The owl shriek'd at thy birth; an evil sign!
The night crow cry'd, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howled, and hideous tempests shook down trees.
And again, in Julius Cæsar, on the night of the murder of the great dictator, Casca, amongst the numerous other prodigies which he witnessed says:—
And yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market place,
Hooting and shrieking.
The rejoinder put into the mouth of Cicero, shows that Shakspere, while he appreciated the dramatic value of the "folk-lore" of superstitious people like the terrified Casca, was fully alive to the folly of the popular interpretation of the phenomena referred to. He says:
Indeed, it is a strange-dispos'd time;
But men may construe things after their fashion
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
This is still more markedly indicated in the dialogue between Hotspur and Owen Glendower, in the first part of King Henry IV.:—
Glendower: At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
Hotspur: Why, so it would have done
At the same season, if your mother's cat
Had but kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born.
Glendower: I say the earth did shake when I was born.
Hotspur: And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.