NICK BARNETT CHESS

WE HAVE BEEN entertained by a chess drama recently in The Queen’s Gambit. It has elicited a lot of discussion but not any negative consequence for the author of the original book (Walter Tevis who died in 1984) nor for screenwriters Frank and Allan Scott. But think of one of the earliest English scriptwriters, Thomas Middleton (1580 –1627) who wrote a play called A Game at Chess.

A contemporary of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Middleton was a Jacobean playwright and poet. He had become successful and owned a property adjoining the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. Unlike Shakespeare, he remained a free agent, able to write for whichever company hired him.

But in 1624, his dramatic allegory A Game at Chess, was staged by the King’s Men. Like many modern metaphorical portrayals of chess, the play used the idea of a chess game to present and satirise the recent intrigues surrounding the Spanish Match, which involved the proposed marriage of Prince Charles, son of James I of England, to the Spanish princess.

In the play the ghost of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, realizes that England has not yet been converted to Catholicism.

Error, his servant, has a dream about a game of chess that involves the Catholic and Anglican churches. The Catholics are represented by the black pieces whilst the Anglicans are represented by the white. The play includes all the vices ranging from the common: gluttony, greed, licentiousness and ambition, to the extreme: murder and infanticide. It also features the kind of intrigues which were common in courts of the time (both royal and religious), with few redeeming characters. In the end the black pieces are all sent to ‘The Bag’. The white pieces are all left standing. The game has been won. It became “the greatest box-office hit of early modern London” but although Middleton’s approach was patriotic there was a complaint from the Spanish Ambassador. The Privy Council opened a prosecution against the actors and the author on the grounds that it was then illegal to portray any modern Christian king onstage. The Globe Theatre was shut down by the prosecution, though Middleton was able to acquit himself by showing that the play had been approved by the Master of the Revels. After James I’s death, the play was printed in multiple editions, but Middleton never wrote another full play.

Middleton died at his home at Newington Butts in Southwark in 1627.

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REMEMBER to check facebook.com/ SACHESSPLAYERS for news and tournaments in South Africa.

There is another Facebook page entitled: SA Chess players which may be interesting if you want to keep up-to-date with SA chess.

White to move and mate in 2