Owls IN SHAKESPEARE
I must confess, I love owls, so perhaps this is why I’ve collected just about every owl reference in the complete works for this page. In Shakespeare’s imagination, the owl was a pretty malevolent creature. There are very few positive references to owls at all. In Cymbeline (iii.6), Innogen is welcomed by Belarius and his sons:
The night to the owl and morn to the lark less welcome.
(In other words, she’s very welcome, since those two birds each love their associated hours.)
Likewise, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (ii.3) is determined to party, regardless of the time of day or night:
Shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver?
Owls very often come with negative descriptions - “the vile owl” in Troilus and Cressida (ii.1) or “the obscure bird” in Macbeth (ii.3). From as far back as ancient Rome, owls have been associated with bad omens. In his Natural History (Book X, chapter 16), Pliny describes how the whole city of Rome had to be cleansed with the ritual of lustratio after an owl appeared in the sanctuary of Capitol. He calls the bird “the monster of the night”, an “especially funereal” bird, it is “greatly abhorred” and a “direful omen”. In book IV of his Aeneid, Virgil describes how the owl cries as a portent of Dido’s impending death. Ovid also has an owl cry during the Metamorphoses, during the shocking story of Myrrha sleeping with her own father, Cynadus. (Myrrha was the mother of Adonis, and he was born after she was transformed into the myrrh tree that bears her name.) We don’t know if it’s true that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek” - Jonathan Bate has terrific recent book that suggests that Shakespeare was considerably better versed in the classics than has been believed. You can read it here. Certainly the owl associations have remained, and appear throughout his works.
Owls have a unique appearance, and they are nocturnal, and their cries are very distinctive - perhaps all of these traits have contributed to their negative portrayal. As I mentioned in the episode (no. 127 - The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter) the owl features in both of Shakespeare’s great poems, each time crying during a scene of sexual violence. In Venus and Adonis,
The owl, night’s herald, shrieks “tis very late!”
The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest,
And coal-black clouds that shadow heaven’s light
Do summon us to part and bid goodnight.
Meanwhile in The Rape of Lucrece,
Now stole upon the time the dead of night,
When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes:
No comfortable star did lend his light,
No noise but owls’ and wolves’ death-boding cries:
Now serves the season that they may surprise
The silly lambs: pure thoughts are dead and still,
While lust and murder wake to stain and kill.
And later in the poem;
The dove sleeps fast that this night-owl will catch:
Thus treason works ere traitors be espied.
Who sees the lurking serpent steps aside,
But she, sound sleeping, fearing no such thing,
Lies at the mercy of his mortal sting.
I mentioned these two poems in the context of Ophelia and virginity and sex - each of the poems features a someone being seduced or attacked in a sexual encounter. The myth was that owls hooted when someone lost their virginity. Perhaps this may have stemmed from their association with the virgin goddess Athena (or Minerva). Shakespeare also makes it clear that owls are associated with night, and hunting, and bad news. When you hear an owl at night, something bad must be happening.
No surprise, therefore, that Lady Macbeth hears an owl while Duncan is being murdered in Macbeth (ii.2)
Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the sternest good night.
Owls are incredibly skilful hunters. (If you need any proof, check out the podcast Criminal - its first ever episode, “Animal Instincts” has a shocking story on the subject. I may have hereby spoiled it, but at least you’ll know why I suggested it. ) Elsewhere in Macbeth (iv.2), Lady Macduff likens herself to a wren:
The poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in the nest, agaist the owl.
Earlier in the play (ii.4), owls show behaviour that is unnatural even for them:
On Tuesday last,
A falcon, towering in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.
Wherever owls are found, trouble probably isn’t far away. When King Lear (ii.4) decides to avoid his inhospitable daughters and make his own way, he says he’d rather be outdoors than near them:
No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose
To wage against the enmity o’ the air,
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl -
Necessity’s sharp pinch!
In Titus Andronicus (ii.3), Tamora and her savage sons attack Lavinia in a desolate, dark corner of the forest.
Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,
Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven.
Likewise in The Comedy of Errors, when Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio find themselves exploring Ephesus, Dromio is nervous;
This is the fairy land: o spite of spites!
We talk with goblins, owls and sprites:
If we obey them not, this will ensue,
They’ll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue.
Dromio associates owls with goblins and sprites - supernatural creatures that mean trouble. No surprise, then, that bits of an owl are included in the Witches’ brew in Macbeth (iv.1). Their charm of “powerful trouble” includes an owlet’s wing. Since owls are such good hunters, presumably they are dangerous to diminutive creatures like fairies. In The Tempest (v.1), Ariel describes where he sleeps while the owls are out hunting;
Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip's bell I lie,
There I couch when owls do cry.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ii.2), Titania instructs her fairies to keep the owls away while she sleeps:
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats, and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders
At our quaint spirits.
Even when they aren’t hunting, owls are a bad sign. If an owl was heard while a child was being born, it was a very ill omen. In Henry IV part III (v.6), King Henry mentions how such a sign appeared when Gloucester was born. And of course Gloucester grew up to become the clearly cursed Richard III.
The owl shriek’d at thy birth, an evil sign.
In “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds” (a fabulous title, in and of itself!) Charles Mackay quotes a passage on Fortune Telling from The Spectator in 1710, saying that “a screech-owl at midnight has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers”. Screech-owls clearly have a particularly unpleasant sound, since they can make people think instantly of death. At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream (v. 1), Puck is describing just how late at night it is, as everything is winding up. It’s a grim note in the otherwise jolly conclusion of the play:
The screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.
The three parts of Henry VI feature a great many owls. Most shocking is the scene Part II (i.4) when Gloucester’s wife summons a spirit from the dead to get information about her husband’s prospects. Her fellow necromancer tells her:
Patience, good lady; wizards know their times:
Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night,
The time of night when Troy was set on fire;
The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl,
And spirits walk and ghosts break up their graves,
That time best fits the work we have in hand.
Madam, sit you and fear not: whom we raise,
We will make fast within a hallowed verge.
Later on, the screech-owls resurface in Part II (iii.2). The Earl of Suffolk is having a particularly angry moment when he spits out a rather spectacular stream of curses:
A plague upon them! wherefore should I curse them?
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan,
I would invent as bitter-searching terms,
As curst, as harsh and horrible to hear,
Deliver'd strongly through my fixed teeth,
With full as many signs of deadly hate,
As lean-faced Envy in her loathsome cave:
My tongue should stumble in mine earnest words;
Mine eyes should sparkle like the beaten flint;
Mine hair be fixed on end, as one distract;
Ay, every joint should seem to curse and ban:
And even now my burthen'd heart would break,
Should I not curse them. Poison be their drink!
Gall, worse than gall, the daintiest that they taste!
Their sweetest shade a grove of cypress trees!
Their chiefest prospect murdering basilisks!
Their softest touch as smart as lizards' sting!
Their music frightful as the serpent's hiss,
And boding screech-owls make the concert full!
In Part III (ii.1), things aren’t going well for Warwick as he describes the action:
Our soldiers’, like the night-owl’s lazy flight,
Or like an idle thresher with a flail,
Fell gently down, as if they struck their friends.
And then King Edward IV has his say in (ii.6), scoffing at those who might have prophesied his failure:
Bring forth that fatal screech-owl to our house,
That nothing sung but death to us and ours…
Earlier, in Henry VI part I (iv. 2), the General rails that Talbot/Shrewsbury is an “ominous and fearful owl of death!” Later, in Richard III (iv. 4), the final play that covers this period in history, the king is exasperated as he receives nothing but bad news, interrupting his messenger:
Out on you, owls! nothing but songs of death?
Boding, ominous, fearful owls, with nothing but songs of death indeed. In Troilus and Cressida (v.10), Troilus wonders who would want to be like an owl and bring the bad news of Hector’s death to Priam and Hecuba:
Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called
Go in to Troy, and say there, Hector’s dead.
In Richard II (iii.3), Richard contemplates giving up the crown as he literally comes down to talk about it, and he hears owls instead of larks:
Down, down I come: like glistering Phaethon,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace.
In the base court? Come down? Down, court! Down king!
For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.
The confusion here of hearing an owl when one should hear a lark is a big one. Owls were creatures of night, and so it was particularly worrying to see an owl during the daytime. In Henry VI part III (v.4), it’s described quite clearly:
The owl by day,
If he arise, is mocked and wondered at.
Even more troublingly in Julius Cæsar (i.3), Casca describes having seen an owl at noon:
And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
These are their reasons; they are natural;
For, I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
In Troilus and Cressida (v.1), Thersites crows that he would rather be any number of unpleasant creatures rather than trade places with Menelaus:
To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard,
an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe,
I would not carel but to be Menelaus,
I would conspire against destiny.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost (iv.1) Boyet says “goodnight, my good owl”. It is a different kind of insult - he’s suggesting someone who looks wise but is in fact an idiot. The play concludes with Don Armado’s curious “Dialogue of the Owl and the Cuckoo”. The cuckoo represents spring, and the owl presides over winter. The staring owl sings the refrain:
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whit, tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keep the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit, tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
For Shakespeare, the country boy, owls were a part of life. Whether or not he was alarmed by them (I think probably not), he was aware enough of their perception across centuries of art, literature and folklore to be able to use them to striking effect whenever he so chose.