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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