The Nightingale
I have reserved for the last place in the list of Shakespeare’s birds his references to the NIGHTINGALE. These are numerous and may be divided into two groups. In one of them the style is somewhat artificial in tone, reflecting not the poet’s own experience of the bird, but the legendary interpretation of its song that had been handed down from remote antiquity. In the other group, the nightingale takes its natural place as one of our familiar English songsters. There was a Greek myth that Philomela, the daughter of an Attic King, after being cruelly treated by her brother Tereus, was compassionately changed by the gods into a nightingale, and that thereafter she spent her life among woods lamenting in mournful notes the fate that had befallen her. Her name came to be given to the bird. Shakespeare, following this legend, introduces the bird as Philomel into his separate Poems and into the lyrics included in his dramas. In the ordinary dialogue of the Plays, however, dropping the Greek name and legend, he uses the common English appellation of the bird, and, like ancient and modern poets, speaks of the bird as feminine, although it is the male alone that sings.
The House-Martin
Along with the ancient myth about Philomela he intertwined another and probably much more recent, but equally unfounded belief that the nightingale, when it sings, leans against a thorn that pierces its breast. This combination of ignorant fancies is most fully expressed in the following passage:
Every thing did banish moan,
Save the nightingale alone:
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean’d her breast up-till a thorn,