ABSTRACT
A Game at Chess is well-known among scholars of Jacobean drama for being the play that in August 1624 ran for an unprecedented nine days together, yet it is rarely acted now outside university English departments. A Game at Chess was written by Thomas Middleton and staged by the King's Men, who were notionally Gentleman of the Chamber to King James. The action concerns attempts by the pieces of the Black House to seduce, in various meanings of the word, the pieces of the White House, chiefly the White Queen's Pawn and the White Knight. In 1980 the late Margot Heinemann published her controversial monograph on Puritanism and Theatre. Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, in which the production of A Game at Chess was central to her argument. This volume effectively marks the beginning of a new interest in A Game at Chess.
