where man means to tame. Again in the same play (iv. 2. 39) the shrew is called "this proud disdainful haggard."
ELIZABETH HAWKING
The nestling or unfledged hawk was called an eyas; and in Hamlet (ii. 2. 355) the boy actors, who were becoming popular when the play was written, are sneeringly described as "an aery of children, little eyases." In the Merry Wives of Windsor (iii. 3. 22), Mrs. Ford addresses Robin, the page of Falstaff thus: "How now, my eyas-musket! what news with you?" The eyas-musket was the young sparrow-hawk, a small and inferior species of hawk. The word is derived from the Latin musca, a fly, and probably refers to the small size of the bird. It is curious that, as applied to the firearm, it has the same origin. The gun was figuratively compared to the hawk as a means of taking birds. Similarly, a kind of cannon used in the 16th century was called a falcon; and another, of smaller bore, was known as a falconet.
In Romeo and Juliet (ii. 2. 160), when the lover has left his lady and she would call him back, she says:—
"Hist, Romeo, hist! O for a falconer's voice
To call this tassel-gentle back again!"
The tassel-gentle, or tercel-gentle, was the male hawk. Cotgrave, in his French Dictionary (edition of 1672) defines tiercelet as "the Tassell or male of any kind of Hawk, so termed because he is, commonly, a third part less than the female." The gentle referred to the ease with which the bird was trained.
We find the word tercel in Troilus and Cressida (iii. 2. 56): "The falcon as the tercel, for all the ducks in the river"; that is, the female bird is as good as the male.
The male bird, however, was seldom used in hawking, on account of its inferiority in size and strength. In descriptions of the sport we find the female pronoun generally applied to the bird. Tennyson in Lancelot and Elaine originally wrote:—