“’Tis a hooded valour, and when it appears it will bate.”
Henry V. Act iii. Sc. 7.
The allusion is to the ordinary action of a hawk, which, when unhooded, bates, or flutters. But a quibble may be here intended between “bate,” the hawking technical, and “bate,” to dwindle or abate. The word occurs again in Romeo and Juliet (Act iii. Sc. 2)—
“Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks.”
And to those not conversant with the terms employed in falconry, this line would be unintelligible. An “unmanned” hawk was one not sufficiently reclaimed to be familiar with her keeper, and such birds generally “bated,” that is, fluttered or beat their wings violently in their efforts to escape.
Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, gives us a lesson in reclaiming a hawk when speaking thus of Catherine:—
“My falcon now is sharp, and passing empty,
And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorg’d,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,