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 [Pg vi] 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 [Pg vii] 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. [Pg viii] 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

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 [Pg 2] 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

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

His poem on The Parlement of Foules represents the various birds of the air [Pg 4] 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

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

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.

[Pg 6] 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 [Pg 7] 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 [Pg 8] school of Stratford. At all events, that he himself had known the excitements of bird-nesting may be fairly inferred from the following passage:

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:

[Pg 9]

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 [Pg 10] 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

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:

[Pg 11]

The King in Hamlet, torn with compunction for his crime, exclaims

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:

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.

We find reference to “poor birds deceived with painted grapes,” and to “poor [Pg 12] 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:

[Pg 13]

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,

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 [Pg 14] 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

And there are smooth-stemmed beech-trees, on the massive trunks of which a love-sick swain may carve the name of his beloved.

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:

And in nearly the last strains that reach us before the drama closes, the carol of the birds comes in again:

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:

[Pg 17]

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 [Pg 18] 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:

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

More detailed and even more full of commiseration is the poet’s vivid description of the hunting of “the purblind hare.”

When he has for a little succeeded in throwing the hounds off the scent,

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

Shakespeare elsewhere alludes to our [Pg 21] prevalent insensibility towards the insect world, from our youth upward.

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 [Pg 22] 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]

[Pg 23]

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

[Pg 24] He tells how “The birds chant melody on every bush,”[33] and recounts where

He leads us where we may

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:

The sadness and silence of the woods in autumn when the birds are dumb, are recorded in these musical lines:

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:

Or we are presented with a storm in which we see

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.

[Pg 26] Shakespeare was keenly alive to the strong contrasts so continually placed in juxtaposition by Nature—what he calls

He recognised contrasts of this kind both in the animate and the inanimate creation, and not least where the birds are involved: