HAWKING.
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 As the expense of training and keeping hawks was very great, it is no wonder that the gun soon superseded the bird with sportsmen.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."
ELIZABETH HAWKING
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.
BOY WITH HAWK AND HOUNDS
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.