Shakespeare and Dueling
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Title
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Shakespeare and Dueling
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Date
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April 1941
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volume
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6
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issue
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2
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page start
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8
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page end
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8
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en
SHAKESPEARE AND DUELING
"Dueling Scenes and Terms in Shakespeare's Plays" is the title of a monograph by Horace S. Craig, well-known Pacific Coast fencer and faculty member at the University of California, published recently by the University of California Press.
Fencing enthusiasts who have been annoyedly aware of stilted and extremely unathletic dueling scenes in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Henry IV, and half a dozen other Shakespearean plays will be extremely surprised at the knowledge of fencing which Mr. Craig shows the Bard to have had. The actors themselves seem to have been the ones responsible for the ineptitude.
In tracing Shakespeare's knowledge of the duel, Mr. Craig discusses early concepts of swordplay and shows how the rapier and the foil replaced the heavier sword and buckler after the sixteenth-century Italians "rediscovered the use of the point." Shakespeare, he shows by frequent reference to the plays, was more than casually familiar with both types of combat.
As a sidelight on Aldo Nadi's article in this issue, it should be noted that Mr. Craig refers to guilds of fencing masters being common as early as the sixteenth century, two of the largest being Henry VIII’s English Corporation of Defense Masters and the German Buergerschaft von St. Marcus Von Loewenberg.
"German fencing died out," says Mr. Craig, "because masters never learned to use their heads; also, they tried to keep the art 'mysterious' and 'magical'." Not too far a cry from some of the poseurs of the 1940s.
Of particular interest are Mr. Craig’s deductions in the Hamlet duel scene, when the contestants somehow contrive to exchange rapiers, the first time we know of when the perplexing situation has been attacked by someone with a competent working knowledge of fencing. His ideas should be of enduring interest to later scholars.
Copies of Mr. Craig’s fine monograph may be ordered from the University of California Press, Berkeley. The price is twenty-five cents.
