Arguing that “fencing manuals provide critical new insights into the plots, pacing and characterisation of early modern drama” (1), Dori Coblentz's Fencing, Form and Cognition on the Early Modern Stage: Artful Devices focuses not on scenes of onstage sword combat but on rethinking aspects of key early modern English dramatic texts in terms of the skills of judgment and practical knowledge of space and time—particularly time as kairos, the opportune moment—that were central to early modern instructional writing on fencing.
By centering the skill of choosing the right moment to dissemble, attack, or defend in adversarial engagements, these training manuals—and Coblentz's book—invite us to reassess some commonly used approaches to the ethical and formal interpretation of drama: that deception might not only not be immoral, but that characters might demonstrate the need for training in “the right kind of deception” (136); that modern ethical approaches to interpersonal relationships that focus on developing empathy through cooperative touch might be complemented by early modern approaches that embrace the knowledge-creating potential of antagonistic touch; that apparent plot and character flaws such as inaction or repeated ineffectual acts might be read in kairotic terms—and recognized as such by early modern audiences trained to appreciate fencing and other combat sports—as watchful waiting, or as experimental testing of opponents until the opportune moment arises.
An introduction sets out the bidirectional links and influences between early modern fencing and theater. The first two chapters then expand on “two routes through which the logic of combat made its way into the drama of the early modern English commercial theater: literary texts and skill-based disciplines” (21). An analysis of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier and its reception represents the literary route and introduces the concept of embodied tempo; this is followed by an interpretative chapter on the anonymous Arden of Faversham as an exercise in exploring the skills of kinesthetic reasoning, with contrasting displays of ability (exemplified by Alice Arden) and ineptness (the other conspirators). As Coblentz demonstrates, Arden of Faversham is profitably approached not in terms of linear plot but through the lens of missed and seized opportunity, with objects as well as people repeatedly obstructing the kairotic moment.
The third chapter explores Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors in terms of dramatic pacing and of fencing as a literary-aesthetic influence, and demonstrates violent touch as productive of knowledge of time and space. The next two Shakespeare-focused chapters read the plot structures of a tragedy and a pastoral through the lenses of specific fencing strategies. In a particularly strong chapter, Coblentz interprets Titus Andronicus's seemingly aimless act 4 in terms of contratempo (pretending weakness in order to lure one's opponent into action). In contrast to readings that see act 4's puzzling examples of Titus's apparent madness as a digression from the plot, Coblentz plausibly argues for its antagonistic and interruptive timing as an alternative to the narrative arc, but nonetheless as tied closely to plot, demonstrating in retrospect Titus's skills as an experimental strategist as he repeatedly pretends madness to test Tamora and her sons and lure them into action. Coblentz then reads As You Like It's temporal themes, including the conditional if, as reflective of feints, a fencing strategy reliant on distraction and hypothetical actions. The final, complex, case study, Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, relates kinesic judgement to the theatrical experience, especially Jonson's concerns with audiences’ susceptibility to emotional contagion rather than developing and exercising individual judgment.
Coblentz's book is not only an important early modernist intervention into the growing academic field of theater and sport, but also a work of sustained dramatic interpretation that provides useful and plausible readings of some problematic scenes in canonical early modern English plays that are not on the face of it linked to fencing. This makes it useful for general drama scholars as well as the more specialist ones the title might imply. Its engagement with fencing theory is accessible; although the book's primary audience appears to be scholars of early modern theater, its insights into form and character would also be informative for today's practitioners staging or performing in the plays it features.
