The Gamester Words on Plays (2005)

Transcription

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A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director
Heather Kitchen, Executive Director
PRESENTS
The Gamester
by freyda thomas
directed by ron lagomarsino
based on LE JOUEUR,
by jean-françois regnard
geary theater
january 6–february 6, 2005
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
jessica werner
associate publications editor
paul walsh
resident dramaturg
margot melcon
publications and literary
intern
a.c.t. is supported in part by
grants from the Grants for
the Arts/San Francisco Hotel
Tax Fund and the National
Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a
great nation deserves great art.
© 2005 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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table of contents
1.
Synopsis, Characters, and Cast of The Gamester
6.
A Brief Biography of Freyda Thomas
7.
An Interview with the Playwright
13.
A Brief Biography of Jean-François Regnard
15.
Gambling in 17th-Century France and England
by Paul Walsh
21. The Gamester’s Games
24. The Gamester Observed
33. In Defense of Gambling
by Dan Seligman
36. Pathologic Gambling: America’s Newest Addiction?
by Andrew V. Pasternak, IV, M.S., M.D.
38. The Chrome-Shiny, Lights-Flashing, Wheel-Spinning, Touch-Screened,
Drew Carey–Wisecracking, Video-Playing, “Sound Events”–Packed,
Pulse-Quickening Bandit
by Gary Rivlin
42. The States Bet More on Betting
by Alex Berenson
44. Poker’s Taking over the World
by Darren Rovell
46. The Future of Gambling
by Felicia F. Campbell
OPPOSITE Frontispiece to The Compleat Gamester, by Charles Cotton (1674)
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table of contents, CONTINUED
48. Questions to Consider
50. For Further Information . . .
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synopsis, characters, and cast of
THE GAMESTER
Le Joueur, by Jean-François Regnard, premiered at the Théâtre-Français in Paris on
December 19, 1696. The Gamester, by Freyda Thomas, premiered at the Northlight
Theatre in Evanston, Illinois, on March 21, 2001.
characters and cast
Valère
Angélique
Hector
Thomas
Madame Sécurité
Madame Préférée
Madame Argante
Dorante
Marquis de Fauxpas
Betty, Ensemble
Croupier, Ensemble
Lorenzo Pisoni
Margot White
Gregory Wallace
Steve Irish
Joan Mankin
Stacy Ross
René Augesen
Ron Campbell
Anthony Fusco
Lianne Marie Dobbs
Andy Murray
synopsis
rologue. Paris. A gambling hall in the 18th century. Before the curtain rises, the
Croupier announces the show and introduces the gaming hall and the characters, as
he would have in a 17th-century French theater. The hall swirls with activity, as winners
and losers alike celebrate the all-consuming thrill of The Game.
act 1. scene 1. A shabby boarding-house room. Dawn. Valère’s valet, Hector, is awakened by creditors who have come to collect the money owed them by Valère, who is not
yet home from his nightly revels. Hector puts off the creditors and complains that his
master’s gambling is making his life a misery. Hector has not been paid wages in a very
long time, and he lives in near poverty, but he cannot bring himself to abandon Valère.
Mme Préférée, guardian of Valère’s beloved Angélique, arrives looking for Valère. She
tells Hector that the town is abuzz with the gossip that Valère has lost his entire inheritance. She announces that Angélique has called off her planned wedding to Valère, because
he is out of money and she is heartbroken that he would choose gambling over her love.
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When Valère arrives, Préférée departs, mentioning to Hector on her way out that
Angélique has decided instead to marry Valère’s Uncle Dorante, who is old but rich.
Valère, suffering the effects of a long night out, complains that his father has disowned
him because of his wasteful, debt-ridden lifestyle. He swears off gambling once and for all
(again), a promise at which Hector scoffs. Valère takes solace in the fact that he still has
Angélique’s love, but Hector must tell him that Angélique is now planning to wed
Dorante. Valère at first cannot believe she would choose to marry someone so old and
withered, and then vows to win her back by truly giving up gambling for good.
Valère’s father, Thomas, arrives and confirms that Valère has wasted his fortune, having
ignored his duties as manager of the family estate to pursue gambling. Thomas threatens
to disinherit Valère unless he can prove that he is willing to turn over a new leaf. Valère,
desperate, declares his willingness to reform. Thomas refuses to give Valère any money, but
proclaims that if Valère can win Angélique back on his own, he will regain his father’s
support. Thomas leaves, and Valère and Hector devise a plan to get the money they need
by seducing the insatiable and wealthy widow Mme Sécurité.
Sécurité arrives. Valère makes up a wild story about why he is broke, and she promises
to give him money—in exchange, of course, for the satisfaction of her own needs.
scene 2. Valère fulfills his part of the bargain. Afterwards, Sécurité reflects upon the
plight of the aging woman, leaves a purse for Valère, and exits to the street. There she
encounters Angélique and Préférée, who are being chased by Dorante with his annoying
offers of affection. Angélique and Préférée ask Sécurité for advice about what to do with a
lover who is addicted to gambling. Sécurité, aware that it is Valère whom Angélique loves,
and that if Angélique marries Valère, he will no longer be available to satisfy her own
desires, paints a dismal future for Angélique should she wed the incorrigible gamester.
Angélique believes her love can yet reform him. She decides to meet with Valère.
Sécurité leaves as Mme Argante arrives. Argante is Angélique’s elder sister, also a
widow, and also in love with Valère. She is pursued by the Marquis de Fauxpas, who is so
nervous around her that he makes a fool of himself with inept attempts to woo her. When
he accuses her of being in love with Valère, she asks him to leave, which he does.
Valère enters, in flight from demanding creditors; to avoid discovery, he dives under
Argante’s skirts, much to her delight. Upon resurfacing, he asks her to intervene on his
behalf with Angélique. She agrees to speak with Angélique—but without promising to do
so on his behalf.
Angélique enters with Préférée and catches Valère kissing Argante; she accuses him of
trying to woo her sister. He immediately professes his love for Angélique, and she relents.
Angélique was on her way to accept Dorante’s marriage proposal, planning to give him a
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picture of herself in a jewel-encrusted frame as a token of her promise, but she decides to
give the portrait to Valère instead. She warns him that if he should ever lose the portrait,
she will never speak to him again. Dorante approaches and Valère and Angélique part
ways.
Préférée breaks the news to Dorante that Angélique and Valère are together again.
Hoping that Angélique will marry Dorante instead, however, Préférée devises a plan to
woo Angélique on Dorante’s behalf. They compose a love letter to Angélique, and Préférée
convinces Dorante to lure Valère back into the world of gambling.
Valère and Hector, now both pursued by creditors, meet. To get the creditors off his
back, Valère tells Hector to take the bills to Thomas and convince his father to pay them;
meanwhile, Valère will pay another “visit” to Sécurité. Hector finds Thomas, who gives
him enough money to pay off Valère’s debts. When Valère and Hector meet again, Valère
is flush with money from Sécurité and greedy for the money from his father that is meant
to settle his debts. Hector tries to reason with Valère, but, spurred by needling from
Dorante, decides to head to the gambling hall with the money. Hector insists that Valère
at least go in disguise, so his father and Angélique will not know that he has broken his
promise to reform.
Préférée informs Angélique that Valère is planning to go to the gambling hall.
Determined to find out if she has truly been forsaken, Angélique decides to go there, disguised (as a man), as well, to catch Valère in the act.
Argante, meanwhile, has written a letter to Valère promising to give him her entire fortune if he will marry her. She dispatches her servant, Betty, to deliver the letter at the gambling hall that night. Too impatient to wait for his response, however, she decides to go to
the gambling hall herself to spy on Valère’s reaction to her letter.
The anticipation rises as prospective lovers and players, pursuers and pursued, masters
and servants all don their disguises and prepare to risk their fates and fortunes.
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ct ii. A private room in the gambling hall. Dorante, Thomas, Mme Sécurité, the
Marquis de Fauxpas, Betty, and Mme Préférée all wander about, looking for those
they came to find. Mme Argante enters in a new gown and wig, carrying a very large fan.
Valère enters in a disguise so effective that it fools even Hector. Undetected by his
pursuers, Valère makes his way to a dice game while Hector, with some cash from Valère,
heads to the roulette wheel. Sécurité, looking for some quick sex, goes after Fauxpas.
Angélique enters, also in disguise. She finds Préférée and, not seeing Valère, believes
that she and the power of her love have triumphed over the lure of the game. Satisfied, she
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decides to look around the hall to see if she can discover what makes gambling such an
intoxicating pastime.
Angélique sits next to Valère at a dice table and soon recognizes him, but he does not
recognize her, instead believing her to be a country gentleman wholly inexperienced at
gambling. Hoping to take advantage of the situation, Valère encourages the “gentleman” to
play, assuming his greater experience will bring him easy money. Lady Luck, however,
favors Angélique, and she begins to win. Frustrated, Valère attempts to con his opponent
by teaching “him” écarté, a complex card game.
Sécurité finally corners Fauxpas and, within earshot of Argante, recalls what a good
lover he was the last time they met. Fauxpas politely refuses Sécurité’s advances, professing his love for another. Argante, who suddenly sees Fauxpas in an intriguing new light,
decides to find out whether he can live up to Sécurité’s claims.
Meanwhile, Angélique and Valère continue to play, while she, maintaining her disguise,
tries to get him to explain the lure of gambling. To her dismay, he claims he would never
give up gambling for love.
Argante, concealing her face behind her fan, stops Fauxpas as he passes. Because he is
unaware that he is actually speaking to his beloved, he is able to calmly and eloquently
describe his passion for Argante to this unknown lady. Won over by this charming version
of Fauxpas, Argante encourages him to pursue his love and he, in gratitude, kisses her. She
immediately renounces Valère and leaves to find Betty before she can deliver Argante’s
letter to him.
Dorante is looking for Valère when he happens upon Sécurité, who by now is willing to
take any man she can find. Dorante, depressed by his own lack of sex appeal, despairs of
ever winning Angélique; willing to teach Dorante how to make the most of his “manly
power,” Sécurité drags him into an anteroom and slams the door.
Back at the card table, fortune continues to favor Angélique and she quickly takes
everything Valère has. So he can keep playing, Valère tries to get Hector to give him back
the money Valère gave him, but Hector tells him it has all been lost at the roulette table.
Remembering that he still has the jewel-encrusted portrait of Angélique, Valère returns to
the table with renewed confidence.
Préférée encounters Thomas, who is pleased that he has been unable to find his son in
the gambling hall. She leads him to the table where Angélique and Valère are playing.
Sécurité and Dorante re-emerge, both satisfied by their tryst.
Valère returns to the table and Angélique, in a gentlemanly manner, offers to split her
winnings with Valère to end the playing. Insulted, he draws out the portrait and offers it
as a wager. Angélique tries to argue him out of betting something so dear to him, but he
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responds that his honor is more important. At the same time, Betty mistakes Angélique
in disguise for Valère and hands her the letter from Argante.
A crowd has gathered around their table to see who will win the final hand. The cards
are thrown and Angélique triumphs, winning her own jeweled portrait from Valère. She
delivers the letter she received for him and reveals her disguise, telling Valère that she knew
it was he all along, and leaves. Thomas, who has also been watching, disowns his son.
Valère, broke once again, reads the letter from Argante. Believing that her marriage proposal is the only option left to him, Valère goes to find her and accept her offer.
Thomas finds Hector, thanks him for his loyalty to his son, and apologizes that he will
now be unemployed. Hector, however, produces a huge wad of money and announces that
he did not in fact lose at the roulette table, but won 20 times the initial amount. Taking
Thomas’s advice, Hector goes to find a wife.
Argante finally finds Betty and learns that the letter has been delivered. She is so flustered that she drops her disguise and runs headlong into Fauxpas, who, upon seeing her,
reverts to his stammering awkward self. Now able to see through his shyness, she reassures
him and leaves to find Valère. Fauxpas, still jealous, follows.
Dorante finally asks Angélique to marry him, but, although disappointed by Valère, she
refuses Dorante’s offer. He runs off to find comfort with Sécurité.
Valère finds Argante, who now recants her offer of marriage and professes her love for
someone else. Fauxpas, seeing them together and misunderstanding the situation, challenges Valère to a duel. Valère tries to explain that Argante has in fact chosen Fauxpas as
her true love, so there is no need for a duel, but, in despair that gambling has ruined his
life, Valère begs Fauxpas to run him through with his sword. Amid the ensuing chaos,
Betty and Hector discover each other and agree to marry, while Sécurité and Dorante agree
to play another round of “pokey poke.”
Fauxpas insists on following through with the duel and Valère incites Fauxpas, hoping
he will put an end to his misery. Angélique intervenes on Valère’s behalf, however, still
insisting that he can be reformed, and persuades everyone to forgive him. Angélique suggests that they wait a year before marrying, to give Valère a chance to prove that he is truly
reformed. Valère vows to change his ways. A frenzy of betting breaks out, as the company
wagers on the chances of Valère’s success. The Game continues, uninterrupted.
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a brief biography of freyda thomas
orn and raised in Philadelphia, Freyda Thomas has been, at
one time or another in her life, an actor, playwright, college
instructor, high school French teacher, big band vocalist, cruise ship
chanteuse, banjo bandleader, realtor, office manager, dog walker,
and nanny. To celebrate the millennium and add to the initials after
her name (b.a., m.a.) she went back to school and earned an m.f.a.
in playwriting from California Institute of the Arts, completing 47
credits in three semesters and graduating with a 3.95 grade average.
She was older than most of the teachers. The Gamester was her
thesis project and had its world premiere at Chicago’s prestigious
Freyda Thomas
Northlight Theatre, playing to sold-out houses and rave reviews
before its author even graduated. The play was also a finalist for the Susan Smith
Blackburn Women’s Playwriting Award in 2000, and was produced by The Repertory
Theatre of St. Louis in March 2003.
Thomas is also the translator/adaptor of Molière’s sendup of Women’s Lib, The Learned
Ladies, which had its world premiere off Broadway in 1991 starring Jean Stapleton,
followed by a glorious a.c.t. production in 1993, directed by Carey Perloff and also featuring Stapleton. In 1996 Thomas’s translation/adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe (Tartuffe: Born
Again), featuring the infamous religious hypocrite as a televangelist, had its world premiere
on Broadway starring John Glover. She is also the author of Regnard’s The Heir
Transparent, which had its world premiere at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1986
and was a first alternate in the 1986 American College Theatre Festival. The Will Geer
Theatricum Botanicum produced The Heir Transparent in 1988; Florida Studio Theatre
produced it in 1993. Both productions were popular and critical successes. Both of
Thomas’s Molière adaptations are published by Samuel French, Inc. Her new Molière
adaptation, School for Trophy Wives, a Hollywood romp, is available for consideration, in
case there is anyone reading this who works at a regional theater.
As an actor, Thomas has appeared on sitcoms, in made-for-television movies, on
commercials, on and off Broadway, and in regional and dinner theaters in 28 states. As a
singer, she has entertained audiences from New York to Bora Bora. Her longest and most
satisfying profession was that of vocalist with her father, Eddie Shaw, and his orchestra,
which she began at the age of 12 and continued until his death in 1986.
Thomas divides her time between Los Angeles and Southern France.
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an interview with the playwright
T
he following is an interview between Freyda Thomas, the author of The Gamester, and
one of her muses, transcribed by the playwright at 3 a.m. on February 12, 2003. We hope it
will serve to answer any questions that may arise regarding the genesis of this work.
muse: what motivated you to write
freyda thomas: Revenge.
THE GAMESTER ?
would you elaborate?
I had just returned to l.a. from my first Broadway production (as a playwright).
which play?
Tartuffe: Born Again. It was—let me be diplomatic here—somewhat on the dark side of
successful. Utterly despondent about my first foray up to the citadel, I thought I would at
least parlay my newfound title, “Broadway Playwright,” into something that would extricate me from Admin Agony. So I applied for several playwriting grants, also for admission
to the UCLA graduate playwriting program. I used the first 30 pages of The Gamester as my
proposed project and sent it to upwards of 15 different grant offerings. Not only did I not
receive a single grant, I didn’t get into ucla either. Not even an interview. Obviously, being
a Broadway playwright did not offer the perks I had imagined. Teeth gnashing, I decided
I would show them all and I wrote The Gamester anyway, 20 minutes every night for nine
months while I was working full time in the above-mentioned purgatorial position. I
finished Act i right before Christmas and sent it to a director friend whose opinion I
valued, to see whether I should continue or not. With unbounded enthusiasm, she assured
me that I must finish it. I wrote Act ii in four days over Christmas ’97.
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so you had already begun this play?
Yes.
how did you find it?
Rummaging through the decaying annals of the central library in New York City.
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who is regnard?
A post-Molière wannabe who wrote plays with good skeletal plots, in verse, the genre of
his day. He actually has a bust in the lobby of the Comédie-Française in Paris, not far from
the hermetically sealed chair that Molière sat in to perform The Imaginary Invalid on the
night he died. He was pretty good looking. Regnard, I mean. So was Molière.
what attracted you to this play?
The subject matter.
gambling?
Compulsive gambling.
why?
My father and my grandfather before him suffered from this particular compulsion. They
ruined their lives with it, and the lives of some of their loved ones.
you?
Obviously not, here I am with a major production in a large prestigious regional theater,
the third one in four years. Two more and I can retire to Provence.
so your father’s compulsion didn’t cause you grief?
I didn’t say that. But it did teach me to be self-reliant, out of necessity. We never had any
money.
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do you gamble?
I enter contests. I get a lot of junk e-mail. But I never gamble with money. If there’s a gene,
I didn’t get it.
let ’s talk about the play.
My pleasure. It’s one of my favorites.
is this an adaptation or an original play?
That depends.
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on what?
On how you word the title page. If it says, “The Gamester, by Jean-François Regnard, translated and adapted by Freyda Thomas,” it’s an adaptation. If it says, “The Gamester, by
Freyda Thomas, based on a creaky old play by Jean-François Regnard,” then it’s an
original play. Language is powerful.
which do you consider THE GAMESTER to be?
At a certain point in the adaptive process, depending on the material you’re working with,
the play may lose so much resemblance to its original source that it becomes a new entity.
Molière gave me such great material to begin with that I consider my two Molière adaptations to be just that. From Regnard[’s Le Joueur] I took the skeletal plot, which I took
and rewrote. None of the language comes from the original version. Regnard also gave me
far too many characters for a 21st century production, most of them one-dimensional cardboard clowns. So the cast had to be cut down as far as possible, and in some cases two characters were combined into one. I had to do a lot of work fleshing out their personalities.
for example?
Valère is totally unlikable in his first incarnation. You have to want him to succeed for the
play to work. And I just could not write another crafty servant, we’ve all seen that, so I
created Hector, a naive yet clever foil for his master. Then there is the character of Mme
Sécurité. In Regnard’s opus, she comes in for her scene, Valère turns her down, and she
leaves, never to be heard from again in the play. I thought she was too potentially wonderful a character to be left with a cameo role. As the play evolved she became the
spokesperson.
why her?
Two reasons: She is very comfortable in her own skin and can therefore be objective about
everyone else’s compulsions. In case you didn’t notice, everyone in this play is addicted to
something or other. The second reason is I envision some famous actress who is now “of a
certain age” playing the role when the play goes to Broadway.
who?
Oh, Meryl Streep might be nice.
what else is different?
The ending.
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in what way?
I don’t want to reveal the ending before people have seen the play. Where would the
surprise be? I’ll say this much: In Regnard’s version, it was BORING! So I borrowed a
little Shakespeare.
which one?
I leave it to this knowledgeable audience to discover that. Perhaps we can all place bets as to
which Shakespeare I stole from and give a prize. Oh, that would be gambling, wouldn’t it?
how do you feel about stealing plots?
Molière stole most of his plots from the Romans; if it was good enough for him, it’s good
enough for me. And he didn’t even give them credit! Besides, I haven’t heard from Molière
or Regnard’s lawyers so far. Keep your fingers crossed.
let ’s talk about france in 1696 and the united states in 2004.
What is there to talk about?
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differences and similarities.
Well, they spoke French, not English, the hair was bigger, and the clothes took up more
room, at least on the women. They wore a lot of makeup like we do. Even the men. They
didn’t live as long. They didn’t have as many toys to play with as we do—tvs and video
games—so obviously the leisure class looking for things to occupy all that extra time had
to rely almost exclusively on sex and lies—no videotape—and les jeux. And if you remember the plot of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, those people were so bored they had to make up
scandals and dramas to keep themselves entertained. Lucky us, we have television to do
that. Oh, they also had theater, dance, and music, all three frequently combined in a single
evening of entertainment, but mostly they had gambling halls. I suspect that women
especially enjoyed this divertissement because it helped them forget their pain.
pain from what?
All that uncomfortable wiry underwear they had to put on every day. I had to wear that
stuff once in a play. I know.
what about today?
Underwear is very comfortable.
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i mean the gambling thing.
Ah. Well, I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been to Atlantic City and Las Vegas and I’ve
seen it all in action.
i thought you didn’t gamble.
I don’t. Actually, that is not entirely true. When my father was at the height of his compulsion in 1980 I was working on a cruise ship as a chanteuse. We stopped in Curaçao one
morning. Right there in the port there were casinos that opened at 11 a.m. I went in and
bought five dollars’ worth of quarters to play the slot machines. I wanted to understand
what drove my father to do what he did. In five minutes I had won $40. In ten minutes I
had lost all of it, including the five dollars. I walked out.
did you figure out the mystery?
Not really. It is easy to understand why people gamble occasionally, just as it is to understand why they would drink occasionally, go to a movie occasionally, or get together with
friends to play bridge occasionally. But as to why some, indeed many, can’t stop? If I could
answer that, I’d be on the cover of next week’s Time. I have watched the frozen faces of the
hundreds of thousands of people who frequent the casinos, whose arms seem to be welded
to the handles of the slot machines. They don’t look happy, I’ll tell you that, even when
quarters drop out in their laps. But they don’t do it for happiness. I think they do it to stop
the chattering in their heads that comes from despair, misery, feelings of worthlessness, and
pain. There are always a lot of wheelchairs in the room.
but they are not the leisure class, like the gamblers in 17thcentury paris.
That’s right, the high rollers are tucked away in private rooms. However, I used to sing for
them with my father’s band, and their faces were as expressionless as that of their downstairs neighbors. They didn’t look happy either.
that sounds so serious.
It’s very serious.
and yet you wrote a comedy.
Yes, I did.
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why?
Because I can. Laughter is the best medicine. Molière taught me that.
what about those rhymed couplets?
Fun, aren’t they? Everybody loves rhymes.
from whence comes this facility?
I think it is a combination of having a strong musical background and having sung for 30
years with my father’s dance band. Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin, plus all the
Broadway musical masters of the last century, not one of them ever wrote a lazy rhyme in
their lyrics. And I know them all. Plus I can hear the rhythm of the lines, thanks to the
music my father provided for me.
so your life with him was not all grief?
Goodness, no. Most of it was very joyful. I am grateful for the gifts he gave me, for all that
wonderful music and for the time we had together. For that matter, I’m grateful to Regnard
for providing me with a pretty solid skeleton on which I could build a theatrical body. And
I’m really grateful that you finally came back. I hope you’ll stick around. I’m working on
something new.
what is it?
That’s for the next interview.
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“He who does not delight in Regnard is not worthy of admiring Molière.”
—Voltaire
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a brief biography of jean-françois regnard
ean-François Regnard was born in Paris
on February 8, 1655. His parents came
from a long line of established and prosperous French merchants, his father in the
salt-fish trade and his mother’s family in
mercerie, which included dress goods,
gloves, and hats. From a family of nine
children, of whom only Regnard and his
four elder sisters survived, Regnard was
raised by his mother and sisters after his
father died when he was little more than
two years old. His mother was a shrewd
businesswoman in her own right, and after
the passing of her husband she presided
over the family fortune competently
enough to ensure a comfortable lifestyle
for her children.
Most likely educated at one of the
Jean-François Regnard (© Leonard de Selva/CORBIS)
better schools available to those of his
class, Regnard developed a sound knowledge of Latin, some Greek, and a fairly extensive
reading of the classics. At 15 he apprenticed with the wealthy Charpentier dress goods corporation before beginning work with his brother-in-law’s firm, which traded in jewelry
and exports as well as dress goods.
At the age of 17 or 18, Regnard came into a sizeable portion of his inheritance and was
able for nearly a decade to indulge in a personal passion for travel. First touring to Italy
and Turkey, with his respectable upbringing, good looks, and substantial means, he was
granted entry into good society throughout his journey.
Regnard was in his early 20s, traveling by ship with a companion through the
Mediterranean, when they were pursued, attacked, and taken captive by Algerian pirates.
Sold into slavery in Algiers, Regnard suffered under the cruel treatment of his captors—
although his promise of a rich ransom guaranteed him minimal labor and the occasional
opportunity to bathe. After seven months in captivity, the ransom was paid by his family
J
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and he was freed. Less than two years later he embarked on another extensive voyage, this
time through the Netherlands, returning via Eastern Europe.
Upon returning to France at the age of 28, Regnard began to think of settling down, and
in 1683 he purchased the post of treasurer of France, a profitable position he would hold for
20 years. His occupation was not demanding, however, allowing him the freedom to hunt, to
enjoy the diversions of Paris (including gambling, at which Regnard was rather successful),
and to begin writing a series of books about the adventures he enjoyed during his travels.
Regnard’s writing, which began as an amusement for friends, quickly grew into an entertaining and productive endeavor. Among his friends were a group of dilettantes who dallied
as playwrights and librettists for the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the Théâtre-Français (ComédieFrançaise), and the Opéra. Regnard had a gift for comedic writing, and, beginning with collaborations with such friends as Charles Rivière Dufresny, a similarly well-off companion
(who happened to suffer an incurable, albeit unlucky, passion for gambling), he was soon
writing short pieces on his own in French for the Italian commedia dell’arte troupe performing at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, an association that would last some ten years.
Regnard’s early plays were light, satiric, and lyric comedies written in prose and
influenced in style and plot by the ancient classics, Italian comedies, and the work of the
great 17th-century French dramatist Molière. Regnard achieved success with his collaborations, primarily those written with Dufresny, and they eventually began writing extensively for the Théâtre-Français, including the early one-act comedies Attendez-moi sous
l’orme (1694), La Sérénade (1694), and Le Bal, ou le bourgeois de Falaise (1696).
First produced on December 19, 1696, the five-act verse comedy Le Joueur represents
Regnard’s most sophisticated and brilliant independent writing. A comedy of manners and
character, Le Joueur satirizes 17th-century French society’s frenzied mania for games of
chance and paints a portrait of a young man from a good family living a shallow and
purposeless life, completely under the thrall of his addiction.
Regnard continued writing successfully for the Théâtre-Français for the next dozen
years, producing such popular works as Les Folies amoureuses (1704), Les Menechmes (1705),
and Le Légataire universel (1708).
Little is known of Regnard’s personal life, other than that he cultivated the pleasures of
society and enjoyed the good things in life. He never married but appears to have taken
part in feminine company, though if any lasting relationships were ever made, they remain
unknown.
Regnard died unexpectedly and somewhat mysteriously on September 4, 1709. It is speculated that he suffered from acute indigestion, and, after taking inappropriate medication,
suffered a fatal seizure, though the actual cause of death will probably never be known.
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gambling in 17th-century france and
england
by paul walsh
he history of gambling is as old as the history of humankind. Chance has been associated with everything from divinity to devilry, just as attempts to predict the vagaries
of chance have been associated with divine or devilish attempts to control what cannot or
should not be controlled. The association of luck and providence gave special currency to
gambling in some circles in the 17th century, while tempting fate was decried in others.
Gambling gained particular and widespread favor as a social activity among the gentry
and aristocracy in 17th-century France and England. As royal power was consolidated at
the courts of London and Paris, and the rules and expectations of “courtly culture” were
promulgated in defense of an all-powerful monarch. In mid 17th-century France, for example, Cardinal Mazarin, the meticulous and politically brilliant regent of Louis xiv, followed the lead of Maria de Medici in attempting to tame the rebelliousness of French
nobles by tying them to the court of the Sun King. He lured the French nobility from their
ancestral lands and responsibilities by tying
prominence and precedence in the kingdom to
service at court. Once the nobles were in Paris
or Versailles, Mazarin “corrupted them with
gambling, exhausted them with dissipation, and
made their destinies dependent on their capacity to please” the king.1
Etiquette became a means of governing, and
gambling became an important part of courtly
etiquette. Since gambling was considered
immoral only for those who could not afford to
lose, courtiers were expected to defend their
social position, demonstrate their wealth, and
exercise their conviviality at the high-stakes
tables in private homes or at court-sponsored
gambling salons where they participated in
games of cards, dice, and the spinning-wheel
“hoca”.
T
Fortuna, by Behaim (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
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In his history of gambling, The Gaming Table (1870), Andrew Steinmetz cites the French
historian St. Pierre about the early history of gambling at the court of Louis xiv:
The year 1648 was the era of card-playing at court. Cardinal Mazarin played
deep and with finesse, and easily drew in the king and queen to countenance
this new entertainment, so that every one who had any expectation at court
learned to play at cards. Soon after, the humour changed, and games of chance
came into vogue—to the ruin of many considerable families: this was likewise
very destructive to health, for besides the various violent passions it excited,
whole nights were spent at this execrable amusement. The worst of all was that
card-playing, which the court had taken from the army, soon spread from the
court into the city, and from the city pervaded the country towns.
Before this there was something done for improving conversation; every one
was ambitious of qualifying himself for it by reading ancient and modern
books; memory and reflection were much more exercised. But on the introduction of gambling men likewise left off tennis, billiards, and other games of skill,
and consequently became weaker and more sickly, more ignorant, less polished,
and more dissipated.
The women, who till then had commanded respect, accustomed men to
treat them familiarly, by spending the whole night with them at play. They were
often under the necessity of borrowing either to play, or to pay their losings;
and how very ductile and complying they were to those of whom they had to
borrow was well known.2
16
Among the games of chance that came into vogue was betting on the “spinning wheel”
in a game called hoca. The hoca wheel consisted of a circular flat bed with 40 numbered
pockets around the periphery (1–36 and three pockets numbered 0) and a spindle projecting upward through the center. A six-spoked rimless wheel pivoted on the spindle. A ball
was placed between the spokes (which were about half the radius of the bed), so that when
the wheel was spun, the ball was forced clockwise around the bed and also thrown simultaneously by centrifugal force toward the numbered pockets on the edge. A rim around the
edge of the bed prevented the ball from flying off.
While banned in Italy by Popes Urban vii and Innocent xi, hoca was sponsored on a
grand scale in France by Cardinal Mazarin, who “saw in it an easy way to increase the fortunes of the youthful Louis xiv,” as Alan Wykes writes in The Complete Illustrated Guide to
Gambling: “He authorized the opening of innumerable casinos in France and then
collected the profits for the royal treasury (and no doubt the Mazarin treasury, too, for he
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was immensely rich when he died in 1661). Since there were three zeros among the 40
pockets, and all the money on the table went to the bank every time the ball fell into a zero,
the profits were ludicrously large.”3
Another early roulette game, especially popular with fashionable ladies, was e.o. (evenodd), also called roly-poly. Here the wheel (with 40 compartments) was set in the
middle of a round table marked for the placing of bets. Twenty of the compartments were
marked e, and the other twenty o. If the ball came to rest on an o compartment, the bank
took all e bets, and vice versa. An e.o. casino was set up at the English spa resort of
Tunbridge Wells in 1739, where the game was considered part of the cure. Boule became
popular at European casinos in the 18th century.
The frenzy of gambling at the court of Louis xiv led to stories of excess and extravagance, as John Laurence Carr notes:
On Christmas Day 1678, for example, the royal mistress Montespan lost
700,000 écus, and on another occasion the king’s brother was obliged to pawn
family jewels to pay off gaming debts. Far from discouraging gambling, the
king found that it served his financial purposes. So gambling continued at a
prodigal rate. In 1675 the king paid off his brother’s debts amounting to 40,000
écus, whilst the queen continued to lose a considerable sum every time she
played cards—so much so indeed that these losses kept from destitution the
Princesse d’Elbeuf, who was poor and perhaps dishonest. In vain did the leading preachers of the time reprove the gamblers of France. Bourdaloue, for
instance, pointed out that things had got out of hand, that gambling was a passion, a rage, a fury, leading to neglect of duty and of household routine; to
squandering of income, to cheating, to sharp practices and despair. But he was
ignored. After all, it was the chief amusement in the palace of His Majesty. It
was also one which excused a man the most offensive of peccadillos—for
example, the Marquis d’Heudicourt’s habit of spitting over his shoulder whilst
playing cards, without troubling to ascertain whether others were in the line of
fire. Another of the many privileges of being a gambler was that one was
allowed to be seated, for normally this was denied in the palace.4
Louis xiv did try to restrict gambling to the aristocracy and nobility, criminalizing gambling among “those whose losses would ruin their families, wreck commerce, fill the jails,
and generally disrupt the good order of the realm.”5 The social elite of Paris gambled in
their palaces and town homes or in sumptuous gambling salons; the less affluent
frequented illegal gambling dens in the backrooms of coffee houses and jeux de paume
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Louis XIV at billiards, from The Compleat Gamester, by Charles Cotton (1674)
18
(tennis courts that had been built to meet the craze for indoor tennis in the first half of the
century). These disused jeux de paume often used billiard tables to mask illegal games of
cards and trictrac (backgammon) or a hoca wheel.
The craze for gambling at cards, dice, and wheel spread from France to England
following the defeat of the puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of monarchy in 1660. The vogue for all things French at the court of Charles ii led quickly to the
emulation of courtly culture that expected courtiers to gamble with reckless abandon. From
court, the vogue for gambling spread quickly to the city where, as it was said, “unless one
gambled freely it was quite impossible to be counted as a gentleman, or for that matter, a
lady of fashion.” This is the point that the character Dorimant makes in George Etherege’s
The Man of Mode (1676), when he quips that “the deep-play is now in private homes”
(iii.ii), relishing a pun that equates gambling at cards and sexual play.
Gambling was not criminalized in England until well into the 18th century, but the disastrous effects of gambling on the aristocracy and gentry—including rapid transfers of
property away from the English aristocracy and the disruption of commerce—led to
attempts to curb betting by restricting the recovery of gambling debts. In the 1670s
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Charles ii, who himself loved racing and gambling and is credited with setting down the
rules for bowls, decreed that anyone who lost more than 100 pounds at one time gambling
could not be compelled to pay the debt. In fact, the winner was bound to forfeit three times
the amount (16th Statute of Charles ii, cha. 7). In 1710, Queen Anne expanded upon this
prohibition, decreeing that all bonds, securities, and mortgages given to pay gambling
debts were legally void. Furthermore, any person who lost more than ten pounds gambling
was entitled to receive his losses back from the winner. If the winner refused to restore the
losses, he could be compelled by the courts to pay a fine totaling three times the disputed
sum (9th Statute of Anne, cha. 14). Queen Anne’s strictures made gambling debts
unrecoverable under common law in the English-speaking world. Furthermore, anyone
who loaned someone money, knowing that the money would be used for gambling, was
making a contract that could not be enforced.
These restrictions on the recovery of gambling debts did little, however, to curb the
widespread popularity of gambling or the extralegal collection of gambling debts.
Similarly, stricter statutes that forbade gambling altogether during the reigns of George i
and George ii had little effect. According to the treatise on the evils of cards and gaming
included in Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1809): “By the 12th statute of George ii, the
games of faro, hazard, &c. are declared to be lotteries, subjecting the persons who keep
them to a penalty of 200 pounds, and those who play, to 50 pounds. One witness only is
necessary to prove the offence before a justice of the peace, who forfeits ten pounds if he
neglects his duty. By the 8th statute of George i, the keeper of a faro-table may be
prosecuted for a lottery, where the penalty is 500 pounds.” Still, gambling continued to be
popular, as Ackermann’s decried:
When a species of gambling, ruinous to the morals and to the fortunes of the
younger part of the community, who move in the middle and higher ranks of
life, is suffered to be carried on in direct opposition to a positive statute, surely
blame must be attached somewhere. When such abominable practices are
encouraged and sanctioned by high-sounding names, when sharpers and blacklegs find an easy introduction into the houses of persons of fashion, who assemble in multitudes together for the purpose of playing at the odious and
detestable games of hazard, which the legislature has stigmatized with such
marks of reprobation, it is time for the civil magistrate to step forward, and to
feel, that in doing that duty, which the laws of his country impose on him, he
is perhaps saving hundreds of families from ruin and destruction, and preserv-
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ing to the infants of thoughtless and deluded parents that property which is
their birthright.
Card games popular in fashionable England in the years following the Restoration
included the “noble Spanish game of l’Ombre,” the “ingenious game of Picquet” (or pit)
and the “genteel game of Cribbidge,” as well as whist (or whisk), English ruff, French ruff,
costly-colours, lanterloo, gleke (or gleek), bone ace, noddy, cribbidge-noddy, penneech,
post & pair, and bankafalet. Dice games, particularly the ancient games of hazard and
passage, were also popular, as was the spinning wheel (hoca, roly-poly, e.o.), and backgammon and its variants (Irish, ticktack, or trictrac). Descriptions of each of these games are
included in Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester (1674), which also includes discussion
of billiards and trucks (similar to billiards), bowling, chess, horse racing, archery, and
cock-fighting.6
1Erlanger, Philippe (2002). “Louis XIV,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Expanded Edition DVD.
2Steinmetz, Andrew (1870). The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, in All Times and Countries, Especially in England
and in France (London: Tinsley Brothers), 87–88 (Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library).
3Wykes, Alan (1964). The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.), 208–11.
4Carr, John Laurence (1966), Life in France under Louis XIV (London: Batsford), 50–51.
5Bernard, Leon (1970). The Emerging City: Paris in the Age of Louis XIV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 183.
6Cotton, Charles (1674). The Compleat Gamester, reprinted in Games and Gamesters of the Restoration (1930), ed. and intro.
Cyril Hughes Hartmann (London: G. Routledge and Sons).
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games
elow is a brief historical overview of the games mentioned by the characters of Freyda
Thomas’s The Gamester.
B
roulette
Although no one seems to know all of the details surrounding its origination and development, some form of roulette (French for “little wheel”) is probably as old as the wheel
itself. There are accounts of ancient Romans tipping their chariots on their sides and spinning one of the wheels for games of amusement. Several early versions of the game
appeared in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is believed that the noted French
scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who pioneered the study of the mathematical
field of probability, invented the mechanism in 1657 while experimenting with perpetual
motion devices.
écarté
From the French word for “separated” or “discarded,” écarté is a card game probably first
played in Paris salons in the first quarter of the 18th century (and the game Valère and
Angélique play together in Act ii of The Gamester). Écarté is an extension of a very old card
game known as La Triomphe or French-ruff, a relative of English ruff-and-honors, dating
to medieval times, which is also the parent of whist. These games involve a series of tricks
played by two to four players in which the trump card is used. This card belonging to the
trump suit beats all other cards of other suits for the period during which its rank lasts.
dice
The American game we know as “craps” is a descendant of an ancient game called “hazard,”
and the origins of both are a matter of debate. Hazard is claimed to have been invented by
the Englishman Sir William of Tyre and his knights during the Crusades. It is said to have
been invented by crusaders as a pastime with which to entertain themselves during the long
siege of a castle called Hazarth or Asart in 1125 a.d. The Encyclopedia Britannica, however,
reports that the name is derived from the Arabic words al zar or azzah, meaning simply “the
dice,” which implies that the game is Arabic in origin. Whoever invented it, hazard became
a hugely popular British game. It is claimed that after the French took up hazard, the name
was changed to “craps,” a corruption of the term used to designate a losing throw of 2. There
is no documented evidence to support this, however.
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whist
A development of earlier games (triumph and ruff ) known in the 16th century, whist originated in England. In 1742, Edmond Hoyle published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist,
but it was Henry Jones (pseud. Cavendish) who first compiled a complete system of
scientific whist play in 1862. The game spread to other European countries in the 19th
century, and tournaments were organized. Whist gave rise in the late 19th century to the
game of bridge, which quickly surpassed its parent game in popularity.
ombre
A fast-moving trick-taking game with an illustrious history, ombre was developed in Spain
in the early 17th century. A three-player version, originally called hombre renegado, spread
rapidly across Europe and during the 17th and 18th centuries became the premier card
game, occupying a position of prestige similar to that of bridge today. Ombre rapidly grew
in popularity and gained notoriety as a game of the French and English courts.
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A Gaming Table, frontispiece to Lives of the
Gamesters, by Theophilus Lucas (1714)
backgammon
The oldest known game in recorded history,
backgammon can be traced back thousands of
years b.c.e. to board games played by the
Egyptians, Sumerians, and Romans and is
believed to have originated in Mesopotamia during the Persian empire. The game was typically
played on a hard surface such as wood, using
stones as markers and dice made from bones,
stones, wood, or pottery. The first mention of the
game in English print appeared in 1025 c.e.; then
known as “nard” or “tables,” it was popular in
English taverns throughout the middle ages. The
game was even banned for some time due to its
gambling nature, until the reign of Elizabeth i.
The term backgammon is said to have been
derived in 1645 from either the Saxon baec (“back”)
gamen (“game”) or the Welsh bac or bach (“little”)
gammon or cammaun (“battle”). In 1743 Edmond
Hoyle codified the rules of play in his Treatise on
Backgammon, the first official set of modern rules.
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baccarat
Deriving its name from the Italian word for “zero” and dating back to Italy in the middle
ages, baccarat was first played with the cards of a tarot deck. From Italy, baccarat made its
way to France, where it became popular among the aristocracy and developed into two
games: baccarat banque (or à deux tableaux), in which three decks of cards are used, and baccarat chemin de fer (railway), in which six decks are sued. The latter is closest to the game
played in today’s casinos, with a few minor variations. (The game was introduced to Las
Vegas casinos at the Dunes in 1950.) What is now known as “American baccarat” is a variation that was picked up in England and later spread to South America.
billiards
The French word bille (“stick”) could provide the first syllable of the name of this game,
although many countries—including England, China, Italy, and Spain, as well as France—have
been credited with its invention. Nothing is really known about the origin of billiards, however.
It may be inferred that it developed from a variety of games in which propelling a ball was a
main feature. The earliest references to the game in Europe occur in the 15th century.
A commonly held belief is that billiards is related to the game of croquet, believed to
have been first played by 13th-century French peasants, who used crudely fashioned mallets to hit wooden balls through hoops made of willow branches. The game was then
brought indoors and raised to table height for convenience. The wood surface of the table
was covered with rough green cloth (presumably to simulate the grassy playing surface of
the outdoor game), and the table was given a rim to prevent the balls from rolling off.
Carom, or French billiards, is played with three balls on a table with no pockets. The
other principal games are played on tables with six pockets, one at each corner and one in
each of the long sides; these games include English billiards, played with three balls;
snooker, played with 21 balls and a cue ball; and pocket billiards, or pool, played with 15
balls and a cue ball. There are numerous varieties of each game—particularly of carom and
pocket billiards.
quinze
In this game the desired sum total for the cards is 15—quinze in French. The game reached
the height of its popularity in France in the 18th century, though it had already been played
for many years. In the casinos, princes, dukes, marquis, and prime ministers all crowded
the quinze tables, often hiding their faces behind masks to conceal their emotions and
identities. The French game vingt-et-un, a close relative of quinze, crossed the ocean to the
United States in the late 1800s, eventually becoming the modern day 21 or black jack.
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the gamester observed
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gambling gets no respect
Historians and literary critics of whatever persuasion have given it at best passing and condescending attention. Yet of all the social practices characterizing 18th-century France in
its transition from ancien régime absolutism to revolution and democracy, few were more
ubiquitous than gambling. King and court gambled. Rich and poor gambled. City dweller
and peasant gambled.
To study gambling in ancien régime France is, in one sense, to study a new chapter in
the history of the circulation of wealth and the increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon of
money. Gambling, especially high-stakes gambling (a concept which waxes and wanes to
accommodate every purse) was one of the first and purest forms of the circulation of
money. To study gambling is to look at how different social groups related to this circulation of money—how they responded to being redefined, at least within the context of the
game, by the cards they drew and the points they
threw.
Gambling seemed to be everywhere. And this in
spite of its prohibition by a series of royal and parliamentary edicts that appeared with almost drum-roll
regularity, but whose very repetition testified to their
futility. In Paris action could be found in any number
of different settings. Because they were ideal for police
surveillance and justified as a kind of public safety
valve, there were ten authorized maisons de jeux in the
capital where gambling was allowed so long as it was
on what were considered to be jeux de commerce, as
opposed to jeux de hasard, in which the skill of the
gambler was seen as playing a larger role than the
purely chance-driven turning of a card or picking of a
number. In fact, the jeux de commerce usually served as
little more than a front for the jeux de hasard played in
the backrooms of the same establishments.
Cosutme sketch for Valère by costume designer Beaver Bauer
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If the whole of France gambled with abandon in spite of what the law might say, this
was in no small part due to the example set at court. While Mazarin is usually credited
with bringing with him from Italy the fashion of playing cards, the real heyday of royal
gambling dates from the reign of Louis xiv and the creation of Versailles. His three-hourlong appartements du roi, held thrice weekly, were for the sole purpose of gambling. During
the reign of Louis xv, his daughter Adelaide organized the king’s public game until that
privilege passed to the dauphin’s new bride. While Louis xvi had little taste for gambling
and became decidedly peevish when others discussed their latest win or loss in his
presence, the queen, Marie Antionette, regularly presided over games of dizzyingly high
stakes in the Salon d’Hercule.
What was it about high-stakes gambling that made it so integral a part of the social
rituals of the most influential groups within the ancien régime? Depending on how one
looks at it, gambling was a consuming passion or a leisure activity that was part of everyone’s life over a long and important period of the French monarchy.
The time roughly corresponding to the reign of
Louis xiv [1643–1715] was characterized by an attitude toward gambling that reflected the intimate
union of the church and state. Gambling was condemned for explicitly religious reasons, and that
condemnation was enforced by civil authority.
Gambling was wrong, so the arguments went,
because all were placed on earth to merit salvation
through devotion to their creator and productive
work for their fellows. Gambling and its concern
with material wealth were antithetical to these
duties. In addition to frustrating the purpose of
human existence, gambling sinfully abused and trivialized a divine providence seen as presiding over all
earthly events, the turning of every card and the roll
of every die. Gambling even for small stakes was
wrong, the moralists proclaimed, because the money
so wagered could have been far more suitably used
Costume sketch for Dorante by costume designer Beaver Bauer
25
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as alms for the poor. The tension and frustration of gambling all too frequently made it an
occasion for blasphemy and superstition.
During the period from the Regency to the Revolution, the religious arguments gave
way to a quite different and distinctly sociocentric discourse. Gambling came more and
more to be seen as a secular danger, an activity not so much threatening the divine order
as promising the financial ruin of gamblers and their families. Because it reduced all players to the common denominator of the money they could wager, gambling also came to be
seen as a dangerous corrosive to the sense of social order and rank.
During the French aristocracy of the ancien régime there were three tests by which the
prestige of a noble was assessed. The first was the social status of the man and his family as
defined by genealogical pedigree. The second test turned on the influence and social power
of the properly pedigreed noble: the extent of the clientele beholden to him and the importance of the patrons from whom he might expect protection. The third and most tangible
index of social prestige was based on the lifestyle of the individual courtier. The aristocratic
disdain for money and for the debasing
bourgeois world of commerce and trade
received practical expression in the lavishness of their daily lives. A high noble lived
more spectacularly and wastefully than a
lesser one, and the king had to outshine
everyone in the splendor of his household,
his prodigality, and his generosity.
As such examples demonstrate, the
essential trait of the noble’s lifestyle was a
disdain for any limit on personal prerogative by reason of cost. Not only was
extravagance the rule but any sign of personal concern with money was potentially
derogating. Ideas like balancing the
budget and living within one’s means
were bourgeois preoccupations which had
no place in the noble ethic. The debts
incurred in consolidating aristocratic
prestige, such as those for shoes, dresses,
Cosutme sketch for Mme Sécurité by costume designer
Beaver Bauer
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and coiffeurs, were inevitably owed to people of inferior social status, who could be, and
quite often were, treated as such.
There was, however, one all-important exception to the aristocracy’s cavalier treatment
of debts. It was the duty of a gentleman always to pay his gambling debts, and that before
any other kind of debt. One of the most interesting references to the special status of gambling debts follows: “One might ask why gambling debts are so rigorously honored in polite
society while the same people often feel little scruple in neglecting far more sacred debts.
The answer lies in the fact that in gambling one accepts a man’s word in a situation where
there is no legal recourse. A trust has been extended to which one must respond. In other
circumstances, the person could be compelled by the courts to meet his obligations.”
Gambling, in the eyes of the law, held the peculiar legal status of an activity that was
toléré mais non permis “tolerated but not permitted”. This meant that as far as the state was
concerned, gambling debts had no legal status. To pay such a debt was equivalent, from a
legal standpoint, to bestowing a gift: while the giver could not ask for the return of what
he had already given, he could not be obliged on the basis of a promise to give more than
he in fact chose. As obligations backed only by the value of one’s word, gambling debts
inevitably obliged the noble. The true aristocrat recognized a gambling debt as binding
because in doing so he was not submitting to the dictates of any externally imposed law
but acting entirely of his own free choice. To pay one’s gambling debts said nothing of the
status of the person to whom they were owed, but it said everything of the value of the
debtor’s freely given word. Gambling in the ancien régime existed within what for us is a
startling configuration of values. Knowing how to gamble nobly meant knowing how to
lose. The ethical value of gambling became negative only when one gambled to win money.
...
The greatest evil of gambling, one threatening to all regardless of their station, was
defined as its unleashing of uncontrollable passions. To gamble was to risk losing all selfcontrol, to create a situation in which one literally did not know what one would do next.
Trying to analyze gambling’s power to inspire such disarray in otherwise rational individuals, [17th-century Huguenot writer Jean] Barbeyrac hypothesized that gambling should
be understood not as a single passion but as a monstrously self-perpetuating synthesis of
antithetical passions—desire and fear, hope and disappointment, joy and regret, anger and
hatred. It is that very trait that makes the passion for gambling so constant. The variety
and the vicissitudes of its movements forestall disgust while providing it with a perpetual
sustenance over which time holds no sway. To gamble was to render the self equally as
unpredictable as the cards and numbers on which one bet. Absorbed entirely within the
impassioned present of the wager, the gambler lost all sense of past and future. Abstracted
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from the prevailing laws of cause and effect, beyond prudence, uninterested in foresight,
the gambler became a figure of solipsistic idiosyncrasy closed to everything beyond the
immediate present. That state, measured against the calm ideal of a rationality shared by
all, could only be a self-inflicted madness which men of reason must refuse, condemn, and
extirpate from themselves and all around them.
Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, by Thomas M. Kavanagh (1993)
28
of gaming in general, or an ordinary described
Gaming is an enchanting witchery, gotten betwixt idleness and avarice: an itching disease,
that makes some scratch the head, whilst others, as if they were bitten by a Tarantula, are
laughing themselves to death: or lastly, it is a paralytical distemper, which seizing the arm
the man cannot chuse but shake his elbow. It hath this ill property above all other vices,
that it renders a man incapable of prosecuting any serious action, and makes him always
unsatisfied with his own condition; he is either lifted up to the top of mad joy with success, or plung’d to the bottom of despair by misfortune, always in extreams, always in a
storm; this minute the gamester’s countenance is so serene and calm, that one would think
nothing could disturb it, and the next minute so stormy and tempestuous that it threatens
destruction to itself and others; and as he is transported with joy when he wins, so losing
he is tost upon the billows of a high swelling passion, till he hath lost sight of both of sense
and reason.
I have seen some dogs bite the stones which boys have thrown at them, not regarding
whence they were flung; so I have seen a losing gamester greedily gnawing the innocent
box, and sometimes tearing to pieces as an accessory to his throwing out; nor must the dice
go unpunished for not running his chance, and therefore in rage are thrown on the ground
to be kickt to and fro by everybody; and at last lookt upon no other than the fit companions of every saucy skip-jack.
Then fresh dice are called for, as thinking they will prove more kind than the former, or
as if they believed that some were good natur’d, others bad, and that every bale produced
different disposition. If these run cross too, the box-keeper shall not go without a horrid
execration, if for nothing else but that he lookt strictly to the cast, it may be conceiving that
his very eyes were capable of making them turn to his disadvantage. This restless man (the
miserable gamester) is the proper subject of every man’s pity. Restless, I call him, because
(such is the itch of the play) either winning or losing he can never rest satisfied, if he wins
he thinks to win more, if he loses he hopes to recover. To this man’s condition the saying
of Hannibal to Marcellus may be fitly applied, that nec bonam, nec malam fortunam ferre
potest, he could not be quiet either conqueror or conquered. Thus have I heard of some who
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with five pounds have won four hundred pounds in one night, and the next night have lost
it to a sum not half so much; others who have lost their estates and won them again with
addition, yet could not be quiet till they lost them irrecoverably.
And therefore fitly was that question propounded, Whether men in ships at sea were to
be accounted among the living or the dead, because there were but a few inches betwixt
them and drowning. The same [query] may be made of great gamesters, though their
estates be never so considerable, Whether they are to be esteemed poor or rich, since there
are but a few casts at dice betwixt a rich man (in that circumstance) and a beggar.
The Compleat Gamester,
by Charles Cotton (1674)
from the confession of richard
minster, a 17th-century aristocratic
english felon who was beheaded for
a long series of crimes
One night during Epiphany I suffered my most
grievous loss of money in the whole of my damned
life, and was forced to return to the world which I
am now to be quit of by my own damnation.
During that sennight I had lost and recouped
and lost again, and was much of an evenness in my
reckoning. My harlot’s jewels that she valued were
gone, but in a flux of generosity I had bought her
more and lain with her and ravished her in my joy
and her lewdness. But ever the craze was upon me
like a grumbling illness and perforce I went forth
again on the Saturday minded to lose all I possessed. Lose! I say—for in my recollections there
lurked the feeling of a beast, a fornicator suffering
a virgin to take his whim, at each toss of the dice
that lost me a fortune; a mounting turmoil within
me, retarded each time by a winning throw. . . .
I played with Mountgarde and Hilbery and
gained 90 guineas from them in an hour, taking
Cosutme sketch for Thomas by costume designer
Beaver Bauer
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Model of the set design for The Gamester by scenic designer Kate Edmunds
30
their notes because they were penniless. . . . My winnings sullened me, and in despair I
raised my stake. Still I won. And so in the main it went on through the night. At one
moment I had upward of 50,000 guineas owed me, and still I went on, throwing scarce a
losing die in all that time.
The room was in hubbub of calls of “Deuce!” “Trey!” and the like. All of us had taken
off our greatcoats and laid up our swords and the room was heady with the wine fumes and
tallow. It was a wild scene of depravity and in its midst I stood surrounded for my fortune,
some of the players touching me and rushing back to their own tables to see how their luck
fared then. I felt as though marching at some great triumph against fortune. But in my
heart I was despairing, for I was winning a battle I sought to lose.
But at last, toward morning (so I think; the notion of time was not with me) I gathered
up my winnings—notes, gold, jewels, perukes, and all that the losers had been able to summon to their aid in their losses and cried to them to hear my last stake.
I lost on the throw and can scarce describe the feeling of relief that overcame me. It was
like a solvent to the harsh world to which I must now return.
From The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling, by Alan Wykes (1964)
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the character of a gamester
Some say he was born with cards in his hands, others that he will die so, but certainly it is
all his life, and whether he sleeps or wakes he thinks of nothing else. He speaks the language of the game he plays at, better than the language of his own country; and can less
endure a solecism in that than this: he knows no judge but the groom-porter, no law but
that of the game [at] which he is so expert all appeal to him, as subordinate judges to the
supreme ones. He loves Winter more than Summer, because it affords more gamesters, and
Christmas more than any other time, because there is more gaming then. He gives more
willingly to the butler than to the poor-box, and is never more religious than when he prays
he may win. He imagines he is at play when he is at Church; he takes his prayer-book for
a pack of cards, and thinks he is shuffling when he turns over the leaves. This man will play
like Nero when his city is on fire, or like Archimedes when it is sacking, rather than interrupt his game. If play hath reduced him to poverty, then he is like one a drowning, who
fastens upon any thing next at hand. Amongst other of his shipwracks, he hath happily lost
shame, and this want supplies him. No man puts his brain to more use than he; for his life
is a daily invention, and each meal a new stratagem, and like a flie will boldly sup at every
man’s cup. He will offer you a quart of sack out of his joy to see you, and in requital of his
courtesie you can do no less than pay for it. His borrowings are like subsidies, each man a
shilling or two, as he can well dispend, which they lend him not with the hope to be repaid,
but that he will come no more. Men shun him at length as they do an infection, and having done with the aye as his cloaths to him, hung on as long as he could, at last drops off.
The Compleat Gamester, by Charles Cotton (1674)
gambling hell
The greater number of those who go to the watering-places, under the pretext of health,
only go after gamesters. In the States-general it is less the interest of the people than the
attraction of terrible gambling that brings together a portion of the nobility. The nature of
the play may be inferred from the name of the place at which it takes place in one of the
provinces—namely, Enfer (“hell”). This salon, so appropriately called, was in the hôtel of
the king’s commissioners in Bretagne. I have been told that a gentleman, to the great disgust of the noblemen present, and even of the bankers, actually offered to stake his sword.
This name of Enfers has been given to several gaming houses, some of them situated in
the interior of Paris, others in the environs.
People no longer blush, as did Caligula, at gambling on their return from the funeral of
their relatives or friends. A gamester, returning from the burial of his brother, where he had
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exhibited the signs of profound grief, played and won a considerable sum of money. “How
do you feel now?” he was asked. “A little better,” he replied, “this consoles me.”
All is excitement whilst I write. Without mentioning the base deeds that have been
committed, I have counted four suicides and a great crime.
Besides the licensed gaming houses, new ones are furtively established in the privileged
mansions of the ambassadors and representatives of foreign courts. Certain chevaliers
d’industrie recently proposed to a gentleman of quality, who had just been appointed
plenipotentiary, to hire an hôtel for him, and to pay the expenses, on condition that he
would give up to them an apartment and permit them to have valets wearing his livery!
This base proposal was rejected with contempt, because the Baron de—— is one of the
most honourable and enlightened men of the age.
The most difficult bargains are often amicably settled by a game. I have seen persons
gaming whilst taking a walk and whilst travelling in their carriages. People game at the
doors of the theatres; of course they gamble for the price of the ticket. In every possible
manner, and in every situation, the true gamester strives to turn every instant to profit.
If I relate what I have seen in the matter of play during sleep, it will be difficult to
understand me. A gamester, exhausted by fatigue, could not give up playing because he was
a loser; so he requested his adversary to play for him with his left hand, whilst he dozed
off and slept! Strange to say, the left hand of his adversary incessantly won, whilst he
snored to the sound of the dice!
I have just read in a newspaper [Journal de Politique, December 15, 1776] that two
Englishmen, who left their country to fight a duel in a foreign land, nevertheless played at
the highest stakes on the voyage; and having arrived on the field, one of them laid a wager
that he would kill his adversary. It is stated that the spectators of the affair looked upon it
as a gaming transaction.
In speaking of this affair I was told of a German, who, being compelled to fight a duel
on account of a quarrel at the gaming table, allowed his adversary to fire at him. He was
missed. He said to his opponent, “I never miss. I bet you a hundred ducats that I break
your right or left arm, just as you please.” The bet was taken, and he won.
I have found cards and dice in many places where people were in want of bread. I have
seen the merchant and the artisan staking gold by handfuls. A small farmer has just gamed
away his harvest, valued at 3000 francs.
De la passion du jeu, depuis les temps anciens jusqu’à nos jours, by J. Dusaulx (1779),
reprinted at http://www.888-gambling.com/ louis-15.html
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in defense of gambling
by dan seligman
ompulsive gambling is an overrated problem, and the latest research on gamblers
suggests we need to rethink it.
A curious thing about gambling in America is that it is extremely popular, yet has a bad
reputation—and I don’t mean the unsavory way in which gambling licenses are awarded.
. . . I am talking about the moral realm, as witnessed in the clucking over William Bennett’s
expensive habit. Casinoland’s high rollers are perceived as inhabiting a zone somewhere
between immoral and diseased, and have great difficulty defending themselves. Yet in their
own lives most Americans demand ever more gambling opportunities. As things stand
now, legal gambling is available in all but [two] states (Hawaii and Utah), and most
Americans admit to gambling sometimes. Surveys done in 1999 for the National
Gambling Impact Study Commission told us that 86% of Americans had gambled at some
time in their lives, and 68% had gambled within the prior year. Total legal wagering runs
around $900 billion a year (about 10% of personal income), of which some $600 billion
takes place at casinos. Casinos, long confined to Nevada and New Jersey, now also exist in
[29] other states (in [more than half ] of which the business is open only to Indians).
That $900 billion covers a broad range of activities, including lotteries, jai alai,
parimutuel betting on horses and dogs, church and secular bingo, sports betting, and
more—yet it clearly understates the gambling total. It doesn’t include illegal betting, whose
total is enormous but unknowable. And it doesn’t include the gambling done in America’s
securities markets by day traders and others. Your broker can perhaps testify to running
into customers whose idea of investment is indistinguishable from Las Vegas action. In any
event Wall Street offers plenty of bets with risk/reward opportunities that mirror those of
slot machines—a long shot with the occasional huge payout. . . .
Despite gambling’s broad popularity, its enemies keep coming at it from all directions.
To begin with its least influential bad-mouthers, it is generally disfavored by economists.
As postulated in several editions of Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook, [Economics,]
gambling is a bad thing under the principle of diminishing marginal utility. The principle
tells us that the $1,000 won on a 999-to-1 bet can buy something less than 1,000 times as
much happiness as the dollar put up for the bet. Thus gamblers are collectively losers, even
in the idealized lottery, where nothing is taken off the top for overhead and taxes. And, of
course, the real world is far from the Platonic ideal—much is lost to overhead.
C
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The other economic formulation has gambling as an evil because it consumes time and
resources without creating any new output. You could say the same about climbing Mt.
Everest, but somehow economists never weigh in on this front.
What you absolutely never hear from them is that gambling is terrific entertainment,
and that perfectly rational people play the lottery and the horses because they get kicks at
a price they find reasonable. The price, of course, is not the amount bet but the amount
lost by customers succumbing to the vigorish—the house’s edge.
You also don’t hear this being acknowledged by people whose livelihood comes from
fighting compulsive gambling and who are, therefore, somewhat motivated to exaggerate
the problem’s magnitude. Gamblers Anonymous, the National Council on Problem
Gambling (and its state affiliates), the Compulsive Gambling Center, the International
Centre for Youth Gambling Problems, the Chinese Community Problem Gambling
Project, Women Helping Women (publishers of a female gambling recovery newsletter),
and the Association of Problem Gambling Service Administrators are all out there getting
across the message that compulsive gambling is ruining lives. In an average month the
Nexis database adds 200 articles mentioning “problem” gambling and 100 or so mentioning “compulsive” gambling.
Yet the overwhelming majority of gamblers are just out there enjoying themselves. The
best available—though still flawed—research on the numbers is the study performed several years ago by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences (nas), which indicated that
compulsive gamblers are about 0.9% of the adult population. There is no longer any dispute about the characters in question being seriously self-destructive, as we were reminded
recently by the April obituary of Leonard Tose, who was forced to sell the Philadelphia
Eagles to pay $25 million in casino gambling debts. (Charming detail from the New York
Times obit: It was Lenny’s habit to take over blackjack tables and repetitively play seven
games simultaneously, at $10,000 apiece.) The nas says another 2% or so are “problem”
gamblers, but this figure is suspect if only because the accompanying definition is so
wobbly. A problem gambler is said to be a guy (about two-thirds are male) whose betting
“results in any harmful effects” to himself or folks around him. Any harmful effects?
Everything you do, from driving cars to taking showers, has some potential for harmful
effects.
Possibly you are telling yourself that characters like Leonard Tose do so much damage,
to themselves and others, that we must do everything possible to curb the disease, even if
its victims are relatively few. It is not clear, however, that we know how to deal with the
disease. The National Council on Problem Gambling, one of many organizations that “certifies” counselors to treat problem gamblers, acknowledges that among those who seek
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counseling, 75% drop out of the programs they are steered to, and only half of the remainder end up abstaining from gambling—an overall success rate of about one-eighth, and
this in a group presumed (because they came in voluntarily) to be above average in their
motivation.
But the success rate is not the main issue. Recent psychiatric research into compulsive
gambling gets into “co-morbidity”—that is, the tendency of problem gamblers to have
problems that go beyond gambling. It turns out that alcoholism and drug addiction are
rampant among problem gamblers (Tose was an alcoholic). [When Tose testified to
Congress about gambling, the politicians who listened in fascination to Tose’s account of
how to lose money quickly were trying to understand the nature of gambling, and whether
it should, or could, be controlled. Mr. Tose was asked if he had any advice for Congress.
“Don’t drink when you gamble,” he said. It sounded obvious, but it drew attention to the
practice of some casinos that provide big-spenders with an unlimited supply of drink.] The
nas study indicates that [problem gamblers] also have rates of depression, schizophrenia,
and “antisocial personality disorder” some three times higher than the rates among
nongamblers. All of which raises an interesting question: Is there any such thing as problem gamblers who are otherwise normal? I recently asked this question of Christine Reilly,
executive director of the Harvard Medical School’s Institute for Pathological Gambling,
and she said: “If there is such a group, it’s probably a very small group.”
Next question: Is it possible that among pathological gamblers, the gambling itself is
not really the problem, or at least not the ultimate problem—that it’s simply the expression of those other “morbidities”?
There are hints in the nas study that some researchers are close to answering yes to that
question, e.g., in a passage indicating drug and alcohol problems are associated with “progression to problem gambling and pathological gambling.” And if the answer is affirmative, it would seem to follow that we wouldn’t really get very far by limiting gambling
opportunities. There are, after all, plenty of other ways for drunks and drug addicts to ruin
their own and their families’ lives.
This article originally appeared in Forbes, June 23, 2003. © Forbes Inc.
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pathologic gambling: america’s newest
addiction?
by andrew v. pasternak, iv, m.s., m.d.
n the past decade, the availability of legalized gambling, especially casino gambling, has
proliferated in the United States. Some form of legalized gambling exists in every state
except Utah and Hawaii, and 29 states have legalized casino gambling. Off-shore companies offer sports-book wagering through toll-free numbers and the Internet. In 1996, $586.5
billion was wagered in all forms of legal gambling in the United States. Overall, between
75 and 90 percent of Americans gamble. While most of these people gamble responsibly,
a small percentage develop addiction to the “action” of gambling, and the prevalence of
pathologic gambling seems to be increasing with the growth of the gaming industry.
Prevalence rates for pathologic gambling in studies conducted after 1990 are higher than
those in earlier studies carried out when fewer gambling opportunities existed. The
density of Gamblers Anonymous chapters is positively associated with the availability of
casinos, card rooms, slot machines, sports betting, jai alai, and off-track betting. The most
recent studies estimate the current prevalence of pathologic gambling at 1.4 to 2.8 percent
with a lifetime prevalence of 3.5 to 5.1 percent in the general population.
Pathologic gambling is not just a recent problem. In 1866, Dostoyevsky wrote The
Gambler, a semiautobiographic work, in part to pay off his own gambling debts. Edmund
Bergler published the Psychology of Gambling in 1957. That same year, the first Gamblers
Anonymous chapter was organized. Based on the 12-step model of Alcoholics
Anonymous, it uses the principles of group therapy. Abstinent gamblers provide peer
support for people who enter the program.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Robert Custer started the first formal treatment program for
pathologic gamblers at the Veterans Administration hospital in Brecksville, Ohio. In 1980,
the American Psychiatric Association added pathologic gambling to the disorders of
impulse control in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm-iii). In
dsm-iii r and dsm-iv, pathologic gambling is not only described as a disorder of impulse
control but is also identified as having similarities to substance dependencies such as
alcohol dependence.
The criteria for pathologic gambling are defined in dsm-iv. Patients must meet five out
of ten criteria and not have an underlying manic disorder to be identified as a pathologic
gambler. Criteria include the following: a preoccupation with gambling behavior, a need to
I
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increase the amount of the bet, the inability to cut back, restlessness or irritability while
cutting back, and using gambling as an escape mechanism. Other criteria include “chasing” losses (returning at another time to get even after losing money gambling), lying to
family members or therapists to conceal behavior, committing illegal acts to cover losses,
jeopardizing relationships or opportunities because of gambling, and having to rely on
others to cover financial losses.
diagnostic criteria for pathologic gambling
a. Persistent and recurrent maladaptive gambling behavior as indicated by five (or more)
of the following:
(1) is preoccupied with gambling (e.g., preoccupied with reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, or thinking of ways to get money with
which to gamble)
(2) needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired
excitement
(3) has repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop gambling
(4) is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling
(5) gambles as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g.,
feeling of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)
(6) after losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even (“chasing” one’s
losses)
(7) lies to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with
gambling
(8) has committed illegal acts such as forgery, fraud, theft, or embezzlement to finance
gambling
(9) has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling
(10) relies on others to provide money to relieve a desperate financial situation caused
by gambling.
b. The gambling behavior is not better accounted for by a manic episode.
This article originally appeared in American Family Physician, October 1, 1997. Reprinted from
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3225/is_n5_v56/ai_19965758/. © 1997 American Academy of Family Physicians.
© 2004 Gale Group.
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the chrome-shiny, lights-flashing, wheelspinning, touch-screened, drew carey–
wisecracking, video-playing, “sound events”–
packed, pulse-quickening bandit
by gary rivlin
early 40 million Americans played a slot machine in 2003, according to an annual
survey of casino gambling conducted by Harrah’s Entertainment. Every day in the
United States, slot machines take in, on average, more than $1 billion in wagers. Most of
that money will be paid back to players, but so great is the “hold” from slot machines that
collectively the games gross more annually than McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and
Starbucks combined. All told, North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in
2003—an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion in tickets sold in North American movie
theaters that year. Pornography, the country’s second most lucrative form of adult entertainment, doesn’t come close, either: experts estimate that Americans spend at most $10
billion a year on live sex shows, phone sex, and porn in various media from cable to dvd
to video and the Internet. . . .
Although it has frequently been controversial—Fiorello La Guardia and Earl Warren
are among those who have made headlines crusading against it—the slot machine has
traditionally enjoyed little status in the world of casino gambling. Slots were where the
wives of the high rollers sat, killing time with buckets of coins. But revenues from the
games have grown exponentially over the past few decades, according to Bill Eadington,
director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the
University of Nevada, Reno, and now the slot machine is the undisputed king of the
casino. Craps, blackjack, and roulette—which once defined organized gambling—are
going the way of tuxedos and diamonds inside the modern-day casino, where the standard
dress these days tends toward polyester and athletic wear. Accounting for more than $7 out
of every $10 of gambling revenues in casinos across the United States, the once lowly slot
machine is the top earner even in glitzy palaces along the Las Vegas strip.
Not only have slots been capturing an expanding share of business on gambling floors
across the country—grabbing an ever greater “share of wallet,” as industry insiders put it;
they have also played a crucial role in expanding the footprint of casino gambling in the
United States. Where casinos were legal in just two states at the end of the 1980s, today
they are legal in more than thirty—a trend that the slot machine, so easy to learn to play
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and seemingly harmless, has no doubt helped fuel. “It’s the slot machine that drives the
industry today,” says Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., head of the American Gaming Association.
While craps, roulette, and baccarat are outlawed in roughly half the states that permit
casino gambling, slot machines are widely viewed as a politically palatable solution for
elected officials seeking to raise revenues—the casino equivalent, critics say, of a gateway
drug. And the trend is far from exhausted: Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Alabama, and Kentucky are among the states that have recently considered installing slots
at racetracks to generate needed tax revenue.
Fahrenkopf is reportedly paid in seven figures to praise all things casino, but he can’t
seem to help taking a poke at the slot machine. He views the transition from table games
to slots as symptomatic of the dumbing down of American life. Playing craps means learning a complex set of rules. Blackjack may be easy to learn, but it still requires skill and concentration, and it’s not uncommon for the novice player to feel stupid in front of strangers.
“I don’t know if it’s the education system, or maybe it’s that we as a society have gotten
intellectually lazy,” says Fahrenkopf, who headed the Republican National Committee
under Ronald Reagan. “But people would rather just sit there and push a button.” When
I asked one elderly man to explain the allure of playing slots, he replied, “I don’t have to
think.” . . .
The archetypal slot machine was invented in 1899 by Charles Fey, a German immigrant,
in San Francisco. But most modern-day slot machines bear little resemblance to the familiar one-armed bandit with its three reels spinning behind a pane of glass and mechanically
click-click-clicking into position with each pull of a lever. Today’s slot machines feature
well-choreographed illusions designed to hide a fundamental truth: at heart they’re really
nothing more than computers whose chips randomly cycle through hundreds of thousands
of numbers every second. A player’s fate is determined almost the instant play begins. But
to simply display a long string of numbers on a computer screen, along with an accounting of the money won or lost, would hardly prove entrancing. . . .
The makers of slot machines may rely on the lure of life-changing jackpots to attract
customers, but the machines’ ability to hook so deeply into a player’s cerebral cortex derives
from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral
scientists call infrequent random reinforcement, or “intermittent reward.” Children whose
parents consistently shower them with love and attention tend to take that devotion for
granted. Those who know they’ll never be rewarded by their parents stop trying after a
while. But those who are rewarded only intermittently—in the fashion of a slot machine—
will often pursue positive outcomes with a persistent tenacity. “That hard-wiring that
nature gave us didn’t anticipate electronic gaming devices,” says Howard Shaffer, director
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of the division on addictions at Harvard Medical School and perhaps the country’s foremost authority on gambling disorders. . . .
“No other form of gambling manipulates the human mind as beautifully as these
machines,” concludes Petry, who has studied gambling treatments since 1998. “I think
that’s why that’s the most popular form of gambling with which people get into trouble.”
Antigambling activists refer to slots as “the crack cocaine of gambling.” Though gambling’s loudest critics tend to be alarmists, the crack analogy may be apt. Just as crack
addicts have frequently seemed to self-destruct much faster than those abusing powdered
cocaine, there is abundant, albeit still largely anecdotal, evidence suggesting that the same
is true of today’s computer-driven slot machines—video-based slots especially. Where
social workers once found that the woes of a typical problem gambler tended to mount
gradually—with a period of 20 or more years commonly passing between a first wager and
a bottoming-out event like bankruptcy, divorce, or even suicide—addiction cycles of a few
years are, if not typical, commonplace among slots players.
“Treatment folks are definitely identifying people who are experiencing what we call
‘telescoping’—a shortening of the period of time that it takes for someone to get into
trouble,” says Rachel Volberg, president of the National Council on Problem Gambling
and the author of When the Chips Are Down: Problem Gambling in America. Volberg, who
runs Gemini Research, an organization that specializes in gambling-related investigations,
says it remains to be seen whether the problem lies in “something special about these
machines or in the people who prefer playing them.” Female slots players in particular,
Petry says, “tend to experience this telescoping phenomenon—and we know from research
that women are quicker to seek treatment.”
Gambling counselors regularly encounter people like Ricky Brumfield, a working-class
Phoenix woman who won $3,700 the first time she ever touched a slot machine—a day that
turned out to be the unluckiest of her life. That was in 1997, when Brumfield, then 43, traveled to Las Vegas to help a friend celebrate the Fourth of July. Within nine months, she
had hocked her jewelry and gone through $100,000 in cash and credit-card debt. She only
stopped, she confesses, because the Sheriff ’s Department arrested her on child-abuse
charges for leaving her two young kids locked in a car in a casino parking lot while she
played the slots inside. “I knew it was really wrong to do that, but the urge to go into the
casino was stronger than my instincts as a mother,” Brumfield says. She had only recently
had back surgery, but she found that when she played, she never felt pain. “I think the
dopamine and serotonin levels, when they kicked in—that blocked off the pain,” says
Brumfield, who now works for the Arizona Council on Compulsive Gambling. “You feel
hypnotized by the machine. You don’t think of anything else.” Near the end, the hold the
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machines had over her, she says, was akin to that of an unfaithful lover. She would fall into
a jealous rage when a favorite machine paid a jackpot to another, less devoted player.
“Slot machines have a different impact on the brain than other forms of gambling,”
Howard Shaffer says. Unlike table games, which are played in groups, slots are played in
isolation, and therefore they lack the same safeguards social situations provide. “And
because the video form is faster than the mechanical form, they hold the potential to
behave in the fashion of psychostimulants, like cocaine or amphetamines. They energize
and de-energize the brain in more rapid cycles. The faster on, faster off, the greater the
risk.” Colleagues of Shaffer have compared the brain scans of people high on cocaine with
those of people while gambling: similar neurocircuitry is lighted up in both sets of images.
...
The typical slots player initiates a new game every six seconds. That works out to 10
games per minute, 600 per hour. If the average player bets $2 a spin, that player is wagering roughly $1,200 every hour. Slot designers have experimented with machines that play
even faster, but the industry standard remains a six-second cycle. “It wouldn’t be much fun
if we took your money any faster than that,” Kaminkow told me with a slight shrug of his
shoulder, suggesting that just how fast people play is entirely up to him.
I asked [ Joe] Kaminkow, [head of design and product development for the country's
largest maker of slot machines, International Game Technology of Reno,] if he ever
worried that the potent mix of tv, technology, and the prodigious talents of his creative
people will produce machines that are too powerful. “What kind of question is that?” he
replied. In his natural state, Kaminkow is a breezy and sarcastic jokester who revels in
politically incorrect jokes. But he suddenly sounded as if he were addressing a Rotary Club.
“I take responsible gaming very seriously,” he said. “We’re not an alcohol, we’re not a drug.”
He is in the entertainment business, he added, a “maker of small little movies” that bring
a touch of joy and laughter to the lives of the elderly and others.
“I’m not looking for people who say, ‘I spent my milk money,”’ he said. “I think people
need to be very responsible in their gaming habits. I know I am.”
Excerpted from the New York Times, May 9, 2004. © 2004 The New York Times Company.
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the states bet more on betting
by alex berenson
tates already raise $20 billion annually from lotteries and casinos, more than four
percent of their total revenue. Now, in capitals from Albany, ny, to Springfield, il, to
Salem, or, politicians are debating whether to rely even more on gambling to try to
balance their budgets without tax increases or service cuts.
Over the next several years, the result could well be a speeded-up expansion in gambling
nationally, making betting more accessible than ever before, and states and cities more
dependent on the willingness of lower-income people to gamble.
[Legalized gambling in the United States grew out of the Depression, when casinos
went up in Nevada as a way to spur economic development. In 1963, New Hampshire
created the first state lottery. In 1987, the Supreme Court gave Indians the right to operate
and self-regulate casinos. In 1991, Iowa became the first Mississippi River state to license
riverboat gambling. Now, casinos operate in 29 states.]
Since 1991, when the current wave of legalization began, the annual amount Americans
lose on all betting, including lotteries, casinos, and racetracks, has risen from $27 billion to
$68 billion, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors, an investment bank specializing in
gambling and entertainment.
Americans now spend more on gambling than on movies, videos and dvds, music, and
books combined, and with an annual growth rate of about nine percent since 1991,
gambling is growing substantially faster than the economy as a whole.
But so far, that growth does not seem to have caused a serious backlash. During the
1990s, opponents of legalization raised the specter of widespread bankruptcies and broken
homes. Those predictions have not come true, however, and gaming—as the casino industry calls it—has increasingly become a part of American life.
espn2 regularly shows poker tournaments, and Positively Fifth Street, a book about the
World Series of Poker, is a best seller [as is Bringing Down the House, about a gambling
ring of six m.i.t. students who beat the system in Vegas]. Forty-[eight] states now have
some legalized gambling.
But as states search desperately for more revenue, more of them are turning to
gambling, and specifically to a form of it that aims at people of modest means and that is
particularly harmful to those susceptible to becoming addicted to gambling, experts say.
S
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The latest expansion proposals mainly involve video lottery terminals, which are widely
agreed to be among the most addictive forms of gambling, and the least likely to create jobs
in a community or generate other positive economic effects.
But, not coincidentally, video lottery terminals can be taxed at extraordinarily high rates,
meaning that they are extremely efficient revenue collectors from the point of view of state
governments, as opposed to local economies. In West Virginia, one of the poorest states,
video terminals account for 12 percent of the state government’s revenue, said Frank J.
Fahrenkopf, Jr., president of the American Gaming Association.
In Las Vegas, money won by casinos is taxed at 6.25 percent, noted Eugene M.
Christiansen, chairman of Christiansen Capital Advisors. On the other hand, in some
states, video lottery terminals are taxed at rates as high as 50 percent.
“The low-tax-rate, big-entertainment resort presents a different face to the community,” Mr. Christiansen said. “It attracts different kinds of consumers. Storefront video
poker can be much tougher on low-income people.” Experts agree that not all forms of
gambling are created equal.
Don Phares, an economist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that, unlike casinos, which create some jobs and foster businesses that cater to the casino-goers, video lottery
terminals provide almost no economic benefit to anyone but their owners and the states.
In addition, experts on gambling addiction say that video terminals are especially
dangerous because they offer gamblers a very fast, highly stimulating, rate of play. Faster
play also means that bettors lose more money, because each bet a gambler makes is, on
average, a loser, so more bets translate into larger losses. Inside the gaming industry, the
terminals are sometimes called “video crack.”
Making terminals more widely available will almost certainly increase the number of
problem gamblers, at least in the short run, said Dr. Rachel A. Volberg, president of
Gemini Research, which specializes in studies of gambling and problem gambling. Several
recent studies have shown, not surprisingly, that the more legalized gambling in a state, the
more problem gamblers it has, Dr. Volberg said. But whether those problems will become
severe enough to discourage states from legalizing video terminals is not clear.
Even in states with lots of legalized gambling, no more than 1 percent to 2 percent of
the population is addicted to it, with an additional 2 percent to 3 percent reporting
gambling “problems.” In addition, studies show that the rise in the number of problem
gamblers flattens out after the first few years following legalization, Dr. Volberg said. . . .
For the moment, the march toward more gambling has stalled. Efforts to legalize
terminals at tracks have failed in several states this year, including Maryland, although proposals are still alive in others, including Illinois. . . .
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That fact has heartened opponents of gambling, like Tom Grey, the executive director of the
National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion. “Our best days are in front of us,” he said.
But if the previous decade is any guide, Mr. Grey is wrong. The stock of International
Game Technology, the world’s largest maker of slot machines and video terminals, has
risen fivefold since 1997. And by 2012, the company expects that as many as ten more states
will legalize casinos or video terminals at racetracks, said Robert McIver, its investor
relations officer.
Mr. McIver may well be right, at least in an era when the states are starving for cash.
That’s something gambling can be relied on to provide.
“One way or another, it’s a tax revenue source,” he said.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times, May 18, 2003. Information also excerpted from “Revised View of
Gambling: Bane Is Now Boon,” by Michael Janofsky, which appeared in the New York Times, May 1, 2003. © 2004 The New
York Times Company.
44
california gambling-related legislation as of november 4, 2004
enacted: A bill creating new state compacts with five Indian tribes in California. Agreeing
to pay into two state revenue streams, the tribes may now operate an unlimited amount of
slot machines and are guaranteed exclusive rights to slots operations in the state.
enacted: The governor negotiated a revenue-sharing compact with five other Indian
tribes. Four of the five compacts were approved by the legislature. The deal reached with
the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians that would have allowed for a 5,000–slot machine casino
in San Pablo was not approved by the legislature.
failed: Ballot initiative appearing as Proposition 68 that would require Indian tribes
operating casinos to share 25 percent of their revenue with the state. If any tribe refused to
comply, five tracks and 11 card rooms would be allowed a total of 30,000 slot machines at
locations including suburban San Francisco and Inglewood.
failed: Ballot initiative appearing as Proposition 70 that would require 8.84 percent of
tribal casino revenue be shared with the state. Limits on the kinds of games tribes can operate as well as limits on the number of casinos and slot machines on tribal land would be
removed. This proposal also would extend the current 20-year gaming compacts to 99 years.
proposed: Reduce the share of lottery revenue dedicated to fund education from 34
percent to 25 percent.
Source: NCSLnet: Gambling Developments in the States–2004. Posted November 5, 2004, by the National Council of State
Legislatures, http://www.ncsl.org/programs/econ/gamblingdev04.htm.
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poker’s taking over the world
by darren rovell
e live in an America where approximately 20 million of us play golf, and 50 million
of us play poker. Industry insiders say that an estimated 100,000 people are playing poker online at peak time (8 p.m. pst, 11 p.m. et) every day. And while right now more
of us are watching the pros play golf than poker, it won’t be long before those numbers will
flip and your grandma will know who Johnny Chan and Chris Ferguson are.
Poker, and more specifically the Texas Hold ’Em variety, is taking the world by storm.
There’s a World Poker Tour (wpt). Players at the touring events took home nearly $30
million, and the televised two-hour wpt segments on Wednesday nights drew an average
of 1.3 million viewers this past season. That’s on the Travel Channel, where “John
Ratzenberger’s Made in America” is no longer the network’s cash cow. Things are so good
that the channel recently signed a five-year rights extension with the tour.
And it isn’t just the Travel Channel. Bravo, when it’s not airing “Queer Eye,” is featuring “Celebrity Poker Showdown.” And the final rounds of the World Series of Poker will
be aired on espn in 22 episodes. . . . One man took home the $5 million prize in the event,
which took place during the last week of May.
Demand is so great that fans of televised poker no longer want to wait to see the action.
With that in mind, Fox Sports Net [aired] the nation’s first live broadcast of a pro poker
tournament on July 14 (telecast on a five-minute delay to prevent any sort of cheating help
from audience members to the players at the table). . . .
Poker is so big that true gamblers can now bet on the pro poker games. Who would
have thought that we’d reach the point where people would gamble on other people
gambling? . . .
Poker is so hot that Card Player Magazine, a biweekly publication which for the past 18
years has been a free publication that could be found in poker rooms, will soon charge for
its issues. Circulation is expected to double in the next couple of months, and copies will
be available on the racks in Barnes & Noble, New York’s Penn Station, and in virtually
every major airport in the United States. The May issue marked the first time a nongambling advertiser had purchased space. That advertiser—Belvedere Vodka—used nine
of the world’s top poker players in its ads that appeared on billboards and cabs in Las
Vegas, and in ESPN The Magazine. . . .
In 1989, the World Series of Poker had 150 participants. This year’s list grew to 2,576
poker-heads, many of whom paid the $10,000 buy-in fee.
W
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One way to slow down the amateur poker rush is to charge $25,000 a night for a lesson,
as Hellmuth is doing. (Hurry up, people: He’s only available about 20 nights a year. His
telephone number is 650-464-0629.) If you aren’t that rich, another option is to pay $2.99
to play “Phil Hellmuth’s Texas Hold ’Em,” which launched in May, on your cell phone.
The other way to control the frenzy is to increase the big tournament buy-in fees.
Due to this year’s astounding rise of more than 1,500 participants than last year, pros say
they expect the buy-in fee to jump to $20,000 very soon, which should thin the amateur
crowd.
How big is this poker craze going to get?
So big that Carmen Electra is reportedly hosting a strip-poker game that will air on
pay-per-view on July 18—though true poker fans won’t pay much attention, since that’s a
different game known as “Texas Hold Them.”
So big that Ben Affleck apparently no longer wants to act in movies (or maybe that was
just the Gigli bust). He beat 90 other players to win a $356,000 prize in California last
month, and the poker circuit is abuzz with rumors about where Affleck will show up next.
Excerpted from ESPN Page 2, July 6, 2004, ESPN.com, http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=poker/archive/.
© 2004 ESPN Internet Ventures.
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the future of gambling
by felicia f. campbell
n a world fraught by deadly ecological problems, the idea of discussing the future of
gambling may seem frivolous. Yet it is far from that.
As a fundamental human activity, it deserves to be studied without cultural or religious
bias for the key that it may provide to survival.
We have been fed a lot of myths about our wish for homeostasis, which is really a state
of bovine contentment. To attempt to achieve this state we consume mountains of pills and
rivers of alcohol. Somehow we seem to feel that if we can deny our essential humanity long
enough, we can solve our problems.
When we attempt to grow, we are considered mentally ill, masochistic, or naive.
Outworn Freudian or Skinnerian approaches to human behavior are pushed at us, and we
seriously consider the nightmare possibilities of Beyond Human Freedom and Dignity.
If we are to design for a healthy future, we must remove our blinders and examine the
total human personality from the point of view of health, not sickness.
Consider gambling. It is a fundamental human activity—that is, people have always
gambled, are gambling now, and will continue to gamble, in the future. Yet we are told that
it is masochistic, sexually sublimative, and aberrant.
Gambling has been ubiquitous in human history, and the gambling impulse has served
us well. It is part of “the adventurer within us”—that part of ourselves which lusts for
change, the wooing of the unknown, chance, danger, all that is new. It sends us to both the
gaming tables and the moon, the laboratory and the numbers man. It is part of what makes
us human.
My studies show that, contrary to popular belief, gambling is by and large beneficial to
the gambler and increases rather than decreases his efficiency. It is beneficial in that it
stimulates, offers hope, allows decision making, and, in many cases, provides the gambler
with “peak experience,” that godlike feeling when all of one’s physical and emotional senses
are “go.”
In fairness, I should note that I was anticipated in these findings by Gerolamo Cardano,
16th-century universal genius, both physician and odds-maker, who prescribed gambling
for melancholy and cares that one would otherwise be unable to endure, noting that “play
may be beneficial in times of grief and . . . the law permits it to the sick and those in prison
and those condemned to death.”
I
47
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This practice was most humane and was common in Nevada prisons as well as those of
renaissance Italy until a few years ago. One ex-inmate of a Nevada prison told me that the
altered state of consciousness produced by gambling was the only thing that kept him sane
in the midst of the brutality, vermin, and bad food.
Moving from the prisons to society as a whole, we see the “preservative impulse”
involved in gambling operate for every age and socioeconomic group.
Many elderly persons are passionate gamblers. I call them “elderly life seekers.” What
they seek is what most gamblers seek, involvement in the action. This is crucial to their
sense of well-being in this society, which excludes them from the action of living and seeks
to hide them away. Not only this, but while they play random games such as bingo and slot
machines, they have an equal chance with the rest of the participants for perhaps the first
time in their lives. “I ain’t won a lot of things in my life,” one woman told me. While they
play, they are wholly absorbed in the contest. . . .
Moving from the retired to the working class, we find the importance of the gamble is
still in the action. In this case, however, the working-class individual sees his participation
as a means of surmounting impotence, of feeling that he has a hand in his own destiny.
Having little opportunity for decision making in his job, he feels that if he wins he has in
some way controlled his world; if he loses, it is simply a tough break. . . .
I am not suggesting that we solve the world’s problems by turning it into a giant casino.
I am suggesting that in a time when we need imagination and creativity more desperately
than at any previous time in history, we do wrong to suppress a whole element of human
personality which may be a key to these other elements, often attempting to deny its existence, while maintaining that the impulse to take a chance is masochistic.
People gamble, whether it is legal or not, because it helps them face the world more successfully than they could without the spark which it gives. Yet we treat gambling as the
Victorians treated sex.
We must learn to accept and deal with our total humanity if we are to have any chance
of creating, rather than a society in which the individual conforms, one geared to the
growth of the individual, a society in which we may glory in our humanity rather than suffering constant guilt over our normal impulses.
Dr. Campbell is a professor in the English department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. This article, which
originally appeared in Business and Society Review, is excerpted from “Easy Money! A Report on America’s
Booming Gambling Industry and Its Economic and Political Clout,” P B S Online and W G B H /Frontline,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gamble/procon/virtues.html.
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questions to consider
1. What do you think of Valère? Why does he have such a hard time giving up gambling?
Do you think he is truly addicted to gambling? Do you sympathize with his problems in
gambling and in love, or do you think he is just immature and selfish?
2. What do you think of Angélique? Is she naive to believe that Valère can change? Why
does she take him back in the end?
3. Manipulation plays a large part in this play, as characters are pulled and pushed by
others to satisfy their own desires. What do you think would happen to Valère if no one
interfered? What about the others? Who would end up with whom in the end, without the
influence of the rest of society?
4. What do you think of the ideas of luck and chance? Do you believe that life is random,
like the spin of a roulette wheel or the throw of the dice? Why do some people seem
“luckier” than others?
5. How are sex, money, and gambling linked in this play? Do you think they were similarly
linked in life in 17th-century France, as well? Are they now?
6. Are social attitudes toward gambling different today? How have we become more, or
less, tolerant of gambling as a leisure activity? Do you think gambling is romanticized in
the play as a viable way to fortune and happiness? Is it still romanticized today? How do
you explain our critical hypocrisy that sees gambling as a moral weakness yet continues to
encourage/support it with public funding?
7. Freyda Thomas, the author of The Gamester, says that “everyone in this play is addicted
to something.” What is each of the characters addicted to? How do they each deal with
their addiction? How is addiction handled in today’s society? How do you think it was
handled in Regnard’s time?
8. Describe a few of the funniest moments in the play. How do the actors portray the
comedy, verbally and phsysically? What are the comic characteristics of each of the individual characters? How do these characteristics serve to highlight their personalities and
motives?
9. Imagine the events in this play happening in a serious drama. How does the use of
comedy change our attitude toward these events?
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10. This play is a verse translation and adaptation of Regnard’s original French text.
Consider the advantages and disadvantages of watching/reading a translation. Keep in
mind that even a very literal, direct translation still involves inevitable changes in the original text. Is that “bad”? Why or why not?
11. What is it like to watch/read a play in verse? Did you enjoy the verse or not? How do
you think it affected you and your reaction to the play and the characters?
12. How do the set and costumes (including the disguises worn in the gambling hall)
demonstrate the relationships between the characters and their changing status? When
(i.e., during which historical period) and where do you think this production takes place?
How can you tell? Does it matter whether it’s set in a particular time and place?
13. In this play, different attitudes about love, marriage, relationships between men and
women, honesty, loyalty, money, and gambling are expressed by different characters. What
does each character say about these issues? Do you think any character has the “right”
answer? If your answer is yes, explain why you think that character is right. If your answer
is no, do you think the play as a whole (and therefore Regnard himself ) expresses an
attitude about these issues? How?
14. Do you think the ideas and characters in this play are relevant to us today? Are there
any characters you “recognize,” or do they all seem foreign to you? If they seem foreign, is
it still interesting to consider them? Why or why not?
15. The play leaves the ending open for interpretation. Do you think Valère will succeed in
giving up gambling? Will he and Angélique finally marry and live happily or will gambling
always be an issue in their lives?
50
16. What do you think of gambling as an addiction? Do you think it is equivalent to other
addictions, such as drugs and alcohol? Why do you think people can’t stop gambling, even
when they are losing everything? Why do they keep playing when they know the odds are
against them ever winning?
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for further information . . .
on jean-françois regnard
Orwen, Gifford P. Jean-François Regnard. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.
on historical gambling
Alvarez-Detrell, Tamara, and Michael G. Paulson. The Gambling Mania On and Off the
Stage in Pre-Revolutionary France. Washington, d.c.: University Press of America, 1982.
Cotton, Charles and Theophilus Lucas. Games and Gamesters of the Restoration: The
Compleat Gamester (1674) and Lives of the Gamesters (1714). London: Routledge, 1930.
Dunkley, John. Gambling: A Social and Moral Problem in France, 1685–1792. Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation at the Taylor Institute, 1985.
Kavanagh, Thomas. Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of
Gambling in 18th-Century France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
———. “The Libertine’s Bluff: Cards and Culture in 18th-Century France.” EighteenthCentury Studies 33 (Summer 2000): 505–21.
Steinmetz, Andrew. The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, in All Times and Countries,
Especially in England and in France. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870.
Wykes, Alan. The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling. Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1964.
on contemporary gambling
Aczel, Amir D. Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just about
Everything Else. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004.
Barthelme, Frederick, and Steven Barthelme. Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and
Loss. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Fleming, Alice. Something for Nothing: A History of Gambling. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978.
Lears, t. j. Jackson. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking, 2003.
Mezrich, Ben. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six
Vegas for Millions. New York: Free Press, 2002.
M.I.T.
Students Who Took
Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.
51
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Page 52
———, ed. Gambling: Who Wins? Who Loses? New York: Prometheus Books, 2003.
Sharpe, Graham. The Essential Gambler. London: Robert Hale, 1995.
———. Fourteen Million to One: Great Gambles and Fantastic Flutters. London: Robson
Books, 1998.
on 17th-century french life and theater
Arnott, Peter D. An Introduction to the French Theatre. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977.
Briggs, Robin. Early Modern France 1560–1715. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Carr, John Laurence. Life in France under Louis XIV. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966.
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Gibson, Wendy. Women in 17th-Century France. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lewis, w. h. The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV. Waveland Press, 1997.
Mongrédien, Georges. Daily Life in the French Theatre in the Time of Molière. Trans. Claire
Eliane Engel. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1969.
Thomas, Freyda, trans. The Learned Ladies. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1991.
———. Tartuffe: Born Again. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1997.
web sites of interest
888-gambling.com. Lucrative Gambling. http://www.888-gambling.com.
52
Gamblers Anonymous. Official Gamblers Anonymous Home Page. http://www.gamblers
anonymous.org.
Gurnett, Kate. “Gambling with Lives: A Four-Part Series.” TimesUnion.com (Albany,
ny). http://www.timesunion.com/specialreports/gamblingseries/.
Neoclassical Nirvana. globegate.utm.edu/french/lit/neoclassical.html.
PBS Online and WGBH/Frontline. “Easy Money! A Report on America’s Booming
Gambling Industry and Its Economic and Political Clout.” Frontline. http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gamble/.
Thomas, Freyda. FreydaThomas.com. http://www.freydathomas.com/reviews.htm.

The Gamester Words on Plays (2005)

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