Folk-lore of Shakespeare - Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer (ereader iphone txt) 📗
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Raven. Perhaps no bird is so universally unpopular as the raven, its hoarse croak, in most countries, being regarded as ominous. Hence, as might be expected, Shakespeare often refers to it, in order to make the scene he depicts all the more vivid and graphic. In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3), Tamora, describing “a barren detested vale,” says:
O’ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe:
Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,
Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven.”
And in “Julius Cæsar” (v. 1), Cassius tells us how ravens
As we were sickly prey.”[310]
It seems that the superstitious dread[311] attaching to this bird has chiefly arisen from its supposed longevity,[312] and its frequent mention and agency in Holy Writ. By the Romans it was consecrated to Apollo, and was believed to have a prophetic knowledge—a notion still very prevalent. Thus, its supposed faculty[313] of “smelling death” still renders its presence, or even its voice, ominous. Othello (iv. 1) exclaims,
As doth the raven o’er the infected house,
Boding to all.”
There is no doubt a reference here to the fanciful notion that it was a constant attendant on a house infected with the plague. Most readers, too, are familiar with that famous passage in “Macbeth” (i. 5) where Lady Macbeth, having heard of the king’s intention to stay at the castle, exclaims,
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty!”
We may compare Spenser’s language in the “Fairy Queen” (bk. ii. c. vii. l. 23):
The hateful messengers of heavy things,
Of death and dolor telling sad tidings.”
And once more the following passage from Drayton’s “Barons’ Wars” (bk. v. stanza 42) illustrates the same idea:
Whose croaking him of following horror tells.”
In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 3), the “night-raven” is mentioned. Benedick observes to himself: “I had as lief have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.” This inauspicious bird, according to Steevens, is the owl; but this conjecture is evidently wrong, “being at variance with sundry passages in our early writers, who make a distinction between it and the night-raven.”[314]
Thus Johnson, in his “Seven Champions of Christendom” (part i.), speaks of “the dismal cry of night-ravens, ... and the fearefull sound of schriek owles.” Cotgrave regarded the “night-crow” and the “night-raven” as synonymous; and Mr. Yarrell considered them only different names for the night-heron.[315] In “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6) King Henry says:
Goldsmith, in his “Animated Nature,” calls the bittern the night-raven, and says: “I remember, in the place where I was a boy, with what terror the bird’s note affected the whole village; they consider it as the presage of some sad event, and generally found or made one to succeed it. If any person in the neighborhood died, they supposed it could not be otherwise, for the night-raven had foretold it; but if nobody happened to die, the death of a cow or a sheep gave completion to the prophecy.”
According to an old belief the raven deserts its own young, to which Shakespeare alludes in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3):
The whilst their own birds famish in their nests.”
“It was supposed that when the raven,” says Mr. Harting,[316] “saw its young ones newly hatched and covered with down, it conceived such an aversion that it forsook them, and did not return to the nest until a darker plumage had shown itself.” To this belief the commentators consider the Psalmist refers, when he says, “He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry” (Psalm cxlvii. 9). We are told, too, in Job, “Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat” (xxxviii. 41). Shakespeare, in “As You Like It” (ii. 3), probably had the words of the Psalmist in his mind:
Yea, providently caters for the sparrow.”
The raven has from earliest times been symbolical of blackness, both in connection with color and character. In “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 2), Juliet exclaims:
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven!”[317]
Once more, ravens’ feathers were formerly used by witches, from an old superstition that the wings of this bird carried with them contagion wherever they went. Hence, in “The Tempest” (i. 2), Caliban says:
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both!”
Robin Redbreast. According to a pretty notion,[318] this little bird is said to cover with leaves any dead body it may chance to find unburied; a belief which probably, in a great measure, originated in the well-known ballad of the “Children in the Wood,” although it seems to have been known previously. Thus Singer quotes as follows from “Cornucopia, or Divers Secrets,” etc. (by Thomas Johnson, 1596): “The robin redbreast, if he finds a man or woman dead, will cover all his face with moss; and some think that if the body should remain unburied that he would cover the whole body also.” In Dekker’s “Villaines Discovered by Lanthorn and Candlelight” (1616), quoted by Douce, it is said, “They that cheere up a prisoner but with their sight, are robin redbreasts that bring strawes in their bills to cover a dead man in extremitie.” Shakespeare, in a beautiful passage in “Cymbeline” (iv. 2), thus touchingly alludes to it, making Arviragus, when addressing the supposed dead body of Imogen, say:
Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath: the ruddock would,
With charitable bill,—O bill, sore-shaming
Those rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lie
Without a monument!—bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr’d moss besides, when flowers are none
To winter-ground thy corse”—
the “ruddock”[319] being one of the old names for the redbreast, which is nowadays found in some localities. John Webster, also, refers to the same idea in “The White Devil” (1857, ed. Dyce, p. 45):
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.”
Drayton, too, in “The Owl,” has the following lines:
The little redbreast teaching charitie.”
Rook. As an ominous bird this is mentioned in “Macbeth” (iii. 4). Formerly the nobles of England prided themselves in having a rookery[320] in the neighborhood of their castles, because rooks were regarded as “fowls of good omen.” On this account no one was permitted to kill them, under severe penalties. When rooks desert a rookery[321] it is said to foretell the downfall of the family on whose property it is. A Northumbrian saying informs us that the rooks left the rookery of Chipchase before the family of Reed left that place. There is also a notion that when rooks haunt a town or village “mortality is supposed to await its inhabitants, and if they feed in the street it shows that a storm is at hand.”[322]
The expression “bully-rook,” in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 3), in Shakespeare’s time, says Mr. Harting,[323] had the same meaning as “jolly dog” nowadays; but subsequently it became a term of reproach, meaning a cheating sharper. It has been suggested that the term derives its origin from the rook in the game of chess; but Douce[324] considers it very improbable that this noble game, “never the amusement of gamblers, should have been ransacked on this occasion.”
Snipe. This bird was in Shakespeare’s time proverbial for a foolish man.[325] In “Othello” (i. 3), Iago, speaking of Roderigo, says:
If I would time expend with such a snipe,
But for my sport and profit.”
Sparrow. A popular name for the common sparrow was, and still is, Philip, perhaps from its note, “Phip, phip.” Hence the allusion to a person named Philip, in “King John” (i. 1):
Staunton says perhaps Catullus alludes to this expression in the following lines:
Ad solam dominam usque pipilabat.”
Skelton, in an elegy upon a sparrow, calls it “Phyllyp Sparowe;” and Gascoigne also writes “The praise of Philip Sparrow.”
In “Measure for Measure” (iii. 2), Lucio, speaking of Angelo, the deputy-duke of Vienna, says: “Sparrows must not build in his house-eaves, because they are lecherous.”[326]
Sparrow-hawk. A name formerly given to a young sparrow-hawk was eyas-musket,[327] a term we find in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iii. 3): “How now, my eyas-musket! what news with you?” It was thus metaphorically used as a jocular phrase for a small child. As the invention, too, of fire-arms took place[328] at a time when hawking was in high fashion, some of the new weapons were named after those birds, probably from the idea of their fetching their prey from on high. Musket has thus become the established name for one sort of gun. Some, however, assert that the musket was invented in the fifteenth century, and owes its name to its inventors.
Starling. This was one of the birds that was in days gone by trained to speak. In “1 Henry IV.”
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