A theater. In Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," birdsong, identified by a character as that of a starling.
My wife and I do the suppressed-guffaw look. Starlings make a variety of sounds: chattering, buzzing, squeaking, rattling, the mimicked calls of other birds, a signature descending whistle — but none you'd confuse with the songs of thrushes.
Well, the scene is poetic, not scientific. But as avid birders as well as avid playgoers, we often chuckle at the bird stuff in plays.
Writing in 1903 Russia, Chekhov had no reason to behold the European startling with loathing. Nor a way to know or care that a Bard-loving fellow named Eugene Schiffelin had 13 years earlier released several dozen (estimates vary) starlings in New York City's Central Park out of a poetic but misguided notion that the New World should be blessed with all the species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.
Flashforward a century. Hundreds of millions of starlings, Schiffelin's spawn, now infest North America, a dark plague outcompeting native birds for nesting sites and using up perfectly good oxygen. They are the Klingons of American avifauna, nasty warrior invaders with an ugly language.
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The offending passage is spoken by Hotspur in "Henry IV Part 1" and goes like this: "The king forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep, and in his ear I'll holler 'Mortimer!' Nay I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion."
Shakespeare's works contain references to the blackbird, bunting, chough, cock, cormorant, crow, cuckoo, daw, dive-dapper, dove, duck, eagle, falcon, finch, fowl, goose, guinea hen, hedge sparrow, heron, jay, kestrel, kingfisher, kite, lapwing, lark, loon, magpie, mallard, martin (or martlet) nightingale, osprey, ostrich, owl, paraquito, parrot, partridge, peacock, pelican, pheasant, pigeon, popinjay, quail, raven, robin, rook, seagull (there's no such thing, but let's count it as an unknown gull), snipe, sparrow, starling, swallow, swan, thrush, turkey, vulture, woodcock and wren.
Many of the Bard's birds are genus names rather than species. And we should probably count the Phoenix, even though it's not a real bird. But let's not quibble. All theater-going bird-lovers should celebrate the fact that the greatest writer in English is also the one whose work most teems with birds.
"It may with truth be said that there are many passages in Shakespeare's plays which, to one unacquainted with the habits of birds or ignorant of the terms employed in falconry, would be wholly unintelligible, but which, being interpreted, are found to contain the most beautiful and forcible metaphors," the naturalist J. E. Harting wrote in 1866.
Take "Act 3, Scene 3, of "Othello," in which the Moor compares his wife to a falcon: "If I do prove her haggard, Tho' that her jesses were my dear heart strings, I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind to prey at fortune."
A "haggard" is a mature hawk caught in the wild, as distinguished from an "eyess," or young hawk taken from the eyrie, or nest. Jesses are those little leather straps fastened to the legs.
Falconers, according to Dr. Johnson, were wont to let the hawk fly off into the wind, believing that with the wind behind them they might simply fly off. So to "let" somebody down the wind to prey at fortune would be kicking her out with a sarcastic "good luck" and little else.
In "The Taming of The Shrew," when Petruccio locks Kate in a dark room in an effort to make her fall in love with him, he is treating her the way a nobleman treated his bird of prey.
One reference that's NOT birdy is the "rooky wood" in "Macbeth." I always wondered why the crow made wing to all those rooks. It turns out "rooky" meant misty or dark.
Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.
