Abstract
For centuries, prisoner's base was one the most popular team capturing games and was played by children and adults. Although the rules vary, the game consistently requires that every player on the field target one specific member of the opposing team for capture while being chased by another individual adversary. Every player is simultaneously pursuer and pursued. This unique feature enables dramatic references to the game to evoke vital issues of contingency and risk. Prisoner's base appears in works by playwrights including Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, and its rules and variations figuratively and physically inform interpretation of their works. Taking into account the specificities of games like prisoner's base produces useful interpretive inroads, as is evidenced by the final example of Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman.
Keywords: prisoner's base, barley-break, Brome, Chettle, Jonson, Marlow, Shakespeare
I
Ye lovers of pleasure, give ear and attend,
Unto these few lines which here I have penned,
I sing not of sea fights, of battles nor wars,
But of a fine game, which is called “Prison Bars.”
David Studley, poet laureate of Ellesmere, Shropshire, wrote the ballad excerpted throughout this chapter about a game played 8 August 1764 between teams of local married men and bachelors. Studley's term, “Prison Bars,” was a common alternate name for prisoner's base, and this game certainly had time to develop variants, as it was one of the most popular catching games in England from the fourteenth century until its decline in the twentieth. It was played by two teams, each with their own safe base and designated prison for captured opponents. The goal was to capture as many prisoners as possible in order to empty and eventually occupy the other team's base. Distinctively, each player left base in order to chase one specific adversary and was, in turn, targeted by someone else from the opposing team. All the players were simultaneously pursuer and pursued.
In the eighteenth century, as Studley's poem testifies, prisoner's base could be a formalized match between adult men, but in the seventeenth century it was often characterized as a boys’ country game. However, over generations it engaged a wide range of participants: children, youth, and adults; male and female; rural and urban.