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A Chinese painter, explaining to his pupils how to paint a grove of bamboo, told them to meditate for months on bamboo, to try to become a bamboo, and then produce their painting in a matter of minutes. In similar fashion, this essay in synthesis, although short and written in the course of a few months, has been long in the making. Writing about festivals, and in particular about Carnival, in my Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) made me want to continue in this direction. Conversations with Philippe Ariès a few months later led to an invitation to give a paper at a conference in Tours in 1980 concerned with ‘Les jeux à la Renaissance’. A conference on ‘tempo libero’, held in Prato in 1992, allowed me to explore the history of the idea of leisure. Writing a book about Castiglione’s Courtier, a dialogue that is presented as a game, encouraged thought about playfulness in the culture of the High Renaissance. A conference on the cultural history of humour, organized by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg and held in Amsterdam, was the occasion for a paper on ‘Frontiers of the Comic’, that turned into a chapter in a collective study of the history of humour, published in 1997.¹ In short, I feel that I have been preparing for this essay for more than forty years without knowing it. I have occasionally stolen sentences from my past self in order to construct it, but I believe that this book offers new ideas as well as developing thoughts that were originally expressed in print elsewhere in new directions.

Another invitation, this time from John Henderson and Virginia Cox, to write a short book for a series of studies of the Italian Renaissance, persuaded me to return to the subject. I do not wish to thank the recent virus, but its result, virtual confinement at home, concentrated the mind wonderfully and allowed me to put my notes in order and produce a first draft while major libraries were closed. I cannot thank my wife Maria Lúcia enough for looking after me in that time of crisis. Telling stories was a form of light relief for the group of young men and women described in Boccaccio’s Decameron – refugees from the plague of 1348 – and doubtless for the author himself. For me in 2020, reading and writing about play was a form of light relief from a world dominated by the Coronavirus.

1 1. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; 3rd edn, Farnham, 2009); ‘Le carnaval de Venise’, in Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds.) Les jeux à la Renaissance (Paris, 1982), 55–64; Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (Cambridge, 1995); Burke, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present 146 (1995), 136–50; Burke, ‘Frontiers of the Comic in Early Modern Italy’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.) A Cultural History of Humour (Cambridge, 1997), 61–75.