A Game at Chess Thomas Middleton

A Game at Chess survives in nine different texts, each of which has its own unique characteristics. Gary Taylor thus calls the play "the most complicated editorial problem in the entire corpus of early modern drama, and one of the most complicated in English literature".[9] The play is unique in that it exists in more 17th-century manuscripts than it does printed editions (six extant manuscripts compared to three printed editions). Of the manuscripts, one is an authorial holograph, and three are the work of Ralph Crane, a professional scribe who worked for the King's Men in this era and who is thought to have prepared some of the play texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.

The manuscript and printed forms of the text present significant orthographical differences as well as some differences in the plot and characters' names. For example, early manuscript forms of the play lack the Prologue and use ambiguous speech prefixes, referring to characters by the initials of their chess pieces rather than by name.[10]

There are two major studies of the relationship between the texts: that of T. H. Howard Hill (1995), and Gary Taylor (2007); the studies give different names to the texts.