Thus we interpret the motto and the stanza,—

Falconers form part of the retinue of the drama (2 Henry VI., act ii. sc. 1, l. 1, vol. v. p. 132), and the dialogue at St. Albans even illustrates the expression, “Nobil’ è quel, ch’ è di virtù dotato,”—

On many other occasions Shakespeare shows his familiarity with the whole art and mysteries of hawking. Thus Christophero Sly is asked (Taming of the Shrew, Introduction, sc. 2, l. 41, vol. iii. p. 10),—

And Petruchio, after the supper scene, when he had thrown about the meat and beaten the servants, quietly congratulates himself on having “politicly began his reign” (act iv. sc. 1, l. 174, vol. iii. p. 67),—

Touchstone, too, in As You Like It (act iii. sc. 3, 1. 67, vol. ii. p. 427), hooking several comparisons together, introduces hawking among them: “As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock will be nibbling.”

Also in Macbeth (act ii. sc. 4, l. 10, vol. vii. p. 459), after “hours dreadful and things strange,” so “that darkness does the face of earth entomb, when living light should kiss it,” the Old Man declares,—

The thought of the sun’s influence in renovating what is decayed is unintentionally advanced by the jealousy of Adriana in the Comedy of Errors (act ii. sc. 1, l. 97, vol. i. p. 411), when to her sister Luciana she blames her husband Antipholus of Ephesus,—

In the Cymbeline (act i. sc. 1, l. 130, vol. ix. p. 167), Posthumus Leonatus, the husband of Imogen, is banished with great fierceness by her father, Cymbeline, King of Britain. A passage between daughter and father contains the same notion as that in the Emblem of Camerarius,—

The action of the ostrich in spreading out its feathers and beating the wind while it runs, furnished a device for Paradin (fol. 23), which, with the motto, The feather nothing but the use, he employs against hypocrisy.

Whitney (p. 51) adopts motto, device, and meaning,—

A different application is made in 1 Henry IV. (act iv. sc. 1, l. 97, vol. iv. p. 317), yet the figure of the bird with outstretching wings would readily supply the comparison employed by Vernon while speaking to Hotspur of “the nimbled-footed madcap Prince of Wales, and his comrades,”—

It must, however, be conceded, according to Douce’s clear annotation (vol. i. p. 435), that “it is by no means certain that this bird (the ostrich) is meant in the present instance.” A line probably is lost from the passage, and if supplied would only the more clearly show that the falcon was intended,—“estrich,” in the old books of falconry, denoting that bird, or, rather, the goshawk. In this sense the word is used in Antony and Cleopatra (act iii. sc. 13, l. 195, vol. ix. p. 100),—

Though a fabulous animal, the Unicorn has properties and qualities attributed to it which endear it to writers on Heraldry and on Emblems. These are well, it may with truth be said, finely set forth in Reusner’s Emblems (edition 1581, p. 60), where the creature is made the ensign for the motto, Faith undefiled victorious.

That is the very subject against which even Hercules,—“qu’ aqerre honneur par ses nobles conquestes,”—is called into requisition to rid men of the nuisance. We need not quote in full so familiar a narrative, and which Corrozet embellishes with twenty-four lines of French verses,—but content ourselves with a free rendering of his quatrain,—

It is not, however, with such speciality that Shakespeare uses this tale respecting Hercules and the Hydra. On the occasion serving, the questions may be asked, as in Hamlet (act v. sc. 1, l. 93, vol. viii. p. 154), “Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery?”

But simply by way of allusion the Hydra is introduced; as in the account of the battle of Shrewsbury (1 Henry IV. act v. sc. 4, l. 25, vol. iv. p. 342), Douglas had been fighting with one whom he thought the king, and comes upon “another king:” “they grow,” he declares, “like Hydra’s heads.”

In Othello (act ii. sc. 3, l. 290, vol. vii. p. 498), some time after the general had said to him (l. 238),—

Cassio says to Iago,—

So of the change which suddenly came over the Prince of Wales (Henry V., act i. sc. 1, l. 35, vol. iv. p. 493), on his father’s death, it is said,—

This section of our subject is sufficiently ample, or we might press into our service a passage from Timon of Athens (act iv. sc. 3, l. 317, vol. vii. p. 281), in which the question is asked, “What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?” and the answer is, “Give it the beasts, to be rid of the men.”

In the wide range of the pre-Shakespearean Emblematists and Fabulists we might peradventure find a parallel to each animal that is named (l. 324),—

With the sad fate of Icarus, Le Bey contrasts the far different condition of Poets,—

In vigorous prose Le Bey declares “their home of glory is the world itself, and for them honour without death abides.” Then personally to his friend Poppæus he says,—

“Onward, and things not to be feared fear not thou, who speakest nothing little or of humble measure, nothing mortal. While the pure priest of the Muses and of Phœbus with no weak nor unpractised wing through the liquid air as prophet stretches to the lofty regions of the clouds. Onward, and let father Phœbus himself bear thee to heaven.”

Now by the side of Le Bey’s laudatory sentences, may be placed the Poet’s glory as sung in the Midsummer Night’s Dream (act v. sc. 1, l. 12, vol. ii. p. 258),—

The Swan of silvery whiteness may have been the heraldic badge of the Poets, but that “bird of wonder,” the Phœnix, which,—

After describing the bird, Freitag applies it as a type of the resurrection from the dead; but its special moral is,—

“That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.”

Ancient authors, as well as the comparatively modern, very gravely testify to the lengthened life, and self-renovating power, and splendid beauty of the Phœnix. In the “Euterpe” of Herodotus (bk. ii. 73) we meet with the following narrative,—

“Ἔστι δε καὶ ἄλλος ὄμνις,” κ. τ. λ. “There is another sacred bird, named the Phœnix, which I myself never saw except in picture; for according to the people of Heliopolis, it seldom makes its appearance among them, only once in every 500 years. They state that he comes on the death of his sire. If at all like the picture, this bird may be thus described both in size and shape. Some of his feathers are of the colour of gold; others are red. In outline he is exceedingly similar to the Eagle, and in size also. This bird is said to display an ingenuity of contrivance which to me does not seem credible: he is represented as coming out of Arabia and bringing with him his father, embalmed in myrrh, to the temple of the Sun, and there burying him. The following is the manner in which this is done. First of all he sticks together an egg of myrrh, as much as he can carry, and then if he can bear the burden, this experiment being achieved, he scoops out the egg sufficiently to deposit his sire within; next he fills with fresh myrrh the opening in the egg, by which the body was enclosed; thus the whole mass containing the carcase is still of the same weight. The embalming being completed, he transports him into Egypt and to the temple of the Sun.”

Pliny’s account is brief (bk. xiii. ch. iv.),—

“The bird Phœnix is supposed to have taken that name from the date tree, which in Greek is called φοῖνιξ; for the assurance was made me that the said bird died with the tree, and of itself revived when the tree again sprouted forth.”

Numerous indeed are the authorities of old to the same or a similar purport. They are nearly all comprised in the introductory dissertation of Joachim Camerarius to his device of the Phœnix, and include about eighteen classic writers, ten of the Greek and Latin Fathers, and three modern writers of the sixteenth century.

Appended to the works of Lactantius, an eloquent Christian Father of the latter part of the third century, there is a Carmen De Phœnice,—“Song concerning the Phœnix,”—in elegiac verse, which contains very many of the old tales and legends of “the Arabian bird,” and describes it as,—

(See Lactantii Opera, studio Gallæi, Leyden, 8vo. 1660, pp. 904–923.)

Besides Camerarius, there are at least five Emblematists from whom Shakespeare might have borrowed respecting the Phœnix. Horapollo, whose Hieroglyphics were edited in 1551; Claude Paradin and Gabriel Symeoni, whose Heroic Devises appeared in 1562; Arnold Freitag, in 1579; Nicholas Reusner, in 1581; Geffrey Whitney, in 1586, and Boissard, in 1588,—these all take the Phœnix for one of their emblems, and give a drawing of it in the act of self-sacrifice and self-renovation. They make it typical of many truths and doctrines,—of long duration for the soul, of devoted love to God, of special rarity of character, of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and of the resurrection of all mankind.

There is a singular application of the Phœnix emblem which existed before and during Shakespeare’s time, but of which I find no pictorial representation until 1633. It is in Henry Hawkins’ rare volume, “Η ΠΑΡΘΕΝΟΣ,”—The Virgin—“Symbolically set forth and enriched with piovs devises and emblemes for the entertainement of Devovt Sovles.” This peculiar emblem bestows upon the bird two hearts, which are united in closest sympathy and in entire oneness of affection and purpose; they are the hearts of the Virgin-Mother and her Son.