Folk-lore of Shakespeare, Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer [e reader comics TXT] 📗
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As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily
As this Gonzalo; I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat.”
Shakespeare always refers to the jackdaw as the “daw.”[167] The chough or jackdaw was one of the birds considered ominous by our forefathers, an allusion to which occurs in “Macbeth” (iii. 4):
By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.”
At the present day this bird is not without its folk-lore, and there is a Norwich rhyme to the following effect:[168]
Then we’re sure to have bad weather.”
In the north of England,[169] too, the flight of jackdaws down the chimney is held to presage death.
Cock. The beautiful notion which represents the cock as crowing all night long on Christmas Eve, and by its vigilance dispelling every kind of malignant spirit[170] and evil influence is graphically mentioned in “Hamlet” (i. 1), where Marcellus, speaking of the ghost, says:
Some say, that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
In short, there is a complete prostration of the powers of darkness; and thus, for the time being, mankind is said to be released from the influence of all those evil forces which otherwise exert such sway. The notion that spirits fly at cock-crow is very ancient, and is mentioned by the Christian poet Prudentius, who flourished in the beginning of the fourth century. There is also a hymn, said to have been composed by St. Ambrose, and formerly used in the Salisbury Service, which so much resembles the following speech of Horatio (i. 1), that one might almost suppose Shakespeare had seen it:[171]
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine.”
This disappearance of spirits at cock-crow is further alluded to (i. 2):[172]
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away,
And vanished from our sight.”
Blair, too, in his “Grave,” has these graphic words:
Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly,
That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand
O’er some new-open’d grave, and, strange to tell,
Evanishes at crowing of the cock.”
This superstition has not entirely died out in England, and a correspondent of “Notes and Queries”[173] relates an amusing legend current in Devonshire: “Mr. N. was a squire who had been so unfortunate as to sell his soul to the devil, with the condition that after his funeral the fiend should take possession of his skin. He had also persuaded a neighbor to be present on the occasion of the flaying. On the death of Mr. N. this man went, in a state of great alarm, to the parson of the parish, and asked his advice. By him he was told to fulfil his engagement, but he must be sure and carry a cock into the church with him. On the night after the funeral the man proceeded to the church, armed with the cock, and, as an additional security, took up his position in the parson’s pew. At twelve o’clock the devil arrived, opened the grave, took the corpse from the coffin, and flayed it. When the operation was concluded, he held the skin up before him and remarked, ‘Well, ’twas not worth coming for after all, for it is all full of holes!’ As he said this the cock crew, whereupon the fiend, turning round to the man, exclaimed, ‘If it had not been for the bird you have got there under your arm, I would have your skin too!’ But, thanks to the cock, the man got home safe again.” Various origins have been assigned to this superstition, which Hampson[174] regards as a misunderstood tradition of some Sabæan fable. The cock, he adds, which seems by its early voice to call forth the sun, was esteemed a sacred solar bird; hence it was also sacred to Mercury, one of the personifications of the sun.
A very general amusement, up to the end of the last century, was cock-fighting, a diversion of which mention is occasionally made by Shakespeare, as in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 3):
When it is all to nought.”
And again Hamlet says (v. 2):
The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit”—
meaning, the poison triumphs over him, as a cock over his beaten antagonist. Formerly, cock-fighting entered into the occupations of the old and young.[175] Schools had their cock-fights. Travellers agreed with coachmen that they were to wait a night if there was a cock-fight in any town through which they passed. When country gentlemen had sat long at table, and the conversation had turned upon the relative merits of their several birds, a cock-fight often resulted, as the birds in question were brought for the purpose into the dining-room. Cock-fighting was practised on Shrove Tuesday to a great extent, and in the time of Henry VII. seems to have been practised within the precincts of court. The earliest mention of this pastime in England is by Fitzstephens, in 1191. Happily, nowadays, cock-fighting is, by law, a misdemeanor, and punishable by penalty. One of the popular terms for a cock beaten in a fight was “a craven,” to which we find a reference in the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1):
We may also compare the expression in “Henry V.” (iv. 7): “He is a craven and a villain else.” In the old appeal or wager of battle,[176] in our common law, we are told, on the authority of Lord Coke, that the party who confessed himself wrong, or refused to fight, was to pronounce the word cravent, and judgment was at once given against him. Singer[177] says the term may be satisfactorily traced from crant, creant, the old French word for an act of submission. It is so written in the old metrical romance of “Ywaine and Gawaine” (Ritson, i. 133):
And in “Richard Cœur de Lion” (Weber, ii. 208):
It then became cravant, cravent, and at length craven.
In the time of Shakespeare the word cock was used as a vulgar corruption or purposed disguise of the name of God, an instance of which occurs in “Hamlet” (iv. 5): “By cock, they are to blame.” This irreverent alteration of the sacred name is found at least a dozen times[178] in Heywood’s “Edward the Fourth,” where one passage is,
You mean no otherwise then you have said.
We find, too, other allusions to the sacred name, as in “cock’s passion,” “cock’s body;” as in “Taming of the Shrew” (iv. 1): “Cock’s passion, silence!” A not uncommon oath, too, in Shakespeare’s time was “Cock and pie”—cock referring to God, and pie being supposed to mean the service-book of the Romish Church; a meaning which, says Mr. Dyce, seems much more probable than Douce’s[179] supposition that this oath was connected with the making of solemn vows by knights in the days of chivalry, during entertainments at which a roasted peacock was served up. It is used by Justice Shallow (“2 Henry IV.,” v. 1): “By cock and pye, sir, you shall not away to-night.” We may also compare the expression in the old play of “Soliman and Perseda” (1599): “By cock and pye and mousefoot.” Mr. Harting[180] says the “Cock and Pye” (i. e., magpie) was an ordinary ale-house sign, and may have thus become a subject for the vulgar to swear by.
The phrase, “Cock-a-hoop”[181]—which occurs in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 5),
You will set cock-a-hoop! you’ll be the man!”
—no doubt refers to a reckless person, who takes the cock or tap out of a cask, and lays it on the top or hoop of the barrel, thus letting all the contents of the cask run out. Formerly, a quart pot was called a hoop, being formed of staves bound together with hoops like barrels. There were generally three hoops to such a pot; hence, in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 2), one of Jack Cade’s popular reformations was to increase their number: “the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer.” Some, however, consider the term Cock-a-hoop[182] refers to the boastful crowing of the cock.
In “King Lear” (iii. 2) Shakespeare speaks of the “cataracts and hurricanoes” as having
Vanes on the tops of steeples were in days gone by made in the form of a cock—hence weathercocks—and put up, in papal times, to remind the clergy of watchfulness.[183] Apart, too, from symbolism, the large tail of the cock was well adapted to turn with the wind.[184]
Cormorant. The proverbial voracity of this bird[185] gave rise to a man of large appetite being likened to it, a sense in which Shakespeare employs the word, as in “Coriolanus” (i. 1): “the cormorant belly;” in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (i. 1): “cormorant devouring Time;” and in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 2): “this cormorant war.” “Although,” says Mr. Harting,[186] “Shakespeare mentions the cormorant in several of his plays, he has nowhere alluded to the sport of using these birds, when trained, for fishing; a fact which is singular, since he often speaks of the then popular pastime of hawking, and he did not die until some years after James I. had made fishing with cormorants a fashionable amusement.”
Crow. This has from the earliest times been reckoned a bird of bad omen; and in “Julius Cæsar” (v. 1), Cassius, on the eve of battle, predicted a defeat, because, to use his own words:
Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us,
As we were sickly prey: their shadows seem
A canopy most fatal, under which
Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost.”
Allusions to the same superstition occur in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 2); “King John” (v. 2), etc. Vergil (“Bucolic,” i. 18) mentions the croaking of the crow as a bad omen:
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