Another post from Delphi forum... 163.1 II. A GAME OF CHESS 77 The title has many associations. It recollects the chess game in Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, in which a widow is distracted by the playing of a game of chess from the duke's seduction of her daughter-in-law Bianca in the next room (on a stage balcony visible to the audience) (almost described as a rape, and in double entendre imaged as a chess game. The dramatist contrived that the accomplice should checkmate the mother at the moment when the daughter-in-law surrendered to the seducer). (The play satirized a marriage based on political expediency) The chess game often represents man's mortality -- for example, Igmar Bergman's film, The Seventh Seal, shows life as a chess game with Death. In the Grail legend, the knight sometimes visits a chessboard castle, where he meets a water-maiden. At the end of Shakespeare's The Tempest the two ancient rival kingdoms of Milan and Naples are united in the promised marriage of Prince Ferdinand and Prospero's daughter, Miranda, who are discovered together playing a game of chess -- signifying the rational basis of their love, their pre-marital chastity, and their marriage as the reduction of a real war to a mere game between lovers. In chess, two kings strive for supremacy by manipulating and sacrificing their Queens, Knights, Bishops, Castles, and Pawns (soldiers), although in fact the two Kings are the weakest pieces on the board. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~mallinic/314/fall00/eliot_notes.html The movie "Seventh Seal" is an excellent movie. I really enjoyed this film. It is available at Netfix movie rentals.