The Anatomy of Melancholy

… In a moment of the shifting hour It changes owners and passes under another’s rights.

For the most part, they strive not to pass the time in innocent recreation, but for filthy profit and from greed for money. “It is turned to the foulest gain and human avarice,” as Daneau observes. “The source of frauds and crimes”: it is the fountain of cheating and villainy. Gaming is now so common throughout Europe, and so widely abused, that many people are utterly ruined by it: their resources spent, their inheritances consumed, themselves and their descendants reduced to poverty. Besides these come swearing, quarrelling, drinking, wasted time, and the other troubles that usually accompany it.

For once they have become accustomed to such company and acquired the habit of gambling, they can scarcely be drawn away from it. It keeps teasing them like an itch; as with men who frequent prostitutes, once they begin, they cannot easily stop. “A mad desire torments their minds”: they are crazed about their pastime.

In the end—as Charles VII, that good French king, declared in an edict against gamblers—“from which came the support of a dutiful and cheerful life for themselves, their children, and their whole household,” and so forth: what was once their livelihood, which should have maintained wife, children, and family, is now spent and gone. “Grief and want,” and so forth: sorrow and poverty follow.

Good things can thus be abused. What was first devised to refresh people’s weary spirits after other labours and studies, to cheer the mind, to pass the time and entertain company—which would otherwise grow tedious on those long, lonely winter nights—and to keep people from worse things, is turned against its purpose: an innocent recreation is perverted.

Chess is a good and ingenious exercise of the mind for certain people, and, Rhazes holds, suits those melancholy people who are idle, whose thoughts wander into irrelevant matters, or who are troubled by cares. Nothing better diverts their minds and changes the course of their thinking. Some say it was invented by an army commander during a famine, to keep his soldiers from mutiny.

But if melancholy comes from too much study, chess may do more harm than good. For some people’s brains it is too taxing, too full of anxiety, every bit as bad as study. Besides, it is an irritable, anger-provoking game, deeply vexing to the player who is checkmated.

In his youth, William the Conqueror, playing chess with the prince of France—Dauphiné had not yet been annexed to that crown—was checkmated and struck the prince about the head with the chessboard. This later caused much hostility between them. It is probably for some such reason that Patrizi, in book 3, title 12 of On the Education of a King, forbids his prince to play chess. He allows hawking, hunting, riding, and so forth; and he allows chess to other men, but on no account to the prince.