Lector Ludens

Lector Ludens March 31, 2015

One of the central virtues of Lector Ludens, Michael Scham’s study of games and play in Cervantes, is Scham’s thorough review of the early modern literature on play, games, and leisure. Scham is not innocent of cultural theory, but instead of imposing a contemporary framework on his subject, he uncovers an extensive, and quite wondrous, tradition of reflection on games.

Some treatises on play are, as one would expect, moralistic. Unexpectedly, many aren’t, and see play as socially beneficial, expressive of human creativity, useful in the same way sleep is useful.

On this last point, Scham quotes Thomas: “The activity of playing looked at specifically in itself is not ordained to a further end, yet the pleasure we take therein serves as recreation and rest for the soul, and accordingly when this be well-tempered, application to play is lawful.” He goes on to quote Cicero to the effect that sport and fund are useful “when we have discharged our obligations in grave and serious matters” (ST II-II, 168, 2; quoted 32).

Rodrigo Caro, an Andalusian priest writing in the early seventh century, traces the origins of ball games, theater, dancing, practical jokes. He observes, “The ancients knew games to be necessary, and more so amongst fresh and energetic youth; and so, to keep them away from the vices caused by curiosity, they organized games that, along with entertaining and delighting, dispose nature to agility and strength for earnest occasions and to preserve health” (32). In Caro’s opinion, adult playfulness was a way of becoming a little child: “what better entertainment than in that which originally deserves this name? What more harmless diversion than in simple childhood games?” (quote, 52, 54).

For Adrian de Castro (1599), play could further society by furthering the pleasure of sociability. But one had to be careful to choose the right playmates. Leisure with suitable friends brought personal, domestic, and public benefits: “One loses the friendship and conversation of friends, who take time to win over, because by virtue of intercourse and communication they are earned. Such is friendship that Saint Chrysostom says of it, that it is a wall and fortress of the republic necessary for the conservation of peace, useful for public life, beneficial for domestic life, wealth for our poverty, glee for our sadness, medicine for our maladies, pleasurable for human life” (quoted 39-40).

Scham’s starting point for his study is Cervantes’s characterization of Don Quixote as play: “My purpose has been to place in the square of our republic a billiards table where each can go to entertain himself.” After setting a rich context by examining writers on play and games, he devotes the remainder of the book to examining the different registers of humor, gaming, and carnival in Cervantes’s masterpiece. Nabokov complained of the “cruel and crude” humor of Quixote (quoted, 150), but Scham shows that the novel isn’t simply a Spanish Three Stooges. Cervantes takes regular aim at “various forms of pedantry, from the minutiae of hair-splitting scholarship to the over-determined formulas of theory” (152). Don Quixote, for instead, goes on at length extrapolating the point that “all the world’s a sage,” to which Sancho witheringly replies: “That’s a fine comparison. . . . only not so vary original that I haven’t heard it about a hundred times before” (quoted, 152). 

Scham points to the important strain of (proto-postmodern) “epistemological humor,” which begins with the first sentence of the book where the author admits he can’t recall certain details, offers several versions of Quixote’s name, but ends with an insistence that these details don’t matter “provided that the narrator doesn’t stray one inch from the truth” (161).

Cervantes doesn’t simply reflect contemporary Spanish and European discussions of play, but contributes to them. “The entire range of contemporary thought on licit and illicit leisure finds expression in Cervantes.” His characters have conventional views on various topics: “cards and gambling lead to violence and dissolution; respectable women sometimes while away their time with needlework.” Cervantes himself doesn’t dissolve moral concerns into irony, but “is acutely attuned to [play’s] dangers, from the solipcism of unreflective mimesis to the cruelty of turning others into objects of play.” For all this, he opens up new possibilities for literary play: “Cervantes’s ludic readers are  . . . idle and active simultaneously: we are at leisure, our activity of free of material consequence; yet we actively mediate the mysterious relationship between our game and the reality to which we will return” (301). We aren’t wholly receptive; if we come to Cervantes’s billiard table, we’re encouraged to play along.


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