Shakespeare and Chess

Jonson and Shakespeare playing chess?

This painting was owned by Catherine de Heyman of Brooklyn, NY when it came to public attention in 1916. She claimed it was a painting of poets Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare playing chess, and it has sometimes been attributed to Karel van Mander (1548-1606), which would make it one of the only known likenesses of Shakespeare from his own lifetime. Although there are a number of portraits often said to depict Shakespeare, only the engraving on the title page of the First Folio and the funerary bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon are widely accepted.

One of the problems with the painting is that Ben Jonson looks much older, when in fact he was eight years younger than Shakespeare. (Another problem is that white's pawn structure seems to be impossible!) But there is some resemblance between the player on the right and the other portraits of Shakespeare. Most scholars are skeptical of the attributions, but in 2004 Jeffrey Netto seemed to endorse it when he argued that "the well known professional rivalry between these figures" is symbolized "in terms of a battle of wits" over the chess board.

Allusions to chess in the plays

The question of allusions to chess in his plays is also heavily contested. Opinions have ranged from "that he must have possessed a large knowledge of the game is evident from the hastiest perusal of his divine writings" to "otherwise there is no clear allusion to chess in all Shakespeare."

The royal family

The problem is that kings, queens, bishops, and knights were normal features of the medieval world, which is how they came to be used of chess, and not the other way around. So when Richard says "our king...is prisoner to the bishop" (3 Henry VI 4.5.4), we chess players might think of the game, even though Shakespeare almost certainly wasn't. Yet the following two passages are more intriguing:

What two Reverend Byshops
Were those that went on each side of the Queene?
(Henry VIII 4.1.119)

For whom?
Why for my King: Tush, that’s a woodden thing
(1 Henry VI 5.3.89)

In the first passage it's possible to find an allusion to the starting position, and in the second a more direct allusion to a king as a wooden chess piece.

Rooks

The situation is different with the rook. Although the word rook as applied to the chess piece seems ultimately to come from the Persian word for "chariot", there was a different word from a Germanic origin that meant "crow", and was used as slang for cheaters in cards. There is one interesting use of the word in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the host says to Falstaff "What saies my Bully Rooke?" (1.3.4). The phrase bully-rook was used as a playful term of affection, although it probably derived from the slang term for cheater, which would be fitting for Falstaff.

It's possible, however, that there is a deeper meaning here based on an allusion to the chess piece. The character Sir John Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, the name of a real person. The character was such an inveterate drunk and liar that Oldcastle's family convinced the poet to change the name. He appears in three different plays, and on several occasions Shakespeare toys with the word castle to allude to this, and he might be doing the same thing here with the word rook, which was often referred to as a castle.

Pawns

The word pawn also has two separate etymologies. In the sense "to give as security", as at a pawn shop, it comes from Old French pan, which has a broad range of meanings, from "pledge, security" to "booty, plunder", and even "a piece of cloth", which some lexicographers have suggested was a medium of exchange and thus the root meaning. We find this sense in such lines as "Have I not pawn'd to you my Majesty?" (King John 3.1.101) or "there is mine Honours pawne" (Richard II 4.1.58).

In its chess sense the word pawn is related to peon and derives ultimately from a Latin term for "foot soldier" or infantry. The word has become such a powerful metaphor for an insignificant thing or a cog in a machine that it almost has a life of its own, and yet it's so rooted in the game that every use is in some sense a reference to chess. Although the first meaning of the word predominates in Shakespeare's plays, I find these two passages interesting:

To lye like pawnes, lock’d up in chests and truncks
(King John 5.2.142)

My life I never held but as pawne
To wage against thine enemies, nere feare to loose it,
Thy safety being motive
(King Lear 1.1.175)

At least one commentator on the first passage interprets pawns here as "articles in a pawn shop", but personally I find the image of chess pieces boxed up out of play instead of doing battle on the chessboard more powerful. Most commentators seem to interpret pawn in the second passage as a "pledge" or "thing pawned", but the word wage has strong associations with war as well as wagers. Like all poets, Shakespeare is fond of endowing a word with several meanings at once, and I think he is deliberately fusing the two meanings in this passage.

Checks

Although the word check comes into English via chess (ultimately from Persian shah "king" and related to Russian шах shakh "check" and шахматы shakhmaty "chess"), by Shakespeare's time it already had a life of its own, so it's often difficult to determine whether there is any direct reference to chess. Some people, therefore, see every use of check meaning "repulse" or "restrain" as a chess metaphor, white others find none of them convincing. The most cited example was first used in Henry VI, Part 3 (2.6.12) and then recycled several years later in King John (2.1.124): "That thou maist be a Queen and checke the world."

Mates

In addition to its chess sense, the word mate can refer to a friend or companion, and it is used as a verb for sexual reproduction. Some readers have have misinterpreted this passage from King Lear (4.3.39) as an allusion to a "self mate", or suicide:

It is the stars, the stars above us governe our conditions,
Else one selfe mate and make could not beget
Such different issues

However mate and make is an archaic phrase for "husband and wife" and combined with the word issues it is clearly referring to the production of life rather than ending it. Likewise people have wanted to see an allusion to stalemate in the following lines from Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (1.1.57):

I pray you sir, is it your will
To make a stale of me amongst these mates?

Katherine is using the noun stale in the sense of "laughing stock", but Shakespeare's audience would certainly have known that it also means "prostitute", even without the suggestive inclusion of mates. In any case, although the word stale was used for the concept of stalemate in the 15th century, the word stalemate wasn't used until 1765, during a time in England when the person who was stalemated won the game.

The word mated in the sense of "confounded" or "amazed", however, which is first attested during Shakespeare's lifetime, does seem to come from chess, where the mind is shocked or defeated:

My mind she has mated, and amazed my sight
(Macbeth 5.1.74)

Not mad, but mated
(Comedy of Errors 3.2.56)

I thinke you are all mated, or starke mad
(Comedy of Errors 5.1.282)

The clearest use of mate in the chess sense comes from Henry VI, Part 2, where Suffolk says "that is good deceit / Which mates him first, that first intends deceit (3.1.265).

Chess in The Tempest

The only direct reference to chess is the stage direction for a scene in The Tempest where two characters play the game (5.1.200):

Here Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda, playing at Chesse.
Mir. Sweet Lord, you play me false.
Fer. No my dearest love,
I would not for the world.
Mir. Yes, for a score of Kingdomes, you should wrangle,
And I would call it faire play.

In the play, which was written around 1610, Miranda has been isolated on an island with her exiled father, when Ferdinand is shipwrecked there. They fall in love. Here she playfully accuses him of cheating. In 2020 GM Raymond Keene wrote an article in which he points out that the rules of chess had changed sometime around 1475, so that the queen became the most powerful piece. Usually the scene is taken to mean that she is so in love that she doesn't care if he cheats, but Keene suggests that perhaps the uncultured Miranda doesn't know about the new form of the game:

Around 1475 the new chess started to become fashionable, with the queen and bishop enjoying the vast range they now exercise. Ferdinand would of course know this, while marooned Miranda would not, hence would still be observing the ancient rules.

Were I to be directing The Tempest, I would have the following moves already played on the board: 1 e4 e5. I would have Ferdinand now move 2 Qh5. That blatant demonstration of the powerful scope of the modern Queen would certainly justify Miranda being provoked to comment.

Although it's a bit of a stretch, I agree that the scene is much more interesting that way. It has often been suggested that the enhanced power of the chess queen is somehow related to the many important female leaders in Europe at the time, and Shakespeare himself was living in the Elizabethan Age. I think Shakespeare would have enjoyed that kind of symbolism, and if we remember the twice repeated line "That thou maist be a Queen and checke the world", perhaps it's not impossible he had that idea in mind.

Final thoughts

One final connection between Shakespeare and chess comes in the figure of Howard Staunton. He was one of the world's top players in the mid-19th century, and he is famous to us for endorsing the Staunton chess set designed by Nathaniel Cooke, which has become standard in the chess world, but he was also a Shakespeare scholar who edited all the plays for Routledge.

I like to think that Shakespeare was a chess player, and that he was often alluding to chess in the plays. I also like to think that the painting in the thumbnail is in fact a portrait of Shakespeare playing chess painted from life. But to twist Shakespeare's own words: thinking doesn't make it so.