4 August 2020
The adjectival phrase cloak and dagger denotes intrigue and espionage. The phrase itself arises in the nineteenth century, but the metaphor of a dagger concealed underneath a cloak for treachery is much older. Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” the first of the Canterbury Tales, dating to c.1387 uses the metaphor in describing what is within the temple of Mars, the god of war:
Of Felonye, and al the compassyng;
The crueel Ire, reed as any gleede;
The pykepurs, and eek the pale Drede;
The smylere with the knyf under the cloke;
The shepne brennynge with the blake smoke;
The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;
The open werre, with woundes al bibledde;
Contek, with blody knyf and sharp manace.(Of treachery, and all the scheming;
The cruel Ire, red as any glowing coal;
The pick-purse, and also the pale dread;
The smiler with the knife under the cloak;
The sheepfold burning with the black smoke;
The treason of the murdering in the bed;
The open war, all covered with blood from wounds:
Strife, with bloody knife and sharp menacing.)
The coining of the modern phrase was influenced by an early-modern Spanish genre of drama, comedia de capa y espada, or comedy of the cloak and sword. That phrase appears in English by 1806 in a biography of Spanish playwright Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635):
Yet even in Lope’s works there is an evident difference in his conception as well as execution of two distinct species of dramatic compositions. In one, the characters and incidents are intended to excite surprise and admiration; in the other, merriment mixed occasionally with interest. Love indeed is the subject of both: but in one it is the love which distinguished the ages of chivalry; in the other, the gallantry which succeeded to it, and which the poets had only to copy from the times in which they lived. The plays of the latter description, when the distinction became more marked, acquired the name of Comedias de Capa y Espada, Comedies of the Cloak and Sword, from the dresses in which they were represented; and the former that of Heroic Comedies, from the character of the personages and incidents which compose them.
Cloak and sword dramas were melodramatic adventures featuring romance and intrigue. But the use of the phrase cloak and sword in English remained restricted to this genre of plays.
By the 1840s, cloak and dagger started being used for intrigue. There are numerous older uses of the collocation of cloak with dagger to literally mean those items, but the earliest metaphorical use I’ve found is in Charles Dickens’s 1841 Barnaby Rudge:
His servant brought in a very small scrap of dirty paper, tightly sealed in two places, on the inside of whereof was inscribed in pretty large text, these words :—“A friend. Desiring of a conference. Immediate. Private. Burn it when you’ve read it.”
“Where in the name of the Gunpowder Plot did you pick up this?” said his master.
It was given him by a person then waiting at the door, the man replied.
“With a cloak and dagger?” said Mr. Chester.
With nothing more threatening about him, it appeared, than a leather apron and a dirty face. “Let him come in.”
From there cloak and dagger would become a synonym for intrigue and suspense.
Sources:
Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1.1996–2003. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Dickens, Charles (“Boz”). Barnaby Rudge. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1841, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Holland, Henry Richard Vassal. Some Account of the Life and Writings of Lope Felix de Vega Carpio. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806, 125–26. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cloak, n.