Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:47:54.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Rhetoric of Providence: Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) and Seventeenth-Century Political Engraving*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Christina Marie Carlson*
Affiliation:
Emerson College

Abstract

This essay compares the rhetoric of providentialism in Samuel Ward’s 1621 engraving To God, In Memorye of his Double Deliveraunce from ye Invincible Navie and ye Unmatcheable Powder Treason with that in Thomas Middleton’s 1624 play A Game at Chess. Both satirize the negotiations over the Spanish Match by using providentialist discourse to modulate and veil their more satirical, and polemical, intentions. Ward and Middleton employ a technique of historical retrospection, referring to past events in order to present a simultaneously diachronic and synchronic world view.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

My thanks to Richard Strier, David Bevington, Bradin Cormack, and the anonymous reviewer at Renaissance Quarterly for comments on earlier versions of this essay.

References

Ball, Bryan W.Joseph Mede (1586–1638).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, 2004. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/18465.Google Scholar
Bellany, Alistair. “Buckingham Engraved: Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s.” In Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, ed. Michael Hunter, 215–36. Farnham, 2010.Google Scholar
Braunmuller, Albert R.‘To the Globe I Rowed’: John Holles Sees A Game at Chess .” English Literary Renaissance 20.2 (1990): 340–56.10.1111/j.1475-6757.1990.tb01016.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
British Library, London, Harley MS 389. Letters of Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 1620–25.Google Scholar
Brooke, Charles F. T., and Paradise, Nathaniel B., eds. A Game at Chess. In English Drama, 1580–1642, 943–77. Boston, 1993.Google Scholar
Bullough, Geoffrey. “The Game at Chesse: How it Struck a Contemporary.” Modern Language Review 49 (1954): 156–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Ed. N. E. McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1939.Google Scholar
Church of England. A Fourme of Prayer with Thankesgiuing, to be Used by All the Kings Maiesties Louing Subiects Euery Yeere, the Fift of August. . . . London, 1606.Google Scholar
Cogswell, Thomas. The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624. Cambridge, 1989.Google Scholar
Cogswell, Thomas. “States and Their Pawns: English Political Tensions from the Armada to the Thirty Years War.” In Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett, 126–34. Cambridge, 2011.Google Scholar
Cowan, Samuel. The Gowrie Conspiracy and Its Official Narrative. London, 1902.Google Scholar
Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: NationalMemory and the Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley, 1989.Google Scholar
Davies, J. David. Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, the Ruthvens, and the “Gowrie Conspiracy.” Hersham, 2010.Google Scholar
de Bèze, Théodore. Ad serenissimam Elizabetham Angliae Reginam. London, 1588.Google Scholar
Fincham, Kenneth, and Lake, Peter. “The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I.” Journal of British Studies 24.2 (1985): 169207.10.1086/385831CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gary, Samuel. Caesaris Hostes: Or, The Tragedy of Traitors: For the Fift Day of August. . . . London, 1618a.Google Scholar
Gary, Samuel. Great Brittans Little Calendar: Or, Triple Diarie, in Remembrance of Three Daies Diuided into Three Treatises. . . . London, 1618b.Google Scholar
Gee, John. The Foot out of the Snare: With a Detection of Sundry Late Practices . . . of the Priests and Jesuits. London, 1624.Google Scholar
George, Mary Dorothy. English Political Caricature: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda. Oxford, 1959.Google Scholar
Goad, Thomas. The Friers Chronicle. London, 1623.Google Scholar
Greene, Robert. The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay. London, 1594.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Antony. The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689. London, 1989.Google Scholar
Heinemann, Margot. Puritanism and Theatre: ThomasMiddleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge, 1980.10.1017/CBO9780511561160CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hind, Arthur. Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Vol. 2, The Reign of James I. Cambridge, 1955.Google Scholar
Howard-Hill, T. H. Middleton’s “Vulgar Pasquin”: Essays on A Game at Chess. London, 1995.Google Scholar
Jones, Malcolm. The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight. New Haven, 2010.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther, and van Leeuven, Theo. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London, 1996.Google Scholar
Lake, Peter. “Constitutional Consensus and the Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match.” The Historical Journal 25.4 (1982): 805–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lake, Peter. “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice.” In The English Civil War, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, 181210. London, 1997.Google Scholar
Lang, Andrew. James VI and the Gowrie Mystery. London, 1902.Google Scholar
Larkin, James F., and Hughes, Paul A., eds. Stuart Royal Proclamations. Vol. 1, Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625. Oxford, 1973.Google Scholar
Limon, Jerzy. Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/24. Cambridge, 1986.Google Scholar
Middleton, Thomas. “The Triumphs of Truth.” In The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Arthur Henry Bullen, 7:227–62. New York, 1964.Google Scholar
Middleton, Thomas. A Game at Chess. Ed. T. H. Howard-Hill. New York, 1993.Google Scholar
Moore, John Robert. “The Contemporary Significance of Middleton’s Game at Chesse .” PMLA 50.3 (1935): 761–68.10.2307/458217CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrissey, Mary. “Presenting James VI and I to the Public: Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Paul’s Cross.” In James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke, 107–22. Farnham, 2006.Google Scholar
Munro, Ian. “Making Publics: Secrecy and Publication in A Game at Chess .” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 207–26.Google Scholar
Phialus, Peter G.An Unpublished Letter about A Game at Chess .” Modern Language Notes 69.6 (1954): 398–99.10.2307/3039737CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierce, Helen. Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England. New Haven, 2008.Google Scholar
Price, George R.The Latin Oration in A Game at Chess .” Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1960): 389–93.Google Scholar
Prynne, William. Hidden Works of Darkenes. . . . London, 1645.Google Scholar
Randall, David. “Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability and Credibility in Early Stuart England.” Journal of British Studies 45.2 (2006): 293312.10.1086/499789CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Randall, John. A Sermon Preacht at St Maries in Oxford, the 5. of August: 1624. Concerning the Kingdomes Peace. . . . Oxford, 1624.Google Scholar
Redworth, Glyn. The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match. New Haven, 2003.Google Scholar
Reynolds, John. Vox Coeli. London, 1624.Google Scholar
Rivet, André. The State-Mysteries of the Jesuites. London, 1623.Google Scholar
Robinson, Thomas. The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon. London, 1622.Google Scholar
Samson, Alexander, ed. The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623. Aldershot, 2006.Google Scholar
Scott, Thomas. Vox Populi. London, 1620.Google Scholar
Scott, Thomas. Vox Dei. London, 1623.Google Scholar
Scott, Thomas. The Second Part of Vox Populi. London, 1624.Google Scholar
Shami, Jeanne. “‘Twice a Day on the Banke Side’?: A Contemporary Report on Middleton’s A Game at Chesse .” Notes and Queries 42.3 (1998): 367–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephens, Frederick G., ed. Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Satirical and Personal Subjects. Division I: Political and Personal Satires. London, 1870.Google Scholar
Stirling, William Alexander. A Short Discourse of the Good Ends of the Higher Prouidence, in the Late Attempt Against his Maiesties Person. Edinburgh, 1600.Google Scholar
Thomson, George Malcolm. A Kind of Justice: Two Studies in Treason. London, 1970.Google Scholar
Tricomi, Albert. Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603–1625. Charlottesville, 1989.Google Scholar
Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640. Oxford, 1987.Google Scholar
Wagner, Bernard M.New Allusions to A Game at Chesse .” PMLA 44.3 (1929): 827–34.10.2307/457415CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallace, John M.‘Examples Are Best Precepts’: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry.” Critical Inquiry 1.2 (1974): 273–90.10.1086/447788CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford, 1999.Google Scholar
Wilson, Arthur. The History of Great Britain. . . . London, 1653.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. H. James VI and I. New York, 1951.Google Scholar