A Game at Chess

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A Game at Chess is a comic satirical play by Thomas Middleton, first staged in August 1624 by the King's Men at the Globe Theatre, and notable for its political content.

The play seems to be about a chess match, and even contains a genuine chess opening: the Queen's Gambit Declined. Instead of personal names, the characters are known as the White Knight, the Black King, etc. However, audiences immediately recognized the play as an allegory for the stormy relationship between Spain (the black pieces) and Great Britain (the white pieces). King James I of England is the White King; King Philip IV of Spain is the Black King. In particular, the play dramatizes the struggle of negotiations over the proposed marriage of the then Prince Charles with the Spanish princess, the Infanta Maria. It focuses on the journey by Prince Charles (the "White Knight") and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (the "White Duke", or rook) to Madrid in 1623.

Among the secondary targets of the satire was the former Archbishop of Spalatro, Marco Antonio de Dominis, who was caricatured as the Fat Bishop (played by William Rowley). De Dominis was a famous turncoat of his day: he had left the Roman Catholic Church to join the Anglican Church—and then returned to Rome again. The traitorous White King's Pawn is a composite of several figures, including Lionel Cranfield, the Earl of Middlesex, a former Lord Treasurer who was impeached before the House of Lords in April 1624.

The former Spanish ambassador to London, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, conde de Gondomar, was blatantly satirized and caricatured in the play as the Machiavellian Black Knight. His successor recognized the satire and complained to King James. His description of the crowd's reaction to the play yields a vivid picture of the scene:

There was such merriment, hubbub and applause that even if I had been many leagues away

it would not have been possible for me not to have taken notice of it.^[1]

The play was stopped after nine performances (August 6-16, Sundays omitted), but not before it had become "the greatest box-office hit of early modern London" [1]. The Privy Council opened a prosecution against the actors and the author of the play on Aug. 18 (it was then illegal to portray any modern Christian king on the stage). The Globe Theatre was shut down by the prosecution, though Middleton was able to acquit himself by showing that the play had been passed by the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert. Nevertheless, further performance of the play was forbidden and Middleton and the actors were reprimanded and fined. Middleton never wrote another play.

An obvious question arises: if the play was clearly offensive, why did the Master of the Revels license it on July 12 of that summer? Herbert may have been acting in collusion with the "war party" of the day, which included figures as prominent as Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham; they were eager for a war with Spain and happy to see public ire roused against the Spanish. If this is true, Middleton and the King's Men were themselves pawns in a geopolitical game of chess.

A Game at Chess is unique in that it exists in more 17th-century manuscripts than printed texts (only three of which survive). Of the six extant manuscripts, one is an authorial holograph, and two are the work of Ralph Crane, a professional scribe who worked for the King's Men in this era and who is thought to have prepared some of the play texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.