I’m a big fan of chess - I play a lot (though not very well!) and I love hearing about chess in literature and art. So it makes sense that I’ve been absolutely loving The Queen’s Gambit. It’s ticked quite a few boxes for me, and it’s so rare to see a show involving chess that not only understands the game and features real, plausible moves, but which is steeped in the lore of the game. Characters often discuss the lives and games of the greats - players like Morphy and Steinitz and Capablanca are common points of reference for these characters - but the way the show uses chess itself is an intelligent nod to the role of chess as a literary motif.
For young Beth, chess gives her a contained, controlled world in which to escape from her harsh reality.
Later, chess is a social interaction, a way of making friends, of spending time with friends, and of flirting and even seducing and being seduced. These symbolic roles of the game are subtly and cleverly done in the show and they draw on a long history of protrayals of chess games. So how can I not ramble on about it for a bit? I make no apologies.
You probably know the famous motif of a game with death, immortalised in The Seventh Seal…
When you think about chess, you might well think of serious, concentrating old white dudes as in Honore Daumier’s 1863 painting The Chess Players…
…but chess is always a bit more playful than that. The game with Death in The Seventh Seal draws on a tradition in medieval romances of games and riddles. Tales like “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” revolve around the allegorical (though heaven knows what for) use of riddles and games, and some of the Grail romances, for example, the hero comes to a chessboard castle where he meets a water-maiden.
Modern chess really came about in 19th-century Europe when people like the first World Champions, Wilhelm Steinitz and Emmanual Lasker, helped codify it into systems of play (”openings”, “middle” and “end” games), but before that we had the “Romantic” era of chess filled with dramatic gambits and sharp, tactical play rather than the slow-burning positional strategy that came later. And chess has always featured women. In 15th-century Italy, for example, chess was respectable for women because it did not rely on chance (and so wasn’t gambling) like dice and cards.
Sofonisba Anguissola’s 1555 painting, ‘The Game of Chess’, is a nice example of chess being playful, social, and not at all just stern old men. Anguissola, just as a point of interest, was a court painter at the royal court in Spain, having trained informally with Michelangelo, and she tutored the queen, Elizabeth of Valois, who was herself a keen amateur painter. She painted ‘The Game of Chess’ when she was 20, and it broke from convention at the time in its informality and lack of allegory - it literally just shows her three sisters, Lucia, Minerva and Europa (great names, right?!), playing chess.
Most things in the renaissance were allegorical and chess was no different. In Elizabethan and Jocobean theatre, chess was often used as a symbol for human life and government. Thomas Middleton’s satire A Game of Chess (1624) for example is structured around a game of chess, using it to satirise conflict between England and Spain (so controversial was its satire that it was shut down after only 9 days). Chess is a political allegory, as well as both a battle between Virtue and Vice, and a metaphor for the transience of human life. Ah, ambiguity, my old friend…
I first came across this tradition via T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922) in which part two is entitled “A Game of Chess”…
Eliot draws on a range of Jacobean drama, including Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1657) where chess is used as a foil for seduction and rape (it being a bloody Jacobean tragedy after all).
But chess seductions are not all forceful and morally uncomfortable, nor are all these references purely of artistic interest. Because there weren’t many chess “manuals” before Steinitz and Lasker came along in the late 19th century, a lot of our chess history comes from literature. For example, the Centre-Counter Opening or Scandinavia Defence was first recorded in Scachs d'amor (Chess of Love) a Spanish poem from the end of the 15th century where chess symbolises love.
Which is perhaps what is happening in George Goodwin Kilburne’s painting A Game of Chess…
And is definitely what is happening in The Queen’s Gambit when Beth plays Benny where fast, frenetic, transactional games of speed chess symbolise the heated, superficial attraction between them…
And when she first plays Townes, the game is slow, full of adolescent nerves…
…and her games with Beltik are so calm and thoughtful that no one seems to have made a gif of them!
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