In Cymbeline, Act iii. Scene 2, Pisanio says: ‘What false Italian, as poisonous tongued as handed, hath prevailed on thy too ready hearing?’ Again, in Scene 4 of the same Act, Pisanio would not hear evil of his mistress, and cries: ‘No, ‘tis slander; whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue outvenoms all the worms.’
Henry VI., Act ii. Scene 2, Clifford says to the King: ‘Who ‘scapes the lurking serpent’s mortal sting!’ Act iii. Scene 2: ‘Their touch affrights me as a serpent’s sting.... What! art thou like the adder waxen deaf? Be poisonous too!’
Much Ado about Nothing, Act v. Scene 1, Antonio says: ‘As I dare take a serpent by the tongue.’
And in King John, Act ii. Scene 1, Randolph says to King Philip, ‘France, thou may’st hold a serpent by the tongue!’
Not snakes only, but toads, lizards, spiders, and other ‘creeping things,’ were thought venomous in Shakspeare’s time.
Song in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘You spotted snakes, with double tongue.’ Then, in appeal to the ‘serpents’ not to injure the Fairy Queen: ‘Newts and blindworms, do no wrong.’
The nearest approach to a scientific work on natural history written in English at that time was a curious volume published in 1608, in whose folio pages may be seen most astonishing ‘Serpentes,’ combinations of worms and feathered fowls, saurian, ophidian, and batrachian, wonderfully adorned with horns, gills, wings, spear-shaped or forked tongues, and arrow-shaped tails. The zoological illustrations of that work give us some idea of what a snake was supposed to be. Among them is one with a human head, and another with a crown, because he is ‘the King of Serpentes for his Magnitude or Greatnesse.’ There is also a ‘Dragon’ with horns, wings, scales, claws, two rows of robust teeth, and an arrow-headed tongue. Mingled fable and fancy with some few facts, these anomalies are solemnly described as ‘The Naturall Historie of Serpentes,’ the said serpents including bees, wasps, ‘frogges,’ toads, earthworms, lizards, spiders, etc., and a ‘cockatrice.’
The author, E. Topsell, addresses the ‘gentle and pious Reader’ on the ‘publishing of this Treatise of Venomous Beasts,’ and more particularly of ‘Serpentes, Divine, Morall, and Naturell, their Poyson and Bitings, since the gentle and pious Reader will see how that the Historie of Serpentes begineth at the Creation.’
Fabulous tongues.