Abstract
This essay focuses on Shakespeare's development of the Gamester figure throughout his canon. I demonstrate that, from The Taming of the Shrew to Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra to The Winter's Tale, the facade of a friendly wager requires the Gamester's concomitant denigration and control of the women around him—often to disastrous results. When the Gamester calls Fortune a “whore” and stakes the reputations and lives of women in bets, he not only attempts to absorb the emasculating risks of determining “odds” and “stakes” between men, but he also risks societal perdition. My focus on the specifically gendered implications of Shakespearean wagers thus elucidates why so many of Shakespeare's plays begin with a game but often end with a stage littered with bodies.
Keywords: Shakespeare, gender, gambling, gamester, dupe, odds, wagers
In a direct address to gold, the eponymous hero of William Shakespeare's The Life of Timon of Athens (1623) derides the ability of money to invert natural hierarchies. According to Timon, gold makes “black white, foul fair,/ Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant” and thus unduly influences men (4.3.29–30). Indeed, by act 4 of the play, the greed of his fellow Athenians has rendered the wealthy and generous Timon misanthropic and broke. Timon concludes his tirade with a vow concerning gold and its source, the earth:
Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that puts odds
Among the rout of nations; I will make thee
Do thy right nature. (4.3.42–45; my italics)
Through “odds,” Timon invokes gambling in a speech that asserts his superiority to his fellows. Other Athenians might succumb to money's unnatural influence, but Timon can use money to restore the natural order. Timon's pose is in line with the ways gambling in the early modern period has been shown to serve the construction of a masculine self. By fashioning himself a “Gamester”—a figure that gained prominence from the Stuart period onward and may be defined as a “dedicated, habitual gambler”—Timon can associate himself with lower class people and pastimes while maintaining and even reaffirming his superior status.
To place too great a focus on a gamester's socioeconomic motivations for gambling, however, neglects the extent of the gendered stakes of gambling in Shakespeare’s plays.