Chess and monsters: foreign encounters on the early modern stage

This paper extends Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of chess in A Thousand Plateaus to a reading of the early modern stage itself, and the ways in which the theatre, using players as chess pieces, 'codes and decodes space'. Representations of chess in early modern theatre are invariably employed to navigate the state's encounters with the foreign (The Tempest, A Game at Chess). While theatrical representations of chess are used to reinforce the encoding of spaces and bodies, the monstrous body and the uncanny city radically destabilise the construction of a 'milieu of interiority'. The paper argues that while chess provides the ideal discourse for representations of encounters with foreign states, interactions with foreign cultures at the communal level of the marketplace are articulated through discourses of monstrosity and disease. In The Tempest, for example, Miranda and Ferdinand use chess to navigate encounters between states along a courtly strata, a structure which permits no space for Caliban's monstrous foreignness. How do these two competing discourses represent and construct the schizophrenic subject of early modern London in terms of encounters with the foreign?

The paper concludes with a reading of sixteenth and seventeenth century treatises on the board game rythmomachia, which combines a chess-like board with complex Boethian arithmetic philosophy, to propose a possible reading of one game (and by extension one culture) as both war machine and State apparatus, both 'smooth' and 'striated'; both chess and Go.