The Game and Playe of the Chesse

Despite its title, Caxton's "Game and Playe of the Chesse" does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it. Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good.

First printed in 1474, the English printer William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse says little about the game of chess, despite its title. Instead, both Caxton’s Middle English translation and its Latin source, a thirteenth-century treatise by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Cessolis, use chess as an allegory for a political community whose citizens serve the common good. Assigning each chess piece to a real-world counterpart and a corresponding moral code, this example of the speculum regis, or “mirror for a prince,” genre envisions a kingdom not bound together by kinship, but organized by professional ties and governed by moral law. Moral exempla and maxims drawn from classical sources, which illustrate these principles while engaging the reader, comprise the bulk of the work until its final chapter finally introduces the playe of chess, using rules largely unchanged since the game’s introduction to Europe in the tenth century.

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