Renaissance duelling, fencing, legalese, Inns of Court, trial, condemning, hanging, challenges, libelling
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35
from terrestrial combat and the legalese of the Inns of Court. It forms part of a poetics that predictably threatens varying degrees of violence and retribution, and often presents private rivalries as public prosecutions by putting an adversary on trial and condemning him to hanging.
60
Like classical oratory, it is a “sublimated form of warfare”.
61
Such concerns reflect that these exchanges of abuse are often not only displays of wit, but also declarations in defence of personal honour that might otherwise be settled through the courts or by physical combat. Donald Weinstein believes that there emerged a shift in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century from duelling to paper quarrels whereby gentlemen increasingly aired their differences by libelling one another rather than resorting to bloodshed.
62
Such a practice might well have gained popularity in England alongside the growing fascination for Italianate duelling. Although there may be no conscious attempt to imitate evasions of duelling in Italy, the ritual of duelling was highly prone to descend into a protracted paper quarrel owing to the practice of issuing written challenges before the drawing of swords.
63
Avoiding physical combat by prolonging the disagreement on paper would be a reasonable strategy of self-preservation without losing face.
64
The author of The Booke of Honor and Armes complains of those who use such evasive tactics, saying that when they ought to be making good their challenges to combat, instead fall into exchanges
60 This scenario appears in many of the examples selected for the first part of this thesis and is proverbial. See Tilley G42.
61 Javitch (1978), p.25.
62 Donald Weinstein, ‘Fighting or Flyting? Verbal Duelling in mid-Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp.204-20 (p.205).
63 One duel theorist writes that “he who challengeth doth send some Letter to that effect […] thereby to expresse in short and proper words the effect of the quarrell and iniurie”, The Booke of Honor and Armes (1590), sig. Dir.
64 The introduction of the rapier and dagger into England increased the danger of duelling since they caused injury more easily than the broadsword, the blows from which could be avoided with less difficulty. See, for instance, Stone (1965), pp.242-3 and Peltonen (2003), p.62.
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