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Hamlet and weaponry

I recalled reading his somewhere, and found notes on it here. In the duel in the last act of Hamlet, the script calls for the Hamlet and his opponent to switch swords, so that wounded Hamlet now has the sharpened and poisoned blade. This often mystified performers ... how would two fencers manage to switch blades?

The answer was that 16th century fighters using rapiers had a move (get past the other man's point, rush him, drop the dagger in your left hand, grab the other fellow's sword guard and twist it from his hand) for which the best counter was for the other person to do the same. The dagger in the left hand, incidentally, was used for defense, the rapier itself being a bit heavy for that purpose.

Chuckle... at Teacher Vision, readers are told that they "inadvertently exchange swords."

Incidentally, in Henry V, Shakespeare has Pistol ask the king (who is impersonating an ordinary soldier), "Trail’st thou the puissant pike?" I found in the british Calendar of State Papers (but unfortunately lost my notes to it) a passage noting that a militia muster at Stratford on Avon had a Wm. Shakespeare mustered as a pikemen. Pikemen were quite proud of the fact that they were chosen from the strongest men, since they had to wear armor and wield an 18 foot spear. You carried it on the march by "trailing" it... grab it by the head and let it drag behind you.