“O heavens, I have my wish!
Dumain transformed: four woodcocks in a dish.”
The woodcock has generally been proverbial as a foolish bird—perhaps because it is easily caught in springes or nets.[336] Thus the popular phrase “Springes to catch woodcocks” meant arts to entrap simplicity,[337] as in “Hamlet” (i. 3):
“Aye, springes to catch woodcocks.”
A similar expression occurs in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Loyal Subject” (iv. 4):
“Go like a woodcock,
And thrust your neck i’ th’ noose.”
“It seems,” says Nares, “that woodcocks are now grown wiser by time, for we do not now hear of their being so easily caught. If they were sometimes said to be without brains, it was only founded on their character, certainly not on any examination of the fact.”[338] Formerly, one of the terms for twilight[339] was “cock-shut time,” because the net in which cocks, i. e., woodcocks, were shut in during the twilight, was called a “cock-shut.” It appears that a large net was stretched across a glade, and so suspended upon poles as to be easily drawn together. Thus, in “Richard III.” (v. 3), Ratcliff says:
“Thomas the Earl of Surrey, and himself,
Much about cock-shut time, from troop to troop,
Went through the army, cheering up the soldiers.”
In Ben Jonson’s “Masque of Gypsies” we read:
“Mistress, this is only spite;
For you would not yesternight
Kiss him in the cock-shut light.”
Sometimes it was erroneously written “cock-shoot.” “Come, come away then, a fine cock-shoot evening.” In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iv. 1) we find the term “cock-light.”