Oct 19, 2020
The 16th century was the first time English history, and the first time in most of European history, that the average person started carrying a weapon as a matter of daily life. The rapier specifically came into fashion in England in the mid 16th century, and while it plays a prominent role in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mentions the rapier specifically over 30 times in his plays including Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the Henriad plays. The specific terminology Shakespeare has characters like Mercutio use which refer to passado, staccato, and the punto reverso were Italian fencing terms from manual being published at the same time Romeo and Juliet was written. More than just a reference to a single manual, though, as our guest this week points out, rapier fencing was a huge cultural moment in England with official edicts from Elizabeth I being passed to try and limit or even outright ban the use of rapiers in London, as some of the noblemen in England were actively hiring Italian fencing masters specifically to be trained in this new, and rapidly popular art of rapier fencing. Here this week to take us back to the 1590s and explore the moment in history and explain what was going on in the very moment that William Shakespeare had Mercutio call Tybalt a cat who fights from the book of arithmetic, is our guest Tobias Capwell.