The Birds of Shakespeare by Sir Archibald Geikie
Blackbird - Bunting - Buzzard - Chough
Cock (Rooster) - Cormorant - Crow - Cuckoo
Dive-dapper (Little Grebe) - Dove and Pigeon - Duck (Mallard)
Eagle - Falcon and Sparrowhawk - Finch
Goose - Hedge Sparrow (Dunnock) - House Martin
Jackdaw - Jay - Kite - Lapwing - Lark
Loon - Magpie - Nightingale - Osprey - Ostrich
Owl - Parrot - Partridge - Peacock - Pelican
Pheasant - Quail - Raven - Robin (Redbreast)
Snipe - Sparrow - Starling - Swallow - Swan
Thrush - Turkey - Vulture - Wagtail - Woodcock - Wren
Shakespeare's Boyhood Surroundings - The Capture of Birds
Shakespeare's Feeling for Nature - Voices of the Birds
Amazon.com: The Illustrated Bald Eagle
The eagle is cited some forty times. The two birds of this kind native to Britain are the golden eagle and the white-tailed or sea-eagle. Shakespeare may have occasionally seen eagles on the wing, though his allusions hardly suggest any personal familiarity with the birds. Recognizing the lofty rank of the eagle and its acknowledged dignity above the other birds of prey, he makes the birds themselves, in the arrangements for the obsequies of the Phoenix and Turtle, admit this supremacy
“From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather’d King!”
[The Phoenix and the Turtle]
The powerful vision which from time immemorial has been ascribed to the eagle is often referred to by the poet, who makes one of his personages even claim that kings of men have eyes like the king of birds. As Richard II stood on the battlements of Flint Castle, the Duke of York pointing to him, exclaimed,
“Yet looks he like a king; behold! His eye,
As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth
Controlling majesty.” [Richard II – III, 3]
The future King Edward IV was taunted by his brother Richard thus:
“Nay, if thou be that princely eagle’s bird,
Show thy descent by gazing ‘gainst the sun.” [3rd Henry VI – II, 1]
With delightful hyperbole, Biron, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, discovers a power of vision beyond that of an eagle, when he is persuading himself and his friends to abjure their foolish vow “to fast, to study, and to see no woman.” Enlarging on the potency of “love first learned in a lady’s eyes” he declares that it
“Gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye:
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d.” [IV, 3]
In the same play, the comparison becomes even more grotesquely exaggerated, for the same lover in praising his lady-love demands to know
“What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?” [IV, 3]
The eagle was credited not only with a wonderful strength of vision, but also with a remarkable length of life. This belief is alluded to by the churlish philosopher who demands of Timon
“Will these moss’d trees,
That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,
And skip where thou point’st out?” [Timon of Athens – IV, 3]
Shakespeare, when he likens the orders of human society to the various grades among the birds, compares the leaders to eagles, and the commonalty to birds of a less reputable kind. The haughty Coriolanus stigmatizes the Roman plebs as a rabble that
“Will in time
Break ope the locks o’ the Senate, and bring in
The crows to peck the eagles.” [Coriolanus – III, 1]
Pandarus, not less contemptuous of the populace of Troy, affirms that “the eagles are gone,” and that there are left only “crows and daws, crows and daws” [Troilus and Cressida – I, 2]. The same kind of similitude is applied to the political condition of England. The future Richard III asserts:
“I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.” [Richard III – I, 3]
And Hastings in the same play remarks
“More pity that the eagle should me mew’d
While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.” [I, 1]
Among Shakespeare’s political allusions in which the eagle appears there is …a reminiscence of a far-off…time in [British] history when the southern half of the island could be likened to the king of birds, while the northern portion was compared to a destructive kind of vermin.
“Once the eagle, England, being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so suck her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse, in absence of the cat,
To tear and havoc more than she can eat.” [Henry V – I, 2]
The contemplation of the various misfortunes that may befall even the king of birds leads to the reflection:
“Often, to our comfort, shall we find
The sharded beetle in a safer hold
Than is the full-wing’d eagle.” [Cymbeline – III, 3]
The last line of this quotation recalls another passage in which, as if the writer had watched the bird on the wing, the majestic sweep of its flight is pictured:
“The course I hold
Flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on,
Leaving no tract behind.” [Timon of Athens – I, 1]
The eagle has been credited with a nobility of nature in keeping with his regal rank:
“The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He can at pleasure stint their melody.” [Titus Andronicus – IV, 4]
Shakespeare may have seen an eagle in confinement, for his description of its manner of feeding seems as if drawn from actual observation:
“Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone.” [Venus and Adonis]
Whether in captivity or in stuffed specimens, the dramatist had evidently set eyes on the bird close at hand, so as to be able to put so whimsical a comparison into Falstaff’s mouth:
“My own knee! When I was about thy
years, Hal, I was not an eagle’s talon in the
waist; I could have crept into any alderman’s thumb-ring.”
[1st Henry IV – II, 4]
