Checkmate?: Playing a Chess Game in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess, George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart, and Václav Havel’s Largo Desolato

• Main Authors: Yen-Wei Chang, 張晏偉
• Other Authors: Hsin-Yi Hsieh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/19965611605428821438

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 104 === This study mainly explores the political connotations in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624), George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (1928), and Václav Havel’s Largo Desolato (1984) in terms of chess metaphors. To analyse these three plays, this thesis does not take chess as a mere board game for entertainment but a miniature of political arena and a reflection of different social strata. In medieval English literature, chess allegories focus more on the binary opposition between black and white and the dualistic concept between right and wrong. However, when it came to the seventeenth century, Middleton’s A Game at Chess dramatised more about the political conflicts between England and Spain by means of bringing the personified chess figures onto the chessboard-like stage, not only satirising some contemporary politicians with ambition but also examining their political strategies. Such a vivid dramaturgy is more or less demonstrated in Shaw’s The Apple Cart as well. A chess-game-like struggle is deployed between the king and his primary minister, which is disturbed by another battle of wits initiated by the American ambassador. Compared to these two chosen plays, Havel’s Largo Desolato is less recognised as a play set in a chessboard-like context; but the protagonist as an intellectual is certainly involved in a combat with his contemporary governmental authority, where the evenly matched tactics employed respectively by these two opponents correspond to the concept of binary opposition, emphasising the dualistic tension in chess game. Accordingly, with reference to the origin and extensive literary functions of chess, this thesis probes into the political connotations in A Game at Chess, The Apple Cart, and Largo Desolato, linking these three plays composed in three different eras together.