“My falcon now is sharp, and passing empty;
And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged,224
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come, and know her keeper’s call;
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient.
She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not.”225
Further allusions occur in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 1), where Viola says of the Clown:
“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well craves a kind of wit:
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time;
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye.”
In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1), Hero, speaking of Beatrice, says that:
“her spirits are as coy and wild
As haggards of the rock.”
And Othello (iii. 3), mistrusting Desdemona, and likening her to a hawk, exclaims:
“if I do prove her haggard, —
I’d whistle her off.”226
The word “check” alluded to above was a term in falconry applied to a hawk when she forsook her proper game and followed some other of inferior kind that crossed her in her flight227– being mentioned again in “Hamlet” (iv. 7), where the king says:
“If he be now return’d
As checking at his voyage.”228
Another common expression used in falconry is “tower,” applied to certain hawks, etc., which tower aloft, soar spirally to a height in the air, and thence swoop upon their prey. In “Macbeth” (ii. 4) we read of
“A falcon, towering in her pride of place;”
in “2 Henry VI.” (ii. 1) Suffolk says,
“My lord protector’s hawks do tower so well;”
and in “King John” (v. 2) the Bastard says,
“And like an eagle o’er his aery229 towers.”
The word “quarry,” which occurs several times in Shakespeare’s plays, in some instances means the “game or prey sought.” The etymology has, says Nares, been variously attempted, but with little success. It may, perhaps, originally have meant the square, or enclosure (carrée), into which the game was driven (as is still practised in other countries), and hence the application of it to the game there caught would be a natural extension of the term. Randle Holme, in his “Academy of Armory” (book ii. c. xi. p. 240), defines it as “the fowl which the hawk flyeth at, whether dead or alive.” It was also equivalent to a heap of slaughtered game, as in the following passages. In “Coriolanus” (i. 1), Caius Marcius says:
“I’d make a quarry
With thousands of these quarter’d slaves.”
In “Macbeth” (iv. 3)230 we read “the quarry of these murder’d deer;” and in “Hamlet” (v. 2), “This quarry cries on havock.”
Another term in falconry is “stoop,” or “swoop,” denoting the hawk’s violent descent from a height upon its prey. In “Taming of the Shrew” (iv. 1) the expression occurs, “till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged.” In “Henry V.” (iv. 1), King Henry, speaking of the king, says, “though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing.” In “Macbeth” (iv. 3), too, Macduff, referring to the cruel murder of his children, exclaims, “What! … at one fell swoop?”231 Webster, in the “White Devil,”232 says:
“If she [i. e., Fortune] give aught, she deals it in small parcels,
That she may take away all at one swoop.”
Shakespeare gives many incidental allusions to the hawk’s trappings. Thus, in “Lucrece” he says:
“Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon’s bells.”
And in “As You Like It” (iii. 3),233 Touchstone says, “As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires.” The object of these bells was to lead the falconer to the hawk when in a wood or out of sight. In Heywood’s play entitled “A Woman Killed with Kindness,” 1617, is a hawking scene, containing a striking allusion to the hawk’s bells. The dress of the hawk consisted of a close-fitting hood of leather or velvet, enriched with needlework, and surmounted with a tuft of colored feathers, for use as well as ornament, inasmuch as they assisted the hand in removing the hood when the birds for the hawk’s attack came in sight. Thus in “Henry V.” (iii. 7), the Constable of France, referring to the valor of the Dauphin, says, “’Tis a hooded valour; and when it appears, it will bate.”234 And again, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 2), Juliet says:
“Hood my unmann’d235 blood, bating in my cheeks.”
The “jesses” were two short straps of leather or silk, which were fastened to each leg of a hawk, to which was attached a swivel, from which depended the leash or strap which the falconer236 twisted round his hand. Othello (iii. 3) says:
“Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings.”
We find several allusions to the training of hawks.237 They were usually trained by being kept from sleep, it having been customary for the falconers to sit up by turns and “watch” the hawk, and keep it from sleeping, sometimes for three successive nights. Desdemona, in “Othello” (iii. 3), says:
“my lord shall never rest;
I’ll watch him tame and talk him out of patience;
His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift;
I’ll intermingle everything he does
With Cassio’s suit.”
So, in Cartwright’s “Lady Errant” (ii. 2):
“We’ll keep you as they do hawks,
Watching until you leave your wildness.”
In “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), where Page says, the allusion is, says Staunton, to this method employed to tame or “reclaim” hawks.
“Nay, do not fly: I think we have watch’d you now,”
Again, in “Othello”