William Caxton: The Game and Playe of the Chesse (review)

William Caxton frames his 1483 edition of The Game and Playe of the Chesse as a teaching text. Beginning with Paul's Romans 15:4, "The holy appostle and doctour of the peple, Saynt Poule, sayth in his Epystle: 'Alle that is wryten is wryten unto our doctryne and for our lernyng,'" Caxton's prologue reads, "Wherfore many noble clerkes have endevoyred them to wryte and compyle many notable werkes and historyes to the ende that it myght come to the knowlege and under-stondyng of suche as ben ygnoraunt, of which the nombre is infenyte." In this way, Jenny Adams's new edition for the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) takes part in a long tradition. For TEAMS' expressed goal is "to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions." The Game and Playe of the Chesse is just such a text. It ranked high in Caxton's regard-first printed in 1474, it is his second English book and one that he reissued quickly-but has long been out of print, the most recent version a 1968 reprint of William E. A. Axon's 1883 edition. This edition, as Adams points out, is available online through Project Gutenberg as an eBook file, and images of both of Caxton's editions are accessible through Early English Books Online (EEBO). Given these online versions, we might ask, "why a book?" And so we find ourselves in the same position as Caxton, contemplating the relationship between teaching and the codex form during a time of change in communication technologies.

The Game and Playe of the Chesse is part of Adams's twofold effort to recognize the importance of the chess-book tradition, particularly Jacobus de Cessolis's thirteenth-century Liber de ludo scachorum, of which Caxton's is an augmented translation. In this, it is a companion piece to her well-received monograph, Power/Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (2006). Over the course of the two books, Adams reads the tradition as not merely about gaming, but about representation, about the way games figure society, about the way the self can be allegorized, and about the way material objects-chess pieces-signify.

The TEAMS edition specifically follows out this argument in two ways: first, as an entry into the tradition overall and, second, as an object lesson in the pedagogical technology of the book. In this vein, it is instructive to compare it to the online versions, to see by contrast how the book works today. The Project Gutenberg eBook reproduces the 1883 edition's apparatus and text. This includes an introduction with facsimiles of Caxton's type and page, copies of his 1474 and 1483 prologues, a glossary, and an index. Axon's voice streams in from another era, one in which The Game and Playe of the Chesse was considered Caxton's first printed book and in which good bibliography contained stories of discovery and of who paid what to whom. His text makes an awkward transition from the nineteenth-century page to the scalable screen, ultimately appearing as a sheet of modern type. The EEBO version takes us further in this same direction by presenting UMI microfilms of both of Caxton's editions, the ESTC entries, and, finally, a searchable version of the 1474 text, keyed to the images. Both eBook and EEBO are in a sense alternatives to the physical book that let us better understand its historical form.

The TEAMS edition is less about books than a bibliographical instrument itself. It begins with a short introduction that concludes with a list of printed editions, facsimiles, and reference works, followed by the text of the 1483 edition. Adams's choice is smart, because this edition introduces woodcuts (Axon includes these woodcuts with the 1474 text). Because the online...