The subject of this book is a critical survey of games — their representations, conceptions, and rules — and the theory and idea of playing games in Don Quixote and in some of his Novelas ejemplares. There are a few but pertinent references to Cervantes’s comedias and other works in which games and play appear. Scham’s study is wide and deep, however, as he also “consider[s] Cervantes’s play references within the context of a substantial body of sixteenth and seventeenth-century writings on leisure” (4–5), namely the works of Montaigne, Erasmus, Vives, Castiglione, Pascal, and Juan de Valdés, among many others. His lengthy introduction sets up his subsequent concentration on Spain and Cervantes’s contemporaries, in which he unearths little-read and less-understood texts on games, play, and leisure by Spaniards such as Pedro de Guzmán, Luque Fajardo, Diego de Castillo, Cristóbal Méndez, Rodrigo Caro, and Fray Alonso Remón.

Scham divides his book into three sections (“Leisure and Recreation in Early Modern Spain,” “Solitary, Collaborative, and Complicit Play in Don Quijote,” and “The Novelas ejemplares: Ocio, Exemplarity, and Community”), each of which is built around numerous subsections. His “theoretical contexts” (8) are based on Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Huizinga, Caillois, Ehrman, Papargyriou, Spariosu, and Bakhtin. In the first section, Scham addresses the concept of eutropelia based on Aristotle and Aquinas as “beneficial play in moderation [that] had broad currency in early modern Spain” (28). (Another definition of the word, perhaps more popular for Cervantes’s general readers, is expressed by one of his contemporaries, Sebastian de Covarrubias [Diccionario de la lengua castellana o española], as “un entretenimiento de burlas graciosas y sin perjuicio” [“an entertainment of funny jokes without doing harm”].) Scham points out that excessive pleasure in ribald humor and telling jokes should be tempered with sobriety, and reminds us of Castiglione’s reference to Spaniards who “are instinctively witty” but who “let their loquacity run away with them and become insipid and inept” (29).

Derisive humor and mockery based on stereotypes are often characteristic of satire. Laughter at or with characters (and by extension, with or at the author) implies the active role of the reader in a larger game in which self-contemplation fills the leisure space and time of reading. Thus the concept of literature itself is a form of play with its own rules in which the “language of eutrapelia . . . is associated with holiday, festivity, and other ‘parenthetical’ spaces delineated against a backdrop of serious endeavor to which the participants will return” (131). In sum, fiction offers a moment to fill leisure time (ocio), an edifying respite from work (negocio). Of course, this notion perfectly fits Cervantes’s idea when he addresses the “desocupado lector” (“idle reader”) in Don Quixote, and his intention in the Novelas ejemplares: “Mi intento ha sido poner en la plaza de nuestra república una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse, sin daño de barras; digo sin daño del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables, antes aprovechan que dañan” (“My intent has been to place in the plaza of our republic a billiards table where each may come for entertainment, without peril to soul or body, because honest and pleasant exercises give benefit rather than harm”).

In the following sections, Scham focuses on Don Quixote and a few of Cervantes’s exemplary tales, offering a number of well-argued and persuasive interpretations of “multiple levels of play and how they interrelate” (130). These levels of play are also applied to the narrative itself so that “[Cervantes’s] playful act of creation invites an equally ludic response in the reader” (131). Scham identifies virtually every example of games in Cervantes, and argues persuasively in his readings of their literal and metaphorical presence and their various connections to Cervantes’s narrative art. His interests are not just internal, that is, to the multiple workings and levels of game playing within the text, but also to the external social implications that playing games have to experience beyond the text, a space to which all readers inevitably return. And here may exist a slight problem with Scham’s definitions of society and other terms, such as ideology, life, values, and cohesion, which at times are unclear and in need of further elaboration. What are the differences between society and an “official society” (235, 260, 265, 287), an “ideal society” (236), “disordered society” (214), and “court society” (235)? What precisely are “official values” (300), the “official world of Seville” (271), “official ideology” (210), and “official order” (266)? What does it mean to talk about “social cohesion” (213), “conventional life” (281), and “prevailing social conditions” (142) in early modern Spain if they are not defined and explained? Despite this reservation, Scham’s book is a fascinating and scholarly analysis of games and play in Cervantes and an excellent accounting of his place in a wider European context.