Post and Pair in Literature
Post and Pair was first mentioned in a list of games played by Gargantua of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a novel written by François Rabelais in the 16th century.
Shakespeare mentions the name of the game as well in a dialogue between the character Rosaline and the Princess of France in a conversation about Berowne, one of the lords attending the King Ferdinand of Navarre, in one of his lost plays Love's Labour's Lost, written in the mid-1590s.
In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, the card game of Post and pair is introduced as one of his children, thus characterizing him as a Knave. According to the A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, obsolete phrases and ancient customs of the Fourteenth century, by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, written in 1868, Pur is the name given to the Knave or Jack in the game of Post and Pair. It seems to be formed by an abbreviation of pair-royal corrupted into "purrial", hence pair-royal has since been further corrupted into prial.
The game is mentioned in Canto Six of Walter Scott's epic poem Marmion as a "vulgar" game played at Christmas.
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Famous quotes containing the words post, pair and/or literature:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary or a stool
To stumble over and vex you ... “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)