This pioneering collection of nine original essays carves out a new conceptual path in the field by theorizing the ways in which the language of games and warfare inform and illuminate each other in the early modern cultural imagination. They consider how warfare and games are mapped onto each other in aesthetically and ideologically significant ways in the plays, poetry, or prose of William Shakespeare, Thomas Morton, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift, among others. Contributors interpret the terms ‘war games’ or ‘games of war’ broadly, freeing them to uncover the more complex and abstract interplay of war and games in the early modern mind, taking readers from the cockpits and clowns of Shakespearean drama, through the intriguing manuals of cryptographers and the ingenious literary war games of Restoration women authors, to the witty but rancorous paper wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- The Interplay of Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: An Introduction
- Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson
- 1. ‘Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France?' Cock-Fighting and the Representation of War in Shakespeare’s Henry V
- 2. Game Over: Play and War in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
- 3. Thomas Morton’s Maypole: Revels, War Games, and Transatlantic Conflict
- 4. Milton’s Epic Games: War and Recreation in Paradise Lost
- 5. Ciphers and Gaming for Pleasure and War
- 6. Virtual Reality, Role Play, and World-Building in Margaret Cavendish’s Literary War Games
- Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker
- 7. Dice, Jesting, and the ‘Pleasing Delusion’ of Warlike Love in Aphra Behn’s The Luckey Chance
- 8. War and Games in Swift’s Battle of the Books and Gulliver’s Travels
- 9. Time-Servers, Turncoats, and the Hostile Reprint: Considering the Conflict of a Paper War
- Index
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