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Abstract
This dissertation explores the cultural implications of gaming in early modern England. In a historical context where probability theory did not exist and the word “risk” had yet to enter the English vocabulary, the cultural practice of profiting from chance, as reflected in both drama and historical events, provides a useful lens through which we can better understand pre-capitalist attitudes and early modern economic life. Through an examination of playtexts, pamphlets, proclamations and woodcuts, I map out the various discursive strategies early moderners used to categorize gaming as either a legitimate or illegitimate social practice. In order to better understand the anti-gaming discourse that suddenly emerged in sixteenth century England, Chapter One considers the political, religious, and moral authorities who created the polemic against gaming in the first place. In Chapter Two I study the world of objects that are exchanged, circulated and transferred in problematic ways as a result of wagering on chance. I also explore how the drama repeatedly stages the undoing and making of subjects through objects (either monetary or sartorial). Chapter Three focuses on gendered representations of gaming and explores how some dramatists reveal an ideological interest in preserving gaming as a masculine pastime indulgence by negatively implicating women in the pastime. In Chapter Four I focus on lotteries as a form of gaming and argue that Elizabeth's Lottery of 1567 inaugurated a new era of capital fundraising that helped shape the emerging nation-state.
By studying the dynamics of the early modern gaming table as a theater in miniature, and by tracing how those dynamics reflect the complexities of social interactions based on economic interests, this dissertation generates a fresh, critical approach to early modern drama. What began perhaps as a simple pastime pursuit in antiquity emerged, during the course of the Elizabethan and Stuart period, as a significant cultural preoccupation with social and economic implications extending beyond the immediate historical context.
