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,

The future King Edward IV. was taunted by his brother Richard thus:

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

Again, in the same Play, the comparison becomes even more grotesquely exaggerated, for the same lover in praising his lady-love demands to know

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

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

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:

And Hastings in the same Play remarks

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.

The contemplation of the various misfortunes that may befall even the king of birds leads to the reflection:

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 eagle has been credited with a nobility of nature in keeping with his regal rank:

Shakespeare may have seen an eagle in confinement, for his description of its manner of feeding seems as if drawn from actual observation:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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

Again, he makes Bolingbroke boast that he would fight Mowbray

He notes how

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:

Malvolio. ‘M. O. A. I. doth sway my life.’ Nay but first, let me see, let me see, let me see.

Sir Toby.  And with what wing the staniel checks at it![68]

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:

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]

In an earlier part of the same Play York asks:

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:

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:

At the battle of St. Albans York declares that

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]

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.

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,

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

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

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

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

Three large water-birds, the Cormorant, Pelican and Loon are disparagingly noticed by Shakespeare. The cormorant, so well-known along all our rocky shores, was described by Chaucer as “full of glotonye,” and by the dramatist as the symbol of a rapacious voracity. Thus, vanity is described as an “insatiate cormorant”; we are told of “cormorant devouring Time,” of the “cormorant belly” and of

The pelican is alluded to in the Shakespearian drama in connection with a popular fable that this bird nourishes its young with its own blood. Laertes in Hamlet affirms that to his father’s friends

When Lear, in the storm on the open heath, sees the disguised Edgar at the entrance of the hovel, he will not be persuaded that the poor man could have been so beggared save by his unkind daughters, and he asks Kent

The word “Loon” or “Lown” is employed by the poet to denote a rogue or low fellow. A messenger of evil tidings is called by Macbeth a “cream-faced loon.”[95] In the play of Pericles we hear of a company that would include “both lord and lown”;[96] and in Othello Iago sings part of a north-country ballad in which the same word occurs:

The name of Loon or Loom is a popular appellation which includes three distinct families of water-birds, all remarkable for their clumsy gait on land. Whether this name was applied to them after it had first been in use as an uncomplimentary epithet for a man, or was originally their own common designation which came eventually to acquire a human application, remains in doubt. More probably the bird was first owner, and the word may belong to the group of bird-names like goose, snipe, kite, hawk and others which have become disparaging epithets for human subjects. In Lincolnshire the word is in use as the common name of the Great Crested Grebe. Though now obsolete in conversational English as an epithet for a rogue it is still in common use in Scotland in that sense.[98]

The owl plays a large part in Shakespeare’s references to bird-life. He does not discriminate between the different members of the large family probably included under this name, though he distinguishes some of their respective cries. He heightens the feeling of the eeriness of night by introducing the remarkable sound of the owl’s voice, and most effectively when some deed of villainy is on foot, or as one of the signs popularly supposed to portend coming disaster. He includes the owl also in that fairy world which he has made so real. It will be enough to cite a few examples of these different usages in his works.

Traces are said still to linger in Gloucestershire of a legend that had become long ago attached to the owl, and which was known to the great dramatist. He makes use of it in the scene where Ophelia appears distraught from her father’s death. In her incoherent talk she exclaims “they say the owl was a baker’s daughter.”[99] The tradition ran that our Lord one day entered a baker’s shop and asked for bread, which was grudgingly and sparingly given by the baker’s daughter who was thereupon turned by Christ into an owl. There has long been a popular feeling that something specially uncanny and mysterious hangs about this bird.

In the Poems night is pictured in these words:

The time chosen by Bolingbroke for the incantation scene in Gloucester’s garden was

In a view of winter the owl is made to play its part:

The poet has noted “the night owl’s lazy flight,”[103] and the predatory habits of the “mousing owl.”[104] He has increased the glamour of the night-scenes in the tragedy of Macbeth by the introduction of this bird. When Lady Macbeth, alone and on the alert for the perpetration of the murder, hears a sound, she exclaims in anxious suspense:

Her husband, too, after he has done the deed, emerges to her with the eager question “Didst thou not hear a noise?”; to which she replies, “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.” Next morning before the fatal news had become known it was reported that, through the midst of a storm,

The appearance of the owl by day was unusual enough to be considered an evil omen. Among the portents that preceded the assassination of Julius Caesar it was reported that

When Richard II. realises the machinations of his enemies, and is asked to come down to the base-court to meet Bolingbroke, he exclaims

The hooting or screeching of the owl was often looked upon as a foreboding of death. Among the nocturnal sounds recounted by fairy Puck, he tells that

Even at a babe’s nativity the sound of this bird’s note might be taken as a bad omen. King Henry VI. tells Gloucester: