The Sword Guy Podcast

Listen in as Guy interviews a wide variety of interesting swordspeople and historians from around the world. Learn more about the practical, the tactical, the theoretical and the just plain awesome from a diverse group of voices.

Podcast Tag: Shakespeare

Jared Kirby is a fight director and stage and screen combat instructor at the New York Combat for stage and screen. He’s a stuntman on shows such as Law and Order, The Equalizer, Bluebloods, and Gotham. We talk about how Jared got interested in stage combat, and the most dangerous stunt he has ever done. Jared is also Maestro d’Armi with the Martinez Academy, editor of the first published translation of Capoferrro and of […]
Stephen Hand is a founder of the Stoccata School of Defence, author of several books, including English Swordsmanship: The True Fight of George Silver and Swordplay in the Age of Shakespeare, and he currently teaches at the Stoccata Branch in Hobart, Tasmania. He has also choreographed a sword fighting movie about Macbeth. We’ve known each other a long time, and we have a little reminisce about what it was like trying to get hold […]
Ben Crystal is an actor, author, producer, and explorer of original practices in Shakespeare rehearsal and production. In this episode we talk about Ben’s work in exploring how actors would have rehearsed, staged, and performed Shakespeare’s plays in the 16th century, and how the original rhymes and pronunciation would have sounded. It makes for a completely different experience to what we think of as “Shakespearean” in modern times. Even if you aren’t into Shakespeare […]
In 1599 George Silver, gentleman, published his Paradoxes of Defence, which lambastes the outlandish (i.e. foreign) Italian rapier fencing that was becoming popular in England, and offers an extraordinary window into the medieval martial arts that the rapier was superceding. Whatever you think about Silver, or rapier fencing, his book is simply essential reading for all historical martial artists. It is one of the few historical fencing sources that doesn’t rely on images, so it […]