“You resemble the lapwing, who crieth most where her nest is not.”
So also Greene, in the second part of his “Coney Catching,” 1592:—
“But again to our priggers, who, as before
I said, cry with the lapwing farthest from her nest.”
And in Ben Jonson’s Underwoods we are told,—
“Where he that knows will like a lapwing flie,
Farre from the nest, and so himselfe belie.”
Hence the phrase “to seem the lapwing,” which occurs in Measure for Measure, Act i. Sc. 4. So also in Much Ado about Nothing,—
“For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs,
Close by the ground, to hear our conference.”