SOURCE: "Dice Games and Other Games in Jeu de Saint Nicolas," in PMLA, Vol. 95, No. 5, October, 1980, pp. 802-11.

In the essay below, Dinshaw considers the role of games in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, arguing that the metaphor of the game works on many levels in the play.

Much of the scholarship on Jean Bodel's Jeu de saint Nicolas has concerned the rules and results of the dice games played by the three rogues, Pincedé, Cliquet, and Rasoir, in the tavern. Intent on explicating the action of these obscure passages, scholars have generated a series of proposed and rejected explanations, in which the literary aspect of the text has been second in importance to exact details of the games.¹ More recent criticism, focusing on the structure of the play as a whole and the function of these tavern scenes within the larger framework, has found thematic and structural...