"For look where Beatrice, like a
lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our
conference."
The lapwing is a kind of plover, and is very swift of foot. When
trying to avoid being seen they run rapidly with depressed heads,
or "close by the ground," as the poet puts it. In the same scene,
HERO says of URSULA:--
"I know her spirits are as coy and wild
As haggards of the rock."
The haggard falcon is a species of hawk found in North Wales and in
Scotland. It breeds on high shelving cliffs and precipitous rocks.
Had Shakespeare been an "amateur poacher" in his youth? He had a
poacher's knowledge of the wild creatures. He knew how fresh the
snake appears after it has cast its skin; how the hedgehog makes
himself up into a ball and leaves his "prickles" in whatever
touches him; how the butterfly comes from the grub; how the fox
carries the goose; where the squirrel hides his store; where the
martlet builds its nest, etc.
"Now is the woodcock near the gin,"
says FABIAN, in "Twelfth Night," and
"Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits,"
says CLAUDIO to LEONATO, in "Much Ado."
"Instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmozet,"
says CALIBAN, in The Tempest." Sings the fool in "Lear:"--
"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo
so long
That it had it head bit off by it
young."
The hedge-sparrow is one of the favorite birds upon which the
European cuckoo imposes the rearing of its young. If Shakespeare
had made the house sparrow, or the blackbird, or the bunting, or
any of the granivorous, hard-billed birds, the foster-parent of the
cuckoo, his natural history would have been at fault.
Shakespeare knew the flowers, too, and knew their times and
seasons:--
"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight."
They have, in England, the cuckoo-flower, which comes in April and
is lilac in color, and the cuckoo-pint, which is much like our
"Jack in the pulpit;" but the poet does not refer to either of
these (if he did, we would catch him tripping), but to buttercups,
which are called by rural folk in Britain "cuckoo-buds."
In England the daffodil blooms in February and March; the swallow
comes in April usually; hence the truth of Shakespeare's lines:--
"Daffodils,
That come before the swallow
dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."
The only flaw I notice in Shakespeare's natural history is in his
treatment of the honey-bee, but this was a flaw in the knowledge of
the times as well. The history of this insect was not rightly read
till long after Shakespeare wrote. He pictures a colony of bees as
a kingdom, with
"A king and officers of sorts"
(see "Henry V."), whereas a colony of bees is an absolute
democracy; the rulers and governors and "officers of sorts" are the
workers, the masses, the common people. A strict regard to fact
also would spoil those fairy tapers in "Midsummer Night's Dream,"--
"The honey-bags steal from the
humble-bees,
And, for night-tapers, crop their
waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery
glow-worm's eyes,"--
since it is not wax that bees bear upon their thighs, but pollen,
the dust of the flowers, with which bees make their bread. Wax is
made from honey.
The science or the meaning is also a little obscure in this phrase,
which occurs in one of the plays:--
"One heat another heat expels,"--
as one nail drives out another, or as one love cures another.
In a passage in "The Tempest" he speaks of the ivy as if it were
parasitical, like the mistletoe:--
"Now, he was
The ivy which had hid my princely
trunk,
And sucked my verdure out on't."
I believe it is not a fact that the ivy sucks the juice out of the
trees it climbs upon, though it may much interfere with their
growth. Its aerial rootlets are for support alone, as is the case
with all climbers that are not twiners. But this may perhaps be
regarded as only a poetic license on the part of Shakespeare; the
human ivy he was picturing no doubt fed upon the tree that
supported it, whether the real ivy does or not.