“My lord protector’s hawks do tower so well;”
and in “King John” (v. 2) the Bastard says,
“And like an eagle o’er his aery[230] towers.”
The word “quarry,” which occurs several times in Shakespeare’s plays, in some instances means the “game or prey sought.” The etymology has, says Nares, been variously attempted, but with little success. It may, perhaps, originally have meant the square, or enclosure (carrée), into which the game was driven (as is still practised in other countries), and hence the application of it to the game there caught would be a natural extension of the term. Randle Holme, in his “Academy of Armory” (book ii. c. xi. p. 240), defines it as “the fowl which the hawk flyeth at, whether dead or alive.” It was also equivalent to a heap of slaughtered game, as in the following passages. In “Coriolanus” (i. 1), Caius Marcius says:
“I’d make a quarry
With thousands of these quarter’d slaves.”
In “Macbeth” (iv. 3)[231] we read “the quarry of these murder’d deer;” and in “Hamlet” (v. 2), “This quarry cries on havock.”
Another term in falconry is “stoop,” or “swoop,” denoting the hawk’s violent descent from a height upon its prey. In “Taming of the Shrew” (iv. 1) the expression occurs, “till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged.” In “Henry V.” (iv. 1), King Henry, speaking of the king, says, “though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing.” In “Macbeth” (iv. 3), too, Macduff, referring to the cruel murder of his children, exclaims, “What! ... at one fell swoop?”[232] Webster, in the “White Devil,”[233] says:
“If she [i. e., Fortune] give aught, she deals it in small parcels,
That she may take away all at one swoop.”
Shakespeare gives many incidental allusions to the hawk’s trappings. Thus, in “Lucrece” he says:
“Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon’s bells.”