Around 1640, the English playwright Richard Brome wrote The Court Beggar, a comic play. The plot centres on the courtier Sir Ferdinando whose principal vice (apart from womanising) is gambling. These depictions on stage were a reflection of wider society during the Caroline Era — the reign of Charles I (1625–1649) — when gambling had become a popular pastime. We gain an insight from the Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne (1600–69) who writes that many in the ‘Cities and Market Towns’ of England spend their Saturday nights in ‘drinking, gaming, whoring and such like worldly or carnall imployments.’1 Around this time, James Shirley, a contemporary of Brome, published the comedy The Gamester (1637), a play said to be a favourite of Charles I.2 In the tavern scene of Act III, Shirley presents a colourful snapshot of a gaming house of 1630s London. A gambler enters with ‘pockets full of gold’ dazzling the gamesters.3 Members of London’s high society rub shoulders with knights and country dwellers, lured to the city’s drinking tables, revelling in masculine camaraderie and ‘bawdy bravado’4 — a scene no doubt familiar to contemporary frequenters.Also from the time, in Brome’s comedy The Antipodes (1638), Peregrine, a highly strung nobleman, is drugged and taken to a country estate as part of an elaborate cure. When he wakes he is made to believe he is in a strange country called The Antipodes of which he is crowned king. For Brome, The Antipodes is in fact Anti-London where roles are reversed: lawyers, for instance, are poor while poets are rich. Peregrine is met with a gallery of ‘pandars, cheaters, house and highway robbers’.5 The chronic gambler, having sold his house and land to fuel his habit, also makes an appearance — allowing us to see the persistence of this character in London’s seedy underworld of the time.In Brome’s The Demoiselle (1637), Sir Dryground, a London tavern owner, organises a lottery in an attempt to avoid financial ruin. Public lotteries had begun a century earlier to raise funds for the public good, such as the 1566 effort for repairing England’s harbours. Brome, however, satirises Caroline society’s desire for gambling by making the prize for Dryground’s lottery the chance to win a young woman’s virginity. While the supposed gentlemen vying for the sordid prize erupt into a murderous mob, we learn that the titular demoiselle is, in fact, a boy in disguise.The execution of Charles I for treason in 1649 brought an end to the Caroline era, and ushered in changes to the gambling landscape. During Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth (1649–1660) (a short-lived republic), although gambling did not enjoy a public platform in lotteries and horse-races, it was not curbed entirely, as that would have been a fool’s errand given the widespread popularity.In present-day England, the Gambling Act of 2005 established the Gambling Commission, a body responsible for regulating the industry, and preventing addiction and gambling-related crime. GambleAware, a notable independent charity, also funds research and education into gambling, and provides support for addicts. Despite this sympathetic shift, the criminal, immoral and addictive realities of gambling that Brome and his contemporaries explored are today glamorised by Hollywood in such films as Casino Royale (2006) or Uncut Gems (2019).