“Before the game’s afoot, thou still let’st slip.”
In “Taming of the Shrew” (v. 2) Tranio says:
“O, sir, Lucentio slipp’d me like his greyhound,
Which runs himself, and catches for his master.”
A sportsman’s saying, applied to hounds, occurs in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3): “a’ will not out; he is true bred,” serving to expound Gadshill’s expression, “such as can hold in,” “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1).
The severity of the game laws under our early monarchs was very stringent; and a clause in the “Forest Charter”[404] grants “to an archbishop, bishop, earl, or baron, when travelling through the royal forests, at the king’s command, the privilege to kill one deer or two in the sight of the forester, if he was at hand; if not, they were commanded to cause a horn to be sounded, that it might not appear as if they had intended to steal the game.” In “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Falstaff, using the terms of the forest, alludes to the perquisites of the keeper. Thus he speaks of the “shoulders for the fellow of this walk,” i. e., the keeper.
Shakespeare has several pretty allusions to the tears of the deer, this animal being said to possess a very large secretion of tears. Thus Hamlet (iii. 2) says: “let the strucken deer go weep;” and in “As You Like It” (ii. 1) we read of the “sobbing deer,” and in the same scene the first lord narrates how, at a certain spot,
“a poor sequester’d stag
That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt
Did come to languish; ...
... and the big round tears
Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase.”
Bartholomæus[405] says, that “when the hart is arered, he fleethe to a ryver or ponde, and roreth cryeth and wepeth when he is take.”[406] It appears that there were various superstitions connected with the tears of the deer. Batman[407] tells us that “when the hart is sick, and hath eaten many serpents for his recoverie, he is brought unto so great a heate that he hasteth to the water, and there covereth his body unto the very eares and eyes, at which time distilleth many tears from which the [Bezoar] stone is gendered.”[408] Douce[409] quotes the following passage from the “Noble Art of Venerie,” in which the hart thus addresses the hunter:
“O cruell, be content, to take in worth my tears,
Which growe to gumme, and fall from me: content thee with my heares,
Content thee with my hornes, which every year I new,
Since all these three make medicines, some sickness to eschew.
My tears congeal’d to gumme, by peeces from me fall,
And thee preserve from pestilence, in pomander or ball.
Such wholesome tears shedde I, when thou pursewest me so.”
Dog. As the favorite of our domestic animals, the dog not unnaturally possesses an extensive history, besides entering largely into those superstitions which, more or less, are associated with every stage of human life. It is not surprising, therefore, that Shakespeare frequently speaks of the dog, making it the subject of many of his illustrations. Thus he has not omitted to mention the fatal significance of its howl, which is supposed either to foretell death or misfortune. In “2 Henry VI.” (i. 4) he makes Bolingbroke say: