Downright Blows and Cunning Fence: Hotspur’s Rapier Modernity in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV

It has been conventional to treat Hotspur as an exemplar of medieval chivalric excellence and Prince Hal as a figure of emerging modernity. In her introduction to the play, Jean E. Howard takes it for granted that Hotspur is “an impassioned embodiment of medieval chivalry” and Prince Hal a “good student of Machiavelli.”¹ Yet the categories of modern and medieval are complex and the characters do not fit neatly into one or the other. One insult, obscure to modern audiences but clear to Elizabethan ones, depends on recognizing the modern in Hotspur and the medieval in Hal to achieve its effect. Hotspur’s dismissive reference to “that same sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales” (1.3.228), shows how Hotspur sees himself as the urbane, cosmopolitan, modern gentleman, and Hal as the old-fashioned English throwback.² To understand the social nuances of sword and buckler in 1 Henry IV, it is useful to consider the contexts in which Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Sir Philip Sidney used a proverb among sword-and-buckler fighters: “Bring me to a [rapier] fencer, I will bring him out of his fence tricks with downright blows.” Hotspur’s insult takes meaning from this context.

Since we have stopped wearing swords as part of everyday dress, it is easy to forget that what swords men wore and the techniques they used to wield them had rich and nuanced meaning. Swords were tools not just of violence but of social display. The primary opposition was between the rapier and the short sword, and each had social meanings even as connotations could take on positive or negative shadings depending on context and speaker. The rapier was coded as modern, scientific, continental, and fashionable, or newfangled, rigid, alien, and faddish; the short sword and buckler connoted obsolete, rustic, lower class, and insular, or traditional, unspoiled, honest, and English.

Elizabethan and Jacobean England was still a martial culture, with tournaments, prize fights, and fencing demonstrations as entertainment.³ The nobility and gentry justified their status by claiming that their primary profession was that of arms: in the words of Baldasarre Castiglione, “the principall and true profession of a Courtyer ought to be in feates of armes.”⁴ When in the sixteenth century swords began to be worn routinely, men understandably began favoring smaller, lighter blades than would be used in war. The traditional English weapon was a short sword (with a three-foot blade, it was short only in comparison with the two-handed swords) and buckler, a small, handheld shield; the sword could thrust, but it was also heavy enough for cuts. Masters of Defence routinely taught short sword and buckler in their schools. But in the 1560s, a weapon imported from Spain and especially from Italy began to arrive: the rapier. With a thinner blade, it emphasized the thrust (foin) and was not suited to piercing armor, but it was deadly against unarmored opponents, such as those one might face in duels—and dueling, another Italian import, was exploding in popularity, despite its illegality. The fact that the rapier could not be used in war cast grave doubts on its claim to social usefulness and made awkward its pretensions toward chivalry, but rapier fencing had an overwhelming edge in social status. In 1576 Rocco Bonetti opened a rapier school in London aimed at gentlemen, which was apparently far more luxurious than the schools of the Masters of Defence. Beginning in 1590 “his boy,” Jeromino, took over Bonetti’s school in partnership with Vincentio Saviolo.⁵

The war in print began later. In 1594, an anonymous translator published a translation of Giacomo di Grassi, His True Arte of Defence, which, while covering many weapons, emphasizes the rapier. The next year, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice came out in two volumes, the first dedicated to the rapier, the second to the etiquette of dueling. The title-page of Di Grassi his True Arte of Defence, a rapier manual published in English in 1594, carefully identifies the anonymous translator as a gentleman, and the author’s epistle is to “diuers Noble men and Gentle-men.”⁶ The translator notes that he has sometimes substituted the word rapier for sword, since “the sworde but with Seruing-men is not much regarded,” implying he is writing for an elite class of people.⁷ Di Grassi goes on to celebrate his fencing as embodying modern sophistication, art, and science: in his opening epistle, “The Author, to the Reader,” he boasts of reducing the old ways of an infinite number of techniques without any order to a rational system informed by geometry (although not nearly to the extent Spanish fencers used it).⁸ In 1595, Vincentio Saviolo, too, makes it clear he is writing to gentlemen, especially in his second volume on the etiquette of dueling.

When attacking the rapier, defenders of the short sword and buckler were mindful to also defend their own social status. George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence (1599) was not a fencing manual per se but an impassioned condemnation of the Italian rapier styles, especially Saviolo’s. Some years later Silver wrote a manuscript, Bref Instructions Upon My Paradoxes of Defence, which was a fencing manual making up for the earlier omission of specific instruction. Silver, who vehemently challenges the Italian teachers and their fondness for the rapier, was in an awkward position: while protesting against the loss of status of the sword and buckler, he also wished to preserve his own status. The title-page identifies him as “George Siluer Gentleman.”⁹ He tackles the issue of fashion in the first sentence of the work, in the dedicatory epistle: “Fencing (Right honorable) in this new fangled age, is like our fashions, euerie daye a change, resembling the Camelion, who altereth himselfe into all colours saue white: so Fencing changeth into all wards saue the right.”¹⁰ Silver tries to counteract the social appeal of the rapier by invoking the negative connotations of fashion and by attacking the notion that change must mean progress.

Silver’s invective against the rapier, however, goes well beyond class, invoking distinctions between English and foreign, urban and rural, contemporary fashion and older tradition:

[I] admonish [Englishmen] to take heed, how they submit themselues into the hands of Italian teachers of Defence, or straungers whatsoeuer; and to beware how they forsake or suspect their owne naturall fight, that they may by casting off of these Italinatated, weake, fantasticall, and most diuellish and imperfect fights, and by exercising of their owne ancient weapons, be restored, or atchieue vnto their natural, and most manly and victorious fight againe, the dint and force whereof manie braue nations haue both felt and feared. Our ploughmen haue mightily preuailed against them, as also against Maisters of Defence both in Schooles and countries, that haue taken vpon thē to stand vpon Schoole-tricks and iugling gambalds: whereby it grew to a common speech among the countrie-men, Bring me to a Fencer, I will bring him out of his fence trickes with good downe right blowes, I will make him forget his fence trickes I will warrant him.¹¹

Silver’s claim that “[b]ring me to a Fencer, I will bring him out of his fence trickes with good downe right blowes” was proverbial seems to have been true. Ben Jonson (who killed Gabriel Spencer with a rapier in 1598) uses it in Every Man in His Humour. A braggart Italian rapier teacher, Bobadill (possibly modeled on Rocco Bonetti), gets beaten soundly by a rustic squire.¹² In the 1601 quarto version, the play is set in Italy and the rustic is named Guiliano; however, the 1616 folio version is set in England and the squire’s name is Downright, invoking the idea of downright blows that beat cunning fence.

The most sustained use of the proverb, however, comes in Sonnet 10 of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella:

Reason, in faith thou art well served, that still

Would’st brabbling be with sense and love in me.

I rather wished thee climb the muses’ hill,

Or reach the fruit of nature’s choicest tree,

 Or seek heaven’s course, or heaven’s inside, to see.

Why should’st thou toil our thorny soil to till?

Leave sense, and those which sense’s objects be:

Deal thou with powers of thoughts, leave love to will.

 But thou would’st needs fight both with love and sense,

With sword of wit giving wounds of dispraise,

Till downright blows did foil thy cunning fence:

For soon as they strake thee with Stella’s rays,

Reason, thou kneeled’st, and offered’st straight to prove

By reason good, good reason her to love.¹³

When Sidney says that love overcame Reason’s fencing with downright blows, he casts Reason as a rapier fencer and Love as a short-sword fencer. The first part of the sonnet makes clear that he is invoking primarily the negative associations of rapier-fencing. The rapier’s foreign associations are highlighted by suggestions that Reason is directed toward foreign objects, such as stars or the Muses’ hill; it has no cause to “toil our thorny soil to till.”¹⁴ Furthermore, Reason’s rapier fencing provides Sidney a new way of talking about Italian artistry and style.¹⁵ Petrarchan poetics is a dominant theme in the first part of Astrophil and Stella. Sonnet 1 begins the theme when the narrator, wanting to move Stella by verse, starts by “studying inventions fine, … turning others’ leaves,” until his muse instructs “look in thy heart and write.”¹⁶ Sonnet 3 continues the explicit discussion of how to write love poetry, and Sonnet 4 mocks Petrarchan conventions. The distinction between polished Italian artistry and strong but less artful natural instinct applies to fencing as well as poetics. With the rapier’s associations with art and style reinforced by the reference to the Muses, Reason’s Italian nature suggests the struggle between the clever Petrarchan poetic forms of the Italian tradition and the desire to express individual emotions. Sidney was an accomplished knight, and his challenge to the Earl of Oxford shows no great aversion to the new dueling culture (Elizabeth intervened to prevent the fight).¹⁷ He probably finished Astrophil and Stella in the early 1580s, after Bonetti had opened his rapier school in London but before any of the fencing manuals discussed above were published.¹⁸ Nevertheless, his “downright blows did foil thy cunning fence” closely echoes what Silver says was proverbial: “I will bring him out of his fence trickes with good downe right blowes.” Sidney clearly expected the audiences to understand the social significance of distinct styles of combat.

Shakespeare, too, used the nuances of fencing styles to reveal character. In Much Ado About Nothing, Antonio tells Claudio, “Sir boy! I’ll whip you from your foining fence” (5.1.84), a variant of the proverb used by Silver, Jonson, and Sidney (“foining,” or thrusting, was the characteristic attack of rapier fencing, while short swords often used a cutting stroke). Here, clearly, the issue is not class but age, the older gentleman unfamiliar with the new rapier style. The opening of Romeo and Juliet is precise in its assignment of weapons to characters: the servants Samson and Gregory enter with swords and bucklers, according to the opening stage direction (1.1.1sd), and Samson’s exhortation, “Gregory, remember thy washing blow” (1.1.57–58) refers to the swashing stroke used with the short sword that gave us the word “swashbuckler.” The young gentlemen presumably use rapiers, as Mercutio’s mockery of Tybalt’s obsession with rapier fencing and its terminology makes clear (2.3.24). Then old Capulet, not wearing either rapier or short sword as part of his daily dress as the young men do, calls for his military long sword (1.1.70), and since old Montague is armed, presumably he has a long sword too (1.1.73). In 1 Henry IV, when Falstaff lies about his buckler being cut through and his sword hacked (2.4.153–54), the sword and buckler suggest his age, his lack of class, and his unconcern with fashion.

This brings us back to Hotspur sneering at Hal as “that same sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales.” Hotspur’s mockery of the sword and buckler aligns him with the new rapier duelists. Footnotes to Hotspur’s line usually oversimplify by identifying the class aspect only; yet looking at the full richness of the connotations shows Hal being presented as old-fashioned, insular rather than continental, and generally conservative.¹⁹ E. M. W. Tillyard’s claim that “for though … Hotspur is satirized as the northern provincial in contrast to that finished Renaissance gentleman, the Prince, he does express positive English qualities” is simply incompatible with the force of this insult.²⁰ The swords tell us that it is Hal being dismissed as provincial and boorish, and if Englishness is at issue, it is being ascribed to Hal. Hotspur is implicitly positioning himself as a cosmopolitan Renaissance gentleman, exactly the opposite of Tillyard’s claims. King Henry IV’s admiration and fear of Hotspur confirms Hotspur’s polish and suggests that perhaps the king sees something of his usurping self in Hotspur: modern, cosmopolitan, ambitious, and willing to fight for his pride.²¹ Hal is the one clinging, for good or for ill, to the old ways. In this context, it is interesting to note that Silver, in his attack on the new rapier fashions and defense of the older short sword and buckler, hearkens back to Henry V: “We like degenerate sonnes, haue forsaken our forefathers vertues with their weapons, and haue lusted like men sicke of a strange ague, after the strange vices and deuises of Italian, French[,] and Spanish Fencers, litle remembering, that these Apish toyes could not free Rome from Brennius sacke, nor Fraunce from King Henrie the fift his conquest.”²² Since Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence was published in 1599, a year after the earliest printing of 1 Henry IV, it is possible that Shakespeare has colored Silver’s judgment; but his constellation of short swords, Henry V’s victories, and the lost virtues of the past (going all the way to Brennius) confirms that Hotspur’s insult in no way aligns Hal with modernity.

Although Hotspur’s success in war gives him chivalric honor, his consistent behavior on stage is not that of a medieval knight but of a thoroughly modern stereotype: the rapier duelist. Silver consistently associates the rapier and the concomitant commitment to private duels for personal honor with civil disruption: “But that which is most shamefull, they teach men to butcher one another here at home in peace, wherewith they cannot hurt their enemies abrode in warre.”²³ Although duels were discouraged (King James made them flatly illegal in 1613), they were popular; and although ostensibly functioning as defenses of courtesy, in practice they allowed a swaggering, quick-tempered arrogance in those who thought themselves skilled (Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet springs to mind).²⁴ Hotspur’s impatience with Glyndwr’s medieval prophecies (3.1.143–59), his mockery of a gentleman who deplores modern gunpowder warfare (1.3.60–64), his extravagant fantasies of pursuing honor to the moon or the depths (1.3.200–206) are modern, not medieval, traits. The impatience of his kinsmen and their careful manipulation of his touchy pride marks his individual honor as a problem, not a communal chivalric virtue. The final encounter in battle between Hal and Hotspur in some way redeems them both; it marks Hal’s unexpected skill in the old-fashioned chivalric world, something that he will build on in Henry V for the (temporary) reunification of Britain, but it also moves Hotspur away from the brabbling everyday quarrels of the rapier duelists in times of peace to a nobler, more significant venue in which his violence has a more recognized place.²⁵ The difficulties of how to read Hotspur probably stem in part from this wavering invocation of medieval chivalric honor and early modern duelist’s honor. For instance, Lewis Walker reads 1 Henry IV against medieval chivalry; Norman Council reads Hotspur against late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century treatises on honor, with understandably different results.²⁶ But Hotspur’s rapier-biased sneer against the sword and dagger and his ever-flashing temper suggest that he should be read in the early modern context of individual violence, and his defeat by Hal’s downright blows (if I am allowed to imagine blows in the staging of the fight) celebrates the defeat of an arrogant, insulting rapier fencer, as many other texts celebrate such defeats.²⁷

This suggests a reading of the play in which Falstaff and Hotspur, though opposites in their attitudes toward honor, are fundamentally similar. They both view Henry IV’s usurpation as an invitation toward excessive individualism (and heightened individualism is, of course, often read as a sign of modernity). Just as Bolingbroke sets aside his loyalty to Richard II and fractures the community in his pursuit of redress for his individual grievances, others are seizing the opportunity to advance themselves with reduced loyalty to any larger whole. Instead of being Hal’s good and bad angels, Hotspur and Falstaff are attractive symptoms of the same problem: charismatic figures willing to pursue individual interests at the expense of collective projects. In order to restore the community of Britain and the authority of the monarchy, Hal must reach back to the past for the chivalric authority of kings and a restored sense of shared community. He acts as a conservative force at least as much as a progressive one. “That sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales” packs a wealth of cultural significance into a compact insult that offers insight into both Hal’s and Hotspur’s characters, emphasizing Hotspur’s irritable modernity and Hal’s old-fashioned habits.

Footnotes