ABSTRACT 

 

 

 

 

Title of Dissertation: THE WHITE ARM IN THE SMOKE:  

THE MEANING OF THEATRICAL 

VIOLENCE ON THE VICTORIAN STAGE   

  

 Casey Kaleba, Doctor of Philosophy, 2023.  

  

Dissertation directed by: Professor Franklin J. Hildy, School of Theatre, 

Dance, and Performance Studies  

 

 

This PhD dissertation examines Victorian theatrical combat on the London stage to place it in 

both historical and cultural context.  By first establishing a possible dance-based origin for stage 

combat, the paper explores the overlapping modes of practice in different forms of popular and 

elite entertainments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they influenced the 

development of historically inspired movement.  Using archival documents, literary analysis of 

stage fights, physical culture and gender studies, the study aims to contribute original research to 

the field of stage combat history and propose new theoretic lenses with which to examine 

historical practice.  The paper discusses the relationship between dueling as cultural habit and 

representations in dramatic literature, as well as the influence of changing patterns in physical 

culture.  Finally, this dissertation examines the role of spectacle theatre and acting theory in the 

development of new Modernist ideas of representing sword fights on stage. 

 

 



  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE WHITE ARM IN THE SMOKE: THE MEANING OF THEATRICAL 

VIOLENCE ON THE VICTORIAN STAGE   

 

 

 

by 

 

 

Casey Kaleba 

 

 

 

 

 

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  

University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 

of the requirements for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy 

2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advisory Committee: 

Professor Franklin J. Hildy, Chair  

Associate Professor Maura Keefe 

Professor James Harding 

Associate Professor Karl Kippola  

Professor David L. Andrews 

 

 



  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright by 

Casey Kaleba 

2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

ii 

 

Acknowledgements  
 

Thanks are due to Dr. David Andrews, Dr. Maura Keefe, and Dr. Karl Kippola for 

serving on my committee.  Special thanks are due to Dr. James Harding for also 

navigating administrative hurdles, and I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Franklin Hildy 

for his many suggestions, wise guidance, and patient shepherding of this paper to 

completion.  An early version of this paper was advised by Dr. Heather Nathans, who 

provided invaluable guidance that shaped the project.  Research in Bristol and Dublin 

was made possible through a generous grant from the International Program for 

Creative Collaboration & Research at the University of Maryland.  Additional 

financial support came from the Graduate School, for which Daniel Conway deserves 

thanks.  The librarians at the British Library’s Western Manuscripts Collection, the 

National Library of Ireland, and the University of Bristol Theatre Collection provided 

access to many of the primary materials upon which this research was based and were 

both kind and helpful.  Special thanks to Megan, Elsie, and Islay for their patience. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

iii 

 

 Table of Contents   

 

Acknowledgements         ii 

 

Table of Contents         iii 

 

List of Illustrations         vi 

 

Introduction          1 

 

Chapter 1: Stage Combat before the Victorians      12 

 A History of Violence        14 

Roots of the Swashbuckler       16 

The Prize Fight Thesis        30 

The Pyrrhic Model        40 

Combat in Popular Drama       58 

 

Chapter 2: The Victorian Duel        73 

 The Structure of the Duel       75 

 Honor and the Duel        83 

 Seneca and Violence        96 

 Seventeenth Century Dueling in England     99 

 Women in Early Modern Dueling      106 

 The Cid and Neoclassical Duels       114 

 The Duel after the Restoration       118

 The Duel and Shifting Masculinity      126 

 Romanticism and Melodrama       133 

 The Semiotics of the Sword       143 

 

Chapter 3: Fencing and Physical Culture       148 

 Victorian Boxing        151 

 The Classical Body        155

 The Crimean War and Muscular Christianity     160 

 The Assault at Arms        171 

 Spectacle Theatre        179 

 Victorian Women and Fencing       187 

 Eugen Sandow and the Commercialized Body     191 

 

Chapter 4: Henry Irving and The Kernoozer's Club     196 

 The Preface to The Paradoxe       201 

 Historical Spectacle at the Lyceum      208 

 Historical Swordplay on Stage       218 

 Saviolo and Esme Beringer       225 

 Beerbohm Tree and Actor Training      234 

 

Conclusion          245 

 

Appendix: Saviolo         253 

 

Bibliography          297 



 

 

iv 

 

 

List of Illustrations 
 

Figure 1. Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet Visualized    21 

Figure 2: Coquelin’s Cyrano Visualized     22 

 



 

 

1 

 

Introduction 

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach describes the process by which “the 

memories of some particular times have become embodied in and through 

performance.”1  Despite natural cycles of reinvention, performance traditions often 

retain continuity across great spans of time; long after the original conditions of 

creation have disappeared, present actions embody past beliefs.  The question of my 

dissertation is how theatrical swordplay functions as this form of cultural memory, 

and how Victorian staged combat changed and embodied new ideas of cultural, 

historical, physical, and gender identity.  Integrating performance studies, archival 

research, and physical studies my dissertation will examine why English staged 

combat changed gradually between 1850 and 1914.  I will place that performance 

theory into social context and explain how the Victorian aesthetic developed and 

contributed to Modernist theatre practice.  This change was not a revolution or a 

radical transformation, but the gradual development over time of a new way of doing 

a very old thing.  

This dissertation attempts to fill gaps in theatrical scholarship.  One such gap 

in the historiographic record is between the bounty of articles on Elizabethan stage 

combat and the scholarly consensus that practice changed in the late Victorian period. 

There is almost nothing written about stage combat in the intervening three centuries, 

and this project attempts to fill in missing details about an incredibly rich and well-

documented period of stage practice.  I am also attempting to use stage combat as the 

 
1 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xi 



 

 

2 

 

lens through which to see the body as the through-line of theatre, rather than text.  

Following Susan Foster, I hope to present stage combat and related physical 

performance as “body-centered endeavors with an integrity as practices that establish 

their own lexicons of meaning, their own syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of 

signification, and their own capacity to reflect critically on themselves and on related 

practices.”2 

Queen Victoria’s reigned from 1837-1901, and between the Victorian and 

start of the Edwardian eras England saw the development of mechanized warfare, the 

birth of modern physical culture, the Chartist movement pushing for popular 

representation in government, and radical movements in women’s suffrage.  These 

ideological revolutions all forced a re-evaluation in the discourse of white Anglo-

Saxon identity and its relationship to the body, which played out in a range of 

theatrical modes.  The training, exhibition, performance, and display of arms and 

armor became points of intersection for a broad web of personal interests and social 

patterns, and my dissertation employs original research to offer new insight into four 

specific and overlapping trends in Victorian performance: changes in stage combat 

practice, the negotiation of meaning of the duel in Victorian material and pictorial 

culture, the interpretation and physical culture of swordplay exhibitions, and the 

intersection of all of these ideas on Henry Irving’s work at the Lyceum Theatre.  

Influenced by a broad public discourse on theatrical choreography, public 

demonstrations of historical swordplay, historical novels, articles and speeches, 

 
2 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History,” in Foster, ed. Choreographing History, 

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 15 



 

 

3 

 

paintings, and museum exhibitions, audiences began to move towards a taste for 

historical accuracy in swordplay.  Part of the larger antiquarian aesthetic movement, 

as well as the British Imperial fascination with material goods as cultural artifacts, the 

public sphere was transformed with images of spectacular masculinity. 

Wellington probably never said that Waterloo was “won on the playing fields 

of Eton,” but the image of healthy sporting schoolboys growing into triumphant 

soldiers was important enough to Victorians in the wake of the Crimean War that they 

needed to invent and believe it.  The phrase entered popular culture in 1856, just after 

the war and the ensuing Parliamentary investigations into high mortality rates from 

disease.  A second political controversy came with the difficulty finding able recruits 

in the First Boer War in 1880. Fencing and military exercises were an opportunity for 

public displays of vibrant English prowess, and the weapons took on new social 

meaning and use by a society that was caught up in improving the social body.    

The topic and time period of my dissertation represents original, archival 

research that will expand the history of Victorian and Edwardian theatre practice: 

although sword fights were a prominent part of the London stage and theatrical 

material culture – featured in newspaper articles and reviews, advertisements, 

celebrity postcards, cartoons – previous studies have not traced the historical 

development of stage combat or looked at the larger social context.  Physical cultural 

studies have likewise not expanded on the connection to theatre and performance in 

this period, emphasizing later Modernist developments in dance, sexuality and Oscar 

Wilde, or military bodies after the war.   



 

 

4 

 

This paper is primarily a history project and is rooted in primary and archival 

material, and draws from semiotics, gender theory, and physical cultural studies.  To 

discuss the signification of staged combat, I employ the ideas in Erika Fischer-

Lichte’s The Semiotics of Theatre and especially Andrew Sofer’s The Stage Life of 

Props.  Both Fischer-Lichte and Sofer apply their work directly to stage properties - 

including weapons - and frame meaning in terms of culturally specific audiences.  

Because my argument is that both the theatrical meaning and the embedding social 

system changed over the Victorian and Edwardian period, I will be often writing 

against Fischer-Lichte’s construction of the sword as a protean prop: swords from the 

Elizabethan theatre onwards held multiple semiotic meanings simultaneously. 

Sofer and Fischer-Lichte also treat the object itself as part of a material sign 

system that is experienced physically, rather than “read” intellectually.  I am setting 

aside logocentric approaches in order to better examine the embodied experience that 

generates gestural meaning and material culture.  Stage fights in the Victorian era 

mapped the ideological onto the corporeal. It is simplistic to observe that the sword is 

a phallic symbol, but my project does examine the parallel changes in the 

iconographic and experiential meaning of the sword while the political and 

ideological meanings of the male body were being contested.  Judith Butler’s 

methodology is supplemented by James Eli Adams’ interpretation of masculinities in 

Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood which examines the 

problematic creation of normative bourgeois masculinity.  Adams shares Butler’s 



 

 

5 

 

central thesis, but examines the relevant historical period for my study, and in doing 

so acknowledges the problems and limitations of applying theory across time.3 

 Carl Sagan quipped that “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you 

must first invent the universe,” and in order to document the ways in which stage 

combat changed in the Victorian period it is first necessary to look at how it was done 

before.4  In the first chapter I will attempt two parallel tasks: to provide a basic 

history of English stage combat from antiquity to the early nineteenth century, and to 

attempt to outline a taxonomy of different forms of theatrical violence.  A definitive 

history of staged combat has yet to be written, and it is beyond the scope of my 

project to do that thorough task, but we do need at least the broad outlines.  My 

emphasis is necessarily European and will largely set aside other historical 

performance traditions that feature combat, such as kabuki or kathakali, because they 

fall outside the geography of the research problem.  My goal is not to present a linear 

or progressive history of European or English stage combat, but to trace the 

inspirations and practices available to - and employed by - Victorian theatre artists.  

My scope will also focus as evidence becomes more available, starting with any 

mention of staged violence from antiquity and winnowing down specifically to staged 

sword fights in the nineteenth century. 

 
3 The Wildean dandy has often been positioned in binary opposition to ideals of conquering muscular 

Christianity, as in the mythology of Gen. Charles Gordon’s failed defense of Khartoum or Burton’s 

African and Middle Eastern experiences.  In contrast, Adams sees a range of Victorian masculinities 

defined by similar strategies of identity construction.  The dandy and hero are not opposites, but rather 

part of a continuum of Victorian expressions of masculinity. See James Eli Adams, Dandies and 

Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 107-112.   

 
4 Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Steven Soter, Cosmos, Episode 9: “The Lives of the Stars,” (Public 

Broadcasting Service, 1980) 
 



 

 

6 

 

  The first chapter also examines the development of standard combats: a 

repertoire of routines that were generally known by working actors throughout 

England and which were used in pantomime, melodrama, spoken word, and variety 

entertainments.  Historians of Victorian theatre have tended to dismiss the importance 

of stock format of stage fights, but the basic gestures and iconography was still 

evident almost a century later.5  This chapter presents a social history of swordplay in 

the theatre from antiquity to Victorian England by reconsidering these stock routines 

in contrast to the work of celebrity fencing arrangers, both of which informed the 

work of fight directors at the end of the century.6   

 The second chapter traces the development of the duel as both a literary and 

social practice.  The Victorians were the first to come of age in an England without 

dueling or trials by combat, and the economies of social behavior and interpersonal 

power.7  The sword was already an antique when in 1895 Oscar Wilde sued Lord 

Queensbury – author of the eponymous Rules for boxing - for libel, marking a 

transition from manly challenge to legal recourse.  But despite being an empire, a 

rhetoric of danger surrounded Victorian gentlemen, who imagined themselves 

besieged at home by psychopathic ruffians, inferior foreigners, and increasingly 

 
5 A short film in the Library of Congress’ collection includes a fight sequence that features gestures 

and routines that exactly match the Pre-Victorian descriptions and images.  Duel Scene from “By Right 

of Sword,” American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1904.   

 
6 In London, the premier celebrity fencer was Baptiste Bertrand, who ran the Salle Bertrand in London 

and was Egerton Castle’s immediate predecessor as a theatrical fight director, and a fencing tutor to 

Dickens.  His son Felix would be a leading fight director in the late Victorian period. 
 
7 Douglas W. Allen and Clyde C. Reed, “The Duel of Honor: Screening for Unobservable Social 

Capital,” American Law and Economics Review (March 2006).  Starting in 1829 Peel instituted 

reforms that would lead to the creation of a permanent municipal police force – he is the Robert after 

whom English “bobbies” are named. 

 



 

 

7 

 

organized criminal networks within England.8  At the 2009 SETC conference, 

Andrew Sofer observed that a prop’s meaning on stage can be renegotiated only when 

its social meaning is also undergoing change, and this was true for the Victorian 

sword.  This chapter will examine the ways that images of the sword – visual, 

rhetorical, theatrical, and practical – changed meaning during the late Victorian era. 

 Chapter three examines the ways in which the male body was presented and 

interpreted in the para-theatrical world of Victorian physical culture: martial 

exhibitions, Grand Assaults-at-Arms, gymnasia, public lectures and demonstrations.  

Performance and spectacle were central to Victorian public discourse.  At the height 

of Empire in the late nineteenth century, the British stage was a space to represent the 

exotic vastness of the colonies and demonstrate the supremacy of English culture.  

Performances emphasized historical and cultural authenticity, martial and physical 

spectacle, and narratives of patriotic and patriarchal triumph.  Following European 

trends towards naturalism, popular theatre had already been moving towards 

increased authenticity in historical costuming and scenery, and especially the use of 

arms and armor.  This authenticity and specificity were driven in part by the 

expanding colonial enterprise which forced cultural diversity on the London 

audiences, who were sorting out what it meant to be “English” when a quarter of the 

world could claim the same.   

 
8 Nineteenth century English masculinity is often defined in terms of conquering global hegemony, but 

several scholars have suggested that the Victorians did not see themselves that way.  Elaine 

Freedgood’s Victorian Writing About Risk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Linda 

Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2002) are 

relevant examples. 

 



 

 

8 

 

The Victorian theatre was often defined by its spectacle: it was the age of both 

Henry Irving and Eugen Sandow.   Within the melodramatic theatre this included the 

sophisticated technology employed to recreate chariot races, burning buildings, 

incorporeal ghosts, sinking ships, and railroad disasters, but it also included acrobatic 

and stunt feats, bodies on display in tableaux, and climactic sword fights that were 

advertised boldly and separately as both the climax of plays and as separate 

performances.  Public entertainment spaces included the legitimate theatre and opera, 

but they also encompassed educational lectures, public demonstrations, and private 

showings hosted by clubs.   

These performances provided a way of understanding the physical activity of 

fencing within new physical and social contexts.  William Clarke’s Boy’s Own Book 

from 1829 stated that fencing was a “means of affording excellent exercise, elegant 

amusement, and imparting an easy deportment and graceful action, as well as 

extraordinary acuteness of eye, and agility of body.”9 Like the rest of the games in 

Clarke’s book, fencing in England throughout the nineteenth century was part of a 

larger cultural transformation that entwined physical, moral, and national health.  The 

cholera epidemic in 1831 had changed the way the English viewed both public and 

private health, and the resulting sanitation and health reforms helped revolutionize 

social medicine.  Most importantly it placed health in the hands of the individual: 

better living was possible by improving one’s diet (the birth of the vegetarian 

 
9 William Clarke, The Boy’s Own Book; A Complete Encyclopedia of All the Diversions, Athletic, 

Scientific, and Recreative, of Boyhood and Youth, Fourth Edition (London: Vizetelly, Branston & Co, 

1829), 75 



 

 

9 

 

movement), exercise (the Victorians coined the term ‘calisthenics’), clothing (Shaw 

in his Jaeger suit), and environment (industrial pollution).   

Central to this culture was the signifying value of the vigorous male body.  

Although ‘Victorian’ has become synonymous with sexual repression, images and 

narratives of bodily censorship indicate the degree to which the spectacular body was 

the object of fin-de-siecle performance, and the ways in which semiotic meaning was 

inscribed onto and read through the physical presence of that body.   

 The final chapter will use the focal point of Irving collaborations with the 

Kernoozers and other artists to consider the developing role of historically based 

movement in Victorian spectacle theatre, the process by which staged fights changed, 

and the possible ways in which Irving and the Kernoozers exploited each other for 

legitimacy.  It also looks at the work of Herbert Beerbohm Tree to establish stage 

combat education, and the journey of theatrical fencing from the salle to the acting 

conservatory. 

The movement towards historical authenticity in staging fight scenes at the 

end of the century was the natural extension of the pictorial staging and 

conspicuously researched spectacle that marked Victorian theatre.  Starting in the 

1850s and coinciding with Charles Kean’s management of the Princess Theatre, plays 

– especially Shakespeare – were staged with the twin goals of spectacle and 

authenticity.10  Drawing on the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Romantic 

fascination for a lost pre-Industrial world, as well as a rise in interest in defining 

 
10 Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (London: Palgrave 

Macmillan, 2009).  Richards cites the movement towards historical spectacle as far back as 1791, 

especially in Shakespearean revivals. 

 



 

 

10 

 

British culture through antiquity and archaeology, Victorian theatre became 

increasingly visually elaborate and reliant on popular history.  The innovations started 

in scenery, progressed to costumes and props, and by Irving’s time had arrived at 

historically informed physical performance.  The devotion to historical authenticity of 

Kernoozers made Egerton Castle a natural choice to collaborate with Irving at the 

height of his social and theatrical success. 

Irving’s career was built in part on his acting, but also on his devotion as 

manager of the Lyceum to these heavily researched costume dramas set in exotic 

locations and designed by leading artists, including a productive collaboration with 

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.11  This chapter will examine the possible ways in which 

the Kernoozers and Irving made use of each other and their theatrical collaboration 

for social capital.   

Attached as an Appendix is the text of the play Saviolo by Egerton Castle and 

Walter Herries Pollock, commissioned for but never produced at the Lyceum Theatre.  

There appears to be only one copy of the play, although it is frequently cited as if it 

had been performed, and this is the first publication since 1893. 

 Finally, the title of this dissertation draws from two sources.  ‘The Smoke’ or 

‘Old Smoke’ were nicknames for the heavy cloud of smog that enveloped industrial-

age London.  John Hotten’s 1874 The Slang Dictionary offers this entry: 

From the peculiar dense cloud which overhangs London. The metropolis is by 

no means so smoky as Sheffield, Birmingham, etc; yet country-people, when 

 
11 These production designs often had an Orientalist or Imperialist subtext, and Irving was not alone in 

revising plays such as Cymbeline to be more conventionally patriotic when history or script did not 

oblige.  See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979) and Robert Irwin, 

Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (New York: Overlook Press, 2006). 

 



 

 

11 

 

going to London, frequently say they are on their way to the SMOKE; and 

Londoners, when leaving for the country, say they are going out of the 

SMOKE.12 

In the Introduction to his 1884 The Book of the Sword, Sir Richard Burton wrote that 

“The history of the sword is the history of humanity.  The ‘White Arm’ means 

something more than the ‘oldest, the most universal, the most varied of weapons, the 

only one which has lived through all time.’”13  In this he was drawing on the French 

armes blanche, often used to distinguish swords from firearms, or armes à feu.  

Burton saw humanity through the lens of the sword, and this paper will attempt to 

view the sword through the lens of humanity. 

 

 
12 John Camden Holton, The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal (London: 

Chatto & Windus, 1874), 298 

 
13 Richard Burton, The Book of the Sword (London: Chatto & Windus, 1884), xv 



 

 

12 

 

Chapter 1: Stage Combat Before the Victorians 

In his 1836 Sketches by Boz, Charles Dickens offers an exaggerated but 

substantive critique of a theatrical fight that is still valid as satire almost two centuries 

later: 

everybody knows what an effect may be produced by a good combat. One — 

two — three — four — over; then, one — two — three — four — under; then 

thrust; then dodge and slide about; then fall down on one knee; then fight 

upon it, and then get up again and stagger. You may keep on doing this, as 

long as it seems to take — say ten minutes — and then fall down (backwards, 

if you can manage it without hurting yourself), and die game: nothing like it 

for producing an effect.14 

 

There is seemingly no equivalent to this moment in ancient or medieval theatre.  

Unlike dramatic structure, or acting theory, or theatre architecture, or costuming, all 

of which can be traced back to antiquity, the stage fight seems to have emerged fully 

formed from Zeus’ head and onto the Elizabethan stage.15  The sword has become so 

associated with early modern drama that, along with the skull, it has become a 

ubiquitous icon on educational posters, book covers, college theatre program 

brochures, lobby displays, Renaissance fairs, theatre advertisements, Shakespeare-

themed children’s crafts, Shakespeare acting intensives and graduate programs, and 

Shakespeare theatre gift shops.16  Staged fights did predate the ages of Marlowe and 

 
14 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman & Hall, 1858), 72 

 
15 John Lennox’s A History of Stage Swordplay: Shakespeare to the Birth of Film, Arthur Wise’s 

Weapons in the Theatre, and Richard Cohen’s By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, 

Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions are representative academic, professional, and 

popular texts that start their history of stage fighting with Shakespeare. 

 
16 Andrew Sofer has made an excellent argument for the bloody handkerchief and skull to be the 

signature props for Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, but the sword as signifier is potentially of body 

and death taboos.  Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 



 

 

13 

 

Jonson, and this chapter will explore a broad history of representing violence on 

stage, examine the bias in scholarship, and attempt to fill in the gaps between Early 

Modern stage craft and Victorian attempts to recreate it. 

A full history of stage combat is beyond the scope of this paper, and it is 

useful to narrow definitions to filter out the whole range of what could be considered 

violence on stage.  For our purposes a stage fight involves seven elements: (1) 

performers (2) pretending to be someone else and engaging in (3) a non-competitive 

physical display (4) with weapons (5) within a narrative (6) with a pre-determined 

outcome (7) for an audience.  This excludes combat sports such as Roman gladiatorial 

matches or medieval jousting, despite the many elements that Richard Schechner 

would fold under the umbrella of Performance.17  We will also largely leave out the 

medieval performances of body trauma discussed by Jody Enders in The Medieval 

Theatre of Cruelty, although they offer a very useful description of violence in 

medieval stagecraft.  The goal is to home in on the very specific theatrical event of 

the sword fight. 

 Every depiction of violence is embedded in a cultural conversation about 

power: who has the legal, moral, economic, physical, social, religious, or educational 

ability to use force.  These discussions are never culturally neutral, and any attempt at 

theorizing historical use or an audience response must filter through this lens as well.  

Both discourse and practice of stage combat have tended elide cultural context, or to 

 
17 In addition to armor and weapons that allowed gladiators to portray specific, different cultures, 

matches were often staged to recreate historical battles – thus following a narrative with a presumably 

pre-determined outcome.  Richard Beacham has an excellent discussion in Spectacle Entertainments of 

Early Imperial Rome.  Schechner discusses some of these blurred boundaries in Performance Theory¸ 

99-104. 



 

 

14 

 

be almost celebratory of the use of violence: emphasis on the objects without 

attention to who they were used against.  Sword fights do not have the same 

performative diversity, equity, or inclusion as, for example, dance numbers.   

The use of sword is not a universal human behavior, and its relationship to 

character, narrative, and design is within a matrix of the material object, how the 

object is used in the performance, how the audience perceives the object and its use, 

and the medium of the performer’s body.  

 

A History of Violence 

 It is useful to work backwards from the present day to trace the history of 

theatrical sword fights.  The scope will be generally confined to England, although 

there are valuable parallels in other theatrical traditions. This is not a full history so 

much as a survey of notable inflection points where a substantial innovation in 

staging practice occurred.  Most histories of staged combat orbit Early Modern 

London, but there is older evidence of sword fights and once we push beyond the 

gravity of Shakespeare there is a separate history that has been largely ignored.  This 

second history of combat is the one we will bring back forward through time to the 

Victorian and Edwardian Kernoozers. 

Modern professional and academic theatre practice in Canada, the United 

States, Scandinavia, England, and Australia is dominated by a standardized 

Eurocentric curriculum, informed by historical reference, performed with props 

roughly corresponding to rough historical periods (Broadsword for medieval plays, 

Rapier and Dagger for Renaissance, and Smallsword for the long Eighteenth 



 

 

15 

 

Century), and an aesthetic rooted on realism.18  Actors are often trained in university 

of theatre educational programs and perform a scene for an adjudicator to receive 

certification – this certification may be required by unions to perform fight scenes, as 

in the United Kingdom, or it may be a useful special skill for some actors.  Both 

professional practice and educational work align to create a unified aesthetic of ‘stage 

combat,’ and the various international organizations that have created these curricula 

have cross-pollinated their ideas to the point that a student from Copenhagen would 

have no difficulty working with an actor from Calgary or Canberra or Chattanooga.  

In the United States the stated goal of the Society of American Fight Directors is to 

train students to work in American regional theatre, and that is the metric used in 

adjudications. 

 This globalized standardization of both aesthetic and training is a product of 

the last fifty years.  The first formal stage combat society was created in 1968 in 

London, bringing together the instructors of leading drama schools with prominent 

fight directors to create a unified training program and consistent technique.19  

Several choreographers who helped found the British Society of Fight Directors 

worked internationally in both theatre and cinema, helping to bring the two aesthetics 

closer together.  The two most prominent and important were Patrick “Paddy” Crean 

and William Hobbs.  

 
18 A Eurocentric curriculum is of course a byproduct of largely Western theatres producing the same 

cannon of European plays, but it is a bias worth acknowledging.  The weapons chosen for certification 

do not always correspond to frequency of use or popularity in plays: the Smallsword, which only 

appears in European martial history and features in the fewest number of plays, is a certifying weapon 

for all Societies even when other more common weapons are not. 

 
19 See Brian LeTraunik, A History of Contemporary Stage Combat (New York: Routledge, 2020) 



 

 

16 

 

 

The Roots of the Swashbuckler 

 Briefly, William Hobbs revolutionized swordplay for stage and film and was 

the most important fight choreographer in the second half of the twentieth century.  

Born in 1939, Hobbs was a gifted child fencer who enrolled in the Central School of 

Speech and Drama in London in 1958.  A brief unsuccessful turn as an actor led him 

to marry his fencing skill with his theatre education and he began to stage fights for 

Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company.  He expanded into opera, working 

with Franco Zefferelli, and then onto film with the celebrated swordplay in Richard 

Lester’s 1973 The Three Musketeers.  Hobbs brought swordplay in line with 

motivated acting choices, creating unique movement for each character, spatially 

integrated choreography, and historically accurate movement.  His work on Ridley 

Scott’s The Duellists, Zefferelli’s stage and screen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, 

and 1995’s Rob Roy have earned wide acclaim from within the fight choreography 

community.  Both Hobbs and Patrick Crean were instrumental in the late 1960s 

creation of the first formal stage combat organization, the Society of British Fight 

Directors, and helped to standardize stage combat practice and establish a fixed 

curriculum for actor training.    

 Hobbs was important for bringing together more realistic acting with realistic 

swordplay to produce naturalistic choreography.  In doing so he was pushing back 

against the practice of using stock phrases – repeatable choreography which 

professional actors shared as a common pool of stagecraft. The use of stock phrases 

in England can be traced back at least to the fifteenth century, and the relationship 



 

 

17 

 

between original choreography and set pieces will be the contrasting ideas that guide 

this chapter.  Writing in 1967 the famed film and stage fight director William Hobbs 

dismissed the practice: 

In the early days when the play demanded that a duel should be played, a 

number of well-known routines were often used, referred to by the profession 

of that time as ‘The Square Eights,’ ‘The Round Eights,’ ‘The Glasgow Tens’ 

(known in England as ‘The Long Elevens’) – and even one called ‘The Drunk 

Combat.’ All these routines were made up from series of cuts, not as we know 

them today, but rather whacks at the opponent’s blade, which, when 

completed, could be repeated as often as required all over the stage; 

undoubtedly the older actor will recall these combinations.20 

 

The techniques Hobbs describes were still in living memory: the film recording of 

Orson Welles 1936 Voodoo Macbeth has such a looped sequence in its brief final 

swordfight. 

 Patrick “Paddy” Crean was Hobbs immediate predecessor, working first in 

London and then a brief Hollywood career before ending up as the resident fight 

director at the Stratford Festival in Ontario for two decades.   He had an outsize 

influence on theatrical combat and was instrumental in forming the Society of British 

Fight Directors, Fight Directors Canada, and training the core of what would become 

the Society of American Fight Directors.  Born in London in 1911, Crean discovered 

both fencing and acting at St. George’s College, the Catholic private school he 

attended from age 14 to twenty.  Following a brief stint as an overseer on a colonial 

plantation in Maskeliya, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Crean enlisted in the British Army 

but then withdrew after one year rather than be transferred to India.21   

 
20 Hobbs, Techniques of the Stage Fight, 8 

 
21 Crean was able to pay his way out of service with a simple fee of £40, which was paid by a former 

lover. 

 



 

 

18 

 

Crean returned to both acting and swordplay in 1932 to join the cast of 

Casanova at the Coliseum.  The spectacle ran for a year, with music by Richard 

Strauss and staging by Erik Charrell, with the lead role shared by Arthur Fear and 

Charles Mayhew.  Crean played several small roles and staged his first theatrical 

fight, all uncredited.22  A productive decade in London led him to play Laertes to 

John Gielgud as Hamlet at the Haymarket in 1945, and his choreography earned a 

1946 news feature from Pathé Films. During this time fight directors began to receive 

program credit more frequently, and they emerge from the repertoire into the archive.  

Crean’s next two decades were mixed: he started film work and appeared as an actor 

with Audrey Hepburn in War and Peace, but artistic differences with Laurence 

Olivier led to a decline in work in London.  Olivier had wanted a grand theatrical 

gesture for the end of the duel, leaping down a staircase atop Laertes for the finale, 

but Crean preferred a more grounded fencing match.  The leap won out and is 

preserved in Olivier’s film adaptation where Dennis Lorraine took over the credit for 

Sword Play.  Crean’s work as both choreographer and stunt double for Errol Flynn’s 

1951 Master of Ballantrae was likewise uncredited, and in 1962 he was invited to 

work at the Stratford Festival in Ontario and moved there permanently in 1963. 

Paddy Crean worked in a gap between public interest in swashbuckling films, 

and so he never achieved the status of Fred Cavens or Ralph Faulkner who had 

worked with Douglas Fairbanks, Basil Rathbone, and Errol Flynn in their prime in the 

1920s and ‘30s.  The fight directors for Hollywood films are worth mentioning 

insofar as they helped change public taste for what a film swordfight should look like, 

 
22 Crean, 137 



 

 

19 

 

which changed expectations for stage choreography.  In a thorough essay from 1965, 

film historian Rudy Behlmer noted that  

the duels staged for the camera before 1920 were little more than “knife 

sharpeners.” Performers…brandished and clashed swords and used 

extravagant gestures, but no thought had been given to fencing routines that 

would be technically correct as well as cinematically effective.23 

 

Behlmer is not accurate that no choreography was technically correct before the 

1920s, but he is right in noting that film fights started to take more care for their 

presentation on the film screen. Olympic fencers who were hired by Hollywood 

studios – especially Fred Cavens and Ralph Faulkner - started to favor saber fencing 

with its frame-filling curves over the horizontal and linear epee choreography 

modeled in Bernhardt’s Hamlet or the stock ‘knife sharpeners.’ Stage fights would 

follow suit. 

Paddy Crean’s status within the theatrical world was important, as he became 

a guiding figure for the next generation of stage choreographers in the 1960s 

collaborated to form the Society of British Fight Directors. Born almost thirty years 

apart, Hobbs and Crean were also divided by the changes in global cinema and 

theatre prompted by the Second World War.  Crean’s work was creatively 

progressive, but he wrapped himself in a nostalgia for empire and classicism, whereas 

Hobbs found a way to integrate sword work with the Stanislavski-based realism of 

kitchen sink acting and European cinema of the 1970s.   

In his 1967 book Techniques of the Stage Fight William Hobbs’ claims that 

“perhaps the first man to be employed by a theatre in the specific role of fight-

 
23 “Swordplay on the Screen,” in Films in Review, June-July 1965, Vol. XVI No. 6, p. 362 



 

 

20 

 

arranger was Patrick Crean.”24 This is undone in the next paragraph when Hobbs goes 

on to say that “the great Master of Fence of the mid-Victorian period was Felix 

Bertrand, who set many stage combats.”  Neither man was the first to be hired to 

stage fights, but the Bertrand family were staging fights when Paddy Crean was born 

and were instrumental in setting up the revolution in stage combat that occurred in the 

1890s by changing the way London thought of fencing itself.   

Separated by the First World War, which would have a profound effect on 

changing audiences, the symbolism of the sword, masculinity, and honor, Patrick 

Crean and Felix Bertrand are useful mile-markers in the development of an aesthetic.  

In the late nineteenth century Bertrand collaborated across the Victorian West End on 

Herbert Beerbohm-Tree’s Hamlet (1892) at the Haymarket, Johnston Forbes-

Robertson’s Macbeth (1898) at Drury Lane, Charles Wyndham’s Cyrano de Bergerac 

(1900) at his own Wyndham Theatre.25 The son of fencer Baptiste Bertrand, Felix 

was the second of three generations to provide fencing instruction to the English elite.  

Baptiste had founded an academy of fencing in London in 1856 and helped to 

transition fencing from a military or combative skill to an athletic and social one.  

Baptiste established an elite clientele, coaching the three daughters of Edward VIII, 

which helped to popularize fencing as an athletic activity as well as a coed pursuit.  

This shifting social role of fencing, as well as the ways in which fencing schools 

allowed for interclass mingling, will be discussed in depth elsewhere, but it is 

 
24 Hobbs (1967), 8 

 
25 The Encyclopedia of the Sword, (52) comments that Hobbs has credited the wrong Bertrand, and that 

Baptiste staged the theatrical fights.  This is impossible, as the elder Bertrand died in 1898.  The 

theatre program for Forbes-Robertson’s Macbeth clearly credits ‘The Fighting superintended by M. 

Felix Betrand.’ 



 

 

21 

 

important here to note that the social cache of the Bertrand school was an attractive 

draw for actors looking for access to the aristocracy, and the interplay between 

London society and theatre was an important part of changing aesthetics on the stage. 

Felix built on his father’s work and branched into choreography for the 

theatre.  The Betrands were popularizers of the French epee, which emphasized 

horizontal linear attacks, deceptive and small point work, and quick exchanges.  

These were the shapes and rhythms that Felix brought onto the stage, and they can 

clearly be seen in the film recordings. 

 Stage fencing in the late Victorian and Edwardian was deeply rooted in the 

last traces of martial swordplay and dueling culture and the emergence of competitive 

sport fencing.  It is the earliest choreography for which there is visual evidence.  

Filmed adaptations of stage productions by Johnston Forbes Robertson’s 1913 

Hamlet, Sarah Bernhardt’s 1899 Hamlet, and a 1900 film of Coquelin’s Cyrano de 

Bergerac are all extant.26  Comparisons should be cautious, as the filmed spaces are 

substantially smaller than the original stages, and the performances altered to adapt.  

This is particularly notable when comparing the Forbes-Robertson film to 

photographs of the stage production: the film crams onlookers into the shot around 

Hamlet and Laertes, and they are required to fight essentially up and down camera, 

whereas photographs from the Drury Lane production of the same year orient the 

fight along the proscenium with much more room to move.  It is likely, however, that 

 
26 Coquelin’s choreography is slower and more presentational, with his opponent Valvert hanging in 

time to allow Cyrano to do a trick, but otherwise there is very little stylistic difference between the 

French and English choreography of Bernhardt and Forbes Robertson. 

 



 

 

22 

 

the choreography remained the same, as film swordplay relying on edits and camera 

angles had not been developed as a separate choreographic art form. 

 Because it is difficult to imagine historical movement, a brief comparison 

between Bernhardt’s Hamlet and Coquelin’s Cyrano is informative.  The images 

below are traced from the two films and represent - frame by frame – roughly each 

sword position in the two fights.  Salutes have been excluded, sword length has been 

standardized for both fights, and frames in which characters are standing for a 

prolonged time or the sword is not clearly visible have been omitted.  Both fights take 

place in a single-camera, continuous static shot in an interior set, with other actors 

visible in the frame.  I have not adjusted for depth of field, although the Hamlet fight 

is arranged flatter to the camera than the Cyrano fight.   

Figure 1: Bernhardt's Hamlet 



 

 

23 

 

In the image from Bernhardt’s Hamlet the figures are very static – it is easy to 

see where each performer is standing on the extreme right and left of the frame from 

the angles tracing diagonally up and down from their wrists.   The lines are more 

geometric, filling the volume between the two performers horizontally and in a clear 

diamond shape.  The diagonal lines generally correspond to en garde positions or 

parries, with the horizontal lines being direct, linear attacks along the sagittal plane 

directly in front of each person.  The separated, steeper diagonal lines in the lower 

right represent an urgent parry by Laertes. 

 In the second image there is a completely different shape.  The performers use 

the swords to sculpt the entire space around them, the swords moving well outside the 

outline of their bodies, with circular shapes represented by lines radiating from a 

Figure 2: Coquelin's Cyrano Visualized 



 

 

24 

 

point, cuts and parries in higher lines above the head, and even a sword tossed behind 

the back.  The greater space between lines indicates more spatial movement between 

frames.  Remarkably, in both sequences the performers switch places, but in the 

Hamlet fight they take up almost identical spots.  My intent here is only to show the 

general sculpting of space by traditional fencing (Hamlet) and stock phrases 

(Cyrano). 

In 1895 Henry Irving revived his celebrated Romeo and Juliet for the fourth 

time, although with the younger Forbes Robertson assuming the title role.  At fifty-

eight the newly knighted Irving had aged out of his leading roles, and his transition 

out of the limelight saw Robertson taking over the parts that Irving had been famous 

for: Hamlet, Romeo, and Macbeth were all produced that season.  The choreography 

work was divided between Felix Bertrand and Egerton Castle, whose innovations 

with Irving involved recreating Elizabethan martial arts, and in doing so brought fight 

choreography in line with the historical research behind Irving’s costumes, properties, 

and scenery.27   

 A century before the Bertrand family had their fencing academy in London, 

Domenico Angelo bridged the gap between theatre and the fencing school by 

leveraging martial skill and social capital to make the salle a liminal social meeting 

place.  It was in this school that fencing became a sport, which became open to 

women, and in which multiple social groups could meet in a new category defined by 

fitness.  The House of Angelo would create a space where fencing became an athletic 

 
27 See Richards (2009), 152-168 

 



 

 

25 

 

activity rather than a marker of class or mode of violence, and in this moment of 

social transition the image and imagination of the sword onstage changed. 

Born in Livorno, Italy in 1717, Angelo favored horsemanship and fencing 

over a future in his father’s merchant business.  Sent to Paris to study accounting, 

Angelo continued his study of equestrian and martial arts, and it was at an exhibition 

of his skills around 1750 that Angelo caught the eye of the actress Margaret Peg 

Woffington.  The Irish actress was on tour in Paris, and according to J.D. Aylward, 

Woffington presented Angelo with a rose and “the favored fencer pressed it to his lips 

before pinning it to his right breast and challenging all opponents to disturb a single 

leaf of it. Needless to say, the roses emerged undamaged from the ordeal.”28  Angelo 

accompanied Woffington to England, where his relationship with the actress gave 

him access to both theatrical and elite London society.  By 1756 the pair had 

separated romantically, and Angelo had met Lord Pembroke whose friendship and 

patronage brought Angelo into royal circles.  After a demonstration for the Princess 

of Wales in 1758 Angelo became the riding instructor to the future King George III, 

and “became a hugely popular riding and fencing master among the royal court, 

aristocracy, artists, actors and poets.”29 

 Angelo opened an expansive school in Carlisle House in Soho, where 

Czajkowski condescendingly notes that “[t]he pupils of Angelo’s Fencing Academy 

were not only men, but – which was a great novelty in those days – also women. 

 
28 J.D. Aylward, The House of Angelo, London 1953, The Batchworth Press. 
29 Zbigniew Czajkowski, “Domenico Angelo – A Great Fencing Master of the 18th Century and 

Champion of the Sport of Fencing.” Studies in Physical Culture and Tourism, Vol. 17, No. 10, 2010, p. 

326 

 



 

 

26 

 

They were mostly theatre actresses, who probably dreamt of the role of Hamlet.”30  

Angelo transferred his school to his son Henry around 1780, and Henry transferred 

the school to Her Majesty’s Royal Theatre, Haymarket.  Henry solidified the social 

status of the school, and it was around this time that the work of the Angelo family 

began to shape theatrical practice. 

Both Angelos were regular theatregoers, and actors were regular students at 

the school.  Domenico was a friend of both celebrated actor David Garrick and 

Thomas Sheridan, father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Angelo pere offered fencing 

instruction to the future playwright when he was a child.31  Domenico was 

particularly interested in scenic painting and stage effects, and Henry credits many of 

the technical innovations of Garrick’s theatre to Angelo’s reports on continental 

advances.32  This interest in pictorial realism was a part of the long process by which 

scenic practice spread to performance theory.   

 

A suggestion of the Angelo family’s effect on acting can be found in a 1776 

copperplate engraving in Bell’s Shakespeare.  William Smith is depicted as Richard 

III, presumably during the Battle of Bosworth Field depicted in Shakespeare’s Act V.  

The image has historical idiosyncrasies: the sword is held in a smallsword grip, 

unsuitable for the heavy medieval blades of the play, and Smith’s body is depicted 

with feet wide but narrow, body open and hand aloft in a contemporary eighteenth-

 
30 Czajkowski, 330 

 
31 The tutoring became important in 1772, when Sheridan fought two duels with Captain Thomas 

Mathews – one interrupted and the other notably savage.  The Sheridan duels were some of the last 

fought with swords before pistols became the preferred weapon.   

 
32 Henry Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo (London: H. Colburn, 1828), 9 



 

 

27 

 

century en garde.  The image of Smith is almost identical to images from Domenico 

Angelo’s influential 1765 The School of Fencing, with its beautifully illustrated full-

color plates.  The picture of Smith from a decade later matches the shadows at their 

feet, the weight shift slightly left and back from center, the overall body silhouette, 

and even the extended pinky finger on their left hands.  This does not tell us that the 

medieval fight on stage looked like an eighteenth-century duel, although that is likely, 

but it does show that the visual reference point for theatrical fencing was Angelo’s 

salle. 

 Sheridan adapted his own experience into the climax of his 1775 play The 

Rivals, in which Jack and Sir Lucious meet to fight.  By the end of the eighteenth 

century the sword had transformed socially, and as a result the theatrical meaning of 

the prop was up for reimagining.  Holinshed had noted in his 1580 Chronicles of 

England, Scotland, and Ireland that  

[S]eldom shall you see any of my countrymen above eighteen or twenty years 

old to go without a dagger at the least at his back or by his side…[.] Our 

Nobility wear commonly swords or rapiers with their daggers, as doth every 

common serving man also that follows his lord and master.33 

 

By the late eighteenth century swords were no longer everyday objects: as Captain 

Absolute quips in The Rivals, “A sword seen in the streets of Bath would raise as 

great an alarm as a mad dog.”34   The century between the Restoration in 1660 and 

the founding of Angelo’s school in 1758 was marked by a transition in the 

dramaturgical function of swordplay.  This will be explored in depth in the next 

 
33 Holinshed, Chronicles, 335 

 
34 The Rivals, Act 5, Scene 2 



 

 

28 

 

chapter, but several trends changed the meaning of the sword in the eighteenth 

century: 

1. Increased professionalization of the English Army and advances in firearms 

meant that the sword was no longer a symbol of feudal social status (the right 

for knights to bear arms), and the sword was no longer a meaningful 

battlefield weapon. 

2. Public taste swung away from the violence and ribaldry of the Restoration and 

towards sentimental and later laughing comedy, in which combat had a much 

smaller role and was frequently either the source of humor or never actually 

happens.  English tragedies in the eighteenth century often emphasized middle 

class concerns and a stable social order, in which violence was not a 

meaningful solution to character’s problems. 

3. A changing athletic culture was transforming the idea of the sword from a tool 

of violence and social order to a piece of sporting equipment.   

Just as the sword was changing its theatrical meaning during this century, it was also 

largely disappearing from the stage.  The cluster of plays which require extensive 

onstage swordplay that came out of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were 

disappearing by the beginning of the eighteenth century.  The last era for whom 

swords were established parts of a gentlemen’s dress and behavior was during the 

Restoration, and that period saw the decline of the sword play as a subgenre.  John 

Dryden’s 1671 Marriage A-La-Mode has offstage sword clashes but in a more 

Neoclassical mode the events and outcome are reported on stage rather than seen. In 

Thomas Shadwell’s 1675 The Libertine and Aphra Behn’s 1677 The Rover, and 



 

 

29 

 

George Farqhuar’s The Recruiting Officer there are onstage sword fights, but in each 

play the violence is increasingly a backdrop to dialogue or ends abruptly: in Behn one 

group judges that their swords are too short to win and decides not to quarrel, and in 

Farqhuar the characters Brazen and Plume stop fighting as soon as their audience has 

left.  The swordplay in these plays is quite different than the fights of the preceding 

Jacobean era in which the plots turn on acts of violence. 

 There were substantive difference between the moral worlds of Elizabethan 

and Jacobean tragedy, but they are more similar in their use of swordplay as 

substantive theatrical and narrative events.  The shared influence of Senecan tragedy, 

with its use of violence to define character and find violent solutions to narrative 

problems was a match for a burgeoning middle class which had only recently been 

given regular access to arms and was transitioning from a feudal social order of 

vertical hierarchies to a new mercantile framework based in law.  Early Modern 

London was a city laid out in terms of power and violence.  The city west was marked 

by the double-tiered gallows of Tyburn, public squares were used for executions like 

Guy Fawke’s in 1605, the open fields of the north such as Moorfield and Finsbury 

Field were used for military exercise of the town militia, Spitalfields to the east was a 

recreational field for working class stick sparring on Sundays, and theatres and 

violent animal entertainments flourished on the south side of the Thames in part 

because laws were lax.  An armed urban population, with no meaningful police, 

surrounded by the exhibition of violence would serve to see itself reflected in the 

theatre of late Renaissance London.  As Andreas Höfele notes, “(t)he blood rituals of 

baiting and criminal justice would inevitably be part of their physical and cultural 



 

 

30 

 

environment and thus be incorporated in the store of everyday experiences that their 

imagination drew on.”35 

 

The Prize Fight Thesis 

The ‘prize’ of a prize fight could be monetary, but specifically referred to 

‘playing your prize’ in order to advance through the professional ranks from scholar 

to free scholar, then from provost to master in a series of bouts.  At each step 

candidates would have fought anywhere from one to forty-seven opponents using a 

few selected weapons: longsword, English backsword, sword and buckler, sword and 

dagger, and staff: 

The said ancient masters shall agree and conclude to appoint and set his days 

when he shall play his prize, and when that day is come the said scholar shall 

at the long sword play with so many scholars as will play with him that day 

and the next day which shall be appointed, to play at his other Weapon with so 

many scholars as will play that day…36 

 

This link between prize fights and drama has provided the foundation for scholarship 

on Early Modern staged combat and has obscured other possible forms of stage 

combat that might change the way we think about actor training, theatrical stage 

practice, and the ways in which these audiences understood stage violence.  It is 

worth unpacking to establish a more complete timeline of stage combat in England 

and to help understand the different forms of stage sword fights that overlapped in 

Victorian theatre.   

 
35 Andreas Höefele, Stage, Stake, & Scaffold, 14 
36 British Library Sloan manuscript No. 2530 



 

 

31 

 

Scholarship on Early Modern stage fights began in the early twentieth century 

but expanded after two publications in 1971 which detailed the Masters of Defense.  

Berry’s book in particular and later Charles Edelman’s Brawl Ridiculous, cemented 

what I will refer to as the Prize Fight Thesis.  In brief, this argument posits that the 

expanding social and economic presence of fencing instructors in London in second 

half of the sixteenth century, as well as their practice of public exhibitions in the form 

of prize fights, intersected with early modern theatre practice in profound ways.  

Stage fights began to resemble prize fights visually, actors took training with fencing 

masters, plays began to reference martial arts textually, and audiences changed the 

ways in which they understood how to read the meaning of a stage fight using prize 

fights as a reference point.   

The Prize Fight Thesis has dominated classroom, rehearsal, and scholarly 

discussions of early modern stage practice, but there are valid reasons to be critical of 

the argument.  Moreover, the bias towards prize fights has obscured both research and 

discussion of alternative forms of early modern staging that inform both our historical 

understanding of Elizabethan theatre and modern practice.  There are four main 

supports for this thesis, each of which is worth examining. 

1. Participant overlap between the fencing and theatrical communities, in 

particular Richard Tarleton 

2. Geographic overlap between fencing and theatrical spaces, in particular 

the stages for prize fights and Blackfriars 

3. Textual references to both fencers and fencing language specific to 

Elizabethan London. 



 

 

32 

 

4. Aesthetic expectations between the shared audiences of prize fights and 

theatre 

 The first line of thought proposes that stage fights must have mirrored real 

fencing because Elizabethan actors were skilled fencers.  As James Jackson notes in 

his essay of fencing actor-lines, “We may be sure, then, that if there were sword and 

rapier techniques to be learned by long practice, and if the audiences demanded 

expert shows…there were undoubtedly expert fencers in the Shakespearean company 

to act the important fencing parts.”37 The primary example of this is the comic actor 

Richard Tarleton, who did indeed play for his fencing Master’s prize in 1587.38 

 There is circularity to the argument – actors must have been good fencers 

because the plays required them to be so, and the plays were venues for expert 

swordsmanship because the actors were such good fencers.  Based on the work of 

L.K. Wright and T.W. Baldwin, Jackson further observes that the lion’s share of 

fencing parts went to two actors in Shakespeare’s company: Richard Burbage, who 

probably played Hamlet, Romeo, Macbeth, and Prince Hal; and Burbage’s foil 

William Sly, who played Laertes, Tybalt, Macduff, and Hotspur.  One problem with 

this assumption is that those actors who were known to be expert fencers – like 

Tarleton - played comic parts.  Contemporary accounts do not mention his fencing 

skill, but rather emphasize his wit and dancing.  Although his status as a Fencing 

 
37 James Jackson, “The Fencing Actor-Lines in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 

57, No. 8 (Dec. 1942), 616 

 
38 Craig Turner and Tony Soper, Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay (Carbondale: 

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 17 



 

 

33 

 

Master is often listed in discussions of his theatrical career, there is little evidence that 

he used his fencing on stage in any part he played. 

 The second main argument is that there is geographic congruence to fencing 

and stage swordplay – prize fights were held on theatre stages, while the Blackfirars 

complex held both the fencing academy of Rocco Bonetti (and later Saviolo), and the 

indoor playhouse of Burbage and Shakespeare.  It is true that some theatrical stages 

were used for fencing matches, and it has been noted that the proximity to 

slaughterhouses made blood easy to come by, but when Charles Edelman refers to the 

“tradition of combat-sports in the playhouses,” we may be overstating the historical 

reality.  As O.L. Brownstein notes in his study of the records of the Masters of 

Defense, in the fifty years before 1590 the Curtain hosted a mere seven prize fights 

and the Theatre only six, while the Bull and Bell Savage each hosted at least twice 

those numbers.   Although they predate Shakespeare’s fencing tragedies, those years 

are significant because they encompass the lives and teaching careers of the foreign 

fencers who brought continental swordplay to London: Bonetti, Saviolo and Jeronimo 

– all of whom were dead by 1599.  At the height of their fame and activity, these 

masters of Defense only occasionally played the theatres. 

By the time Shakespeare moved into Blackfriars in 1608, with its fencing school and 

a wealthier audience presumably more familiar with the fencing world, Shakespeare 

was no longer writing plays which featured fencing.   

Prize fights are bound by both space and time: we do not see them outside of 

London, and they disappear from the formal record after 1590.  Scholarship regarding 

prize fights and Elizabethan theatre tends to center on London and an imagined urban 



 

 

34 

 

audience.  The Sloan document records only a few prizes fought outside of London 

itself, and Mark Brayshay notes that from 1525 to 1640 there is evidence of a single 

travelling swordsman entertainer.39  There simply doesn’t seem to have been an 

entertainment market for this style of martial demonstration outside of the capitol, 

and so both early modern textual references and fight choreography reliant on the 

audience’s understanding and familiarity with prize fights would have made less 

sense for the touring companies.   

 Some plays, especially Romeo and Juliet, are full of textual references to 

fencing terminology, most notably that of Vincentio Saviolo, who provided the terms 

punto reversi, stoccata, and passado.  Ben Jonson included all of these terms and 

more in his 1599 play Every Man in his Humor, and terms crop up in several other 

playwrights’ work.  Following Egerton Castle’s lead, modern stage combat scholars 

like Arthur Wise, J.D. Martinez, and Aaron Anderson have proposed that because the 

fencing techniques are referred to textually, they were probably performed physically.  

Joan Holmer goes further to suggest that the codes of honor that Saviolo outlined in 

his 1595 fencing manual are essential to understanding both plot and character in 

Romeo and Juliet, and Dori Coblentz’s Fencing, Form and Cognition on the Early 

Modern Stage suggests that actors and playwrights “looked to fencing theory and 

performance for physical cues and formal structure.”40  But there is no need to 

suggest that because the fencing terms are used that they were performed.  Benvolio’s 

 
39 Mark Brayshay, “Waits, musicians, bearwards and players: the inter-urban road travel and 

performances of itinerant entertainers in sixteenth and seventeenth century England,” Journal of 

Historical Geography,  

 
40 Dori Coblentz, publisher’s summary. 



 

 

35 

 

summation on the arrival of the grieving Capulets and Montagues mentions nothing 

specific and does not refer to the articles of honor – the original insult, the letter, the 

personal challenge – that could excuse Romeo or explain the deaths.  The argument 

assumes a level of audience familiarity: that audiences were familiar with fencing 

conventions, personalities, and technical debates, and wanted them to be equaled or 

echoed in stage fights.  Certainly a more educated audience, perhaps students of the 

fencers themselves, would have gotten the references in plays like Romeo and Juliet.  

University skits like the 1615 Worke for Cutlers, or, A Merrie Dialogue Between 

Sword, Rapier & Dagger are only funny or even intelligible to an audience fluent in 

fencing terminology.  But it is significant that the plots do not turn on fencing 

specifics:  it does not ultimately matter to narrative or audience whether Mercutio is 

attacked imbroccata, reversi, or fendente.  

 Using the texts to argue for realistic fencing has encouraged an elision of 

other evidence.  In Titus Andronicus, Demetrius taunts his brother  

Go to; have your lath glued within your sheath 

Till you know better how to handle it. (II.i) 

Sexual imagery aside, the stage image of a wooden lath sword must have been 

familiar to audiences, and it occurs in both Titus and Henry VI, Part II.  Wooden 

swords predate Shakespeare and crop back up in English folk drama of the eighteenth 

and nineteenth centuries, and textual references in these two early plays suggest the 

possibility that Shakespeare started with less realistic props than current scholarship 

suggests. 



 

 

36 

 

The historiography built on Egerton Castle’s original suggestion that stage 

fights are best understood through real fights has been excellent, but it is not the only 

possibility. Excluded are other performance traditions that employed swordplay or 

elaborate choreography.  In his recent volume Shakespeare and Violence, R.A. 

Foakes links Shakespeare’s early work, especially Titus Andronicus, to Christopher 

Marlowe and the spectacular productions at the Rose in the 1580s, most notably 

Tamburlaine.41   Certainly there are similarities, particularly in the range of violent 

activity, but I would suggest that instead of assuming that the Elizabethan theatre 

developed its own style of swordplay out of whole cloth, and that Shakespeare was 

aping Marlowe, there was instead a shared ancestry.  Extensive scholarship has yet to 

link Elizabethan and later Jacobean violence to the medieval theatrical traditions, 

even though the spectacular effects of Tamburlaine, Titus, Macbeth, Romeo and 

Juliet and the later plays seem quite at home in what Jody Enders refers to as the 

Medieval Theatre of Cruelty.  The onstage injuries and blood effects are all described 

in the late medieval traditions that Enders charts and suggest a history of stagecraft 

which may have made stage fencing and other dramatic violence of the later 

Elizabethan plays possible.  Enders quotes Quintilian calling for lawyers to produce 

“blood stained swords, fragments of bone taken from the wound, and garments 

spotted with blood…wounds stripped of their dressings, and scourged bodies bared to 

view,” as dramatic props to present at trial.  All of these were effects necessary for the 

staging of Shakespeare and the Jacobeans.42 

 
41 Foakes, 37 
42 Jody Enders, The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 186  

 



 

 

37 

 

 The idea that the only way to create convincing or theatrically compelling 

stage fights would have been to actually fight on stage, as Charles Edelman proposes, 

even in a controlled improvisation, excludes other traditions of sword performance.43  

Many scholars have assumed that only fencing would provide the familiarity with 

swords and physical skill necessary for these complex sequences.  Edelman refers to 

the texts which mention armor and the great number of scenes that center around a 

character dressing for war.  The armor was necessary, Edelman suggests, because the 

actors were really fencing.  But the presence of armor on stage is neither necessary 

nor sufficient for real or realistic combat, just as a pipe on stage is not evidence of 

real smoking.  Armor had – and still retains - a visual signification well beyond 

practical usefulness 

Finally, the most common argument made in support of a relationship 

between Elizabethan playhouse and prizefights – and by extension Early modern 

theatrical and martial practices – is that Elizabethan audiences would have been 

familiar with real fights and would have expected to see the same on their stages.  

There are fundamental historiographic problems with this argument.  The first is that 

Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were familiar with many concepts that they did 

not expect to see represented realistically on stage: for example bears, twins, and 

women.  There are few other aspects of early modern stagecraft where we would 

make the argument that audiences expected realism, and so it is striking how often 

this argument gets made for stage fights.   

 
43 Aaron Anderson, “An Argument Against Realism,” The Fight Master, Fall/Winter 2005 Vol 

XXVIII Number 2, 32 



 

 

38 

 

A useful parallel are the fight scenes in traditional kabuki, known as 

tachimawari.  Many scholars have noted the cultural affinities between the theatres of 

London and Edo, and with the theatres heavily patronized by the samurai class kabuki 

had an audience that was very familiar with arms and their proper use.  And yet a 

realistic style of swordplay did not emerge, and instead an allegorical and symbolic 

form of storytelling movement was highly valued by an educated audience.  The body 

of theatrical sword movements in kabuki are known as tate, and Aaron Anderson 

notes that 

[T]the martial form is also clearly distinguished from the stage form. In some 

instances, different names are given for identical movements in each form. 

For instance, over two hundred specific movement patterns are catalogued for 

tachimawari that are distinct from martial (movements). 

He goes on  

The tate used in these confrontations dramatize the emotional—not 

chronological or real—length or weight of the encounter. One of the most 

famous examples of this type of combat takes place in the play Natsu Matsuri 

(Summer Festival) when the lead character, Danshichi, murders his father-in-

law, Geiheji. Although Danshichi fights armed with a katana and Geiheji is 

both unarmed and essentially caught unaware, the murder itself can take well 

over ten minutes (sometimes up to twenty minutes) to perform. Although 

some of the movements in this fight outwardly look like real combat moves, 

this outer display is largely just a circumstance of the physics of the 

weaponry. The true quality of the tate in this scene is not the correct martial 

use of the weapon but the emotional weight of the murder.44 

 

Shakespeare was employing a similarly symbolic form of performance, and it is 

notable how often the fights in kabuki are referred to as “dancelike” or “stylized” in 

literature, while English staged combat is rhetorically framed as more aggressive, 

physical, and authentic. 

 
44Anderson, 31 

 



 

 

39 

 

Samuel Pepys recorded seeing a prize as late as 1669. Seventy years after the 

dissolution of the Masters of Defense, the practice of using theatres as spaces for 

prize fights had returned with the Restoration although by then the term referred to 

smaller amateur matches: fencing masters, prize fights, and the public exhibition of 

fencing seems to have barely survived into the Stuart reign.    Pepys records going to 

see a prize fight at the New Theatre (home of Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company, 

formerly the Gibbons Tennis Court) in June of 1663.  At the age of 30, the diarist 

notes that “here I came and saw the first prize I ever saw in my life.”45  Despite being 

a regular playgoer, with an estimated 345 trips to various London theatres between 

the reopening of playhouse in 1660 and 1669, Pepys records seeing only five prize 

fights in that time – including one between a butcher and shoemaker.46  Whatever 

influence prize fights may have had on theatrical combat in Shakespeare’s day, the 

fights in plays like Aphra Behn’s The Rover almost certainly drew on another 

aesthetic. 

The point here is not that Restoration theatrical practice should be used to 

illustrate Elizabethan theatre.  Rather, the goal is to note that there was a tradition of 

staging fights the predated the prize fights, likely survived alongside whatever brief 

influence the prize fights had, and when theatres reopened after the Interregnum 

audiences and actors stepped back into an embodied practice for which prize fights 

were a deviation and not the norm.  The meaning of swords and martial culture for 

London audiences had substantially changed in the six decades between Romeo and 

 
45 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London: Macmillan & Co, 1905), 198.   

 
46 Pepys records prize fights on June 1, 1663; April 23, 1664; May 27, 1666; September 9, 1667; and 

April 12, 1669. 

http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/6337/


 

 

40 

 

Juliet and the Restoration.  An audience in 1662 did not necessarily receive a 

reference to a prize fight in a play the same way an audience from 1593 because the 

social role of prize fighters, and swords generally, had changed.  

Prize fight has been used to explain the duels of challenges that pop up in 

Shakespeare – readings of the Tybalt and Mercutio duel in Romeo and Juliet are 

particularly strong.  But the prize fights were solo challenges, and do not explain how 

early modern theatres would have tackled group fights or battles – the “alarums and 

excursions” that make up a majority of onstage combat.  More importantly, the prize 

fight model does not explain how fights were staged prior to the establishment of the 

Masters of Defense in 1540, although plays such as Robin Hood make clear that 

intricate combat was a theatrical element in folk plays a century before the Masters 

were a point of reference. 

 

The Pyrrhic Model 

It is in these earlier plays that the story turns around and we can follow a 

different model for choreography beginning in the late fifteenth and continuing to the 

nineteenth century. Charles Edelman notes how few theatrical combats there are prior 

to Marlowe and Shakespeare but does not offer more context.47  He leaves the 

suggestion that before Elizabethan interaction between fencers and actors neither the 

aesthetic nor the necessary skills were present.  What Edelman fails to note is that not 

only are there relatively few sword fights in plays prior to the English Renaissance, 

 
47 Charles Edelman, Brawl Ridiculous (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 11-23 

 



 

 

41 

 

there are very few sword fights in stories up until that point.  The challenge to single 

combat was simply not an activity that most audience members had social or creative 

access to and could not as easily have an Aristotelian identification with the 

protagonists.  Coupled with a lack of fights in the Biblical or classical source material 

for so much of medieval drama, it is understandable that sword combat does not 

feature in classical or early medieval narratives.  When personal fights do begin to 

appear in late medieval stories it is often in a chivalric frame as a metaphorical 

military combat, as in the knight versus the Turk, or as a challenge for honor.  The 

fight between good and evil, as represented by the good Christian knight against the 

Turk or Saracen, would be added to folk rites and dances of fertility and the defeat of 

winter, ultimately emerging as the sword dances of the late medieval period – a 

performance practice completely overlooked by most scholarship on early modern 

stage combat. 

One of the early records of a sword fight is in the c.1475 fragment Robyn Hod 

and the Shryff off Notyngham. Likely performed by servants of Sir John Paston of 

Norwich, the brief dialogue includes an archery contest, caber toss, wrestling match, 

and a sword exchange that leads to a decapitation.48  Part of what is so significant 

about the Robin Hood stories, and eventually the Robin Hood plays, is that the sword 

fights in the story take personal combat out of a military or chivalric context and into 

a class-conscious framework, allowing non-aristocratic  audiences to identify with the 

sword-wielding protagonist because Robin Hood is socially allied to them.  This 

 
48 The other great source of medieval swordplay, the Arthurian legends, do not appear in plays until the 

1580s. 



 

 

42 

 

coincides with the rise of an English class which wanted the symbols and powers of 

the aristocracy, including the legal right to bear arms.   The sword fight flowered in 

the early English Renaissance in part because it became an available fantasy. 

It is also worth noting that sword fights may have appeared relatively late in 

storytelling in part because the sword was not a primary weapon of combat.  The 

Bayeux Tapestry, for example, features relatively few brandished swords in favor of 

the clubs, axes, and spears which were easier to manufacture and more practical to 

use.  It is the unique role that the sword plays in storytelling that has centered the 

object in our imagination, beyond its actual military or historical function.   Scaled 

especially well to the human body in a theatrical space, the ubiquity of swords in all 

media: plays, books, video games, movies, films, and toys is ironically because the 

spectacle of dramatic sword fights have shifted the sword center stage and allowed us 

to reimagine the object. 

Alan Dessen refers to the idea that Elizabethan stage fights drew from an 

allegorical staging tradition which was already in practice: mock combats. Dessen 

cites dumb shows of the later sixteenth century such as The Tide Tarrieth No Man 

(1576) which includes a fight with Vice wielding a lathe dagger. 49 Part of the 

difficulty in tracing this line of history is that two very different traditions emerged 

out of their source medieval tournaments, both of which are referred to in academic 

literature as “mock combat.”  One practice refers to competitive sparring under 

controlled and non-lethal conditions, a physical competition and exhibition that 

 
49 Alan Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Directions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge  

University Press, 1984), 107 



 

 

43 

 

included elements of pageantry, costume, narrative framing, and audience 

engagement but – like modern mixed martial arts or boxing – was still an athletic 

competition in which the outcome was unknown.  The second mock battle tradition 

grew alongside the tournaments themselves and became elaborate theatrical spectacle 

in which the outcome was scripted, and the mock battles were non-competitive 

performances.   

A historiography of stage combat that draws on dance and other performative 

movement traditions rather than martial movement solves a number of the problems 

that the prize fight argument creates.  It is worth acknowledging a bias in twentieth 

century scholarship, particularly the work that grew out of the Kernoozers original 

project, in which more vigorous, martial, and manly interpretations were favored over 

dance traditions.  Elizabethan stage fights as theatricalized prize fights have been the 

standard historiographic model, but there is an alternative that is worth considering 

and which links historical practice before and after early modern theatre in a more 

cohesive timeline.  Three roughly simultaneous events occurred in the late fifteenth 

century that influenced the origins of the stage sword fight: the arrival of gunpowder 

and the transformation of the tournament, the rebirth of the Pyrrhic dance, and the 

development of the English folk play.  These three performance traditions – martial, 

dance, and theatre – interwove to become the English practice of staged combat over 

the next five centuries. 

 The first significant event is the introduction of gunpowder to the European 

battlefield.  The first English cannons were introduced in 1327 and saw widespread 

application in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453).  Until this time mounted knights 



 

 

44 

 

were the most powerful troops on a battlefield, and the legal right to own property, 

bear arms, and wield social power was tied to the ability to field horses.  The word 

‘chivalry’ itself comes from the French root chevalerie, meaning horsemen.  The 

arrival of gunpowder had a profound effect on English social hierarchies, as it 

destabilized the social order of chivalry that had given knights enormous economic, 

political, and social capital.  The democratized death of artillery meant that a horse 

was no longer the symbol of superiority, and knights would have to give up armor, 

arms, and horses: “the only choice cavalry men had was to adapt via imitation—

which is to say, to discard their lances and become pistoleers.”50 

Theatrically, this disruption in social order changed the performative nature of 

tournaments.   To date, the full theatricality of tournaments has not been studied 

beyond an acknowledgement of their elaborate, metaphorical staging and their origins 

in martial competition. Inspired primarily by Roman ludi, martial games and 

competitions, the tournament emerged between the twelfth and fourteen centuries as 

an intersection of military training, exhibition performance, and social economy as a 

way for knights to engage in courtly politics and honor.  Conceived as a less lethal 

way to keep knights in practice between military activity, tournaments became a large 

spectacle with the competitive event built around an audience.  A highly charged 

social environment, knights were competing physically for victory and awards, 

politically for favor from lords, socially for status honor and prestige, and sexually 

before an audience of potential partners.  The spectatorship of tournaments forms a 

 
50 Sheila J. Nayar, “Arms or the Man I: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern Romance,” 

Studies in Philology, Vol. 114, No. 3 (Summer 2017), 529 



 

 

45 

 

significant narrative of element of plays and stories, including As You Like It, 

Pericles, Richard II, The Cid, the Arthurian legends, and the various Robin Hood 

plays: in each case the act of witnessing (or being barred from seeing) is more crucial 

to the story than the outcome of the competition. 

Originally contests mimicked battlefield conditions, with mounted charges 

and armed group exchanges on foot, but eventually architectural elements were 

introduced to create safer contests and reduce the risk of killing knights: a long railing 

between jousters known as the list, and a barrier between the small groups of 

skirmishers.  This transition from a military exercise to an athletic competition of 

both solo and group events increased spectatorship, deepened the interplay between 

competitors and audience, and introduced narrative or symbolic elements into the 

event.51  Steven Muhlberger notes that 

In the fifteenth century, tourneys practically disappeared while elaborate 

theatrical jousts became ever more common.  The pas d’armes…created a 

fictional scenario in which a fighter defended a “pass” or “position” against all 

challengers, who might be supernatural or allegorical figures.52 

 

Knights would wear symbolically decorated armor, emblazon their shields with 

poetry or mottos, and participate in themed battles with elaborate scenery and fixed 

outcomes.  Martial historical Sydney Anglo has come the closest to tracing the 

relationship between dance, performance, and tournaments: 

 
51 Vern Baxter and A.V. Margavio have done an intriguing study of honor as a social currency, which 

bears on the performative and social value of tournaments as they changed from military exercises to 

spectacle events.  See Baxter and Margavio, “Honor, Status, and Aggression in Economic Exchange,” 

Sociological Theory, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Nov. 2000) 

 
52 Steven Muhlberger, “A Short History of Tournaments” in Medieval Warfare, July/August 2017, Vol 

7, No. 3, p. 11 

 



 

 

46 

 

The characteristic of combat which has, perhaps, most suggested a 

relationship to the dance is the way in which the violence of early tournaments 

evolved into various forms of mock encounter suitable for court festivals, not 

only in the lists but also in the banqueting hall or theatre - in entertainments 

such as disguisings, masques, ballets, mummerei, and intermezzi - where a 

battle might resolve some allegorical debate, and where dancing was 

invariably an essential component at some stage of the proceedings.53  

 

By the sixteenth century tournaments had become part of feast days and court 

celebrations.  Accession Day Tilts were organized sometime in the 1570s to mark 

Queen Elizabeth’s assumption of the throne.  Held annually on November 17 until 

1602, the Accession Day event featured knights in decorative armor, with mottos 

written by established poets, competing in both athletic and performative events 

before an audience of thousands which included royalty and commoners who paid 12 

pence to watch from the stands or nothing if they stood on the tournament ground 

itself.54 

 The arrival of knights to the lists was a significant theatrical moment, and 

much attention was given to costuming and presentation, as well as proper ways of 

marching and walking.55  Their arrival was announced by the presentation of an 

impresa, a paste-board shield with decorative motifs connected to their costuming and 

character.  The knights and their pages “were disguised like savages, or like Irishmen, 

with the hair hanging down to the girdle like women.”56  Special effects borrowed 

from court masques might be employed, as Sir Philip Sydney reported: 

 
53 Sydney Anglo, “The Barriers: From Combat to Dance (Almost),” Dance Research: The Journal of 

the Society for Dance Research, Vol. 25, No. 2, (Winter, 2007), 92 

 
54 Lupold von Wedel, “Journey Through England and Scotland”, Transactions of The Royal Historical 

Society Vol IX 2nd Series (1895), 269 

 
55 Anglo (2007), 97 

 
56 Roy Strong, Art and Power; Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650, 1984, The Boydell Press, 



 

 

47 

 

Another (knight) came in hidden, both man and horse, in a figure representing 

the Phoenix, which, apparently, was set on fire so that the knight appeared to 

rise "as it were out of the ashes thereof." Against this fiery Phoenix Knight 

there ran a "Frozen Knight" whose armor naturally represented ice, and all his 

furniture corresponded to this idea.57 

 

By the Elizabethan period tournaments had transformed from athletic contests to 

court performances and helped introduce the idea of symbolic combat: spectator 

events in which the outcome was pre-determined and the participants were often 

portraying characters inside a symbolic narrative.   

 Prior to the 1540 founding of the English Masters of Defense, and the 

establishment of prize fights, all of the tools for the performance of elaborate 

choregraphed swordfights were already in use in European court performances.  

Starting in the mid fifteenth century with the dance textbooks of Domenico da 

Piacenza and Guglielmo Ebreo, notes for Pyrrhic Dances were available to 

performers, courtiers, and dancing masters.   

Setting aside the mythological origins of the Pyrrhic dance, the first visual 

records appear on Attic vases from the sixth century BCE.58  Both male and female 

dancers are depicted naked with shields and spears, performing both solo and group 

dances.  It is not clear from classical sources whether the ancient Pyrrhic dances were 

solo or paired exercises, or whether dancers fought each other or moved in parallel.  

 
 
57 Frances Yates, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,” Journal of the 

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Jun. 1957), 5 

 
58 Alexandra Goulaki-Voutira, “Pyrrhic Dance and Female Pyrrhic Dancers,” RIdIM/RCMI 

Newsletter, Spring 1996, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring 1996), 3.   

 



 

 

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Arising out of Greek military and civic culture Pyrrhic dances were praised by Plato 

as appropriate for men and women and worthy of state support: 

Of the noble kind there is, on the one hand, the motion of fighting, and that of 

fair bodies and brave souls engaged in violent effort… it represents modes of 

eluding all kinds of blows and shots by swervings and duckings and side-leaps 

upward or crouching; and also the opposite kinds of motion, which lead to 

active postures of offence, when it strives to represent the movements 

involved in shooting with bows or darts, and blows of every description.59 

 

Pyrrhic dancing was popular throughout Greece, including Sparta where it was the 

first step of formal training for boys starting at age five.60  The tradition continued 

into Imperial Rome with mythologically-themed mock battles between masked male 

and female performers with wooden swords and shields.61 

 Barbara Sparti traces the Renaissance recreations of Pyrrhic dance to the 

publication of dance manuals in Italy, in particular those by Domenico da Piacenza 

(c.1455) and Guglielmo Ebreo (1463).62 These sources bear very little resemblance to 

their classical sources, and dance masters seem to have taken written descriptions and 

interpreted them through the contemporary lens of group social dances.  A Pyrrhic 

dance in the fifteenth and sixteenth century was simply a paired dance with swords. 

 
59 Plato. Laws, Plato in Twelve Volumes, translated by R.G. Bury. (Cambridge: Harvard University 

Press, 1967), 815e 

 
60 Cole, 45 

 
61 Ludwig Friedlaender, Roman Life and Manners Under the Early Empire (Vol. 2), London 2013 

(Original Print: 1913), 108.   

 
62 Barbara Sparti, “Antiquity as Inspiration in the Renaissance of Dance: The Classical Connection and 

Fifteenth-Century Italian Dance,” Dance Chronicle Vol. 16, No. 3 (1993), 375 

 



 

 

49 

 

 As with ‘mock combat,’ here again a distinction must be made between two 

different dance traditions that have shared a name: sword dance.  On the one side 

were “hilt and point,” or chain dances in which  

a group of dancers normally ranging from four or five up to twenty-odd, 

moves through various figures, minimally lines and circles but often using 

very complex and demanding movements.  The dancers are connected to one 

another by swords, or sword-like implements of metal and wood, which they 

usually hold with the hilt in their right hand and the point of the next dancer’s 

sword in their left.63 

 

The other category were dances which mimicked an actual fight.  A single dance may 

have elements of both movement traditions, and both would be folded into Morris 

dancing.  They were two distinct performance traditions that have often been lumped 

together despite having very different characteristics.  A third category included court 

dances in which a sword or other prop was held by the dancers, but not used to create 

mimetic fights.  Morris Dancing draws its name from Moorish, a term with a 

complicated history and problematic legacy.  Without sidestepping the colonial and 

racial implications of the term, the ‘Moorish style’ in dance as it was understood by 

Renaissance Europe was marked by acrobatic leaps. 

McDowell Kenley echoes Sparti’s source of combat sword dances and offers 

clarification on terminology and history.  Both locate the origin of European sword 

dances in fifteenth century Italy: 

Masked dances of battle (sometimes simply called morescas), as well as the 

antics of masked comedians, were occasionally referred to by the more 

specific designation matachines. Thus matachines was a name for species of 

 
63 Stephen D. Corrson, “The Historiography of European Linked Sword Dancing,” Dance Research 

Journal, Spring 1993, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1 

 



 

 

50 

 

dance belonging to that genre of moresque dance. A particular pantomimic 

dance that exemplified the species was the mock battle known as Forze 

d’Ercole.64 

Significantly, Kenley points out that the matachin covered both comic and tragic 

characters and scenarios.65  Violet Alford traces the linked sword dances back further, 

noting that “dances already old were being recorded in the 14th century,” but Cossin 

argues that there are no records of performances by sword dancers in England before 

the sixteenth century.66  There were, however, certainly mimetic mock combats in 

England as early as the 1470s as the sword fight in the text of  Robyn Hod and the 

Shryff off Notyngham makes clear. 

Performance records do indicate that choreographed mock combats were 

established on the continent by the early sixteenth century.  The 1502 Lucrezia Borgia 

married the Duke of Ferarra, Alfonso d’Este.  The festivities were marked by was 

marked by an elaborate dance in which ten dancers employed a variety of weapons to 

perform a mock battle.    This martial display may have seemed like the perfect 

addition to Alfonso d’Este’s nuptials, as he drew political power from the quality of 

the artillery produced in his foundries.  In portraits by both Titian and Dosso Dossi 

the Duke is posed leaning on the mouth of a cannon.   

They danced to the music of pipes and tabors and, with quick movements 

expressing a determination to kill the opponent, they fell to blows which, like 

their steps, were in time to the music. The maces broken, they drew their 

swords, stabbing at each other with great dexterity (forward and backward), 

 
64 McDowell Kenley, unpublished 1993 dissertation “Sixteenth-century matachines dances, morescas 

of mock combat and comic pantomime,” 2. 

 
65 Kenley, 14 

 
66 Violet Alford, Sword Dance and Drama: Merlin Press, London 1962, 35.  And Corrsin, 2 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Hod_and_the_Shryff_off_Notyngham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Hod_and_the_Shryff_off_Notyngham


 

 

51 

 

dancing the whole time. At a given signal, they threw down their swords, and 

taking their daggers, attacked each other. At another musical signal, one half 

of the number fell down as if dead or wounded, while the others, with their 

daggers drawn, stood over them. The conquerors then bound their prisoners 

and led them off the stage.67 

 

There are few visual references for these dances, but it is worth noting that multiple 

weapons could be used by different combinations of dancers while keeping time 

musically, suggesting a set and repeated choreography that was adaptable to different 

weapons.   

 This dance was performed as an interlude between comedies presented in a 

temporary purpose-built stage in the Palace of Justice.  Willaim Gilbert describes  

a stage having been built at one extremity of the great hall with a proscenium 

and scenery complete with raised seats in the form of a semicircle in front for 

the audience, while behind the scenes were dressing rooms for the different 

actors, who altogether numbered not fewer than 110 persons. Immediately in 

front of the stage was the orchestra, behind which were placed seats for the 

duke, with the bride and bridegroom, while the ambassadors, the nobles, and 

other guests invited to the performance were ranged according to their rank 

behind them.68 

 

The Pyrrhic dance at Ferrara was performed within the context of five evenings of 

theatrical events, including the full productions of Plautus’ Bacchides and Miles 

Gloriosus with interludes between each act featuring the slaying of a dragon, 

balanced candle dances, shepherds with goat horns, several spear dances, and another 

danced battle like the one described above.69 

 
67 Sparti, 380.  In the same article Sparti describes an earlier 1473 dance battle between Hercules and 

Centaurs, but this may have been more balletic and symbolic.  Her description of the Pyrrhic dance 

draws heavily from William Gilbert’s 1869 biography of Lucrezia Borgia, which discusses further 

armed dances in the procession. 

 
68 William Gilbert, Lucrezia Borgia: Duchess of Ferrara (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1869), 211 

 
69 Gilbert, 211-233 



 

 

52 

 

A strikingly similar Pyrrhic dance was also staged in 1548 for the arrival of 

Henri II into Lyon, a city that was establishing its reputation for military ability.  The 

arrival into Lyon included jousting, mock naval battles, demonstrations of artillery 

and weaponry, as well as theatrical performances and a complicated sword dance. 

Margaret McGowan describes the display, executed by twelve children in which 

spears struck two-handed swords; daggers and long oval shields defended 

attacks from double- swords; different-styled daggers a