UC Davis Books Title Gaming the Stage Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rr5d99v ISBN 978-0-472-90108-1 Author Bloom, Gina Publication Date 2018 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Revised Pages GAMING THE STAGE Revised Pages THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE Series Editors: David Krasner, Rebecca Schneider, and Harvey Young Founding Editor: Enoch Brater Recent Titles: Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance by Natalie Alvarez Performing the Intercultural City by Ric Knowles Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time by John H. Muse Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia by Christian DuComb Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Karen Gonzalez Rice Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91 by Branislav Jakovljević After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance by Daniel Sack Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance by Faedra Chatard Carpenter The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North by Douglas A. Jones, Jr. Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self by Tzachi Zamir Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning by Scott Magelssen Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance by Andrew Sofer Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love by Nicholas Ridout Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism by Tony Perucci The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice by Judith Pascoe The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance by Brandi Wilkins Catanese Artaud and His Doubles by Kimberly Jannarone Revised Pages Gaming the Stage PLAYABLE MEDIA AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH COMMERCIAL THEATER Gina Bloom UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2018 by Gina Bloom Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 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ISBN 978-0- 472- 07381- 8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0- 472- 05381- 0 (paper: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0- 472- 12391- 9 (e-book) ISBN 978-0- 472- 90108- 1 (Open Access ebook edition) http://dx.doi.org//10.3998/mpub.9831118 Digital materials related to this title can be found on www.fulcrum.org at doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9831118 Revised Pages For Max Revised Pages Revised Pages Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction | Gaming the Stage 1 ONE | Gaming History 23 Material Objects and Practices of Play 25 Attitudes toward Gameplay 28 The Politics of Gameplay 43 Spectatorship, Performance, and History 49 TWO | Cards: Imperfect Information and Male Friendship 63 Imperfect Information in Gammer Gurton’s Needle 66 Cards, Theater, and Male Friendship at Cambridge University 77 Imperfect Friendship in A Woman Killed with Kindness 81 Wagering on Theater 95 THREE | Backgammon: Space and Scopic Dominance 99 Theater Space and Scopic Dominance 101 Navigating Space and Place in Arden of Faversham 106 The Two Angry Women of Abington and Blind Play 116 Theatergoers on the Boards and Vicarious Play 134 FOUR | Chess: Performative History and Dynastic Marriage 143 The Temporality of Chess in Benjamin and The Tempest 147 A Game at Chess and Polytemporal History 155 Performative Histories 168 Recursive Temporality, Political Agency, and Embodied Skill 172 EPILOGUE | Participatory Spectators and the Theatricality of Kinect 177 Revised Pages viii CONTENTS Notes 193 Works Cited 245 Index 267 Illustrations following page 22 Revised Pages Acknowledgments In game development and in the theater, collaboration is invaluable. Noth- ing gets made without a team. That is true of this book as well. Although it has my name on the cover, it is the product of many minds, hands, and hearts. I am pleased to share the credit with those who have worked and played alongside me as this book came to fruition. This project in its current form began at the University of California, Davis, where I have been lucky to find incredible colleagues in both early modern studies and game studies. Fran Dolan has been an especially atten- tive mentor and friend, supporting my scholarship and my career in too many ways to count. I am indebted to her and to Margie Ferguson for their feedback on earlier versions of many of my chapters, as well as to other writing group members over the years: Seeta Chaganti, Stephanie Elsky, Ari Friedlander, Noah Guynn, and Claire Waters. My thanks also to Molly McCarthy, whose feedback on grant proposals also pushed the project in useful directions, and to Lee Emrich, who provided superb editorial assis- tance on several article versions of my chapters. Sarah McCullough orga- nized an early writing group on games, where I received excellent feedback from her, Joe Dumit, Susan Kaiser, and Colin Milburn. Colin has been a vital interlocutor for me throughout the book’s development, and I cannot thank him enough for helping me articulate my contribution to game and media studies and for generously reading the entire manuscript to offer feedback at crucial junctures. Many of my ideas about games were shaped by my engagement with the ModLab Colin founded and particularly through conversations with Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Tim Lenoir, Michael Neff, and Amanda Phillips; graduate students Evan Lauteria, Joseph Nguyen, and Emma Waldron; and dozens of undergraduate interns who work on Play the Knave. I would highlight especially my fruitful col- laboration with graduate students Evan Buswell and Nick Toothman, the architects of Play the Knave, and Sawyer Kemp, whose observations about vicarious spectatorship at installations of the game helped me figure out how to situate Play the Knave in relation to my book’s larger argument Revised Pages x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS about gaming and spectatorship. The influence of this collaboration is most evident in my book’s Epilogue, which draws on the article the four of us cowrote, “‘A Whole Theatre of Others’: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave.” Shakespeare Quarterly, special issue on “#Bard,” ed. Douglas Lanier, 67.4 (2016): 408– 30. Portions of several of my other chapters appeared as articles, and al- though these sections have been significantly reframed for the book, the editors who worked with me on those publications shaped my larger argu- ments and methods. Valerie Traub has been a constant source of guidance and friendship for over twenty years and remains one of my most trusted readers. Part of Chapter 4 was published as “Time to Cheat: Chess and The Tempest’s Performative History of Dynastic Marriage” in her edited collec- tion, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Henry Turner, a wonderful editor and friend, worked with me on “Games,” an essay that incorporates parts of my Introduction and short sections from Chapters 2 and 3; it was published in his collection Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford University Press, 2013). A larger section of Chapter 3 was published as “‘My Feet See Better Than My Eyes’: Spatial Mastery and the Game of Masculinity in Ar- den of Faversham’s Amphitheatre” in Theatre Survey 53.1 (2012): 5–28, where it benefited from the feedback of Catherine Cole, Leo Cabranes- Grant, and anonymous readers. My thanks to Oxford and Cambridge University Presses for permission to reprint sections of these essays. In order to write a book as interdisciplinary as this one, I relied on feed- back from scholars at diverse venues. I am thankful for invitations to pres- ent versions of my chapters at the Technology and Society Lecture Series at the Tandon School of Engineering, New York University; the “Theatrical- ity” conference at Rutgers; the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar at Colum- bia University; the Medieval- Renaissance Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania; the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University; the “Attending to Early Modern Women” confer- ence; and the “Phenomenal Performances: Getting a Feeling for Shake- speare’s Theater” conference at Northwestern University. I also benefited greatly from feedback offered by fellow participants in various working groups at the American Society for Theatre Research and audiences who attended my talks at