The talk of the hunters about the dogs in The Taming of the Shrew (ind. 1. 16) is in the same vein:—
"Lord. Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds—
Brach Merriman, the poor cur, is emboss'd—
And couple Clowder with the deep-mouth'd brach.
Saw'st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good
At the hedge corner, in the coldest fault?
I would not lose the dog for twenty pound.
1 Hunter. Why, Bellman is as good as he, my lord;
He cried upon it at the merest loss,
And twice to-day pick'd out the dullest scent:
Trust me, I take him for the better dog.
Lord. Thou art a fool: if Echo were as fleet,
I would esteem him worth a dozen such.
But sup them well, and look unto them all;
To-morrow I intend to hunt again."
In the Merry Wives of Windsor (i. 1. 96) Page defends his greyhound against the criticisms of Slender, and Shallow takes his part:—
"Slender. How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say, he was outrun on Cotsall.
Page. It could not be judged, sir.
Slender. You'll not confess, you'll not confess.
Shallow. That he will not.—'T is your fault, 't is your fault: 't is a good dog.
Page. A cur, sir.
Shallow. Sir, he 's a good dog, and a fair dog; can there be more said? he is good and fair."
Cotsall (or Cotswold) is an allusion to the Cotswold downs in Gloucestershire, celebrated for coursing (hunting the hare), for which their fine turf fitted them, and also for other rural sports.
The description of the horse in Venus and Adonis (259), a youthful work of Shakespeare's, is famous:—
"But, lo, from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young, and proud,
Adonis' trampling courser doth espy,
And forth she rushes, snorts, and neighs aloud;
The strong-neck'd steed, being tied unto a tree,
Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.
Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,
And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;
The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,
Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven's thunder;
The iron bit he crushes 'tween his teeth,
Controlling what he was controlled with.
His ears up-prick'd; his braided hanging mane
Upon his compass'd crest now stand on end;
His nostrils drink the air, and forth again,
As from a furnace, vapours doth he send;
His eye, which scornfully glisters like fire,
Shows his hot courage and his high desire.
Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps,
With gentle majesty and modest pride;
Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps,
As who should say, 'Lo! thus my strength is tried;
And this I do to captivate the eye
Of the fair breeder that is standing by.'
What recketh he his rider's angry stir,
His flattering 'Holla', or his 'Stand, I say'?
What cares he now for curb or pricking spur,
For rich caparisons, or trapping gay?
He sees his love, and nothing else he sees,
Nor nothing else with his proud sight agrees.
Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportion'd steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
So did this horse excel a common one,
In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone.
Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.
Sometime he scuds far off, and there he stares;
Anon he starts at stirring of a feather;
To bid the wind a base he now prepares,
And whether he run or fly they know not whether;
For thro' his mane and tail the high wind sings,
Fanning the hairs, who wave like feather'd wings."
In Richard II. (v. 5. 72) the dialogue between the Groom and the King could have been written only by one who knew by experience the affection that one comes to feel for a favorite horse:—
"Groom. I was a poor groom of thy stable, king,
When thou wert king; who, travelling towards York,
With much ado at length have gotten leave
To look upon my sometimes royal master's face.
O, how it yearn'd my heart, when I beheld,
In London streets, that coronation day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary,
That horse that thou so often hast bestrid,
That horse that I so carefully have dress'd!
King Richard. Rode he on Barbary? Tell me, gentle friend,
How went he under him?
Groom. So proud as if he had disdain'd the ground.
King Richard. So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back!
That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand;
This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.
Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down,—
Since pride must have a fall,—and break the neck
Of that proud man that did usurp his back?
Forgiveness, horse! why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be awed by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse;
And yet I bear a burden like an ass,
Spur-gall'd and tir'd by jauncing Bolingbroke."
The description of hare-hunting in Venus and Adonis (679) must also have been based on actual experience in the sport:—
"And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles
How he outruns the winds, and with what care
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles:
The many musits through the which he goes,
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.
"Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep,
To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
To stop the loud pursuers in their yell,
And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear:
"For there his smell with others being mingled,
The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled
With much ado the cold fault cleanly out;
Then do they spend their mouths; Echo replies,
As if another chase were in the skies.
"By this, 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;
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell.
"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:
For misery is trodden on by many
And being low never reliev'd by any."
Mr. John R. Wise comments on this passage as follows: "This description of the run is wonderfully true; how the 'dew-bedabbled wretch' betakes herself to a flock of sheep to lead the hounds off the scent; how she stops to listen, and again makes another double. Mark, too, the beauty and aptness of the epithets, 'the hot scent-snuffing' hounds, and the 'earth-delving' conies; but more especially mark the pity that the poet feels for the poor animal, showing that he possessed a true feeling heart, without which no line of poetry can ever be written."
There are many allusions to fowling in Shakespeare's works. He had evidently seen a good deal of it, probably in his boyhood, whether he had had actual experience in it or not.
In As You Like It (v. 4. 111) the Duke says of Touchstone, who combined much philosophy with his professional foolery, "He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit." And in Much Ado About Nothing (ii. 3. 95), when Don Pedro and his companions are talking about Benedick, whom they know to be hid within hearing, Claudio says: "Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits"; that is, go on with the practical joke, for the victim does not suspect it.
The stalking-horse, originally, was a horse trained for the purpose and covered with trappings, so as to conceal the sportsman from the game. It was particularly useful to the archer by enabling him to approach the birds, without being seen by them, near enough to reach them with his arrows. As it was not always convenient to use a real horse for this purpose, the fowler had recourse to an artificial one, made of stuffed canvas and painted like a horse, but light enough to be moved with one hand. Hence stalking-horse came to be used figuratively for anything put forward to conceal a more important object, or to mask one's real intention. Thus an old writer describes a hypocrite as one "that makes religion his stalking-horse."
In the Midsummer-Night's Dream (iii, 2. 20) Puck, describing the fright of the clowns when Bottom makes his appearance with the ass's head on his shoulders, says:—
"Anon his Thisbe must be answered,
And forth my mimic comes. When they him spy,
As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly."
In 1 Henry IV. (iv. 2. 21) Falstaff says that his recruits are "such as fear the report of a caliver [musket] worse than a struck fowl or a hurt wild-duck." And in Much Ado (ii. 1. 209) Benedick says of Claudio, who runs away from his friend's bantering: "Alas, poor hurt fowl! now will he creep into sedges"; that is, he will go and brood over his vexation in solitude.
In The Tempest (ii. 1. 85) we have an allusion to "bat-fowling," a method of fowling by night in which the birds were started from their nests and stupefied by a sudden blaze of light from torches. Gervase Markham, a contemporary of Shakespeare, in his Hunger's Prevention, or the Whole Arte of Fowling, says: "I think meet to proceed to Bat-fowling, which is likewise a nighty taking of all sorts of great and small birds, which rest not on the earth, but on shrubs, tall bushes, hawthorn trees, and other trees, and may fitly and most conveniently be used in all woody, rough, and bushy countries, but not in the champaign," or open country. He then goes on to explain how it is carried on. Some of the sportsmen have torches to start the birds, while others are armed with "long poles, very rough and bushy at the upper ends," with which they beat down the birds bewildered by the light and capture them.
Hawking, or falconry, the art of training and flying hawks for the purpose of catching other birds, was a sport generally limited to the nobility; but Shakespeare's many allusions to it show that he was very familiar with all its forms and its technicalities. He doubtless saw a good deal of it in his boyhood rambles in the neighborhood of Stratford.
The practice of hawking declined with the improvement in muskets, which afforded a readier and surer method of procuring game, with an equal degree of out-of-door exercise. As the expense of training and keeping hawks was very great, it is no wonder that the gun soon superseded the bird with sportsmen. The change, indeed, was surprisingly rapid. Hentzner, in his Itinerary, written in 1598, tells us that hawking was then the general sport of the English nobility; and most of the best treatises upon this subject were written about that time; but in the latter part of the next century the art was almost unknown.
Shakespeare knew all the different kinds of hawks. He refers several times to the haggard, or wild hawk. In Much Ado (iii. 1. 36) Hero says of Beatrice:—
"I know her spirits are as coy and wild
As haggards of the rock."
In The Taming of the Shrew (iv. 1. 196) Petruchio employs the same figure with reference to Katharina:—
"Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come and know her keeper's call";
where man means to tame. Again in the same play (iv. 2. 39) the shrew is called "this proud disdainful haggard."
The nestling or unfledged hawk was called an eyas; and in Hamlet (ii. 2. 355) the boy actors, who were becoming popular when the play was written, are sneeringly described as "an aery of children, little eyases." In the Merry Wives of Windsor (iii. 3. 22), Mrs. Ford addresses Robin, the page of Falstaff thus: "How now, my eyas-musket! what news with you?" The eyas-musket was the young sparrow-hawk, a small and inferior species of hawk. The word is derived from the Latin musca, a fly, and probably refers to the small size of the bird. It is curious that, as applied to the firearm, it has the same origin. The gun was figuratively compared to the hawk as a means of taking birds. Similarly, a kind of cannon used in the 16th century was called a falcon; and another, of smaller bore, was known as a falconet.
In Romeo and Juliet (ii. 2. 160), when the lover has left his lady and she would call him back, she says:—
"Hist, Romeo, hist! O for a falconer's voice
To call this tassel-gentle back again!"
The tassel-gentle, or tercel-gentle, was the male hawk. Cotgrave, in his French Dictionary (edition of 1672) defines tiercelet as "the Tassell or male of any kind of Hawk, so termed because he is, commonly, a third part less than the female." The gentle referred to the ease with which the bird was trained.
We find the word tercel in Troilus and Cressida (iii. 2. 56): "The falcon as the tercel, for all the ducks in the river"; that is, the female bird is as good as the male.
The male bird, however, was seldom used in hawking, on account of its inferiority in size and strength. In descriptions of the sport we find the female pronoun generally applied to the bird. Tennyson in Lancelot and Elaine originally wrote:—
"No surer than our falcon yesterday,
Who lost the hern we slipt him at";
but he afterwards changed "him" to "her."
The hawk was "hooded," that is, had a hood put over its head, until it was slipped, or let fly at the game; and to this we have several allusions in Shakespeare.
In Henry V. (iii. 7. 121) the Constable, sneering at the Dauphin, says of his boasted valor: "Never anybody saw it but his lackey: 't is a hooded valour; and when it appears it will bate." To bate, or bait, was to flutter the wings, as the bird did when unhooded. In this passage there is a pun on bate in this sense and as meaning to abate or diminish.
In Othello (iii. 3. 260), when the Moor has been told by Iago that Desdemona may be false, he says:—
"If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,
I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind,
To prey at fortune."
Here we have several hawking terms in a single sentence. Haggard, already mentioned, is used as an adjective, meaning wild or lawless. The jesses were straps of leather or silk attached to the foot of the hawk, by which the falconer held her. The bird was whistled off when first set free for flight; and she was always let fly against the wind. If she flew with the wind behind her, she seldom returned. If therefore a hawk was for any reason to be dismissed, she was let down the wind, and from that time shifted for herself and preyed at fortune, or at random.
The legs of the hawk were adorned with two small bells, not both of the same sound but differing by a semitone. They were intended to frighten the game, so that it could be more readily caught. This is alluded to in Lucrece, 511:—
"Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon's bells."
Touchstone also refers to the bells in As You Like It (iii. 3. 81): "As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires." There is another figurative allusion to them in 3 Henry VI. i. 1. 47, where Warwick, boasting of his power, says:—
"Neither the king, nor he that loves him best,
The proudest he that holds up Lancaster,
Dares stir a wing if Warwick shake his bells."
In England mews is the name commonly given to a livery stable, or place where carriage horses are kept. The word has a curious connection with hawking. A bird was said to mew, when it moulted or changed its feathers. When hawks were moulting they were shut up in a cage or coop, which was called a mew. The royal stables in London got the name of mews because they were built where the mews of the king's hawks had been situated. This was done in the year 1537, the hawks being removed to another place. The word mews, being thus used for the royal stables, gradually came to be applied to other buildings of the kind.
It would take too much space to quote and explain all the allusions to hawking in Shakespeare's works. The few here given may serve as samples of this very interesting class of technical terms, most of which became obsolete when the art ceased to be practised.
Before dropping the subject, however, I may remind the young reader that many of the quotations here given to illustrate archery, hawking, and other ancient arts, sports, and games, also illustrate the fact that the figurative language of a period is affected by its manners and customs. The one needs to be known in order to understand the other. To take a fresh example, John Skelton, who lived in the time o£ Henry VIII., refers to a lady thus:—
"Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower;
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower."
If we should compare a young lady nowadays to a falcon or a hawk, she would hardly take it as a compliment; and this very simile has been criticised by a writer who evidently did not understand it. He says: "We would rather be excused from wedding a lady of that ravenous class. This simile, we fear, was predictive of sharp nails after marriage." He forgets, or does not know, that this was written when, as we have learned, the art of hawking was in vogue. The trained falcons were as gentle and docile as any dove. They were domestic pets, and high-born ladies especially took delight in them. Shakespeare in his 91st Sonnet says:—
"Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse.
* * * * *
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be,
And, having thee, of all men's pride I boast."
And in Much Ado (iii. 4. 54) when Beatrice sighs, Margaret asks: "For a hawk, a horse, or a husband?"
Commentators on Shakespeare, like the critic quoted above, have sometimes erred in their interpretation of a passage because they did not understand the fact or usage upon which a figure or allusion was founded.
When the players came to town I suspect that no Stratford boy was more delighted than William. John Shakespeare, like his fellows in the town council, seems to have been a lover of the drama. When he was bailiff in 1569 he granted licenses for performances of the Queen's and the Earl of Worcester's companies.
The Queen's company received nine shillings and the Earl's twelvepence for their first entertainments, to which the public were admitted free. They doubtless gave others afterwards for which an entrance fee was charged.
Did John Shakespeare take the five-year-old William to see them act? He may have done so, for we know that in the city of Gloucester (only thirty miles from Stratford) a man took his little boy, born in the same year with Shakespeare, to a free dramatic performance similarly provided by the corporation. In his autobiography, written in his old age, the person tells how he went to the show with his father and stood between his legs as he sat upon one of the benches.
The play was one of the "moralities" then in vogue, and the good man's quaint description of it is worth quoting as giving an idea of those curious dramas:—
"It was called The Cradle of Security, wherein was personated a king or some great prince, with his courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three ladies were in special grace with him; and they, keeping him in delights and pleasures, drew him from his graver counsellors, ... that, in the end, they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies, joining in a sweet song, rocked him asleep that he snorted again; and in the mean time closely [that is, secretly] conveyed under the clothes wherewithal he was covered a vizard, like a swine's snout, upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally by those three ladies, who fall to singing again, and then discovered [uncovered] his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing.
"Whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another door at the farthest end of the stage two old men, the one in blue with a sergeant-at-arms his mace on his shoulder, the other in red with a drawn sword in his hand and leaning with the other hand upon the other's shoulder; and so they two went along in a soft pace round about by the skirt of the stage, till at last they came to the cradle, when all the court was in the greatest jollity; and then the foremost old man with his mace struck a fearful blow upon the cradle, whereat all the courtiers, with the three ladies and the vizard, all vanished; and the desolate prince starting up bare-faced, and finding himself thus sent for to judgment, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and so was carried away by wicked spirits.
"This prince did personate in the moral the Wicked of the World; the three ladies, Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury [Lust]; the two old men, the End of the World and the Last Judgment.
"This sight took such impression in me that, when I came towards man's estate, it was as fresh in my memory as if I had seen it newly acted."
So far as the Stratford records show, the theatrical company of 1569 was the first that had visited the town, but afterwards players came thither almost every year.
How much they had to do in awakening a passion for the drama in the breast of young William and shaping his subsequent career, we cannot guess; but "the boy is father of the man," and in all that we know of Shakespeare as a boy we can detect the germinal influences of many characteristics of the man, the poet, and the dramatist.