To winter-ground thy corse.[213]
The list of signs whereby Speed knows that his master Valentine is in love begins thus: “first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a male-content; to relish a love-song, like a robin-redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence.”[214] When Hotspur presses his wife to sing and she twice refuses, his only remark is, “’Tis the next way to turn tailor, or be redbreast-teacher.”[215]
The Hedge-sparrow and Finch
The only allusion to the HEDGE-SPARROW occurs in King Lear. When Goneril has gone some way in her recrimination of her father, the Fool, who had just before called the old king “a shealed peascod,” breaks into the conversation with these lines:
The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it had it head bit off by it young.[216]
The FINCH, included in Bottom’s song, is not elsewhere mentioned by the poet, though the epithet “finch-egg,” as a term of reproach, is hurled by Thersites at Patroclus.[217] Of the various English finches we may suppose that the bird intended was the common chaffinch.
The familiar HOUSE-SPARROW, though often mentioned by Shakespeare, receives little commendation from him. He twice connects it with evidence of the care of Providence, in obvious allusion to passages in Holy Writ. Hamlet observes that “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”[218] Reference has already been made to the trust expressed by Orlando’s faithful old Adam in Him “that providently caters for the sparrow.”[219] The bird comes also into the presentation of classical deities in The Tempest, where Iris tells how Venus’
Waspish-headed son has broke his arrows,
Swears he will shoot no more, but play with sparrows