"Mounsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your
hand, and kill me a red-hipp'd humble-bee on the top of a thistle,
and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag."
This command might be executed in this country,
for we have the "red-hipp'd humble-bee;" and we have the thistle,
and there is no more likely place to look for the humblebee in
midsummer than on a thistle-blossom.
But the following picture of a "wet spell" is more English than
American:--
"The ox hath therefore stretch'd his
yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat; and
the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a
beard;
The fold stands empty in the
drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the
murrain flock."
Shakespeare knew the birds and wild fowl, and knew them perhaps as
a hunter, as well as a poet. At least this passage would indicate
as much:--
"As wild geese that the creeping
fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in
sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun's
report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep
the sky."
In calling the choughs "russet-pated" he makes the bill tinge the
whole head, or perhaps gives the effect of the birds' markings when
seen at a distance; the bill is red, the head is black. The chough
is a species of crow.
A poet must know the birds well to make one of his characters say,
when he had underestimated a man, "I took this lark for a bunting,"
as LAFEU says of PAROLLES in "All's Well that Ends Well." The
English bunting is a field-bird like the lark, and much resembles
the latter in form and color, but is far inferior as a songster.
Indeed, Shakespeare shows his familiarity with nearly all the
British birds.
"The ousel-cock, so black of hue,
With orange-tawny bill,
The throstle with his note so true,
The wren with little quill.
"The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray,
Whose note full many a man doth
mark.
And dares not answer nay."