Illustration depicting d’Artagnan and the three musketeers from an 1894 edition of Alexandre Dumas's novel. Four soldiers in early seventeenth-century dress walking arm-in-arm down a street, one holding four swords aloft.
2 September 2022
Today we associate swashbuckling with the exploits of Elizabethan sea heroes, like Francis Drake, and pirates plundering the Spanish Main, especially as they are portrayed in Hollywood films by the likes of Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp. But exactly what is a swashbuckler?
A swashbuckler is not merely a swordsman, but one full of swagger and braggadocio. In later use, after swords and bucklers fell out of fashion, it came to mean any braggart or bully. The word is literally a compound of swash + buckler. A swash is a swordsman, and the verb to swash is to make a sound like a sword beating on a shield, and a buckler is a small shield, one favored by swordsmen to ward off the blows of their enemies while being light and small enough so as not to impede their own sword strokes.
Swash is an echoic word that appears in writing about the same time as the full swashbuckler, that is the mid sixteenth century. We see it in a 1549 translation of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folie:
But Counsaile in warres (saie they) is of great importaunce, and as for that I sticke not muche, that counsaile in a capitaine is requisite, so it be warlyke, and not philosophicall. For commenly thei that bringe any valiant feate to passe, are good blouddes, venturers, compaignions, swasshes, dispatchers, bankrowtes, with suche lyke, and none of these Philosophers candel wasters.
And it appears twice in a 1556 translation of Rudolf Gwalther’s Antichrist, a tract about the corruption of the Church:
And the roofe of the churche maketh a dynne, wyth their synging & organe pyping: so that if a man marke euery one of their knackes þ[e] right kynde, all their god seruice is rather like the ruffling and ioyly swashing of a princes courte, than the forme of religion.
And:
I speake not now of mytred bishoppes, and swashing abbottes, which wilbe called and regarded as princes, and kepe astate as if they were Lordes.
Buckler dates to the fourteenth century. For instance, the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales says of the miller, in line 558, “a swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde.”
The word swashbuckler itself is in place by 1562, when it appears in James Pilkington’s Aggeus and Abdias Prophetes:
God hath geuen man all hys creatures to serue for hys necessary vse: But too be a dronkarde, a hore hunter, a gamner, a swashebuckeler, a ruffin too waste hys money in proude apparel, or in haukinge, hunting, tennyes or in suche other vnprofitable pastimes, but onely for necessarie refreshinge of the witte after greate study or trauayle in weghty affayres, he hathe I saye not alowed thee one mite.
Another early use, this one from John Booker’s 1646 A Bloody Irish Almanack, is in the context of the Royalist forces during the English Civil War:
Gods Providence hath made those words true, for did we not first take Bristoll, then beleaguer Exceter, and now this present March have we not in Cornwall unhorsed these pure Swash-buckling Cavaliers, so that now they may see these words to their shame and Gods glory fulfilled.
Swashbuckling, as can be seen from these examples, was not considered an admirable trait.
But by the end of the nineteenth century the negative connotation had lessened considerably, and swashbuckling was being applied to romantic stories containing dashing feats of heroism. For instance, this theater review in the 6 December 1896 Philadelphia Inquirer says:
The success with which Mr. Stephens has caught the spirit of those romantic times is evident from the first. There is a “swashbuckling” scene in the second act, as I recall it[?], which could be entirely eliminted [sic] from the play to advantage, but it is easy to imagine that such scenes, too, were within the range of frequent occurrence at that time. Certainly Mr. Sothern’s conception of the hero has ample warrant in many of the characters of that age. The use of the sword was then the province of the gentleman as well as of the professional soldier, and was often the badge of his social rank. So that there is nothing inconsistent in the fact that a man of the hero’s rare and beautiful sentiment should at the same time be quick to quarrel.
And three weeks later, on 10 December 1896, the Colorado Springs Gazette gives a premature obituary to this literary genre:
A WANING FASHION
Is the “Swashbuckler Romance” Losing its Grip on the Public?
New swashbuckler romance is waning in favor in America. At last accounts it was losing ground in England too, for in November Marie Corelli’s latest novel was selling better than the spirited “Under the Red Robe” and “The Sowers.”
Of course, any diminishment in the popularity of the genre was temporary, and swashbuckling epics have graced literature and the silver screen to this day.
Sources:
Booker, John. A Bloody Irish Almanack. London: John Partridge, 1646, sig. A.4r. Early English Texts Online (EEBO).
Chaucer Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folie. Thomas Chaloner, trans. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1549, sig. D3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Gwalther, Rudolf. Antichrist. J. Olde, trans. London (Southwark): Christopher Trutheall, 1556, 138v, 147r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, swashbuckler, n., swashbuckling, adj.
Pilkington, James. Aggeus and Abdias Prophetes. London: William Seres, 1562, sig. S2v. Early English Texts Online (EEBO).
“Theatres.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 December 1896, 20. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“A Waning Fashion.” Colorado Springs Gazette, 20 December 1896, 10. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: Jules Huyot (engraving) and Maurice Leloir (drawing), 1894. Public domain image. Gallica Digital Library.