Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift

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Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift

Holly Faith Nelson and Jim Daems (eds)

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019

ISBN: 978-9463728010

Games and War in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Holly Faith Nelson and Jim Daems, is the latest volume in Amsterdam University Press’s ‘Cultures of Play, 1300-1700’ series. In its nine chapters (plus the editors’ introduction), the book sets out to explore the long history of the association of warfare and games through readings of literary texts that range from the late-sixteenth to the early-eighteenth century. The texts include works by Aphra Behn (The Luckey Chance), Margaret Cavendish (The Blazing World), Jonathan Swift (Battle of the Books, Gulliver’s Travels), John Milton (Paradise Lost, ‘Of Education’), Thomas Morton (New English Canaan), William Shakespeare (Henry V, Troilus and Cressida), and John Wallis (An Essay on the Art of Decyphering).

The topics covered in the individual chapters are similarly varied. As the editors tell us in their introduction, their authors ‘address the term “war games” or “games of war” in the broadest possible sense, which frees them to uncover the more complex and abstract, rather than purely concrete, interplay of war and games in the imaginations of early modern writers’ (p. 11). Accordingly, topics range from cockfighting, to cuckolding, to cryptography, and, if there is a criticism to be levelled at the volume (and this is barely criticism at all), it is that some of the chapters have more to say about war in the early modern period than they do about games or play.

The volume opens with Louise Fang’s essay ‘Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France?’, a fascinating exploration of the metaphor of cockfighting in Shakespeare’s Henry V – the play from which the chapter takes its title. Paying close attention historical context, Fang reads Shakespeare’s play alongside a series of contemporary responses to cockfighting, ranging from Gervase Markham’s positive portrayal of the sport in Markhams Methode or Epitome (1616), in he writes of cocks ‘proude, valiant, and apt to fight’ (p. 26) to Joseph Hall’s condemnation of the sport in Occasional Meditations (1631), in which cockfights are seen as a sign of mankind’s never-ending strife: ‘How fell these creatures out? Whence grew this so bloudy combate? […] Since Mans sin brought Debate into the World, nature is become a great quarreller’ (pp. 27-8). Paying close attention to such sources, Fang is able to argue convincingly that the cockfighting metaphor of the Chorus sets up an idealised image of war and national identity (amongst Shakespeare’s contemporaries if not now), ‘echo[ing] the national unity that Henry’s harangues aim at throughout the play’ (p. 36).

Fang’s chapter stands here as an example of all that is best about the volume, namely the clear sense of the historical that emerges in its analyses. This continues across the chapters that follow, which work well together to offer a clear sense of war and games (both together and separately) in the early modern period. Accordingly, to give but a few examples, we read about play and pacifism in Sean Lawrence’s chapter on Troilus and Cressida; the role of sport in the conflict between Puritans and Royalists (the reading of James I’s 1618 Declaration on ‘Lawfull Sports’ is fascinating); the merging of the political and the domestic in Katherine Ellison’s fabulous discussion of cryptography (arguably the most game-focused of the chapters); and seventeenth-century concerns about games as expressed in the Charles II’s 1664 Act against deceitfull disorderly and excessive Gameing – ‘by the immoderate use of [games] many mischeifes ad inconveniencies doe arise’ – in Karol Cooper’s discussion of gambling and cuckoldry in Aphra Behn’s The Luckey Chance.

This emphasis on history is understandable given the contributors’ impressive credentials as scholars of early modern literature, and while the volume’s editors gesture towards Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Zones of Control and Martin Van Creveld’s Wargames as touchstones, the book is perhaps better placed in the (equally good) company of literary-cultural histories of warfare such as Simon Barker’s Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (2007) and Susan Harlan’s Memories of War in Early Modern England (2016). This comment notwithstanding, the emphasis on games in their historical contexts, over the study of games qua games, is a valuable in and of itself, offering a fascinating, and well-executed, reminder that our understandings of play and games, like our concepts of conflict and war, are tied to the socio-historical conditions out of which they arise.

 

Book ReviewsPaul WakeComment