This simple delight in the voices of the birds, so prominent in the poems of the author of the Canterbury Tales, was maintained among his successors in English poetry. By Elizabethan times, however, it had become enlarged and enriched by the growth of a more observant and contemplative habit. The spontaneous and irresistible joy of the human soul in the varied beauty of Nature, and not least in the bird-music of the fields and woods, is as marked in Shakespeare’s works as it was in those of Chaucer; but it is now combined with more thought and reflection. The appreciation of life in all its divers forms has grown closer, more sympathetic and more intimately linked with human experience.
Surroundings of his Boyhood
Shakespeare had the good fortune to be born in one of the pleasantest and most varied districts of England, in the midst of fields and gardens, as well as wide tracts of woodland and heath, among sturdy farmer-folk, and simple peasantry. The face of open Nature lay spread out around him, and his earliest poems bear witness to the range and acuteness of his faculty of observation amid the fields and forests, the beasts and birds of his home. The extent and accuracy of his acquaintance with law have been claimed as proof that he had passed through some legal training. There is sounder evidence that his remarkable familiarity with objects of natural history could not have been derived at secondhand from books, but was acquired from his own personal observation. His youthful surroundings in Warwickshire furnished him with ample opportunity of acquiring and cultivating this knowledge. Nor should it be forgotten that the London in which he spent the active years of his middle life, was a comparatively small town. Open country lay within a short walking distance from any part of it. Heaths and woodlands, with all their riches of animal life, extended almost up to its outskirts. So that even in the height of his busy theatrical career the dramatist could easily, at any interval of leisure, renew his acquaintance with the face of Nature which he dearly loved.
An attentive study of Shakespeare’s dramas supplies probable indications of some of his early observations among natural history objects. When, for instance, he makes Benedick assert that Claudio had committed
the flat transgression of a school-boy, who, being overjoyed with finding a bird’s nest, shows it his companion, and he steals it,[5]
he probably could remember incidents of that kind among the boys at the grammar school of Stratford. At all events, that he himself had known the excitements of bird-nesting may be fairly inferred from the following passage:
Unreasonable creatures feed their young;
And though man’s face be fearful to their eyes,
Yet, in protection of their tender ones,
Who hath not seen them, even with those wings