Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: "A Game at Chess" in Context
1984; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3817364
ISSN1544-399X
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Resumopopulation, packed the Globe during the nine performances of A Game at Chess. The loud cheers from the theater echoed across London and testified to the audiences' delight with Thomas Middleton's brutal satire of Catholicism, Spain, and Gondomar, the former Spanish ambassador.2 A Game at Chess drew Lord Haughton to his first performance in ten years, and elderly John Chamberlain offered excuses for not seeing it.3 Literary scholars have always been fascinated with the commotion at the Globe. Between the play's unprecedented run, the longest on the Jacobean stage, and its equally unprecedented discussion of contemporary politics, they could not easily ignore this succes de scandale. Historians on the other hand have found the play less compelling. They have generally contented themselves with noting the play's popularity and its eventual suppression; the former was an indication of contemporary hispanophobia, and the latter a telling example of royal censorship of the stage.4 Needless to say, these fleeting references scarcely equal the extended literary discussions of the play.5 This scholarly imbalance presents serious interpretative problems to the unwary student of Middleton, problems which Margot Heinemann has unwittingly discovered in her recent work, Puritanism and Theatre. Heinemann, a literary scholar, sought to place Middleton within his social and political context, but critical reviews from historians-one has even termed her work meaningless make it difficult to pronounce her study an unqualified success.6 Admittedly Heinemann gave offense with her persistent use of historiographical concepts, like Parliamentary Puritan opposition, which many historians have jettisoned in recent years.
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