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“AN VNDER BLACK DUBBLETT SIGNIFYING A SPANISH HART”: COSTUMES AND POLITICS IN MIDDLETON's A GAME AT CHESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2007

Robert I. Lublin
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Extract

Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess has long held a place of particular importance in studies of early modern English theatre history. Performed for a record nine straight performances (a feat not accomplished again until the Restoration), Middleton's production has attracted scholarly interest by virtue of both its unparalleled contemporary success and its overt religious and political messages of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda. Performed by the King's Men at the Globe playhouse between 5 and 14 August (except for Sunday) 1624, A Game at Chess provides the most conspicuous instance from the period in which the stage addressed issues of immediate political significance. Certainly history plays, such as Shakespeare's series of works chronicling the Wars of the Roses, dealt with English politics, but no play dealt so directly with the politics of the moment. Even more important, the politics of the moment responded. John Woolley, the secretary of the English agent in Brussels, wrote “all the nues I have heard since my comming to towne is of a nue Play. It is called a game at Chess, but it may be a vox populy for by reporte it is 6 tymes worse against the Spanyard.” The play's politics struck such a chord and the performance was deemed so scandalous that it was ultimately shut down by King James himself after he received an official complaint from the Spanish Ambassador Extraordinary, Don Carlos Coloma.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , November 2007 , pp. 247 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. 2007

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References

ENDNOTES

1. Thomas Cogswell estimates that nearly thirty thousand spectators saw the performance, and Thomas Postlewait concludes that more than a tenth of London's population attended the play, with more people turned away. Cogswell, Thomas, “Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game at Chess in Context,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984): 273–88, at 273Google Scholar; Postlewait, Thomas, “Theater Events and Their Political Contexts: A Problem in the Writing of Theatre History,” in Critical Theory and Performance, rev. and enl. ed., Reinelt, Janelle and Roach, Joseph, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 198–222Google Scholar.

2. Middleton, Thomas, A Game at Chess, ed. Howard-Hill, T. H., Revels Plays edition (New York: Manchester University Press, 1993) [hereafter TM/HH], Appendix 1, Item 2, 192Google Scholar.

3. MacIntyre, Jean and Epp, Garrett P. J., “‘Cloathes worth all the rest’: Costumes and Properties,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. Cox, John D. and Kastan, David Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 269–85, at 284Google Scholar.

4. T. H. Howard-Hill offers the fullest explanation of the different texts of A Game at Chess in the second half of his book Middleton's “Vulgar Pasquin”: Essays on “A Game at Chess” (Newark: University of Delaware Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 1995). For a summary of the issues, see “Documentary Foundations” in the introduction to his edition of the play (TM/HH, 1–60, at 2–10).

5. Braunmuller, A. R., “‘To the Globe I rowed’: John Holles Sees A Game at Chess,” English Literary Renaissance 20.2 (1990): 340–56, at 341CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Middleton, A Game at Chess, Appendix 1, Item 7, 198.

7. T. H. Howard-Hill, “The Occasion of the Play” in his introduction (TM/HH, 16).

8. I do not mean to suggest that all English audience members perceived the events in the same way. However, it must be acknowledged that these events were known by all who attended the production and influenced how it was experienced. For a consideration of the complex relationship between politics and A Game at Chess, see Postlewait's essay.

9. TM/HH, Appendix 1, Item 7, 198–9. Subsequent items from this appendix are cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Howard-Hill, “Composition, Sources, and Revision,” in his introduction (TM/HH, 29).

11. Ibid. Among his “villainies,” Gondomar instigated the proceedings that led to the execution of Raleigh in 1619 and was a major supporter of the marriage match between Charles and the Spanish Infanta.

12. All quotes are from the TM/HH edition.

13. Moore, John R., “The Contemporary Significance of Middleton's Game at Chesse,” PMLA 50 (1935): 761–8, at 763CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. T. H. Howard-Hill reproduces the pictures in his introduction (TM/HH, 15, 25).

15. Moore, 762.

16. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century (London: Faber & Faber), 99.

17. Seven if, as Howard-Hill has suggested, Error is dressed as a Jesuit. He notes that Holles apparently missed his vocative “Error” and calls the character his “disciple” in Howard Hill, T. H., “The Unique Eye-Witness Report of Middleton's A Game at Chess,” Review of English Studies 42.166 (1991): 168–78, at 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. For a study of the development of religious apparel, see Mayo's, JanetA History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London: B. T. Batsford, 1984), particularly chaps. 5 and 6Google Scholar.

19. Greenblatt, Stephen, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 162Google Scholar.

20. It is important to note that this is not the apparel in which the Fat Bishop appears on the title page. There, he wears a cassock with a mozetta, a short hooded cape worn over the shoulders, and a biretta, a stiff three-cornered hat. This was everyday clothing for a Catholic bishop and is the apparel in which the former Archbishop of Spalato appeared in the painting that was copied for the title page.

21. Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tutors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 287Google Scholar.

22. For a thorough discussion of the vestment controversy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Primus, J. H., The Vestments Controversy (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1960)Google Scholar, and Lesser, Zachary, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81–114Google Scholar.

23. Lockyer, Roger, Tudor and Stuart Britain: 1471–1714 (London: Longmans, 1964), 231Google Scholar.

24. In 1618, Frederick misguidedly accepted the throne in Bohemia when it was offered to him by the Protestant Bohemian nobles upon the death of the Emperor Mathias. This went counter to the long custom whereby the Catholic Habsburg emperors were also the kings of Bohemia. The two results were (1) that Frederick became a hero in England for championing the Protestant cause on the continent and (2) open war ensued, which ravaged Europe and left Frederick and Elizabeth exiled in the Netherlands. Lockyer, 236.

25. Clifton, Robin, “Fear of Popery,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Russell, Conrad (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 144–67, at 147CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. The Black Knight's Pawn notes that “This' a strange habit for a holy father, / A president of poverty especially” (4.1.6–7).

27. Chakravorty, Swapan, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 178CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. MacIntyre and Epp, 274. T. W. Craik notes that “the pretence of vices to be virtues is a theme almost universal in the interludes, and in allegorical literature in general”; The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume, Acting (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1962), 87.

29. TM/HH, Appendix 1, Item 7, 199.

30. Postlewait.

31. Braunmuller, 353. Jane Sherman suggests that “the White King's Pawn is not so much Cranfield as a composite of Northampton, Carr, Suffolk, Secretary Lake, and Secretary Calvert”; “The Pawns' Allegory in Middleton's A Game at Chesse,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 29.114 (1978): 147–59, at 156.

32. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Stallybrass, Peter, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 184Google Scholar.

33. My edition of Shakespeare is The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

34. See Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926)Google Scholar. Sumptuary legislation was discontinued by King James in 1604, but its prescriptions were widely known in 1624 and beyond the Interregnum.

35. See Hentschell, Roze, “A Question of Nation: Foreign Clothes on the English Subject” in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Richardson, Catherine (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 49–62Google Scholar. Also see Orgel, Stephen, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly chap. 2Google Scholar.

36. Hentschell, 50–3.

37. Gillian A. Sanderman argues that William Rowley, who had the reputation of playing fat clown parts, performed the role of the Fat Bishop; “A Critical Study of the Work of William Rowley” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1974).

38. Jean MacIntyre examines how the theatrical companies' accumulation of costumes affected dramatic scripts in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama in Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992).