In remembrance of a shroud.[109]
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:
The owl shriek’d at thy birth—an evil sign:
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time.[110]
Among its mysterious relationships, the owl was believed to be connected with some of the machinations of witchcraft. It will be remembered that the miscellaneous ingredients which went to the making of the hell-broth of Macbeth’s “midnight hags” included “a lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.”[111]
Shakespeare’s introduction of the owl into his fairy-land was a dexterous artistic stroke, for it connected a well-known but somewhat mysterious bird with his world of sprites, and gave to that world a further touch of realism. Alike in the Tempest and the Merry Wives this conjunction may be seen. The “dainty Ariel,” Prospero’s “tricksy spirit,” sings:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.[112]
Titania, the Queen of the fairies, when she disperses her train on their several quests, bids