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WHILE A TERMINUS AD Quem FOR ROMEO AND JULIET IS ESTABLISHED by the publication of the first quarto of the play in 1597, a terminus a quo has proven much more elusive for this play.(1) Proposed dates range from 1591 to 1596, although recent editorial consensus favors the theory that the play could not have been written before 1593.(2) The fencing material in Romeo and Juliet typifies the eclectic nature of Shakespeare's borrowings and was probably culled from his own London experience as well as from various literary sources. I suggest that the fencing manual of Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo his Practise, dedicated to the earl of Essex and published in 1595, provides evidence that Shakespeare probably responded to this manual's specific diction and general theory in writing his play.(3) If so, Saviolo's book helps to establish a terminus a quo of 1595 for Romeo and Juliet and is an important new source for both comic and tragic elements in Shakespeare's use of fencing in the play. Complementing Saviolo's foreign fencing rhetoric is his careful articulation of the ethic informing the truly honorable duello, the values of which significantly illuminate the tragic complexity of the fatal duels in Romeo and Juliet.
Mercutio complains to Benvolio about the affected duelists in Verona: "The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting phantasimes, these new tuners of accent]...Why, is not this a lamentable thing...that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardon-me's, who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench?" (2.4.25-30). The earliest accents of rapier fence in Elizabethan drama appear in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost and Romeo and Juliet. Although Shakespeare could possibly have heard such terms, since expatriate Italians had been teaching rapier fence in London at least as early as 1590,(4) the fact is that he never uses any of the terms in his earlier work. It is probably not accidental that Shakespeare's introduction of such language into his drama coincides with the publication of Saviolo's volume in 1595. A similar flourishing of this foreign jargon in the literary works of such Elizabethans as Thomas Lodge, John Marston, and Ben Jonson also postdates publication of Saviolo's book and therefore suggests its impact.(5)...