Helena retorts, "The wildest hath not | human dog," a term of abuse that such a heart as you." And from the recurs in "Othello." This reminds other plays at least a score of opinions Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you, As a matter of fact, Shakespeare never me to say that the student will find the comparison of the two Moors, Aaron and Othello, a very interesting study. The lamb is mentioned in a passage that is a paraphrase of another in "Richard II.: "" In war was never lion raged more fierce, When we all join in league, This antithesis is a very favorite one of the poet's and is worth another word here for its reference to the ocean, for Shakespeare repeatedly uses the sea as exceeding the lion in its rage, as the superlative superlative of furiousness. There is only one allusion to the ass. "Now what a thing it is to be an ass !" says Aaron, aside of Chiron, an exclamation, I need hardly say, common in Shakespeare. Cattle meet with mention: Nor should it be overlooked that the lion which Lavinia especially instances as being, traditionally, credited with generosity he "did endure to have his princely paws pared all away" (ii. 3) is almost invariably in the other plays of Shakespeare treated in sympathy with that tradition of "the royal They never do beget a coal-black calf. disposition of that beast" (As You Like It). The boar occurs as "the chafed boar." In "Taming of the Shrew " we have "boar chafed with sweat,' "" and in "Henry VI." will be found "chafed bull " ("Warwick rages like a chafed bull "), and in "Henry VIII.," "chafed lion." The king has just gone by, and Wolsey, prescient of coming doom, says: He parted frowning from me as if ruin leap'd from his eyes: so looks the chafed lion upon the daring huntsman that has galled him. Where the bull and cow are both milkwhite, The cat: What a caterwauling dost thou keep ! says Aaron the Moor to the nurse with the black-a-moor baby. In "Twelfth Night" we have Maria saying to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, who are making the night hideous with a catch : What a caterwauling do you keep ! The pig affords an admirable touch, the master's own. Those three " hell-dogs of bloody kind " Aaron the Moor and the sons of Tamora - are sitting in council with the nurse, as to the best 66 The references to "domesticated "thing to do now that Aaron's criminal animals are all Shakespearean. The dog of the proverb is there and the dog of bear-baiting, and the "hell-hound " that we meet again in "Macbeth and "Richard III.," and the "fell cur (also in "Henry VI.") "of bloody kind "" (Richard III.), and the "in intrigue with the empress is betrayed. The nurse has the black proof, the tadpole," in a shawl on her lap. AARON : How many saw the child? NURSE: Cornelia the midwife, and myself, And no one else, but the deliver'd em press. AARON. The empress, the midwife, and | Page, when rehearsing the punishment of Sir John, says: yourself? Two may keep counsel, when the third's Go to the empress; tell her, this I said - to the spit. and Mrs. Ford adds: Let the supposed fairies pinch him sound. How could you dress children "like" hedgehogs? and why should hedgehogs "pinch"? Again, in the "Tem And till he tell the truth The utter callousness of the bloody Moor is brought out by this unexpected line with startling vividness. Not even his own vaunting confessions afterwards, in which the very nadir of crime is sounded, can add to our sense of the villain's devilish indifference to pest," Prospero, punishing Caliban, others' sufferings after that "Weke! says: weke! so cries the pig." urchins Shall, for that vast of night that they may All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinched Another illustration of the continuity of the natural history of Shakespeare is afforded by the use of the word "urchins." Tamora, in order to enrage her sons against them, is charging La- Surely hedgehogs are not meant here? vinia and her husband with having And Caliban, soliloquizing over his made the most monstrous threats punishment, afterwards says: against her life and with employing enchantinents for her torture: They told me, here, at dead time of the night, A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, Would make such fearful and confusèd As any mortal body, hearing it, No sooner had they told this hellish tale, His spirits hear me, And yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin shows, pitch me i' the mire ... unless he bid them. 66 Here the word is most obviously For every trifle are they set upon me; which then like hedgehogs, But straight they told me, they would bind Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and me here Unto the body of a dismal yew; Now, in Shakespeare's day (as indeed at the present) the hedgehog1 was known as the urchin, but I do not think Shakespeare ever uses the second name. He mentions the hedgehog four times as an animal, and as many times uses the word urchin, but each time as a synonym for "goblin." In the "Merry Wives of Windsor," Mrs. 1 When Lady Anne calls Gloster a hedgehog, it may have been either from some association with his crest of a hog, or from its generally "obscene" and ill-omened reputation. mount Here we have" urchin " and "hedgehog" in one and the same passage, the double meaning of urchin being so familiar to his audience that Shakespeare did not hesitate to use both names of the one animal in two senses in the one sentence. At any rate, no one will suppose that Shakespeare meant "hedgehog shows" when he said " chin shows." So I see no reason whatever for supposing that when he used the word "urchin," for the fourth time, in "Titus Andronicus," he meant to convey a different meaning than on the ur But One can three previous occasions of its use. and " 'toads,' "owl" and "raven,' On the contrary. Is it possible to con- thought naturally of hedgehog. ceive Shakespeare, when piling up the ten thousand hedgehogs! horrors of the scene, adding, as an ele- almost imagine that one hears Shakement of peril and wicked enchantment, speare laugh at the image. Happy ten thousand hedgehogs? Can you im- thought! urchin. This word exactly agine it-ten thousand hedgehogs! completes the line and crowns its Swarms of snakes and toads, myriads sense. Ten thousand "goblins," that of them, are horrible in contemplation; should pinch and torment the bound the number alone makes them horrible. Tamora, and yet just enough of the But hedgehogs. Think of the empress, hedgehog left in, after all, to satisfy bound to a dismal yew with an acre of the author's requirements of sorcery, hedgehogs round her! No. Shake- and to let those who preferred the acre speare intended the word urchin here of hedgehogs enjoy their fancy. to mean, as it does on the other three occasions in his plays, "goblins." The picture is then complete, "ten thousand goblins." It might be objected that, having "fiends" already, “goblins " would be redundant, but Shakespeare does not think So. To quote one example (Comedy of Errors): We lurk with goblins, owls,1 and elvish sprites. If we obey them not, this will ensue, They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue. Now the use of this ambiguous word here is distinctly interesting. For the hedgehog is one of the special animals of Shakespeare's fauna of witchcraft and abomination, which comprises also To turn now to the hunting-scene. Let me quote from this, and from another, play :— 1. 2. toads, "snakes of all kinds, owls, My love shall hear the musick hounds. my Uncouple in the western valley; go And mark the musical confusion Never did I hear Such gallant chiding for besides the groves, and ravens; and the writer, flashing through his mind his repertory of “damned" things, and needing a dissyllable to make the line and its hor ror complete thought of hedgehogs. When the three witches are making "hell-broth; " when Titania's bodyguard are exorcising all evil things; when Prospero tells Ariel to "charge his goblins" to torment his wouldbe murderers-the hedgehog recurs punctually to Shakespeare's mind every time and is added accordingly. So One of these passages is admitted by on the fourth and only other occasion all authors and critics, and Dr. Johnon which the black art is directly son, to be indubitably Shakespeare's; and seriously employed, Shakespeare, the other is just as unanimously rehaving already introduced "snakes" jected. Which is which? 1 "Ouphs" would be a. better reading, and then we should have exactly the same line quoted above from the "Merry Wives of Windsor." The skies, the fountains, every region near By searching the other plays, hunting-passages will be found which so amplify, illustrate, repeat, and blend with, both of the above that one can no | To the which place a poor sequestered stag That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt, more pick out a single thread from the tissue and say it is genuine Shakespeare than you can "pluck birdlime out of frieze." Did come to languish ; but also of other game, as in "Much Ado About Nothing: Alas, poor hurt fowl! Now will he creep into sedges. Here, too, should be noted a touch as to illicit sport, which Shakespeare so constantly introduces when speaking of illicit passion. Demetrius asks: And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose? What, hast not thou full often struck a doe, Elsewhere, it is "groping for trouts in Again, the emperor, addressing Tamora, says, Madam, now shall ye see our Roman hunting," whereupon Marcus and Titus begin to brag about their hounds, that "will rouse the proudest panther in the chase, and climb the highest promontory top," and their horses that "will follow where the game makes way, and run like swallows o'er the plain." In "Midsummer Night's Dream," Theseus, addressing Hippolyta, says, "My love shall hear a peculiar river" (Measure for Measthe musick of my hounds," whereupon the queen proudly speaks of when she was "with Hercules and Cadmus once," and they "bayed the bear in Sparta," and vaunts the music of the Spartan pack; upon which Theseus at once begins to brag about his own pack, and says they are Spartan-bred : So flewed, so sanded: and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; ure), "fishing another's pond" in his absence (Winter's Tale), with other variations drawn from hunting, fowling, angling, snaring, and ferreting. This is surely Shakespeare. Again, the ever-present idea of sport suggests the phrase "if she' (the bear-whelp's dam) "wind you once." tance of the wind in any undertaking Both as hunter and falconer the imporis remembered. In the same play, Aaron, seating himself with his "blackCrook-kneed, and dew-lapped like Thessa-a-moor baby safely out of reach of the rapier that Chiron wishes to " spit Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like the tadpole bells, Each under each. The coincidence is significant, and how Straying in the park. We will have the wind of you. Why do you go about," says Hamlet testily to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whom he suspects of treachery, "to recover the wind of me?" In "Henry VI.," Clarence of the cunning Gloster says: "He knows the game; how true he keeps the wind!" Further examples of these "Shakespearean "' touches could be easily, but it seems to me unnecessarily, multiplied. Flying high suggests to him, as it so The incident of Lavinia's outrage has often does elsewhere, hawking; and occurred during "a solemn hunting,' Aaron, speaking of his mistress who and she herself, by her ravishers, was has climbed aloft says he too will called "the dainty doe." Her uncle," mount aloft with his imperial misreturning from the chase, finds her tress and mount her pitch." wandering in the wood, and Shakespeare appropriately continues hunting metaphor, using a simile he uses several times elsewhere, not only of deer, as in the following, from "As You Like It:" Compare this with the passage in the"Henry VI." where Suffolk, talking of Gloster's hawks, says : They know their master loves to be aloft, And bears his thoughts above his falcon's pitch. To which Gloster: My lord, 'tis but a base, ignoble mind soar. But the two passages, apart from such Citizens in tumult and scared by sudden danger suggest 66 a flight of severed fowl." So in Midsummer Night's Dream," the wild geese "who the creeping fowler eye," sever themselves, and madly sweep the sky." 66 The eagle occurs in an admirable passage, the ring of which is distinctly Shakespeare: — The eagle suffers little birds to sing, This idea — that "the abuse of great- the extreme opposites in voice; and Titus, not having heard Lavinia do so, does the same. There is more excuse, of course, where one has heard the other, even in the use of so preposterous a word as discandy," which Antony exchanges with Cleopatra. Shakespeare does this so often that examples may be found in probably every play. A fancy occurs to him; he uses it twice or even three times in rapid succession—and never again To take an throughout his plays. illustration from "Titus Andronicus " itself. Aarou, counselling the outrage on Lavinia, says, "The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull;" and Titus, lamenting the outrage, but not having heard Aaron, says, "The woods are ruthless, vast, and gloomy." "Titus Andronicus" is, distinctively, No one less than Shakespeare would a play of wrong and revenge of do this, in this inartistic way. But "black Revenge "that has "palfreys Shakespeare often did not even read black as jet" for her wagon (Act v., over his manuscript. As it was writScene 2). So in " 'Henry IV.," Re- ten so it stands, the first thoughts of venge lives in " an ebon den," and in his mind, and the wonder of time to 66 Othello," "the other tragedy with a the last. Moor in it, vengeance is "black" vengeance. The "fatal raven" flies more often in this play than in any other. So in "Hamlet: " To see his face the lion walk'd along Behind some hedge, because he would not fear him. HAM. The croaking raven Doth bellow for revenge. Luc. Thoughts black agreeing. Lavinia calls the empress's paramour her "raven-colored love," and immediately afterwards, when pleading for her chastity and life, is ill-advised enough to draw a simile of mercy from There are other touches of natural blackness in the play. The Moor calls himself "a black dog," and again, defending the color of his offspring, says: Coal-black is better than another hue; For all the water in the ocean Although she lave them hourly in the flood. |