Search
Close
Search
Advanced Search
Search Menu
AI Discovery Assistant

Extract

IN Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, Theseus questions the newly captured Arcite about his origins and breeding. Arcite explains that he is a gentleman familiar with aristocratic pursuits such as falconry and hunting to hounds, adding in the Quarto of 1634:

        I dare not praise

My feat in horsemanship: yet they that knew me

Would say it was my best peece (E4v, II.v.12–14).1

Arcite’s ‘best peece’ is what he was best at, his outstanding attribute. Editors have accepted Q’s ‘feat’ here, without comment or with the gloss ‘skill’ or ‘achievement’. OED gives no clear support for either meaning. In normal usage, ‘My feat in horsemanship’ would be one particular exploit: a feat can be an achievement but not a level of achievement or expertise. Under sense 5, OED does supply ‘a kind of action … a pursuit’, so that ‘the feat of merchandise’ can mean ‘mercantile business’, but this is a poor analogue for the locution ‘feat in horsemanship’, with that preposition. OED’s sense 6 is ‘the art, knack, or trick of doing anything’, but none of the citations shows the word being used in a way that would be perfectly apt in Arcite’s indirect boast about the quality of his horsemanship: one may possess ‘the feat’ (or knack) of performing some activity, but not ‘feat in’ (or knack in) an activity or discipline. Neither Shakespeare nor Fletcher (to whom II.v is generally ascribed) ever uses ‘feat’ to mean ‘skill’, though the word is admittedly used rather oddly by Shakespeare in The Two Noble Kinsmen, III.i.46 and V.i.43.

Issue Section:
Notes
You do not currently have access to this article.
Download all slides