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Shipwreck With Speculator Early Modern Representations Of Risk And Gambling, David J. Hart
Shipwreck With Speculator Early Modern Representations Of Risk And Gambling, David J. Hart
Occasional Papers
Charles Cotton’s Compleat Gamester, one of the best known manuals accompanying a virtual pandemic of gambling fever across early modern Europe, likens gaming to shipwreck since there are “but few Casts at Dice betwixt a rich man and a beggar,” “but few inches between [living] and drowning.” This conjunction of shipwreck and gaming recurs in early modern literature and constitutes a rhetorical topos in the sense of philosopher Hans Blumenberg. I examine several instances of this conjunction (e.g. in Cardano’s autobiography, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, and Joseph de la Vega’s Confusion de Confusiones) and suggest that the conjunction …