Pawn (chess) Pawn (chess) The pawn (♙,♟) is the most numerous piece in the game of chess, and in most circumstances, also the weakest. It historically represents infantry, or more particularly, armed peasants or pikemen. Each player begins a game with eight pawns, one on each square of the immediately in front of the other pieces. (The white pawns start on a2, b2, c2, d2, e2, f2, g2, h2; the black pawns start on a7, b7, c7, d7. e7, f7, g7, h7.) Individual pawns are referred to by the on which they stand. For example, one speaks of "White's f-pawn" or "Black's
A Game at Chess If this is true, Middleton and the King's Men were themselves pawns in a geopolitical game of chess. The characters are based on real political figures. The identifications below are suggested by Gary Taylor in "Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works" (OUP, 2007), pp. 1830–1. "A Game at Chess" survives in nine different texts, each of which has its own unique characteristics. Gary Taylor thus calls the play "the most complicated editorial problem in the entire corpus of early modern drama, and one of the most complicated in English literature". The play is unique in that it exists in more 17th-century