A Dangerous Game on the Jacobean Stage

For nine days beginning on 6 August 1624 the Globe Theatre was home to the greatest box office phenomenon of the English Renaissance. Performed by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s former acting company whose patron was James I himself, it achieved more immediate success than anything Shakespeare ever produced. At a time when one or two performances was considered usual for a play, nine consecutive days on stage was a record-breaking achievement. The play in question, blatantly disregarding the highly restrictive censorship laws of the era, was A Game at Chess, a political satire written by one of the King’s Men’s most frequent playwrights, Thomas Middleton. The comedy’s popularity was due to its daring premise: Middleton tapped into the social zeitgeist, exploiting the rampant Hispanophobia of the day through a spectacle in which real-world Anglo-Spanish diplomacy was reimagined as a match between living chess pieces. The best indication of how the play captured the public’s attention is provided by the Spanish ambassador to England, Carlos Coloma: ‘There were more than 3,000 persons there on the day that the audience was smallest.