The chess world has come back into public attention with the premiere on Netflix of The Queen’s Gambit, a charming and brilliantly executed fictional story of an orphaned girl who becomes a chess prodigy. But even when it comes to chess, Shakespeare got there first.
In The Tempest, the shipwrecked Prospero plays matchmaker between his daughter Miranda and the more recently shipwrecked Ferdinand, who is the rightful Prince of Naples. After setting for Ferdinand tests of endurance that he submits to out of love for Miranda, their courtship culminates in this short scene:
[Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess]
Miranda: “Sweet lord, you play me false.”
Ferdinand: “No, my dear’st love,
I would not for the world.”
Miranda: “Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it, fair play.”
Prospero, by the way, is the rightful Duke of Milan, deposed by his own brother Antonio and, with his then three-year-old daughter, cast into the Mediterranean to die. Given provisions by a remorseful courtier, Gonzalo, they survive and fetch up on an island, where they remained for the next 12 years. Then Prospero finally tells Miranda the backstory:
Prospero: “…In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg’d,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar’d to us, to sigh
To the winds whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.”
Miranda: “Alack, what trouble
Was I then to you!”
Prospero: “O, a cherubim
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile.
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck’d the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burthen groan’d; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.”
Miranda: “How came we ashore?”
Prospero: “By Providence divine…”
Beth Harmon, the child chess prodigy in The Queen’s Gambit, is nine when her King Alonso, played by her very own mentally ill mother, attempts to kill her (and succeeds in killing herself) by ramming her car into an oncoming truck. And like Miranda, Beth by providence divine survived the crash and became in her own way shipwrecked – in an orphanage.
In the basement of the orphanage, Beth was introduced to an arcane mystery – the mystery of chess, and of her own prodigious talent at the game. The building’s janitor, Mr. Shaibel, teaches her chess in his janitorial cell. He also gives Beth a book, Modern Chess Openings (1948) by W. C. Griffith and P. W. Sergeant.
Prospero has a book that illuminates arcane mysteries as well, a book that contains secrets that confer on him magical powers, which he uses to free Ariel, a supernatural sprite who was imprisoned in a pine tree by the evil witch Sycorax. Prospero uses his own powers, and Ariel’s, to crash not a car into a truck, but a passing ship containing Alonso, the King of Naples, accompanied by Prospero’s own brother Antonio, and to strand its passengers on the island. One of the passengers is Ferdinand, Alonso’s son.
Prospero wants to resolve all the conflicts in the story, including Antonio’s crime in deposing him, and the vassalage to Naples that Antonio has permitted Milan to fall under. Well, if Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples, were to marry Miranda, the rightful Princess of Milan, all would be well indeed.
Ferdinand sees Miranda and is smitten, but Prospero sets him a list of arduous tasks that he must complete if he hopes to win her. One of these is to cart logs across the island by hand, hardly the usual labor of a prince. Miranda spies him at his work:
Miranda: “Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard: I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoin’d to pile!
Pray, set it down and rest you…”
Ferdinand: “O most dear mistress,
The sun will set before I shall discharge
What I must strive to do.”
Miranda: “If you’ll sit down,
I’ll bear your logs the while: pray, give me that;
I’ll carry it to the pile.”
Miranda approaches the world of traditional men’s work with the same equanimity that Beth Harmon employs in the also largely male world of chess. Miranda practically channels Harmon when she dismisses Ferdinand’s protest that honor requires that he and not she complete the work:
Ferdinand: “No, precious creature;
I had rather crack my sinews, break my back,
Than you should such dishonor undergo,
While I sit lazy by.”
Miranda: “It would become me
As well as it does you: and I should do it
With much more ease; for my good will is to it,
And yours it is against.”
The marriage in The Queen’s Gambit is not between Beth Harmon and any man, but between the people of the United States (or at least those who love chess) and their Russian counterparts. The courtship proceeds in the face not of disapproving parents, but of two governments that are implacable cold war opponents, and it is consummated in a public park in Moscow where Beth is rapturously received after vanquishing a Russian Grandmaster.
Beth at the very ends sits down to play the most senior of the Russians who, out of a love of chess, sit in winter in a park in Moscow to play it. Let’s look again at Miranda and Ferdinand’s chat over the board, in this new light:
Miranda: “Sweet lord, you play me false.”
Ferdinand: “No, my dear’st love,
I would not for the world.”
Miranda: “Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it, fair play.”
Are they simply two people of Naples and Milan (or of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R), or are they two officials of the respective governments? Well, a Princess and a Prince are both, of course, and they are indeed wrangling over kingdoms. So is it cold war appeasement when Miranda offers to call such wrangling fair play? As he often does, Shakespeare asks, and leaves it to us to answer.
I write this blog because the classics, and Shakespeare chief among them, can keep us connected to the highest and best in Western culture, and because modern life can reveal richer meanings when it’s refracted through a Shakespearean prism. Hope you enjoyed!
