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:
“Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“If I have any justification for having lived it’s simply, I’m nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There’s some value in that.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)