The birds of Shakespeare

PUBLISHED BY JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW Publishers to the University.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. , LONDON.
MCMXVI.
THE BIRDS OF SHAKESPEARE
K.C.B. , D.C.L. , F.R.S.
GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY 1916
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
The attentive reader of Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays can hardly fail to notice the remarkable frequency of the Poet’s allusions to Birds, not merely as a great Choir of songsters, enlivening the woods and fields With their varied music, but as individual creatures, each endowed with its own special characters. Shakespeare has drawn an assemblage of bird-portraits to which, for extent and variety, no equal is to be found in any other great English poet. Making ample use of what he had himself observed about Birds in their native haunts, and combining this personal knowledge with what he could obtain from literature and from popular fancy or superstition, he has employed the material thus gathered to illustrate, in many an apt simile and striking metaphor, his vivid presentation of the great drama of human life. If we compare him in this respect with either the poets who preceded or those who have followed him we learn that he stands apart from them all.
The present little volume was written as a Presidential Address to the Haslemere Natural History Society, and was read to the members on March 9th of the present year. The approach of the Shakespeare Tercentenary having brought the poet and his writings more closely to the mind, it appeared to me not inappropriate that a company of naturalists should be asked to consider how one branch of the subjects in which they are more specially interested had been treated by the greatest poet of all time. The Address was nearly finished when I came, for the first time, upon the excellent and exhaustive Ornithology of Shakespeare , by Mr. James Harting, published in 1871. I would gladly have availed myself of this volume had I known of it sooner, but I gleaned from it a few quotations which in my search through the Poems and Plays I had missed. My object, however, was somewhat different from that author’s. Approaching the subject from the literary rather than the scientific side, I desired to show that Shakespeare’s delight in birds and bird-music was not less keen than that of Chaucer and the earlier poets, and at the same time to point out how detailed was his acquaintance with birds, and how wide the range of similitudes which he drew from them to the great enrichment of our literature. I have ventured also to illustrate the change of poetic mood since his time in regard to Nature by citing three poems on Birds by three of the great poets of last century.