ABSTRACT
Because Shakespeare’s texts are so filled with birds, it has been claimed that he had a particular interest in ornithology. In actuality, all English people in Shakespeare’s time lived surrounded by birds and utilized bird bodies and body parts to write, and to sleep on, as well as to eat. Bird song was used as music and to tell time. Birds were absolutely integral to English human culture. Also, people were much more aware of and attentive to the very many varieties of birds in the world, their behaviors, their minds, and their appearances. Before there was ornithology and ethnology, what looks today like specialized knowledge about birds was common knowledge.
Shakespeare had that knowledge, and he clearly depended on his audiences and readers having it. This chapter will look closely at the birds and bird-related vocabularies that appear in six Shakespeare plays: a history play, a Roman play, a comedy, a tragedy, a problem play, and a romance. No contemporary scholar has written about birds in any of these plays, but in this chapter I will show how close attention to birds pays dividends. In this chapter, I will explore how generic differences in plays relate to the bird vocabularies of those plays. I will also show how the bird knowledge displayed in the plays relates to what natural histories say about birds.
