Fighting had become an everyday activity—men skirmished in the streets, in theaters, in print. “Soon anyone wanting to be a good swordsman had to join a school of fence,” Castle records, and aristocrats were happy to take lessons from plebeian masters. In addition to straightforward sword-work, schools taught disarms, tripping, and wrestling moves—less useful perhaps in a formal duel but vital when suddenly attacked in an alleyway or dark passage. These schools, meanwhile, became havens for assassins and cutpurses, and Castle speculates that “brutal revelry, as well as darker deeds,” likely took place in comparative safety behind their walls. A contemporary is more direct: “Dead men, with holes in their breasts, were often found by the watchmen, with their pale faces resting on doorsteps or merchants’ houses, or propped up and still bleeding, hid away in church porches.”15
Between 1490 and 1550 vast numbers of swords were produced throughout Europe, at increasingly affordable cost. Sword deaths from personal quarrels rose accordingly. As London doubled in size to 200,000 inhabitants between 1580 and 1600, it saw a vast influx of restless young men. By 1586 the city had at least eight major fencing schools and many more smaller, less formal venues of instruction. In many towns the art of arms fell so low, taught by whoever considered himself capable of passing on advice, that the fencing master was also the dancing instructor—or even the local dentist. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth passed vagrancy acts requiring fencers to have “respectable occupations to satisfy the law”—but to little avail. The playwright Christopher Marlowe was at one point charged with manslaughter after a rapier and dagger duel involving one of his closest friends; in 1593 he was killed in peculiar circumstances in a tavern brawl. Five years later, Ben Jonson was penning his play Every Man in His Humour (Bobadill: “You shall kill him, beyond question: if you be so generously minded.” Matthew: “Indeed, it is a most excellent trick!”)‖ when he killed a fellow actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a rapier duel. He was arraigned at the Old Bailey in October 1598, where he pleaded guilty, being released by “benefit of clergy” (a one-time plea that any literate person could employ), forfeiting his “goods and chattels” and being branded on his left thumb.
The urban calendar was littered with holidays, which became an excuse for punch-ups and attacks on brothels and bathhouses (frequently sited close to fencing establishments) or houses belonging to foreigners. Gangs roamed the streets, bearing down on anyone who stood in their way. Their swaggering manner led to their being called “swashbucklers,” from the clattering sound they made bashing their dueling shields.a Fencing thugs, or “sword men,” became the bullies of city life—and England was hardly alone. The French government banned all fencing schools in Paris. In Germany swashbucklers were called “Schwertzucher,” “Eisenfresser” (“Ironeaters”), or “Raufdegen.” A fifteenth-century German woodcut, “The Fencing Hall and the Brothel,” shows fencers practicing with two-handed swords while women lure them with cries of “Come with us into the bath and enjoy yourself. You’ll have such a good time you won’t want to leave.” A Portuguese swordfighter fell afoul of the authorities for practicing his skills on a passing breeches-maker whose hat he cut in two.16
Italians were more notorious still. The year 1498 saw the birth of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the son of a Medici. Giovanni became the leading mercenary of his day and introduced the ambush into military use (so becoming, in the confined spaces of an ambush, an expert swordsman). Dubbed “Capitano di ventura”—“captain of fortune”—he changed sides constantly and, after the death of Leo X, a Medici relative, took up arms against the new pope. Papal favor was not unimportant: Benvenuto Cellini came to be admired as much for his swordplay as for his sculpture, and Pope Paul III had to explain away “Benito’s” killings by declaring, “Men unique in their professions like Benvenuto are not subject to the laws.” Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571–1610) might have agreed; blessed with a hair-trigger temper, in 1606 he killed a man over a squabble about a tennis-match wager, piercing him through the penis, and was forced by the Vatican to flee Rome.
A fencing school and bathhouse circa 1464. (illustration credit 2.3)
Caravaggio’s weapon was the rapier, as it had been for so many before him; it was the weapon that finally brought about the triumph of the thrust over the cut. In itself, it was deadly, but after some seventy-five years of near supremacy it became outmoded. Spanish fencers continued to use it, as they continued to follow Carranza’s precepts up until the opening years of the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, however, after its high season, the rapier lost its place in popular esteem. Over the mid–seventeenth century, while the Spanish clung to their great discovery, modifying it slightly into a new version, the bilbo, across the rest of Europe the rapier was shortened and lightened; but it was still too long for easy use, and the fencing world looked around for new inspiration.
SHAKESPEARE IS SAID TO HAVE LEARNED TO FENCE AT THE BLACKFRIARS Theatre, most probably under the instruction of Vincentio Saviolo, who had arrived in London when the young playwright was twenty-six. Shakespeare took his fencing seriously, on at least one occasion, in 1589, ending up on the wrong side of the law when accused of being caught in public in an affray, his sword in hand. Elizabethan audiences watched the style and execution of stage fights with keen interest: it was not unusual for unruly members of the audience to join in the action onstage, and eventually an ordinance was passed banning the wearing of swords to the theater. In 1596 James Burbage, the leading actor of Shakespeare’s company, bought the lease of the fencing school he had been attending and annexed it to Blackfriars Theatre; Shakespeare was one of his partners. Two years later the playwright, along with a theatrical group that included Burbage’s two sons, decided to move the company to a less expensive site on the south bank of the Thames. Their old landlord expected (not unreasonably) that the building itself would remain where it stood. During the Christmas holiday, however, the group, armed with swords, dismantled Burbage’s theater piece by piece and transported it to the new site.b
While other playwrights offered up fight scenes in profusion—John Webster would give an entire play-within-a-play to swordfighting in Love’s Graduate—until Shakespeare no one had used the swordfight so well, or for such a variety of purposes. There are 437 references to “sword” in the Shakespearean canon (though, interestingly, only five to “duel”), and in play after play swordfights occur center stage.
Sometimes Shakespeare makes fun of the whole business, as when Slender, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, clumsily bruises his shin “playing at sword and dagger,” or when Sir Andrew Aguecheek takes on a disguised Viola in Twelfth Night. In As You Like It Touchstone, the outlawed jester, famously ridicules the newly formed rules that applied to formal challenges, listing “the retort courteous … the quip modest … the reply churlish … the reproof valiant … the countercheck quarrelsome … the lie circumstantial … the lie direct,” while pertinently adding, “Your ‘if’ is the only peace-maker; much virtue in ‘if.’ ”
There are other, more deadly encounters: Antony challenges Octavian to a duel in Antony and Cleopatra, Iago wounds Cassio in a brawl in Othello. There is a trial by combat in Henry VI, and in the opening scene of Richard II Shakespeare portrays the historic charge of treason made by Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, against Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, challenging him to public combat. “What my tongue speaks, my right drawn sword may prove,” Henry declares.
By that, and all the rites of knighthood else,
Will I make good against thee, arm to arm,
What I have spoke, or thou canst worse devise. (I, i, 80–82)
The most dramatic of Shakespeare’s swordfights, however, comes in Act III, Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet with Mercutio’s duel with Tybalt. The verse provides a vivid description of an exchange with rapier and dagger (or perhaps cape):
He tilts
With piercing steel at bold Mercutio’s breast;
Who all as hot, turns deadly point to point,
And wi
th a martial scorn, with one hand beats
Cold death aside, and with the other sends
It back to Tybalt, whose dexterity
Retorts it. (III, i, 173–78)
The scene is also Shakespeare’s chance to make fun of the Spanish school of rapier play. Mercutio derisively exclaims as he prepares to take on Tybalt that his opponent is “a villain who fights by the book of arithmetic.”
Above all, there is Hamlet’s duel with Laertes. Though a considerable literature exists covering this most famous of stage fights, critics disagree on what is meant to take place: how are the two swords swapped convincingly? Few eyewitness accounts of Shakespeare’s plays survive, and there is not a single description of any of his fights; but we are given clues. Hamlet uses a rapier:
HAMLET: What’s his weapon?
OSRIC: Rapier and dagger.
HAMLET: That’s two of his weapons—but well. (V, ii, 144–46)
Hamlet is an expert fencer and (although earlier in the play he admits to being much out of practice, a possible slip on Shakespeare’s part) expects to win:
HORATIO: You will lose this wager, my lord.
HAMLET: I do not think so. Since he [Laertes] went into France I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds. (V, ii, 210–13)
Shakespeare would have choreographed the “scuffling” called for in the text as something like close-quarter wrestling (the two men would have been far closer to each other than we are used to)—so two rapier players could easily have found themselves deadlocked and able to grasp each other’s sword hand. The lunge had not yet come to England—attacks would have been by “passes,” in the old style. If the swordfight were not done convincingly, the Elizabethan audience would mock or boo the actors offstage. And so the greatest play ever written climaxes in a swordfight, at once exciting, exactly described, and crucial to the outcome of the drama. It is impossible not to thrill to that moment in Act V, Scene 1, so full of foreboding and menace:
KING: Come, begin,
And you the Judges beare a wary eye.
HAMLET: Come on Sir.
LAERTES: Come on Sir.
They play.
* Wrestling continued to have a place in swordfighting well into the seventeenth century. One of the first treatises on the sport is dated 1727, The Inn-Play or Cornish-Hugg Wrestler, by Sir Theo Parkyns of Bunny Park, Nottinghamshire. Alongside entries such as “Buttock truly Perform’d” and “Your knee in his ham To prevent his throwing his Head in your Face” are several fencing instructions, including “wrestling of use in duels” and “I illustrate how useful Wrestling is to a Gentleman in Fencing.” At one point Parkyns writes, “Play-wrestling is just like French fencing, which runneth much upon falsifying, taking and spending of Time.”
† The great artist and Agrippa certainly fenced together, but did Michelangelo undertake the illustrations for his friend? The fencing historian Malcolm Fare recently purchased a copy of Agrippa’s book, previously owned by Giuseppe Molini, librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. It bears an inscription on the reverse of the title page by the sixteenth-century poet Torquato Tasso, presumably also a fencer, that runs, “le figure intagliate da Michelangelo Buonarroti.” Although some historians have doubted that Michelangelo was responsible for Agrippa’s illustrations, citing instead Giovanni Stradanus (born Jan van der Street of Holland), the artist remains unknown; we can only speculate.
‡ The Spanish word for “sword,” espada, is one obvious association of swords with spades. Another is to be found in playing cards. An invention of the Chinese, cards were divided into suits and symbols in the fifteenth century. Even before the invention of printing, the northern Italians produced hand-painted decks of seventy-eight Tarot cards, whose court cards included a king and queen of swords. The Germans were the first to mass-produce playing cards, changing the Italian suits of swords, batons, cups, and coins to leaves, acorns, bells, and hearts. Then the French did away with the Tarot’s twenty-two trumps, reduced the deck to fifty-two cards by combining knight and page into a single jack, and introduced spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. These suits reflected the structure of medieval society: spades (or swords) for the warrior aristocracy, hearts (cups or chalices) for the Church, diamonds (coins or bartered treasures) for the merchant class, and clubs (batons) for agriculture, or the peasantry. The French were also the first to name court cards after particular historical or mythical characters. The king of spades is the biblical King David, who carries the sword belonging to his most celebrated victim, Goliath; the queen of spades, the only armed queen, is Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and war; and the jack of spades, shown in profile carrying a beribboned pike, is Oger the Dane, a knight of Charlemagne. The jack of clubs is Lancelot, from King Arthur’s Round Table.6
§ The rapier is said to have been introduced to England in 1587 by one Rowland Yorke, a desperado who in January of that year betrayed Fort Zutphen in the Netherlands to the Spanish. As Holinshed was writing the year before Yorke is meant to have made his introduction and other references can be found as far back as 1570—they are even listed in the armory of Henry VIII in 1540—there is reason to doubt that gentleman’s place in history. More reliably, William Camden, in his Annuals of the Queen (1615), stated that Yorke introduced a particular way of fencing with the rapier, thrusting beneath the girdle, which had previously been considered unmanly. Yorke was evidently treacherous in matters both large and small.
‖ Act IV, Scene 7. The play is full of swordfights, and in this same scene Bobadill sets himself up as a fencing coach, well able to teach “your Punto, your Reverso, your Stoccata,” and a host of other Italianate moves.
a Another reprobate, Roger le Skirmisour, is said to have given his name to the English language, having been called up before the Lord Mayor of London early in the fourteenth century for keeping a fencing school of dubious character. Certainly the old military name for mercenary or irregular troops, “skirmishers,” is similar to the French word for fencers, escrimeurs, but “skirmish” has a long history, going back to its Indo-European roots (the American Heritage Dictionary lists more than forty words in the same family, including “scrum” and “scaramouche”). It is more likely that Roger took his name from the word than the other way around.
b Shakespeare’s brushes with the law have long fascinated other writers. In Tales of the Jazz Age F. Scott Fitzgerald has a story, “Tarquin of Cheapside,” about a struggling writer toiling away when a ruffian, on the run from “two murderous pikemen … with short swords lurching and long plumes awry,” with whom he has had a fierce passage of arms, arrives at his door and begs to hide in his loft. The ruffian, “a grey ghost of misty stuff,” is of course Shakespeare, who admits he is something of a writer himself—he is at work on a long poem, The Rape of Lucrece. But the narrator is too preoccupied with his own efforts to take much notice, and soon “Soft Shoes,” as he dubs his visitor, “flashes through a patch of moonlight” and sets off back to “the black lanes of London.”17
He goes forth gallantly. That he and Caesar might Determine this great war in single fight!
—CLEOPATRA, IN SHAKESPEARE’S Antony and Cleopatra, IV, iv, 36–37
Men may account a duello an honourable kind of satisfaction, yet it is but a scarlet or a grained kind of murdering.
—SIR FRANCIS BACON, Letters, 1614
THE WORD “DUEL” COMES FROM THE LATIN DUELLO, MADE UP OF bellum (“conflict”) and duo (“two”). A duelist was defined by Noah Webster as “one who fights in single combat.” To the eighteenth-century Scots philosopher David Hume, a duelist was “one who always values himself upon his courage, his sense of honor, his fidelity and friendship”—curiously leaving out the business of fighting altogether.1 An 1884 study of dueling, The Field of Honor, opts for “a professional fighter of duels; an admirer and advocate of the code duello.”2 Perhaps it is best to settle on a combination of all three.
Unlike the early medieval tournaments, the scuffles between indiv
iduals in a pub-room argument, or the clan combat Sir Walter Scott describes in such convincing detail in The Fair Maid of Perth, the duel was fought within an imposed set of conventions. An artificially staged encounter, it was deliberately confined by formal restrictions and, as such, was the truest precursor of fencing. The two would overlap and borrow from each other over the centuries.
Dueling dominated the landscape of swordplay for more than a thousand years. A number of historians cite David and Goliath, Achilles and Hector, and Turnus and Aeneas as early duelists, but they were individual combatants engaged in a national quarrel: David and Goliath in the age-old struggle between Jews and Philistines; Achilles and Hector representing Greece and Troy; Turnus and Aeneas as rivals for Lavinia—but each with a whole army behind him. What we think of as duels were virtually unknown in the ancient world; Tacitus comes nearest, with a description in the Germania.3 The Greeks and Romans had very different conceptions of what it was to be courageous: Plato for one defines courage as “the virtue of fleeing from an inevitable danger.”
It is a matter of record that Antony sent a challenge to Octavius Caesar, but most historians date the origins of the duel to A.D. 501. That was when Gundebald, King of Burgundy, under pressure from a relentless bishop, drew on pre-Christian precedent to declare the wager of battle a recognized judicial proceeding. He argued that since God directed the outcome of wars, it was only right to trust in His providence to favor the just cause in private quarrels as well. (Gundebald must also have been aware that perjury was regularly being committed under the existing system of trial by oath.)* His Lex Burgundiorum combined Celtic, German, and Roman traditions into a single code. Victory in combat would be admissible as proof of integrity in all legal proceedings in lieu of swearing; women, invalids, men over sixty, and boys under fifteen would be exempt, and later so were priests. Why Gundebald expected God to have a freer hand in duels than elsewhere is unclear; perhaps he was guided by the belief that in a one-on-one contest God would be cornered and would have to see that justice was done. In any event, his “trial by battle” (also called trial by combat or wager of battle) soon became the norm throughout Europe. Duels were used to decide even the most arcane and academic conflicts, so that in Toledo, in 1085, a duel determined whether Latin or Mozarabic rites should be used in the liturgy (the Mozarabic champion won).
By the Sword Page 7