Contradiction and Allegorization: Middleton’s A Game at Chess and Althusser’s Theatrical Thought

hat does the game of chess in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess mean? How does it mean what it means? A Game, first performed in w August 1624, is the rare case of an early modern history play that represents not the past but the present. It dramatizes, albeit freely and with significant alterations, Anglo-Spanish relations between 1620 and 1624, especially events surrounding the Spanish Match, the proposed marriage of Prince Charles and Maria, infanta of Spain, which had collapsed after long negotiations only months before the play was staged. Strikingly, Middleton represents these events in the form of a chess game, and their protagonists—including James I; Felipe IV; Charles; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Conde de Gondomar and the Spanish ambassador to James’s court from 1613 to 1622—as chess pieces. The dramatization of affairs of state brought instant notoriety and popular success. Performed on nine consecutive days at the Globe, A Game had the longest uninterrupted run of any English play before the Restoration, which came to an end only because the Privy Council, prompted by a Spanish diplomat’s letter of complaint objecting to the impersonation of his king on stage, shut down the production. The council issued a warrant for Middleton’s arrest. A Game was