-160 and Passion plays 185-186 and white supremacy 210-211 appropriation 256-258, 271 as game 278, 282, 286, 295-296 authority challenged 193, 267 comedy as commentary 140, 153-154, 155 complex representation 282 cultural status 18, 255, 271, 278, 280, 284-285 depiction of prison 182-183 familiarity with source material 270 fit to audience 259

329 influences 126, 185, 210-211, 213 in sources 47 literacy 281, 282, 284-285 literary playwright 289 narrative structure 260 new uses of 255, 262-263, 287, 292 recognition of 268, 304-305 text play 149 videogame adaptation 237, 239-247, 256, 258-259, 260-268, 270-271, 278 See also Individual characters, Individual games, Individual plays Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) and authority 192, 194 famous lines 194 Granville adaptation 190 has Antonio arrested 183, 184 in prayer 193 jailor scene 182, 184-185 vilification 186, 190, 193-194 The SIMS (2000) 311-313 Sin gambling as 90, 92, 97-98 greed 100, 101, 102, 105 idleness 93, 94, 100 immoral behavior 93 language 147 portrayed on stage 90, 95 temporary distraction 97 Sir John (Misogonus) 105, 106 Skill bowling 173 versus chance 106-107 versus luck 94-95, 107 Skin game 283, 284, 285n Skink (Look About You) 163, 167, 173-175 Slander 48 Social commentary 90, 132, 140, 152-153, 309 Social isolation 161, 162, 169 Social media 20 Solanio (The Merchant of Venice) 182-183 Solas (Solace), Barnard 76-77, 78, 79 Something Wicked (2021) 276, 282, 283, 287, 288, 292 Spectators See Audience Speedrunning 30 Speght, Gilbert 82 Spiritus est vicarius 94-95 Sport and community 165 as analogy 58-59, 60-61 categorization of 21, 23 for health 166 hunting as 117 team sport 58 Spying 46, 216 Stage contemporary 50, 60 direction 50, 51, 53, 54, 60, 171, 313

330 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

early modern 50, 60 Globe 50, 59 offstage 162, 169 onstage 162 physical space of 25, 59, 160 Stageplay and agency 237 and education 50-51 and games 23, 41-42, 45, 108, 120 apology for 140 as artistic expression 20, 31 called game 41-42, 120 Caroline 120, 132 commercialization 84-86 contemporary performance 52-55, 155, 289-290 flexibility in 19, 52, 58-59, 63-64 historical performance 27, 290-291 imitation of social hierarchy 143, 152 impact of 141 licensing 84, 85 physicality 59 play within 129, 162 popularity 85 pre-Civil War 117 predetermined ending 176, 187, 230, 313 professionalization 85 royal involvement 86 satire 118-119, 120, 125, 127, 131, 304 script 17-18, 25, 56, 159-160, 168, 171, 181, 188, 268-269, 278 stage direction 93, 171 social commentary 90, 107, 132, 140, 309 textual ambiguity 93n tonal ambiguity 141, 154 See also Individual plays Staging action 50 and meaning 286 blocking 52-53, 62, 191-192, 285 challenges of bowling 161-162, 167, 172 ephemeral 49 game 276, 280, 284-287 morality play 205-206 plays 107 Passion plays 188 Staging game 276, 284-285, 286, 292 Staging Shakespeare (pre-production) 276, 278, 282, 285-286, 287, 288 Stanislavskian acting 21, 52, 55 director 54 notions of character 50, 51, 53 super-objective 51 terms 59 The Stanley Parable 229, 230, 232, 248-249 Stanton, Philippa 52 Status marker games of chance and upper class 108

pursuit of 115-116 social hierarchy 109, 115-116, 152 wealth 109 Statute of Winchester 70 Stealth character 246 Stephano (The Tempest) 215, 222 Stoppard, Tom 21, 236, 269 Stow, John 80, 164 Stubbes, Philip 43-44 Student as audience 30, 276, 281 as game developer 284, 295 as player 278, 923 early modern 128 performance 50-51, 92, 277, 284-285 See also Education Subversion 46, 148-149, 307 Suckling, John 120-121, 125 Super-objective 51 Sutton-Smith, Brian 24, 110, 143-145 The Tempest and colonialism 210, 218, 223, 307 and games 256 and gamification 27, 204, 215, 218 and white supremacy 210 as playground 206 game-like conditions 205, 223 racist tropes 210-211 training game 215-216 training ground 207, 211, 214-215 Temptation 102-103, 171 Tennis commercialization of 84 court 72, 74-75, 76, 77, 78-80, 81, 82, 83, 206 early version 71 decline 81 leisure activity 70-71 morality of 164 played by royalty 80 playing of 21, 70, 80, 83 popularity 70, 73, 74, 75-76, 77 profit 85 regulation 70-71, 73, 74-75, 78, 81, 86 revival 75 royal license 83, 84, 85, 306 volley as rapport 53 Tennis ball as gift 12, 49 as tithe 74, 80 burning of 82 decline in or lack of sale 80, 81, 83 discounted pricing 76 made of 73 price 73, 75-76 sale of 70, 73-75, 77, 305 Tennis court as playground 206 license 83, 84, 85, 306

Index

operation of 74, 79-80, 82, 84, 85 peahens for 77 rental 72-73, 76, 78, 81, 83 Textual analysis 26, 276, 282-284, 287, 288 Thames docks 82 f loating playhouse on 22, 123-124, 130, 131 London Globe Theatre on 20 north of the 125 public playhouse on 132 source of pride 130 Theatre (contemporary) as game 50, 54 audience 54 immersive 279 ontology and 294 physical 54-55, 59 Theatre (early modern) approach 63 as game 50 audience 30, 56-57 conventions of 233 court influence 127, 128, 129 economic pressure 128 history plays 160 industry 291 ontology and 294 on water 130-131 physical space 160 players 49, 56-57, 63 professionalization 43, 64, 69, 85-86, 90 rushes 172-173 See also Floating theatre TheatreGame (1991) 276, 285, 286-287, 288 Thersites (Troilus and Cressida) 152 Tin Man Games 243, 256, 260, 263-264, 267-268, 270 To Be or Not to Be (2015) adaptation 231, 243-245, 256, 260, 263-268, 267 and choice 267, 269, 270 characters 264 crowd-funding 263 homage 269, 270 players and 270, 271 Shakespearean 270, 271 Tooke, Robert 73 Tooke, Thomas 73 Tournaments 23, 144 Trade 92, 104, 190 The tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey or Cæsars reuenge 160 Tragedy 231, 235-236, 239, 237, 246, 247-248 Training actors 17, 50-51, 54, 60 artificial training environment 28, 206, 208, 209, 213-214 colonial 28, 211, 307

331 environment 211, 214 evaluation 209, 219 for war 23, 206, 207 safety of 220, 224 social 310 students 50-51 system 209 through game 204, 206, 215-216, 219 The Travailes of the Three English Brothers 63 Treswell, Ralph 80 Trinculo (The Tempest) 215, 222 Troilus (Troilus and Cressida) 47, 144, 151, 153 Troilus and Cressida and play 25, 47, 48, 149, 152, 153 and sex workers 48 as comedy 139, 141, 153-154, 155 games in 25, 47, 144-145, 308 intentions 140-141, 153-154, 155 on authority 142, 143 performance 140, 155 Qb Epistle to 139-141, 151, 154 tonal ambiguity 141, 144-145, 151 Tudor period consumer trends 73 economics 22 laws and regulation 21, 43, 69-71, 74, 78, 81, 105 London during 21 Twelfth Night 46, 53, 55-56, 58-59, 161 Ulysses (Troilus and Cressida) and games 143-144, 147, 308 and Hector’s challenge 142, 143, 144, 151-152 and text play 149, 150, 151 as filter 146, 147, 149, 150 imitating 151, 153 on authority 142, 143, 145, 150 reporting play 25, 48, 140-141, 145, 146-147, 149-150, 153, 154 Unlawful Games Act 72, 75, 84 See also Games Usury 92, 104 Variations on the Merchant of Venice 193-195 Vazquez, Yolanda 52-53 Venereal disease 93 Venus 45 Vice (allegorical character) 45 Video clips 305, 240 Videogames aesthetics 282, 284, 288 and choice 229-230, 233-234, 235, 240, 243-244 and education 256, 277-279, 281-282 as work 217 based on Shakespeare 13, 26-27, 28-29, 239-248, 256, 258-259, 260-268 challenge environment 207

332 

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Engl and

character building 233, 234, 237 choose your own adventure 247, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 270 closed system 27, 28, 29-30, 270, 294 completion conditions 276, 284 connection to theatre 258, 259 culture 259, 307, 312 first-person shooter 206, 217 information gathering 246 massive multiplayer online game 240-241, 256, 271, 280 medium over adaptation 261, 263 mixed reality game 13 narrative 232, 235, 236, 244-245, 248-249 open world 27, 28-29, 249 playable media 294, 304 player as audience 28-29, 232 player interaction 270 points, scoring, and levels 207, 209, 216, 218, 235, 267, 287 predetermined plot 27, 237, 313 production of 27 puzzles 233, 240, 242, 249, 256, 260-262 quest games 29, 261, 262 repeated action 216, 233-234, 247, 283 rules 247-248 shooting 206, 217, 281 story-based 28, 231, 233-234 text-centric 278 training game 208-209 winning 241, 267 See also Adaptation, Games, Grinding, Individual games, Interactivity Violence and hunting 119 in games 236 in narrative 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 234 in play 283 in videogame culture 307 Virginia Company 210, 211, 214, 219 Virtual reality 209, 300, 304, 311 Walker, Gilbert 102 Wall, Jem 59 War as game 49, 117-118, 143, 209 as videogame 209-210, 311 battle 90, 144, 165, 194, 282 mock invasion 117-118 refashioned into game 143, 206-207, 209-210

“thus far” 160 Wealth and church hypocrisy 91, 105, 107-108, 109 as reward 101 bankruptcy 107 dangers of 91, 101, 102-103 desire for 103 hunter 119-120 loss of 184 money-making schemes 115-116, 122 proper use of 103 reflection of faith 101 See also Projector Weapons 70-71, 81, 82 Webster, John 46 Who Killed Romeo and Juliet? (unpublished) 276, 284, 287, 288, 295 Widow (Women Beware Women) 46 Winning and romance 47 as requirement 241 by following structure 235, 242 by luck 95, 107 desire for wealth 101, 103 flexibility of outcome 243 freedom 205, 207-208, 216, 218, 219, 222, 230 historical versus game 249 hope of 97, 101 incentives 207, 281, 284 meaning of 245 salvation as 91, 97, 101 skill to 97 “power fantasy” 246, 247 prayer to win 107 victory denied 222 The Winter’s Tale 53, 222 Witness 149, 186, 188, 215-216, 284, 289 The Wolf Among Us (2014) 28, 233-235, 237, 240 Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal) 78, 81, 82, 83, 86 A Woman is a Weathercock 169 A Woman Killed with Kindness 48 Women Beware Women 46, 48 Work ethic 93, 95, 221 World of Warcraft 217 Young, John 74-75 Youth morality plays 92, 100-105, 106-109 Youth, Interlude of 22, 89, 92, 96, 97, 103-104