In the late 1590s as William Shakespeare was writing Henry V, and the famous battle scene of Agincourt, there was a cultural battle going on between the older and younger generations of men in England concerning the use of the longbow. As Shakespeare staged Henry V in 1605, he did so with the obvious absence of the very longbows that are considered responsible for the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt. Similarly, Christopher Marlowe sidesteps the use of archery in his portrayal of Tamburlaine, when the real Tamberlaine was famous for his skills with a recurve, or Eastern-style bow. These omissions are made even more striking when we consider that scholars and historians like John Smythe and Roger Ascham were writing treatises at this time making a plea to the young men of England to take up the longbow once more in what they saw as the quintessentially English weapon to use. With an absence of teachers in the art of archery, having been replaced by the booming fencing industry coming over from Italy at this time, these pleas to take up the longbow fell on deaf ears for most of England’s young men who saw the sword as the more popular weapon of choice. 

 

Here to help us step into the moment when England was divided in their opinion about archery and young men were turning their sights on the sword while older men went so far as to pass laws to try and save the dying art of using a longbow, we can see through the silences in Shakespeare’s history plays, as well as those of his contemporaries, that the case for archery in early modern England demonstrates what Lyn Tribble describes as “the intergenerational tensions and discords that arise from [trying to bring together the mindset of the] late medieval period into the very different “mental universe” of the late Elizabethan period.”

Lyn joins us this week to help us explore this mental universe, as well as the cultural divide between archery and swords that existed for Shakespeare, and what we can learn from the obvious absences of the longbow in his plays.