SOURCE: "A Game At Chess: Thomas Middleton's 'Praise of Folly'," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2, June, 1987, pp. 107-23.

Thomas Middleton's Game at Chess might have been a play for Puritans, but it certainly was not a play only for Puritans. John Chamberlain, who was in a better position than we to know something about the play's audience, wrote [in a letter to Dudley Carleton, 21 August 1624, quoted in A Game at Chesse, ed. R. C. Bald] that it was "frequented by all sorts of people old and young, rich and poore, masters and servants, papists and puritans, wise men etc. churchmen and statesmen…. " While Chamberlain's census of the audience may not be strictly accurate, his main point—that A Game at Chess attracted a huge and diverse audience—constitutes a crucial historical fact about the play which can hardly be disputed in the twentieth century.

A second, and equally important, historical fact consists in the lenient treatment accorded the players after the play was finally suppressed. In spite of the scandalous notoriety of the play, the authorities clearly were disposed to be forgiving. In a letter to the president of the Council, dated 27 August 1624, the third earl of Pembroke wrote that King James

nowe Conceives y punishment if not satisfactory for all their Insolency, yet such, as since it stopps y Current of their poore livelyhood and maint nance without much prejudice they Cannot longer vndergo. In Co miseraçon therefore of those his poore servants, his Ma: would have their LL: Connive at any Common play lycenced by authority, that they shall act as before….

Indeed the mildness of the company's punishment has led most modern scholars to what I will try to show is the mistaken view that the play must have had a sponsor at court, someone with enough influence to be able to assuage the anger of the king and thus guarantee the safety of the players.

The diversity of the audience and the mild punishment accorded the players will serve as starting points for a reevaluation both of the nature of the satire in A Game at Chess and of the circumstances surrounding its writing, licensing, production, and reception. Like Erasmus before him and Swift after him, Middleton learned the art of seeming to praise the thing he meant to mock; after all, only a thoroughly convincing encomium of royal folly can both undertake to ridicule the king and yet escape the king's wrath. In this view, the crucial point to be made about the nature of the play is that it attracted and pleased so many different kinds of people because it had the capacity to mean something quite different to different members of the audience. A Game at Chess, in other words, has two faces: it looks one way in praise of the king, the other way in derision; it manages to be both a glowing idealization and an uproarious satire of the fiasco of Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham's trip to Spain to negotiate for a marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta Maria. It is primarily this deliberate, calculated, and brilliantly executed two-facedness which allowed the playwright to score such a tremendous popular success and also to evade the wrath of the authorities. One could say that Middleton had perfected the aspect of satire that Swift found so noteworthy over a century later. "Satire," Swift wrote [in "Gulliver's Travels" and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa, 1960)], "is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it."

In what follows, historical argument and literary analysis are of necessity intertwined. "What led Middleton to write A Game at Chess?" "Why did the Master of the Revels license it?" "Why did the King's Men put it on?" "Why were the players not punished more severely?" Questions such as these bear directly on the question of the nature of the play. To put my historical argument briefly, A Game at Chess was intended not as propaganda but as a master stroke in the "great game" of writing for the commercial theater. The chess master in this case was not an aristocratic sponsor determined to promulgate a particular view of foreign affairs—the chess master was Thomas Middleton himself.

As we have seen, the temerity of the King's Men production of Middleton's Game at Chess has sent scholars off in search of a likely sponsor, someone who had both an interest in promoting anti-Spanish propaganda and sufficient sway at court to shelter the instruments of that propaganda. Louis B. Wright suggested some years ago [in a letter, Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 16, 1928] that the duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles themselves might have sponsored the play. More recently, in a fascinating and controversial study of Middleton's career [Puritanism and Theater, 1980], Margot Heinemann has suggested that the earl of Pembroke might have stood sponsor to the play. Finally, in a recent article ["Thomas Middleton and the Court, "Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984)], the historian Thomas Cogswell has argued that Pembroke and Charles and Buckingham might have joined together in order to encourage and protect both Middleton and the King's Men.

Wright's argument that Charles and Buckingham might have sponsored the play in order to incite public sentiment against Catholic Spain has a certain appeal. The two young men were impetuous and somewhat foolish, and could have attempted something out of the ordinary in order to stir up public opinion. On the other hand, public opinion was already stirred up against the Catholics, and it is difficult to see what advantage could have been gained by this anti-Catholic satire, especially when Buckingham was at that moment pushing James anew to make concessions to English Catholics so that Charles might marry a Catholic princess of France—Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII.

Heinemann argues that A Game at Chess was backed by a group opposed to James's foreign and domestic policies, and identifies Pembroke as one of the group's leaders and the probable sponsor of the play. Along with the fact that Pembroke was an outspoken enemy of Spain, Heinemann adduces four pieces of evidence that suggest he was behind the play: first, as Lord Chamberlain, he was the senior official in charge of overseeing the theater and had, as well, friendly relations with the King's Men; second, Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, was Pembroke's kinsman and had won his appointment through Pembroke's influence; third, Pembroke evidently interceded on the players' behalf with the king; and fourth, Pembroke had close connections with Archbishop Abbot, perhaps the man who shielded the Puritan pamphleteer Thomas Scott from persecution in 1622. (As it happens, Middleton helped himself to material in Scott's pamphlets when writing A Game at Chess).

Against Heinemann's argument, the following points ought to be made. Except for the familial ties between Pembroke and the Master of the Revels, there is no evidence to connect him with the play before it was staged. It is possible that Pembroke interceded on behalf of the players after the Globe was closed, but this is not itself significant since he had done as much in previous cases. That Pembroke might have approved the general anti-Spanish tenor of the satire—not an unlikely supposition—cannot be taken to indicate that he was in any way involved in its production. As for the point that Middleton's use of Scott's pamphlets connects him with this opposition group, we surely cannot assume that literary borrowing indicates either political allegiance or personal acquaintance.

Cogswell's theory that A Game at Chess was backed by a coalition that included the otherwise antagonistic earl of Pembroke on the one side and Charles and Buckingham on the other is based on an analysis of the contemporary political climate more persuasive than Heinemann's. It is true, as Cogswell argues, that the heady anti-Spanish atmosphere precipitated by Charles's return from Spain temporarily drew together various factions at court and catapulted Buckingham, briefly, into public favor. In view of these conditions, Cogswell suggests, we should view A Game at Chess as having served "a critical propaganda function" in that it "offered a plausible justification for the trip [Charles and Buckingham's trip to Spain] as much as it stirred up popular jingoism" (p. 284). However, Cogswell's argument runs into two problems. The first has already been mentioned. It is difficult to understand why Buckingham should have wished to stir up popular hatred of Catholics at the very moment he was campaigning to have Charles marry the Catholic Henrietta Maria. Even if, as Cogswell suggests, the terms of the marriage were favorable to England, Buckingham could hardly have thought that the virulent anti-Catholic satire of A Game at Chess would have won the hearts of the English people to the proposed marriage. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any play that would have had a more dampening effect than A Game at Chess on the public's attitude toward a Catholic bride for the heir apparent. Second, Cogswell's argument that A Game at Chess is not a satire of the English court but in fact a celebration of the court is contradicted by contemporary reports which—as we will see—make clear that the play's satire was seen to be aimed at the English as well as at the Spanish leaders.

All three sponsorship theories are based on the unfounded assumption that men in power in Jacobean England used the theater as a vehicle for propaganda. But the fact is, there is not a single piece of evidence which points to the writing-to-order of commercial-theater plays for the whole of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Masques, pageants, sermons, pamphlets, and proclamations seem to have satisfied the ruling class's desire to promulgate its views. As a rule, then, the theater was not employed by the ruling class—or by any segment of the ruling class—to influence the attitudes of the public. On the contrary, the theater was free to appeal to the various tastes and interests of all the constituent groups of its audience, just so long as it did not violate the complex and mostly unwritten laws of Jacobean censorship.

This argument does not mean, of course, that members of the ruling class might not sometimes have entertained the notion of advertising their views in the commercial theater. The performance of Richard II commissioned by Essex on the eve of his unsuccessful coup d'état shows clearly enough that propaganda in the theater was thinkable; however, it is equally clear that Richard II is the exception that proves the rule. On the face of it, the dismal—and fatal—failure of Shakespeare's play to rouse popular support for Essex should have been sufficient in itself to recommend against any further theatrical propagandizing. More to the point, the Essex debacle demonstrates the irrelevance of the theater to the system of Elizabethan and Jacobean propaganda; the theater appears to have had some capacity to crystallize ideas that were already in the air, but it seems to have been quite unable to influence public attitudes in any radical or decisive way.

These sponsorship theories propound highly speculative arguments whose main claim to our attention lies in the received idea that A Game at Chess could not have been put on without a sponsor. It may be worthwhile, however, to consider (as an alternative theory) the possibility that A Game at Chess was conceived and produced on the strength of the playwright's and the players' daring and desire for a popular and profitable show rather than on the strength of either Pembroke's or Buckingham's promise of protection and reward. According to this theory, A Game at Chess is not a freak of the theater but rather is representative (in the extreme) of several typical qualities of the Jacobean drama—an energetic drive toward social and political relevance, a broadly critical or even satirical outlook, and a remarkable Janus-faced presentation of issues which could make a single character at once both a prince and a most princely hypocrite.

The players were by nature and profession strongly inclined to stage controversial and topical plays whenever they thought they might be able to get away with it. The history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater is rich in examples of the "insolency" of the players, occasions when the players got into trouble with the authorities for being, or for trying to be, too topical or too political or too pointedly satirical. No doubt the staging of plays such as Eastward Ho, Chapman's Biron, Middleton's Witch, Fletcher and Massinger's Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, or Drue's Duchess of Suffolk was motivated partly by desire to fill the theaters; however, the topicality of much of the drama must not be ascribed solely to the profit motive. The English theater was traditionally topical, controversial, and politically and socially relevant. The religious drama of the Middle Ages had a prominent political dimension, and much drama of the Tudor period was primarily political, caught up as it was in the controversies of the time. This tradition continued and developed in the relative freedom of the commercial theater of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period: the large and various body of plays that give us our sense of that theater suggests a lively forum where embedded cultural values and established political and social hierarchies might be debated, tested, and analyzed. Moreover, this argument applies not only to patently topical plays like A Game at Chess but also to plays like The Family of Love or Michaelmas Term since such plays take as their satirical focus the lives of men and women in the English polis. Finally, English Renaissance dramatists developed to the top of its bent the dialectical production of meaning inherent in the dramatic form (dialectical since no point of view in a play is clearly authoritative and all points of view are subject to dramatic irony). For this reason, the over-all meaning or point of view in plays such as Doctor Faustus or Henry V is indeterminate. It is indeterminate, furthermore, not primarily because the dramatists were profoundly uncertain about the ontology of meaning but rather because a Janus-faced handling of controversial issues allowed dramatists to be graceful under the pressure of an often brutally defensive church and state, and also increased the appeal of their plays to an audience made up of different classes and political persuasions. In this general context, the full meaning and purpose of A Game at Chess become apparent—its full double meaning as both panegyric and satire, and its purpose "which was to please" all members of its diverse audience.

The players, of course, could never be certain that their plays would please. For this reason, we can assume that the players would weigh possible financial benefits against possible risks of censorship and punishment before undertaking a topical or controversial play. In 1624, the political winds must have seemed very favorable to a theatrical venture like A Game at Chess. The nation was united in its bellicose resentment against Spain; the Commons now found new allies in Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham as together they pressed the old and increasingly impotent king to declare war. Rumors of James's abdication in favor of his anti-Spanish son spread throughout the kingdom. The old king's sun was setting; Charles, the "rising glory of that House of Candour" (as he is called in A Game at Chess), was expected shortly to become king.

Fashioned carefully to catch its moment in history, A Game at Chess is respectful and even eulogistic toward King James but tellingly transforms the heir apparent (as the White Knight) into the true hero of the play's apocalyptic "great game" against Spain. In this respect, A Game at Chess is an "interregnum" play and, as William Power has pointed out [in "Thomas Middleton vs. King James I," Notes and Queries 202 (1957)], is paralleled by Middleton's Phoenix, the play he wrote twenty-one years earlier in celebration of James's accession to the English throne. Both plays portray their respective rulers with meticulous respect, but both monarchs clearly are not quite up to the job of ruling; in each the heir apparent (Prince Phoenix standing for James, the White Knight standing for Charles) goes undercover in order to expose and thereby defeat the wicked enemies of the state. The over-all rhetorical design of A Game at Chess is more complex than that of The Phoenix (since it has two distinct levels of meaning against one in The Phoenix), but the basic allegorical pattern and attendant strategy of flattery is the same in both plays.

In its flattering designs on the sympathy of the monarchy, A Game at Chess follows the strategy not only of The Phoenix but also of Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion, a court masque by Jonson planned for performance seven months earlier. Both A Game at Chess and Neptune's Triumph idealize Charles and Buckingham's preposterous expedition to Madrid. Middleton makes poor Charles the mastermind behind a great moral and millennial victory over the Spanish-Catholic "bed of snakes" (V.iii.184); Jonson makes him Neptune's (King James's) "precious pawn" [in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel 1969), line 285] whose voyage to "Celtiberia" (line 93) is intended to reveal nothing to the discredit of its inhabitants but rather to test the love and trust of the English people in a royal and appropriately inscrutable manner:

Both the play (on one level) and the masque are patriotic and royalist treatments of a crucial event in the ongoing struggle against Spain. The differences between them are fully illustrative of the differing views of history and of the king appropriate to courtly and commercial audiences. Jonson's problem is immense: he cannot allow historical reality to impinge on literary idealization and so rouse the spirit of laughter; he must treat his material poker-faced. The antimasque serves well here as an outlet since it transfers to itself the mockery that properly belongs in the panegyric to James's diplomatic fiasco. Additionally, Jonson cautiously demurs from a detailed allegorical rendering of the historical facts: instead he allows his version of history to coalesce cloudily in encomiastic song and stately dance after some preliminary ridicule of excessive plebeian celebration. Jonson's sense of history, moreover, is absolutist or "familial," its majestic growth determined by the growth of the royal family itself, a view expressed figuratively by the banyan-fig—"the tree of harmony" (143)—under which Charles and his companions make their entrance. Jonson's off-stage king is, rather like Middleton's White Knight, an accomplished schemer whose actions might seem foolish but are in reality wise and virtuous.

Jonson's resolution of the dilemma inherent in his material is brilliant, but he is unable nonetheless to transmute fully the brazen of history into the golden of poetry. In contrast, Middleton—writing for the public theater—is able to turn all Jonson's disadvantages to advantage. Middleton develops with great enthusiasm a fully articulated allegorical rendering of history and allows anyone in his audience so inclined to fill the interstices between reality and idealization with laughter. Middleton's idea of history is rooted in apocalyptic versions made popular by Protestant polemicists such as John Bale and John Foxe, by poets such as Spenser, and by dramatists such as Dekker (in his Whore of Babylon). Middleton's royal hero is an amalgam of Red Cross Knight and Shakespeare's Malcolm, a godly leader-to-be who is able to use hypocrisy against the hypocritical enemies of the Elect. In sum, Jonson's masque is directed toward King James alone; Middleton's play is directed in part toward King James, in part toward the prince, in part toward that segment of the audience for whom Prince Charles represented the hope of England, and in part toward those who believed that the king and prince were fools indeed.

The relationship between the masque and the play is, furthermore, historical as well as artistic. The King's Men often played the speaking parts in masques at court; on the evening when Neptune's Triumph was supposed to be put on (it was canceled because of a dispute between the French and Spanish ambassadors), the King's Men were summoned to play Middleton's More Dissemblers Besides Women in its stead. It is reasonable to assume, then, that (at least) the King's Men knew generally what the masque was about and that (at most) they had actually taken part in the rehearsals at court. In either case, it must have occurred to them that what could pass at court as a properly respectful and patriotic treatment of a political embarrassment might likewise pass in the commercial theater, and in the event, their surmise was approximately correct.

A Game at Chess was licensed by the Master of the Revels on 12 June 1624. While it is remarkable that the play was licensed, it is reasonable to assume that Sir Henry passed it because it undertook the same apologist project that Jonson's masque had undertaken six months earlier (as Master of the Revels, Sir Henry supervised masque-making at court). Both on the evidence and in light of this argument, it is far less probable that Sir Henry licensed the play because he was a member of a multifaceted oppositional conspiracy. I should note that this question is but a small part of the very large issue of Jacobean censorship. It must suffice here to suggest that the severity and uniformity of Jacobean censorship has been greatly exaggerated. The censor tended to be motivated by caprice and greed rather than by any consistent policy. Recent scholarship by Philip J. Finkelpearl and others has shown, first, that the inconsistency of Jacobean censorship is a historical fact and, second, that its causes lie in the factional, loosely organized power structure under James I and in the intentionally indeterminate topicality of many of the plays with which the censor had to deal.

The king did act expeditiously to have the play suppressed once the Spanish language-secretary delivered his ambassador's irate protest against it; but neither the players nor the playwright nor the censor suffered harsh treatment in the aftermath. The Globe was shut down for about a week, the King's Men were obliged to give bond never to perform A Game at Chess again, Middleton was sought by the authorities but could not be found, and in the end both he and the censor escaped scot free. James's mildness in this case is particularly noteworthy since, although he was an intelligent and peaceful man, he did not relish literary works which trod on his royal dignity. Jonson and Chapman, for example, were imprisoned for some incidental sniping at the king and his countrymen in Eastward Ho, and Spenser escaped a similar or worse fate by going to Arthur's bosom before James came to England's throne. It seems likely, then, that A Game at Chess could not have made James genuinely angry…, and the best possible explanation of this is that the king did not perceive that he was a target of the play's satire.

To some members of the audience, of course, the play's treatment of James must have seemed irreverent indeed. On August 11, in a letter to the disgraced earl of Somerset, John Holles described how the Black Knight (Gondomar) "sett the Kings affayrs as a clock, backward, and forward, made him believe, and un-believe as stood best with his busines." On August 20, in a letter to the doge, the Venetian ambassador wrote, "The Spaniards are touched from their tricks being discovered, but the king's reputation is much more deeply affected by representing the case with which he was deceived." Other contemporary accounts, however, such as Chamberlain's letter to Carleton and Thomas Salisbury's verse epistle, show no awareness of an affront offered the monarch. More to the point, the pertinent correspondence from the court suggests that the players' offense consisted in the outrage offered the Spanish rather than in any satire directed against the rulers of England. In a letter to the Privy Council dated August 27, Secretary Edward Conway mentions only "the personnating of Gondomar," and in his letter of the same day to the president of the Council, Pembroke mentions only "some passages in it reflecting in matter of scorne and ignominy upon y King of Spaine some of his Ministers and others of good note and quality."

The remarkable divergence of recorded contemporary opinion about the overall meaning of A Game at Chess pays tribute to Middleton's brilliant satirical strategy. These divergent (even mutually exclusive) interpretations constitute good evidence of the capacity of individuals to respond to art individually. That much is commonplace, and Middleton must have anticipated that different members of his audience would "read" his play in different ways. The patriotic and royalist could be counted on to enjoy his quasi-Jonsonian defense of royal integrity and leadership; the disfranchised and antagonistic, he could be confident, would revel in his mockery of all leaders—especially the English ones. The leaders themselves—especially the king—would not take offense because no offense was offered; quite the contrary, A Game at Chess is a virtual encomium to the goodness of the monarchy:

Most blest of kings! throned in all royal graces,
Every good deed sends back its own reward
Into the bosom of the enterpriser;
But you to express yourself as well to be
King of munificence as integrity
Adds glory to the gift.
(III.i. 169-74)

The basis of Middleton's satirical strategy lies outside the text itself in both the heterogeneity of the audience and the discrepancy between historical reality and literary idealization. Consequently, Middletonian laughter is both interstitial and unauthorized since the text itself pretends to recognize no gap between the actual fiasco of the "Spanish match" and its own (wickedly playful) "noblest mate of all" (V.iii.161). But while A Game at Chess leans heavily on the gap between reality and idealization, the playwright does labor assiduously to manage audience response, continually empowering the opposing perspectives that his heterogeneous audience brought with it to the theater.

In order to maintain the two faces of his play, Middleton matches archaic dramatic form with modern dramatic language, and national—even cosmic—struggle with chess play. Middleton's sense of style is crucial here; he is acutely conscious of changing dramatic styles, a fact demonstrated by his practice in the theater and by his preface to The Roaring Girl [in the edition of Andor Gomme, 1976]:

The fashion of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel: for in the time of the great crop-doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to lean purpose, was only then in fashion. And as the doublet fell, neater inventions began to set up. Now in the time of spruceness, our plays follow the niceness of our garments, single plots, quaint conceits, lecherous jests, dressed up in hanging sleeves, and those are fit for the times and the termers….

Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights conventionally mix archaic and modern styles in order to manipulate audience response. In 1 Henry IV, Hotspur's heroical idiom "places" him in relation both to the pragmatic plain speaking of the play as a whole and to his polyglot rival. Hotspur's old-fashioned language ("By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap / To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon" [I.iii. 199-200] subtly suggests the inadequacy of old-fashioned glory seeking and heralds Hal's re-creation of heroic values and heroic language. In Volpone, Bonario's high-flying archaic denunciation of Volpone renders his own position comical and helps undermine simplistic responses to Volpone's seduction of Celia:

Forbear, foul ravisher! libidinous swine!
Free the forced lady, or thou diest, imposter.
But that I am loth to snatch thy punishment
Out of the hand of justice, thou shouldst yet
Be made the timely sacrifice of vengeance,
Before this altar, and this dross, thy idol.
Lady, let's quit the place, it is the den
Of villainy; fear nought, you have a guard;
And he ere long shall meet his just reward.
[III.vii.267-75]

Middleton is as adept as Shakespeare and Jonson at manipulating poetic styles. His bourgeois Londoners in A Trick to Catch the Old One, for example, are absurd by virtue of their appropriation of an outmoded chivalric style (this works as well to guy the pretensions of the City in general):

In Michaelmas Term, Richard Easy's victory over Shortyard ought to earn our wholehearted approval, but Middleton complicates response by giving Easy (at the crucial moment of triumph) a feudalized diction which suggests the hero's smug assurance that he has won by right rather than by wit: "Villain, my hate to more revenge is drawn; / When slaves are found, 'tis their base art to fawn" [V. i. 36-37].

In these cases, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton use archaic language as implicit criticism. The archaic style tends toward allegory and toward a diction ponderous with the weight of ostensibly authoritative value-words. The language of Bonario and Richard Easy is characterized by a diction that declares its allegiance to an ordained social and moral order; in the modern, uncertain, "witty" world of Jacobean drama, such pompous moral certainty is bound to be risible.

The costuming, characterization, pageantry, and allegorical psychomachia [psychological genre in which virtues and vices are personified] of A Game at Chess are aspects of archaic dramatic form. Characters' moral status is made obvious by their white or black costumes; agents of evil weep crocodile tears in order to entrap the innocent just as they had in Tudor moral plays a generation or more earlier; characters' actions for good or ill are determined by their place in an ordained moral order rather than by their own desires and decisions; and virtue's victory over vice is rendered as a pageant tableau: "there behold the bag's mouth, like hell, opens / To take her due" (V.iii.179-80). These archaic features, in a play at the Globe in 1624, must have rendered the spectacle mildly ridiculous, certainly ridiculous enough for those inclined toward laughter.

In contrast to its archaic form, however, the language of A Game at Chess is remarkably modern—complex, flexible, and expressive of characters' inward lives as well as of their outward roles in the play's psychomachia. The allegorical mode does exert an inevitable pressure on poetic diction so that there are more weighty moralizing epithets than there are normally in Middleton ("Truth's glorious masterpiece," "Queen of sweetness," "yond fair structure / Of comely honour" [V.iii.168-70]); however, the language remains supple and serious, and never seems to be intended to ridicule its own meaning. While, for example, the White Queen's Pawn can be seen as an allegorical counter representative of the purity of England, her verse, with its complex syntax, high degree of enjambment, and idiosyncratic imagery, suggests a particular mind in the actual process of thinking:

I must confess, as in a sacred temple
Thronged with an auditory, some come rather
To feed on human object, than to taste
Of angels' food;
So in the congregation of quick thoughts
Which are more infinite than such assemblies
I cannot with truth's safety speak for all.
Some have been wanderers, some fond, some sinful,
But those found ever but poor entertainment,
They'd small encouragement to come again.
(I.i.130-39)

I do not need to labor the point: the play's language works to moderate Middleton's elaborate parody of the political psychomachias of the late Tudor period. The parody subsists, of course, but its tone is modulated by the serious timbre of the language. The form of the verse, especially in the poetry of praise and the verse spoken by the White King, is designed so that it does not seem to mock its content. These lines, from a speech by the White King, illustrate Middleton's intellectually sophisticated and metrically graceful style at its best; they demonstrate his convincingly encomiastic presentation of King James's chess double:

The pride of him that took first fall for pride
Is to be angel-shaped, and imitate
The form from whence he fell; but this offender,
Far baser than sin's master, fixed by vow
To holy order, which is angels' method,
Takes pride to use that shape to be a devil.
(II.ii.135-40)

Middleton's allegorization of the Spanish match affair is either Lilliputian or Brobdingnagian at the same moment; the White King is either a mere chess piece or the leader of God's Elect Nation. These points of view are mutually exclusive but are emphasized equally throughout the play. Thus the various words that denominate either chess play or earnest moral struggle are so intertwined in the play that they can be separated only by viewers who are able to apprehend only one meaning or point of view:

Falsehood can sue for, it well suits perdition;
'T is their best course that so have lost their fame
To put their heads into the bag for shame.
(V.iii.172-78)

Finally, we must see A Game at Chess, in its historical moment, striking a balance between and including opposite views of the monarchy's relationship with the nation. Such a balance is precarious, but it seems not untypical of much Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including much of Shakespeare. In so far as discordia concors [discordant harmony] was the epitome of English society, Janus was doubtless the appropriate deity for the commercial theater. When the rift in society deepened, however, the drama could no longer balance its own opposing perspectives by which it previously had contained, crystallized, and perhaps even exacerbated the social, religious, and political pressures which led inevitably toward 1642.