Folk-lore of Shakespeare, Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer [e reader comics TXT] 📗
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Colt. From its wild tricks the colt was formerly used to designate, according to Johnson, “a witless, heady, gay youngster.” Portia mentions it with a quibble in “The Merchant of Venice” (i. 2), referring to the Neapolitan prince. “Ay, that’s a colt, indeed.” The term “to colt” meant to trick, or befool; as in the phrase in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 2): “What a plague mean ye to colt me thus?” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps[397] explains the expression in “Henry VIII.” (i. 3), “Your colt’s tooth is not cast yet,” to denote a love of youthful pleasure. In “Cymbeline” (ii. 4) it is used in a coarser sense: “She hath been colted by him.”
Crocodile. According to fabulous accounts the crocodile was the most deceitful of animals; its tears being proverbially fallacious. Thus Othello (iv. 1) says:
If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.—
Out of my sight!”
We may also compare the words of the queen in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1):
Too full of foolish pity; and Gloster’s show
Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers.”
It is said that this treacherous animal weeps over a man’s head when it has devoured the body, and will then eat up the head too. In Bullokar’s “Expositor,” 1616, we read: “Crocodile lachrymæ, crocodiles teares, do signify such teares as are feigned, and spent only with intent to deceive or do harm.” In Quarles’s “Emblems” there is the following allusion:
Compos’d of treachries and ensnaring wiles!
She cloaths destruction in a formal kiss,
And lodges death in her deceitful smiles.”
In the above passage from “Othello,” Singer says there is, no doubt, a reference to the doctrine of equivocal generation, by which new animals were supposed to be producible by new combinations of matter.[398]
Deer. In “King Lear” (iii. 4) Edgar uses deer for wild animals in general:
Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.”
Shakespeare frequently refers to the popular sport of hunting the deer;[399] and by his apt allusions shows how thoroughly familiar he was with the various amusements of his day.[400] In “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2) Leontes speaks of “the mort o’ the deer:” certain notes played on the horn at the death of the deer, and requiring a deep-drawn breath.[401] It was anciently, too, one of the customs of the chase for all to stain their hands in the blood of the deer as a trophy. Thus, in “King John” (ii. 1), the English herald declares to the men of Angiers how
Our lusty English, all with purpled hands,
Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes.”
The practice is again alluded to in “Julius Cæsar” (iii. 1):
Sign’d in thy spoil, and crimson’d in thy lethe.”
Old Turbervile gives us the details of this custom: “Our order is, that the prince, or chief, if so please them, do alight, and take assay of the deer, with a sharp knife, the which is done in this manner—the deer being laid upon his back, the prince, chief, or such as they do appoint, comes to it, and the chief huntsman, kneeling if it be a prince, doth hold the deer by the forefoot, whilst the prince, or chief, do cut a slit drawn along the brisket of the deer.”
In “Antony and Cleopatra” (v. 2), where Cæsar, speaking of Cleopatra’s death, says:
She levell’d at our purposes, and, being royal,
Took her own way”—
there is possibly an allusion to the hart royal, which had the privilege of roaming unmolested, and of taking its own way to its lair.
Shooting with the cross-bow at deer was an amusement of great ladies. Buildings with flat roofs, called stands, partly concealed by bushes, were erected in the parks for the purpose. Hence the following dialogue in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 1):
That we must stand and play the murderer in?
A stand where you may make the fairest shoot.”
Among the hunting terms to which Shakespeare refers may be mentioned the following:
“To draw” meant to trace the steps of the game, as in “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2):
The term “to run counter” was to mistake the course of the game, or to turn and pursue the backward trail.
The “recheat” denoted certain notes sounded on the horn, properly and more usually employed to recall the dogs from a wrong scent. It is used in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1): “I will have a recheat winded in my forehead.” We may compare Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xiii.):
The phrase “to recover the wind of me,” used by Hamlet (iii. 2), is borrowed from hunting, and means to get the animal pursued to run with the wind, that it may not scent the toil or its pursuers. Again, when Falstaff, in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), speaks of “fat rascals,” he alludes to the phrase of the forest—“rascall,” says Puttenham, “being properly the hunting term given to a young deer leane and out of season.”
The phrase “a hunts-up” implied any song intended to arouse in the morning—even a love song—the name having been derived from a tune or song employed by early hunters.[402] The term occurs in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Juliet says to Romeo, speaking of the lark:
Hunting thee hence with hunts-up to the day.”
In Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xiii.) it is used:
At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring,
But hunts-up to the morn the feather’d sylvans sing.”
In Shakespeare’s day it was customary to hunt as well after dinner as before, hence, in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 2), Timon says:
The word “embossed” was applied to a deer when foaming at the mouth from fatigue. In “Taming of the Shrew” (Ind. scene 1) we read: “the poor cur is embossed,” and in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 13):
Was never so emboss’d.”
It was usual to call a pack of hounds “a cry,” from the French meute de chiens. The term is humorously applied to any troop or company of players, as by Hamlet (iii. 2), who speaks of “a fellowship in a cry of players.” In “Coriolanus” (iv. 6) Menenius says,
Good work, you and your cry.”
Antony, in “Julius Cæsar” (iii. 1), alludes to the technical phrase to “let slip a dog,” employed in hunting the hart. This consisted in releasing the hounds from the leash or slip of leather by which they were held in hand until it was judged proper to let them pursue the animal chased.[403] In “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3) Northumberland tells Hotspur:
In “Taming of the Shrew” (v. 2) Tranio says:
Which runs himself, and catches for his master.”
A sportsman’s saying, applied to hounds, occurs in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3): “a’ will not out; he is true bred,” serving to expound Gadshill’s expression, “such as can hold in,” “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1).
The severity of the game laws under our early monarchs was very stringent; and a clause in the “Forest Charter”[404] grants “to an archbishop, bishop, earl, or baron, when travelling through the royal forests, at the king’s command, the privilege to kill one deer or two in the sight of the forester, if he was at hand; if not, they were commanded to cause a horn to be sounded, that it might not appear as if they had intended to steal the game.” In “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Falstaff, using the terms of the forest, alludes to the perquisites of the keeper. Thus he speaks of the “shoulders for the fellow of this walk,” i. e., the keeper.
Shakespeare has several pretty allusions to the tears of the deer, this animal being said to possess a very large secretion of tears. Thus Hamlet (iii. 2) says: “let the strucken deer go weep;” and in “As You Like It” (ii. 1) we read of the “sobbing deer,” and in the same scene the first lord narrates how, at a certain spot,
That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt
Did come to languish; ...
... and the big round tears
Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase.”
Bartholomæus[405] says, that “when the hart is arered, he fleethe to a ryver or ponde, and roreth cryeth and wepeth when he is take.”[406] It appears that there were various superstitions connected with the tears of the deer. Batman[407] tells us that “when the hart is sick, and hath eaten many serpents for his recoverie, he is brought unto so great a heate that he hasteth to the water, and there covereth his body unto the very eares and eyes, at which time distilleth many tears from which the [Bezoar] stone is gendered.”[408] Douce[409] quotes the following passage from the “Noble Art of Venerie,” in which the hart thus addresses the hunter:
Which growe to gumme, and fall from me: content thee with my heares,
Content thee with my hornes, which every year I new,
Since all these three make medicines, some sickness to eschew.
My tears congeal’d to gumme, by peeces from me fall,
And thee preserve from pestilence, in pomander or ball.
Such wholesome tears shedde I, when thou pursewest me so.”
Dog. As the favorite of our domestic animals, the dog not unnaturally possesses an extensive history, besides entering largely into those superstitions which, more or less, are associated with every stage of human life. It is not surprising, therefore, that Shakespeare frequently speaks of the dog, making it the subject of many of his illustrations. Thus he has not omitted to mention the fatal significance of its howl, which is supposed either to foretell death or misfortune. In “2 Henry VI.” (i. 4) he makes Bolingbroke say:
And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves.”
And, again, in “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6), King Henry, speaking of Gloster, says:
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howl’d, and hideous tempests shook down trees.”
The same superstition prevails in France and Germany,[411] and various
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