“Princess. Then forester, my friend, where is the bush
That we must stand and play the murderer in?
Forester. Hereby, upon the edge of yonder coppice;
A stand where you may make the fairest shoot.”
Among the hunting terms to which Shakespeare refers may be mentioned the following:
“To draw” meant to trace the steps of the game, as in “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2):
“A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well.”
The term “to run counter” was to mistake the course of the game, or to turn and pursue the backward trail.
The “recheat” denoted certain notes sounded on the horn, properly and more usually employed to recall the dogs from a wrong scent. It is used in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1): “I will have a recheat winded in my forehead.” We may compare Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xiii.):
“Recheating with his horn, which then the hunter cheers.”
The phrase “to recover the wind of me,” used by Hamlet (iii. 2), is borrowed from hunting, and means to get the animal pursued to run with the wind, that it may not scent the toil or its pursuers. Again, when Falstaff, in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), speaks of “fat rascals,” he alludes to the phrase of the forest—“rascall,” says Puttenham, “being properly the hunting term given to a young deer leane and out of season.”
The phrase “a hunts-up” implied any song intended to arouse in the morning—even a love song—the name having been derived from a tune or song employed by early hunters.[402] The term occurs in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Juliet says to Romeo, speaking of the lark: