THE BIRDS OF SHAKESPEARE
PUBLISHED BY
JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW
Publishers to the University.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.
_New York_, _The Macmillan Co._
_Toronto_, _The Macmillan Co. of Canada_.
_London_, _Simpkin, Hamilton and Co._
_Cambridge_, _Macmillan and Bowes_.
_Edinburgh_, _Douglas and Foulis_.
_Sydney_, _Angus and Robertson_.
MCMXVI.
THE BIRDS OF
SHAKESPEARE
BY
SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, O.M.
K.C.B., D.C.L., F.R.S.
GLASGOW
JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS
PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
1916
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
Preface
The attentive reader of Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays can hardly fail
to notice the remarkable frequency of the Poet’s allusions to Birds,
not merely as a great Choir of songsters, enlivening the woods and
fields With their varied music, but as individual creatures, each
endowed with its own special characters. Shakespeare has drawn an
assemblage of bird-portraits to which, for extent and variety, no
equal is to be found in any other great English poet. Making ample use
of what he had himself observed about Birds in their native haunts,
and combining this personal knowledge with what he could obtain from
literature and from popular fancy or superstition, he has employed
the material thus gathered to illustrate, in many an apt simile and
striking metaphor, his vivid presentation of the great drama of human
life. If we compare him in this respect with either the poets who
preceded or those who have followed him we learn that he stands apart
from them all.
The present little volume was written as a Presidential Address to the
Haslemere Natural History Society, and was read to the members on March
9th of the present year. The approach of the Shakespeare Tercentenary
having brought the poet and his writings more closely to the mind, it
appeared to me not inappropriate that a company of naturalists should
be asked to consider how one branch of the subjects in which they are
more specially interested had been treated by the greatest poet of
all time. The Address was nearly finished when I came, for the first
time, upon the excellent and exhaustive _Ornithology of Shakespeare_,
by Mr. James Harting, published in 1871. I would gladly have availed
myself of this volume had I known of it sooner, but I gleaned from
it a few quotations which in my search through the Poems and Plays
I had missed. My object, however, was somewhat different from that
author’s. Approaching the subject from the literary rather than the
scientific side, I desired to show that Shakespeare’s delight in
birds and bird-music was not less keen than that of Chaucer and the
earlier poets, and at the same time to point out how detailed was his
acquaintance with birds, and how wide the range of similitudes which
he drew from them to the great enrichment of our literature. I have
ventured also to illustrate the change of poetic mood since his time in
regard to Nature by citing three poems on Birds by three of the great
poets of last century.
The _Cambridge Shakespeare_ of W. Aldis Wright is the text from which
my citations are made. I have to thank Messrs. Gurney and Jackson for
their courtesy in supplying some clichés taken from the illustrations
in the useful _Manual of British Birds_ by my friend the late Mr.
Howard Saunders, in which the text-figures are so faithful and at the
same time artistic.
In all humility I desire to lay this little Tercentenary offering at
the shrine of the “Sweet Swan of Avon.”
SHEPHERDS’ DOWN,
HASLEMERE, _1st August, 1916_.
List of Illustrations
PAGE
THE EAGLE 32
THE PEREGRINE FALCON 40
THE COMMON BUZZARD 42
THE KITE 46
THE CORMORANT 48
THE BARN OWL 56
THE CUCKOO 58
THE QUAIL 62
THE LAPWING 64
THE MALLARD 72
THE RAVEN 74
THE CHOUGH 78
THE STARLING 80
THE MAGPIE 88
THE JAY 90
THE TURTLE DOVE 94
THE SONG-THRUSH 96
THE WREN 104
THE HOUSE-MARTIN 106
THE NIGHTINGALE 110
A FRIENDLY CHOUGH 119
The Birds of Shakespeare
From the infancy of mankind no tribe of living creatures has awakened
more sympathy in the human heart than the Birds of the Air. Their
pairing, their nesting, their sedulous care of their young, their
arrival in spring and disappearance in autumn, the endless variety
of their notes, and the manifold diversity of their habits and
dispositions, often so suggestive of analogies with those of human
nature, have arrested the attention of even the most unobservant men.
This wide range of attraction, appealing so directly to the poetic
instincts of humanity, has called forth hearty recognition in the
literature of every age and of every tongue. In our own literature this
recognition has been more especially ample. Chaucer, the illustrious
Father of English Poetry, struck the keynote of that passionate love of
Nature which has been maintained among us with ever-growing devotion.
“Nature, the vicar of the Almighty Lord,” to use his own expression,
filled his soul with a deep, reverential and joyous delight in the
endless beauty and charm of the outer world. This pleasure included
an ardent appreciation of bird-life, which finds vent continually in
simple but enthusiastic language all through his writings. Chaucer
was undoubtedly a bookish man, much attached to his favourite authors
and to meditation upon them. Yet, as he himself confesses, there were
times when the open country, with all its varied sights and sounds, and
especially with its exuberant life in plants and animals, had for him
even greater attraction. He tells that
[Sidenote: _Chaucer’s Love of Nature_]
On bokes for to rede I me delyte,
And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence,
And in myn herte have hem in reverence
So hertely, that there is game noon,
That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,
But hit be other upon the haly-day,
Or elles in the Ioly tyme of May
Whan that I here the smale foules singe
And that the floures gynne for to springe――
Farwel my studie, as lasting that sesoun![1]
In his vivid descriptions of scenes in spring and summer, the carols of
the birds are always a prominent feature. Thus, at the very beginning
of his _Canterbury Tales_, the mere thought of April, with its sweet
showers and tender leafage “in every bolt and heath,” recalls to him
how the
Smale foules maken melodye
That slepen al the night with open yë.[2]
His poem on _The Parlement of Foules_ represents the various birds of
the air coming in a crowded throng from all quarters to choose their
mates. As he enumerates our familiar birds he couples with their names
epithets that express the popular estimation of them. The scene is laid
in a garden where
On every bough the briddes herde I singe
With voys of aungel in hir armonye.[3]
Again, in his quaint and humorous verses on the _Cuckow and the
Nightingale_, the poet transports us into the very heart of the woods
to hear a discourse between these two harbingers of summer. For the
nightingale he had a fondness which is lovingly expressed in the
_Flower and the Leaf_, where we find the picture of a woodland of oaks
whose new leaves
Sprongen out ayein the sonne shene,
Some very rede, and some a glad light grene;
Which, as me thought, was right a plesaunt sight,
And eek the briddes songes for to here
Would have rejoised any erthly wight;
And I, that couth not yet, in no manere,
Here the Nightingale of al the yeare,
Ful busily herkned with herte and ere,
If I her voice perceive coud any-where.[4]
This simple delight in the voices of the birds, so prominent in the
poems of the author of the _Canterbury Tales_, was maintained among
his successors in English poetry. By Elizabethan times, however, it
had become enlarged and enriched by the growth of a more observant and
contemplative habit. The spontaneous and irresistible joy of the human
soul in the varied beauty of Nature, and not least in the bird-music
of the fields and woods, is as marked in Shakespeare’s works as it
was in those of Chaucer; but it is now combined with more thought
and reflection. The appreciation of life in all its divers forms has
grown closer, more sympathetic and more intimately linked with human
experience.
[Sidenote: _Surroundings of his Boyhood_]
Shakespeare had the good fortune to be born in one of the pleasantest
and most varied districts of England, in the midst of fields and
gardens, as well as wide tracts of woodland and heath, among sturdy
farmer-folk, and simple peasantry. The face of open Nature lay spread
out around him, and his earliest poems bear witness to the range
and acuteness of his faculty of observation amid the fields and
forests, the beasts and birds of his home. The extent and accuracy
of his acquaintance with law have been claimed as proof that he had
passed through some legal training. There is sounder evidence that
his remarkable familiarity with objects of natural history could not
have been derived at secondhand from books, but was acquired from his
own personal observation. His youthful surroundings in Warwickshire
furnished him with ample opportunity of acquiring and cultivating this
knowledge. Nor should it be forgotten that the London in which he
spent the active years of his middle life, was a comparatively small
town. Open country lay within a short walking distance from any part
of it. Heaths and woodlands, with all their riches of animal life,
extended almost up to its outskirts. So that even in the height of his
busy theatrical career the dramatist could easily, at any interval of
leisure, renew his acquaintance with the face of Nature which he dearly
loved.
An attentive study of Shakespeare’s dramas supplies probable
indications of some of his early observations among natural history
objects. When, for instance, he makes Benedick assert that Claudio had
committed
the flat transgression of a school-boy, who, being
overjoyed with finding a bird’s nest, shows it his
companion, and he steals it,[5]
he probably could remember incidents of that kind among the boys at
the grammar school of Stratford. At all events, that he himself had
known the excitements of bird-nesting may be fairly inferred from the
following passage:
Unreasonable creatures feed their young;
And though man’s face be fearful to their eyes,
Yet, in protection of their tender ones,
Who hath not seen them, even with those wings
Which sometime they have used with fearful flight,
Make war with him that climb’d unto their nest,
Offering their own lives in their young’s defence?[6]
As a concomitant of his love of outdoor life it was natural and almost
inevitable that the future dramatist should become a sportsman. There
does not appear to be any good reason to question the truth of the
tradition that in his youth he joined his Stratford companions in
poaching Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer in Charlecote Park. When he wrote
the following lines we can well imagine that he had some of his own
escapades in mind:
What, hast not thou full often struck a doe,
And borne her cleanly by the keeper’s nose?[7]
[Sidenote: _Bird-Capture_]
Both the Poems and the Plays show him to have been well-versed in all
the arts then in vogue for the capture of birds dead or alive――the
use of bird-lime for the smaller kinds, the fixing of springes and
gins, the spreading of nets, the employment of decoys in the shape of
caged birds or of painted fruit and flowers, as well as the ordinary
weapons for shooting――birding-pieces, bows and arrows, and crossbows
and bolts. More especially does he appear to have mastered the whole
craft of falconry, then so much in vogue; for his writings are full
of the vocabulary of its technical terms. The frequency and detail of
the poet’s allusions to the various methods of bird-capture suggest
the experience of one who speaks from personal practice. He is fond
of introducing these allusions in illustration of the plots and wiles
of man with regard to his fellow-men. So many of these methods of
capture have gone out of fashion that the modern reader is apt to
be surprised at the constant recurrence of references to them in
Shakespeare’s writings, and to forget how much more they would appeal
to the imagination in the days of Elizabeth than they can do now. A
few illustrations may be quoted here. Thus Lady Macduff, musing on the
future of her little son, but all unsuspicious of the fate immediately
impending on him, tells him
Poor bird! thou’ldst never fear the net, nor lime,
The pitfall, nor the gin.[8]
Again, the Duke of Suffolk, having to inform the Queen of King Henry
VI. regarding the steps which he has taken about the Duchess of
Gloucester, conveys his news in the language of the bird-catcher:
Madam, myself have limed a bush for her,
And placed a quire of such enticing birds,
That she will light to listen to the lays,
And never mount to trouble you again.[9]
[Sidenote: _Similes from Bird-Capture_]
The King in _Hamlet_, torn with compunction for his crime, exclaims
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that struggling to be free
Art more engaged.[10]
The supposed experience of a bird that has once been nearly caught is
transferred by the poet to the human heart. King Henry VI. laments his
fate in this wise:
The bird that hath been limed in a bush,
With trembling wings misdoubteth every bush;
And I, the hapless male to one sweet bird,
Have now the fatal object in my eye
Where my poor young was limed, was caught and kill’d.[11]
On the other hand, the innocent assurance of a blameless soul is
likened to that of a bird that has never known the treacherous arts of
the fowler.
For unstain’d thoughts do seldom dream on evil;
Birds never limed no secret bushes fear.[12]
We find reference to “poor birds deceived with painted grapes,” and to
“poor birds that helpless berries saw.”[13] There is a graphic force
in the exclamation
Look how a bird lies tangl’d in a net,[14]
and in the simile applied to Lucrece,
Like a new-kill’d bird she trembling lies.[15]
But it is from the sport of falconry that Shakespeare draws most
frequently his allusions to bird-capture. Some of these I shall quote
in connection with his references to hawks and hawking. The poet does
not confine his similes to birds in the wild state, but draws them also
with effect from birds in confinement, as where he represents King
Henry VI. thanking the Lieutenant of the Tower for courtesy shown to
him during his imprisonment:
I’ll well requite thy kindness,
For that it made my imprisonment a pleasure;
Ay, such a pleasure as incaged birds
Conceive, when after many moody thoughts,
At last, by notes of household harmony,
They quite forget their loss of liberty.[16]
[Sidenote: _His feeling for Nature_]
It will be remembered, also, how touchingly the same comparison appears
in the scene wherein Cordelia and Lear are led off the stage guarded.
When she asks her father, “Shall we not see these daughters and these
sisters?” Lear impatiently answers,
No, no, no, no. Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage;
When thou dost ask me the blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, …
And take upon’s the mystery of things.[17]
Shakespeare’s feeling for Nature and love of outdoor life are nowhere
more fully and admirably expressed than in his delightful Play of _As
You Like It_. Pervaded by the very breath of the country and the charms
of rural life and sylvan peace, the chief scenes of this drama are
laid in a landscape that was doubtless based on recollections of his
youthful home, and he appropriately named it after his own “Forest
of Arden” in Warwickshire. He transports us to a green woodland,
interspersed with copses of hawthorns and brambles, revealing grassy
glades among venerable trees, where flocks of sheep and goats are
pasturing, while here and there we catch sight of a quiet herd of deer.
We meet, too, with shepherds and foresters, and come upon a cottage
near the rank osiers by a murmuring stream. Now and then our attention
is drawn to some specially picturesque feature in the timber of the
forest, such as “an oak whose antique root peeps out upon the brook
that brawls along the wood.”[18] Or we are halted
Under an oak, whose boughs were moss’d with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity.[19]
And there are smooth-stemmed beech-trees, on the massive trunks of
which a love-sick swain may carve the name of his beloved.
[Sidenote: _His picture of English Landscape_]
Into this essentially English scenery the poet introduces a fence
of olive-trees around the sheep-cote, likewise “a green and gilded
snake,” together with a “hungry lioness” that lies crouching on the
ground, ready to spring upon a man when he awakes from sleep. But these
productions of other climes were, from the dramatist’s point of view,
no more out of place in his forest, than was the presence of a banished
duke with his company of lords and attendants. He had created an ideal
landscape out of his own Forest of Arden, and he might clothe it with
such vegetation and people it with such beings as he thought that the
claims of his art allowed.
Among the first sounds that greet our ears after we enter this land of
enchantment are those of an invitation to hear the bird-music:
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.[20]
And in nearly the last strains that reach us before the drama closes,
the carol of the birds comes in again:
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.[21]
It will be remembered that the contemplation of the woodland peace and
happiness of the Forest of Arden inspired the poet with one of the most
pregnant passages to be found in his works. Though the quotation has
become rather hackneyed from constant use, it deserves to be treasured
in the heart of everyone to whom the study of Nature is dear:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.[22]
[Sidenote: _His Sympathy with Life_]
In this pastoral drama, and throughout his Poems and Plays, Shakespeare
manifests the keen pleasure with which the face of Nature filled his
soul. The beauty and fragrancy of flowers and woods, the movements and
music of birds were a joy to him. But he combined with this enjoyment
a feeling of pity for the frailty and suffering of living things. A
recent and most able writer on Shakespeare has stated as his opinion
that “the wild creatures of the fields and woods, because they have
never run the risk of familiarity with man, are outside the circle of
Shakespeare’s sympathetic observation.” I venture to think that a more
mistaken judgement could hardly have been pronounced. Shakespeare was
not a man of science, but he obviously had some of the best qualities
of a naturalist――quickness and accuracy of eye and sympathy with life,
not of man only, but of every creature that lives and feels. This
sympathy shows itself in his allusions to birds, but is displayed also
in his references to animals both higher and lower in the scale of
being, which “have never run the risk of familiarity with man.” In the
remarkable Play which we have just been considering it is conspicuously
prominent. The banished Duke in the Forest of Arden asks his companions
if they will go with him to kill some venison, but before their answer
comes, he immediately adds, on reflection:
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forked heads
Have their round haunches gored.[23]
This commiseration is expressed much more forcibly by one of his
“co-mates and brothers in exile,” the melancholy Jaques, who had been
overheard, as he lay under an oak near the brook, lamenting the fate
of a wounded stag that had come to languish at the same spot. As he
watched the creature
[Sidenote: _The Wounded Deer_]
weeping into the needless stream;
‘Poor deer,’ quoth he, ‘thou makest a testament
As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more
To that which had too much;’ then, being there alone,
Left and abandon’d of his velvet friends;
‘’Tis right,’ quoth he; ‘thus misery doth part
The flux of company:’ anon, a careless herd,
Full of the pasture, jumps along by him
And never stays to greet him; ‘Ay,’ quoth Jaques,
‘Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens;
’Tis just the fashion: wherefore do you look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?’
Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court,
Yea, and of this our life; swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what’s worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign’d and native dwelling-place.[24]
More detailed and even more full of commiseration is the poet’s vivid
description of the hunting of “the purblind hare.”
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles,
How he outruns the wind, and with what care
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles.[25]
When he has for a little succeeded in throwing the hounds off the scent,
Poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs, with listening ear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still:
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear,
Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn, and return, indenting with the way;
Each envious brier his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay.[26]
The poet’s feeling of pity descends even to small and fragile forms of
living things, to which most people are indifferent or even hostile.
Perhaps he may sometimes have credited these feeble creatures with
greater sensitiveness to pain than a modern naturalist would allow, as
where Isabella in _Measure for Measure_ tells her brother that
The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.[27]
[Sidenote: _Pity for the humblest Creatures_]
Shakespeare elsewhere alludes to our prevalent insensibility towards
the insect world, from our youth upward.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.[28]
In maturer life men will do “a thousand dreadful things as willingly
as one would kill a fly.”[29] But the poet’s pity extended even to
the fly. In a spirited picture of a superb charger he tells how the
animal proudly “stamps and bites the poor flies in his fume.”[30]
The most detailed and remarkable expression of this commiseration
in the whole of Shakespeare’s works, however, is to be found in the
unpleasing tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_, which, though printed among
his dramas, is doubtless mainly the work of another writer. Yet it
contains passages of great power and beauty which are not unworthy of
Shakespeare and probably came from his pen. Among these passages I
would include the singular scene in which Titus is sitting at table
with his brother Marcus, who strikes the dish with his knife, whereupon
the following dialogue ensues:
_Titus._ What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?
_Marc._ At that that I have kill’d, my lord――a fly.
_Tit._ Out on thee, murderer! thou kill’st my heart;
A deed of death done on the innocent
Becomes not Titus’ brother: get thee gone;
I see thou art not for my company.
_Marc._ Alas! my lord, I have but kill’d a fly.
_Tit._ ‘But’! How if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly!
That, with his pretty buzzing melody
Came here to make us merry! and thou hast kill’d him.
_Marc._ Pardon me, sir; it was a black ill-favour’d fly
Like to the Empress’ Moor; therefore I kill’d him.
_Tit._ O, O, O.
Then pardon me for reprehending thee,
For thou hast done a charitable deed.
* * * * * * *
I think we are not brought so low,
But that between us we can kill a fly
That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor.[31]
[Sidenote: “_The poor harmless Fly_”]
The mind of Titus, broken down by a succession of crushing calamities,
had by this time become unhinged, and the extravagance of his language
is doubtless designed to show this derangement, though it may perhaps
also express the poet’s own underlying pity with even “the poor
harmless fly.” Modern science, however, has recently discovered that
the house-fly is far from harmless, and that its ruthless extirpation
from human habitations, as a dangerous carrier of disease, should be
regarded as really what Titus called “a charitable deed.”
Not less effectively than his forerunner Chaucer, does Shakespeare
enliven his pictures of day and night and of the seasons of the year by
introducing the voices of the birds. He loves the
summer bird
Which ever in the haunch of winter sings
The lifting up of day.[32]
He tells how “The birds chant melody on every bush,”[33] and recounts
where
As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a grove of myrtles made,
Beasts did leap and birds did sing,
Trees did grow and plants did spring;
Everything did banish moan.[34]
He leads us where we may
See the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.[35]
The movement of spring and the renewal of the activity of the birds are
well pictured in the song at the end of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_:
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks.
The sadness and silence of the woods in autumn when the birds are dumb,
are recorded in these musical lines:
[Sidenote: _In Winter and Storm_]
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.[36]
Again, in a song from which I have just quoted, a graphic picture of
winter shows the changed aspect of the birds at that season:
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw.[37]
Or we are presented with a storm in which we see
A flight of fowl
Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts.[38]
In many passages, to some of which I shall presently allude, the poet
heightens the gloom of night by allusion to the nocturnal birds which
screech or moan in the dark, or he lightens its eeriness with the
pensive melody of the nightingale.
Shakespeare was keenly alive to the strong contrasts so continually
placed in juxtaposition by Nature――what he calls
Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh-sounding,
Ear’s deep-sweet music, and heart’s deep-sore wounding.[39]
He recognised contrasts of this kind both in the animate and the
inanimate creation, and not least where the birds are involved:
Unruly blasts wait on the tender spring;
Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers;
The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing,
What virtue breeds iniquity devours.[40]
He makes the Bishop of Ely account for the reformation of the Prince
of Wales by calling attention to the association in Nature of what is
baneful with what is profitable.
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:
And so the Prince obscured his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.[41]
[Sidenote: _Contrasts in Nature_]
The co-existence of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, met the poet
even among the tender creatures in whose songs he delighted. He saw
that the grief or suffering of one single songster in no perceptible
degree quieted the carolling of the rest of the choir.
All thy fellow-birds do sing,
Careless of thy sorrowing:
Even so, poor bird, like thee,
None alive will pity me.[42]
He realised, as many another poet has also found, that there are times
in which the joyous songs of birds may even sound harshly to human ears
when the heart is bowed down with affliction. Thus he wrote of Lucrece:
The little birds that tune their morning’s joy
Make her moans mad with their sweet melody:
For mirth doth search the bottom of annoy.
* * * * * * *
‘You mocking birds,’ quoth she, ‘your tunes entomb
Within your hollow-swelling feather’d breasts,
And in my hearing be you mute and dumb:
My restless discord loves no stops nor rests;
A woeful hostess brooks not merry guests.’[43]
While Shakespeare, like his poetical predecessors and contemporaries,
regarded the whole tribe of birds as a great vocal assemblage, a
delightful section of animated Nature, that gives life and charm to the
countryside, his Poems and Plays stand apart for the remarkable extent
to which he singles out individual birds by name, often with such
detailed reference to their habits as to show that he well knew them in
their native haunts. The birds thus distinguished by him amount to some
fifty in number, as given in the following list:
[Sidenote: _Birds mentioned by Him_]
Eagle
Falcon
Kestrel
Sparrowhawk
Buzzard
Kite
Osprey
Vulture
Parrot
Ostrich
Cormorant
Pelican
Loon
Owl
Cuckoo
Woodcock
Pheasant
Partridge
Snipe
Quail
Lapwing
Wild Duck
Dabchick
Raven
Crow
Rook
Chough
Jackdaw
Magpie
Jay
Starling
Domestic Cock
Goose
Turkey-cock
Swan
Peacock
Dove and Pigeon
Turtle-dove
Lark
Blackbird
Thrush
Wren
Wagtail
Bunting
Redbreast
Finch
Halcyon or Kingfisher
Hedge-Sparrow
House-Sparrow
Swallow
House-Martin
Nightingale.
Of a few of them he makes only a single mention, but most of them are
more frequently cited, in some cases, indeed, as often as forty or
fifty times. Recognising in these creatures traits that remind him of
the feelings and actions of mankind, he makes varied and effective use
of them as symbols and illustrations with which to enrich his vivid
picture of the great drama of human life. The naturalist, interested
in noting the attitude of the greatest poet of all time towards living
creatures, feels no surprise that Shakespeare’s knowledge of natural
history is sometimes inaccurate, or that he should have taken on trust
some of the fabulous legends in that subject, which were current in
his day. The scientific study of Nature had not yet been seriously
undertaken.
I propose to enumerate here the birds individually selected by
Shakespeare for special comment, and to cite a few passages from his
works in illustration of the various ways in which he makes use of each
of them. It will be convenient to take them in groups.
[Sidenote: _The Eagle_]
We may begin with BIRDS OF PREY, following the precedent set by
Chaucer, who in his long list tells that “the fowles of ravine were
hyest sette.” The EAGLE is cited some forty times. The two birds of
this kind native to Britain, the Golden Eagle, and the White-tailed or
Sea-eagle, now so restricted in number, were doubtless more abundant
in his day. He may have occasionally seen examples of each of them on
the wing, though his allusions hardly suggest any personal familiarity
with the birds. Recognising the lofty rank of the eagle and its
acknowledged dignity above the other birds of prey, he makes the birds
themselves, in the arrangements for the obsequies of the Phoenix and
Turtle, admit this supremacy.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather’d King.[44]
The powerful vision which from time immemorial has been ascribed to
the eagle[45] is often referred to by the poet, who makes one of his
personages even claim that kings of men have eyes like the king of
birds. As Richard II. stood on the battlements of Flint Castle the Duke
of York pointing to him, exclaimed,
Yet looks he like a king; behold! his eye,
As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth
Controlling majesty.[46]
The future King Edward IV. was taunted by his brother Richard thus:
Nay, if thou be that princely eagle’s bird,
Show thy descent by gazing ’gainst the sun.[47]
With delightful hyperbole, Biron, in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, discovers
a power of vision beyond that of an eagle, when he is persuading
himself and his friends to abjure their foolish vow “to fast, to study,
and to see no woman.” Enlarging on the potency of “love first learned
in a lady’s eyes” he declares that it
Gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye:
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d.[48]
Again, in the same Play, the comparison becomes even more grotesquely
exaggerated, for the same lover in praising his lady-love demands to
know
What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?[49]
[Illustration: THE EAGLE]
The eagle was credited not only with a wonderful strength of vision,
but also with a remarkable length of life. This belief is alluded to by
the churlish philosopher who demands of Timon
Will these moss’d trees,
That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,
And skip where thou point’st out?[50]
Shakespeare, when he likens the orders of human society to the various
grades among the birds, compares the leaders to eagles, and the
commonalty to birds of a less reputable kind. The haughty Coriolanus
stigmatises the Roman plebs as a rabble that
Will in time
Break ope the locks o’ the Senate, and bring in
The crows to peck the eagles.[51]
Pandarus, not less contemptuous of the populace of Troy, affirms that
“the eagles are gone,” and that there are left only “crows and daws,
crows and daws.”[52] The same kind of similitude is applied to the
political condition of England. The future Richard III. asserts:
I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.[53]
And Hastings in the same Play remarks
More pity that the eagle should be mew’d
While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.[54]
Among Shakespeare’s political allusions in which the eagle appears
there is one of some interest as a reminiscence of a far-off unhappy
time in our history when the southern half of the island could be
likened to the king of birds, while the northern portion was compared
to a destructive kind of vermin.
Once the eagle, England, being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse, in absence of the cat,
To tear and havoc more than she can eat.[55]
The contemplation of the various misfortunes that may befall even the
king of birds leads to the reflection:
Often, to our comfort, shall we find
The sharded beetle in a safer hold
Than is the full-wing’d eagle.[56]
The last line of this quotation recalls another passage in which, as if
the writer had watched the bird on the wing, the majestic sweep of its
flight is pictured:
The course I hold
Flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on,
Leaving no tract behind.[57]
The eagle has been credited with a nobility of nature in keeping with
his regal rank:
The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He can at pleasure stint their melody.[58]
Shakespeare may have seen an eagle in confinement, for his description
of its manner of feeding seems as if drawn from actual observation:
Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone.[59]
Whether in captivity or in stuffed specimens, the dramatist had
evidently set eyes on the bird close at hand, so as to be able to put
so whimsical a comparison into Falstaff’s mouth:
My own knee! When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an
eagle’s talon in the waist; I could have crept into any
alderman’s thumb-ring.[60]
[Sidenote: _Hawks and Hawking_]
Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the family of HAWKS was manifestly of
the most intimate kind. These birds were common natives of the country,
and in great request for the sport of falconry. His writings prove him
to have had a detailed knowledge of the terminology of this sport, and
he was probably himself a keen falconer in his early years, if not
throughout his life. His Plays are full of the technical language of
hawking, which he employs by way of similitude in matters of a wholly
different nature. As an example of this habit no better illustration
can be given than Petruchio’s description of the method he meant to
employ to tame his ill-tempered wife. In the approved lingo of the
practical falconer he remarks to himself:
Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And ’tis my hope to end successfully.
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty;
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come and know her keeper’s call,
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient.
She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not;
As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I’ll find about the making of the bed;
And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly I intend
That all is done in reverend care of her.[61]
The extent to which falconry and its language had taken hold of the
society of Elizabeth’s time is well illustrated in the scene in
Capulet’s garden where Romeo and Juliet make their declaration of
mutual attachment. She has twice retired, but again returns to the
window for one last word. He has slowly and reluctantly crept back into
the darkness, but a voice from above recalls him:
Hist! Romeo, hist! O, for a falconer’s voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again!
Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud.[62]
The actual array of hawking is brought before us in the gay scene in
the second part of _King Henry VI._ where the King and Queen, with
their company and falconers halloing, appear on the stage after a
morning’s sport.
_Queen._ Believe me, lords, for flying at the brook,
I saw not better sport these seven years’ day:
Yet, by your leave, the wind was very high;
And, ten to one, old Joan had not gone out.
_King._ But what a point, my lord, your falcon made,
And what a pitch she flew above the rest!
To see how God in all His creatures works!
Yea, man and birds are fain of climbing high.
_Suffolk._ No marvel, an it like your majesty,
My lord Protector’s hawks do tower so well;
They know their master loves to be aloft,
And bears his thoughts above his falcon’s pitch.
_Gloucester._ My lord, ’tis but a base ignoble mind
That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.
_Cardinal._ … Believe me, cousin Gloucester,
Had not your man put up the fowl so suddenly
We had had more sport.[63]
Under the general designation of HAWKS most of our larger birds of prey
were employed for purposes of sport, and it is mainly with reference
to this use of them that they are mentioned by Shakespeare. FALCON,
the name most frequently used by him, may include several distinct
species.[64] He evidently admired their flight. He speaks of
A falcon towering in her pride of place.[65]
Again, he makes Bolingbroke boast that he would fight Mowbray
As confident as is the falcon’s flight
Against a bird.[66]
He notes how
A falcon towering in the skies,
Coucheth the fowl below with his wings’ shade,
Whose crooked beak threats if he mount he dies.[67]
The falcon generally employed in hawking was the female Peregrine,
which was held to be more adapted for the purposes of sport than the
male. The KESTREL is referred to by Shakespeare, under the local name
of _Staniel_ in the scene in _Twelfth Night_, where Malvolio, gulled
by Maria, picks up and begins to guess at the meaning of the clever
letter, Sir Toby and Fabian watching in concealment:
[Illustration: THE PEREGRINE FALCON]
_Malvolio._ ‘M. O. A. I. doth sway my life.’ Nay but first, let me
see, let me see, let me see.
_Fabian._ With what dish o’ poison has she dressed him!
_Sir Toby._ And with what wing the staniel checks at it![68]
[Sidenote: _The Sparrow-Hawk_]
The SPARROW-HAWK (_Musket_) is only once alluded to in the Plays, and
then as a kind of pet name applied by Mrs. Ford to little Robin, the
page:
How now, my eyas-musket! what news with you?[69]
The BUZZARD is mentioned several times by Shakespeare, and always
in a more or less depreciatory sense. It is a large handsome bird,
but compared with the falcon is slow and heavy in flight. So in
the encounter of wits between Petruchio and Katharine, he in his
characteristic falconer’s language asks her:
O slow-winged turtle, shall a buzzard take thee?[70]
In a passage already cited the buzzards are coupled with the
disreputable kites. Professor Newton remarks that “in the old days
of falconry, buzzards were regarded with infinite scorn, and hence
in common English to call a man a ‘buzzard’ is to denounce him as
stupid.”[71]
[Illustration: THE COMMON BUZZARD]
[Sidenote: _The Kite_]
In the time of Elizabeth the KITE (or _Puttock_), now one of the rarest
of our birds, was quite common in this country. It was particularly
abundant in London, where it fed on the garbage of the streets,
and even of the Thames, and where, together with the raven, it was
protected by law as a useful scavenger without pay. The frequency of
Shakespeare’s allusions to this bird is good evidence of how familiar
it must then have been. It is always referred to in some disparaging
way. The “hungry kite” did not scruple to carry off any living creature
it could overcome even from the very farm-yard. When Warwick mentions
to the Queen his suspicions of foul play in Duke Humphrey’s death, he
tells her:
Who finds the partridge in the puttock’s nest
But may imagine how the bird was dead,
Although the kite soar with unbloodied beak?
Even so suspicious is this tragedy.[72]
In an earlier part of the same Play York asks:
Were’t not all one, an empty eagle were set
To guard the chicken from a hungry kite,
As place Duke Humphrey for the King’s protector?
to which the Queen replies:――“So the poor chicken should be sure of
death.”[73] In _Winter’s Tale_, when Antigonus is sent on his task to
carry the child to some distant desolate spot, he takes it up, saying:
Come on, poor babe:
Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens
To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,
Casting their savageness aside, have done
Like offices of pity.[74]
But it was more especially as feeders on carrion or on weakly animals
that the kites were held in disrepute. Cassius, before the battle of
Philippi, recognises the forerunners of carnage in the foul birds that
hovered above him:
Ravens, crows and kites
Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us,
As we were sickly prey: their shadows seem
A canopy most fatal, under which
Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost.[75]
At the battle of St. Albans York declares that
The deadly-handed Clifford slew my steed;
But match to match I have encounter’d him,
And made a prey for carrion kites and crows
Even of the bonny beast he loved so well.[76]
The thievish propensities of the kite when building its nest led
it to plunder all sorts of garments that might be bleaching on the
hedge,――pieces of rag, old hats, and bits of paper. This habit is
sympathetically referred to by Autolycus, who was himself, as he
confesses, another “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.”――“My traffic
is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen.”[77] The very
name of kite became an epithet of contempt and hatred. When Goneril
announced to her father in peremptory terms that he must “disquantity
his train,” poor old Lear’s indignation was in response hurled at her
in these words, “Detested kite.”[78]
The OSPREY, now almost extirpated as a native of these islands, was
probably not uncommon in the time of Elizabeth. It is once mentioned by
Shakespeare. Aufidius, the General of the Volscians, alluding to the
regard of the Roman people for the banished Coriolanus, reluctantly
confesses:
I think he’ll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature.[79]
It would almost seem that the poet had himself watched the bird plunge
into some clear lake or pond in southern England, and, with unerring
stroke, seize in its talons the unsuspecting fish which its keen eyes
had detected from aloft.
[Illustration: THE KITE]
[Sidenote: _The Vulture_]
The VULTURE, not infrequently mentioned by Shakespeare, is not a
British bird, though at rare intervals it has appeared as a migrant in
this country. The poet most likely never saw one, his allusions to it
being obviously based on its reputation for voracity, and partly also
on the legend of Prometheus and the eagle. In one passage a speaker
asserts “there cannot be that vulture in you to devour so many.”[80]
The expressions “vulture thought” and “vulture folly” are used in the
Poems.[81] A favourite observation of the braggart Pistol was “let
vultures vile seize on his lungs.” Sir William Lucy speaks of “the
vulture of sedition that feeds in the bosom of great commanders.”[82]
“The gnawing vulture of the mind” is referred to in _Titus Andronicus_.
But the most touching allusion in which this bird is used is that where
King Lear, wounded to the quick by Goneril’s unkindness, exclaims to
her sister, as he raises his hand to his heart,
O Regan, she hath tied
Sharp-tooth’d unkindness like a vulture here.[83]
[Illustration: THE CORMORANT]
[Sidenote: _Parrots and Popinjays_]
Reference may be made to two other exotic birds mentioned by
Shakespeare――the Parrot and the Ostrich. As one result of the many
voyages of discovery in his day, both in the Old and the New World,
the PARROT had become a familiar bird in England. Its loud and harsh
clamour, its docility, its clever imitation of human speech, but at the
best, the paucity of its vocabulary, are duly noted by our dramatist.
In one scene we are told how Falstaff was pleased to have “his poll
clawed like a parrot,”[84] in another, a lady declares that in her
jealousy she will be “more clamorous than a parrot against rain.”[85]
Again we hear of
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes
And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper;[86]
also of an indiscreet officer who in his tipsy fits would “speak
parrot, and squabble, swagger, swear and discourse fustian with his own
shadow.”[87] Nor must we forget the drawer at the Boar’s Head Tavern
in Eastcheap who had only two words of reply to any call, and of who
the merry Prince remarked, with a sly hit at the fair sex: “That ever
this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of
a woman!”[88] The parrot was also known by the name of popinjay, a
word sometimes applied to a foppish dandy. It is used in this sense by
Hotspur with reference to
A certain lord, neat and trimly dress’d
Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin new-reap’d
Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home.
* * * * * * *
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pester’d with a popinjay,
Answer’d neglectingly I know not what.[89]
The same word was used of the stuffed bird or other mark set up to be
shot at in a competition of marksmanship. This kind of sport in archery
continues to be kept up in Scotland, or was only recently abandoned. It
has been described by Scott in _Old Mortality_. I have myself attended
the summer festival of the “Papingo” at Kilwinning where it is said to
have been held ever since 1488. The stuffed bird is there suspended
from the end of a pole fastened on the steeple at a height of 100 feet
from the ground.
The OSTRICH or ESTRIDGE was doubtless an unfamiliar bird in England
in the reign of Elizabeth, though its feathers were in repute. When
Hotspur asked after “the nimble-footed, madcap Prince of Wales” and his
comrades, he was told by Sir Richard Vernon that they were
All furnished, all in arms;
All plumed, like estridges that with the wind
Baited like eagles having lately bathed,
Glittering in golden coats, like images.[90]
Among the marvels told of this bird, it had the credit of digesting
iron for the sake of its health. This reputation is alluded to in Jack
Cade’s defiance in Iden’s garden, when he vowed to the honest owner
that
I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my
sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.[91]
[Sidenote: _The Cormorant and Pelican_]