The Ornithology of Shakespeare Part 42

Looking to the antiquity of the fable of the Pelican's feeding her young with her own blood, it is not surprising that Shakespeare has alluded to it when mentioning this bird. Laertes says:--

"To his good friends thus wide I'll ope my arms; And, like the kind life-rendering pelican, Repast them with my blood."

_Hamlet_, Act iv. Sc. 5.

King Lear, too, likens himself to a pelican when speaking of his ungrateful children:--

"Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?

Judicious punishment! 'Twas this flesh begot Those pelican daughters."

_King Lear_, Act iii. Sc. 4.

Again--

"_K. Richard._ ...

Dar'st with thy frozen admonition Make pale our cheek; chasing the royal blood With fury from his native residence.

_Gaunt._ ...

That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp'd out, and drunkenly carous'd."

_Richard II._ Act ii. Sc. 1.

It is generally supposed that the fable alluded to is a cla.s.sical one.

But this is not the case. Many and various explanations have been offered as regards its origin, but none is more ingenious, and at the same time more plausible, than the explanation suggested by Mr.

Bartlett, the energetic Superintendent of the Zoological Society's Gardens. In a letter addressed to the editor of _Land and Water_, dated the 3rd April, 1869, Mr. Bartlett says:--

"Having devoted much attention to investigations upon the subject of the supply of food provided by several species of birds for their young, I have collected many interesting facts showing that in some instances the parents prepare by partial digestion, and in others by the addition of a secreted nutritive substance, the food intended for the support of their offspring. The one which I am about to relate I was certainly not prepared to expect; nevertheless, such facts as I now lay before you have caused me no little astonishment, as they appear to me to afford a solution to the well-known and ancient story of the Pelican in the Wilderness. I have heard that the so-called fable originated, or is to be found, on some of the early Egyptian monuments (I do not know where), but that the representations are more like flamingoes than pelicans. I have published elsewhere, in the 'Proceedings of the Zoological Society,'

for March 1869, what I consider to be the facts of the case, and take this opportunity of referring to the matter. The flamingoes here in the gardens have frequently shown signs of breeding, and have been supplied with heaps of sand to form their nests, but without result; nevertheless they appear to take considerable notice of a pair of Cariamas in the same aviary. These birds have a habit of bending back their heads, and with open gaping mouths utter loud and somewhat distressing sounds. This habit at once attracts the flamingoes, and very frequently one or more of them advance towards the cariamas, and standing erect over the bird, by a slight up-and-down movement of the head, raise up into its mouth a considerable quant.i.ty of red coloured fluid. As soon as the upper part of the throat and mouth becomes filled, it will drop or run down from the corners of the flamingo's mouth; the flamingo then bends its long neck over the gaping cariama and pours this fluid into the mouth, and as frequently on the back of the cariama. Having seen this repeatedly, I took an opportunity of obtaining a portion of this fluid and submitted it to the examination of Dr. Murie. We placed it under the microscope, and find it composed of little else than blood; in fact, the red blood-corpuscles are wonderfully abundant in the otherwise clear and almost transparent glutinous fluid. That this does not proceed from any disease or injury done to the flamingo, nor arise or is produced by any portion or part of the food taken by them, I am perfectly certain, for the birds are in the most vigorous health and condition; but I believe that it is an attempt to supply food to the cariamas, just as the hedge-sparrow and other birds supply food to the young cuckoo, and I have no doubt, if a careful observer had the opportunity of watching the flamingoes on their breeding-ground, he would find that this is the mode of feeding their young: no doubt other food is also provided, but most likely mixed with this secretion. I think it highly probable that this habit was noticed in ancient Egypt, and, by the confusion of names in translation, the pelican was supposed to be the bird intended; in fact, I have heard that the representation (which I am very anxious to see) is much more like a flamingo than a pelican. Again, a flamingo is much more a bird of the wilderness than the pelican, seeing that the pelican requires a good supply of fish, while the flamingo can live and does well upon very small insects, seeds, and little fry, and is found in places in which the pelican would starve."

This communication naturally drew forth some comments. Mr. Houghton, in a long letter to the editor of the same journal, dated 24th April, 1869, says:--"That this is the origin of the old story of the pelican feeding its young with its blood seems very plausible. I purpose to examine this ingenious idea, and to offer a few remarks on the old fable. It is commonly supposed--and you will often find it so expressed in works on natural history--that this fable is a cla.s.sical one. This is an error: I have searched in vain amongst cla.s.sical authors for any allusion to the pelican feeding its young with its blood. To the Greeks this bird was known by the name of pe?e???, or pe???a?, or pe?e?????, though it would appear that some species of woodp.e.c.k.e.r was also intended by the word pe???a? (see Aristoph. _Aves_, 1155). Aristotle mentions pelicans two or three times in his 'History of Animals;' he speaks of their migratory habits and flying in crowds. He says they take large sh.e.l.l-fish into their pouches (?? t? p?? t?? ?????a? t?p?), wherein the molluscs are softened. They then throw them up and pick out the flesh from the opened valves. aelian merely repeats this story, only he says the sh.e.l.l-fish are received into the stomach. In another place he says there is mutual hostility between the pelican and the quail. The pelican was known to the Romans under the name of _onocrotalus_. Pliny says this bird is like the swan, except that under the throat there is a sort of second crop of astonishing capacity. There is, of course, no doubt that the pelican is here intended. Cicero says there is a bird called _platalea_ which pursues other birds and causes them to drop the fish they have caught, which it devours itself. He then gives the same story as aelian, viz., that this bird softens sh.e.l.l-fish in its stomach, &c. The first part of this account is true of the parasitic gulls (_Lestris_). It is uncertain what bird Cicero alludes to by the name _platalea_. Pliny gives the same story as Cicero, and calls the bird _platea_. The fable, then, is no cla.s.sical one. Whence did it originate? Does any pictorial representation occur on the Egyptian monuments, as Mr. Bartlett has been informed? I am inclined to think--but I speak under correction--that such a representation does not occur. Horapollo (i. 54) tells us that when the ancient Egyptians want to represent a fool they depict the pelican, because this bird, instead of laying its eggs on lofty and secure places, merely scratches up the ground and there lays. The people surround the place with dried cow's dung, and set fire to it. The pelican sees the smoke, and endeavours to extinguish the fire with her wings, the motion of which only fans the flame. Thus she burns her wings, and falls an easy prey to the fowlers. Some Egyptian priests, considering this behaviour evinces great love of its young, do not eat the bird; others, again, thinking it is a mark of folly, eat it. The Egyptians, however, did believe in a bird feeding its young with its blood, and this bird is none other than a vulture. Horapollo says (i.

11) that a vulture symbolises a compa.s.sionate person (??e???a), because during the 120 days of its nurture of its offspring, if food cannot be had, 'it opens its own thigh and permits the young to partake of the blood, so that they may not perish from want.' This is alluded to in the following lines by Georgius Pisidas:--

??? ???? ??t???te?, ?at??????

G??a?t?? ?????? ??p????s? t? ??f?.

Amongst cla.s.sical authors, the love of the vulture for its young was proverbial. But when do we first hear of the fable of the pelican feeding its young with its blood? In Patristic annotations on the Scriptures. I believe this is the answer. The ecclesiastical fathers transferred the Egyptian story from the vulture to the pelican, but magnified the already sufficiently marvellous fable a hundredfold, for the blood of the parent was not only supposed to serve as food for the young, but was also able to reanimate the dead offspring! Augustine, commenting on Psalm cii. 5--'I am like a pelican in the wilderness'--says: 'These birds [male pelicans] are said to kill their young offspring by blows of their beaks, and then to bewail their death for the s.p.a.ce of three days. At length, however, it is said the mother bird inflicts a severe wound on herself, pouring the flowing blood over the dead young ones, which instantly brings them to life.' To the same effect write Eustathius, Isidorus, Epiphanius, and a host of other writers, except that sometimes it was the female who killed the young ones, while the male reanimated them with its blood. This fable was supposed to be a symbol of Christ's love to men. I think, then, that the very interesting fact of the flamingo feeding the cariama with the red fluid and other contents of its stomach can hardly be, as Mr. Bartlett conjectures, the origin of the old fable of the pelican feeding its young with its blood, because the Egyptian story of the vulture wounding its thigh has nothing a.n.a.logous to the natural-history fact of the flamingo, while the fable of the pelican pouring from its self-inflicted wound the life-restoring blood which reanimates its offspring is still further from the mark."

In a short criticism upon the subject in the same number of _Land and Water_, Mr. H. J. Hanc.o.c.k is inclined to believe that some confusion has arisen in the translation from the original Hebrew. "The word ?????

(_Kah-ath'_), which is rendered pe?e??? in the Septuagint, and Pelican, or Onocrotalus, in the Vulgate, is derived from the verb ??? 'to vomit,'

and signifies 'a vomiter.' This name, evidently a general one, may have been intended by the Hebrew writers to apply either to such birds as, like the pelican and many others, possess the power of disgorging their food on being disturbed or alarmed, or to such birds as are accustomed to nourish their young from their own crops; and, in the latter case, the curious b.l.o.o.d.y secretion of the flamingo may well have given rise to the superst.i.tion concerning the pelican. I may observe, as an evidence that the translators did not consider the Hebrew word to be other than a general name, that _Ka-ath'_ is sometimes rendered 'cormorant' (Isa.

x.x.xiv. 11; Zeph. ii. 14). For further information concerning this point, I would refer your readers to the 'Hebrew and Chaldee Concordance,' p.

1083; Bate's 'Hebrew Dictionary,' p. 538; and Parkhurst's 'Hebrew Dictionary,' pp. 631, 632."

Shakespeare, doubtless, had not investigated the subject so narrowly, but was content to accept the common story as he found it, and to apply it metaphorically as occasion required.

[Sidenote: IN THE ENGLISH FENS.]

The majority of the birds mentioned in this chapter are not natives of the British Islands, but, strange as it may appear, there is evidence to show that the pelican, or, to speak more correctly, a species of pelican, once inhabited the English fens.

The peat-bogs of Cambridgeshire have yielded of late years a large number of bones of birds, and amongst these has been discovered the wing-bone of a pelican. This interesting discovery was made known by M.

Alphonse Milne-Edwards, in an able article in the "Annales des Sciences Naturelles,"[169] a translation of which subsequently appeared in _The Ibis_.[170] The author thus antic.i.p.ates the objections of the sceptical:--

"We may be inclined, perhaps, to wonder that a single bone, belonging (as it does) to a young animal, and consequently not presenting all its anatomical characters, should permit the exact recognition of the genus and species of bird to which it belongs. So precise a determination would not be always possible, but in the present case there need be no doubt; for I have shown, in another work,[171] that the wing-bone in the genus _Pelica.n.u.s_ offers extremely clear distinctive peculiarities, which do not allow of its being confounded with that of any other bird."

[Sidenote: THE PELICAN IN ENGLAND.]

The only species of pelican which has been recorded to have occurred in England in recent times, is the great white pelican, _P. onocrotalus_.

Latham has stated,[172] on the authority of Sir Thomas Brown, that a pelican of this species was killed in Horsey Fen in 1663. This statement was copied by Montagu,[173] and subsequently by Dr. Fleming,[174] but there is no evidence to show that the bird was a wild one. On the contrary, it is probable, as suggested by Sir Thomas Brown, that it may have been one of the King's pelicans which was lost about that time from St. James's Park.

He says[175]:--"An _onocrotalus_, or pelican, shot upon Horsey Fen, May 22, 1663, which, stuffed and cleaned, I yet retain. It was three yards and a half between the extremities of the wings; the chowle and beak answering the usual description; the extremities of the wings for a span deep brown; the rest of the body white; a fowl which none could remember upon this coast.

"About the same time, I heard one of the king's pelicans was lost at St.

James's; perhaps this might be the same."

Latham was further a.s.sured by Dr. Leith, that in the month of May he saw a brown pelican fly over his head on Blackheath, in Kent. Montagu, however, suggests that the bird was an immature swan.

In _The Zoologist_ for 1856 (p. 5321), the Rev. H. B. Tristram has recorded, that on the 25th of August, 1856, the remains of a pelican were picked up on the sh.o.r.e at Castle Eden, Durham. Such are the scanty records of the appearance of a pelican in England in modern times.

The bone found in Cambridgeshire may have belonged to _P. onocrotalus_, a native of South and South-Eastern Europe, and which is stated to be "common on the lakes and watercourses of Hungary and Russia, and also seen further south in Asia and in Northern Africa." M. Milne-Edwards, however, has not quite determined the species, for, on comparison with the bones of other recognized and existing species, it appears to differ rather remarkably in its greater length.

Enough has probably been said, however, to show the interest which attaches to the discovery, and to suggest further research.

With the pelican ends the long list of birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.

[Sidenote: CONCLUSION.]

The reader who has had the patience or the curiosity to follow us thus far will, doubtless, ere this have formed a just estimate of Shakespeare's qualifications as a naturalist, and will have drawn the only conclusion which the evidence justifies.

It is impossible to read all that Shakespeare has written in connection with ornithology, without being struck with the extraordinary knowledge which he has displayed for the age in which he lived; and our admiration for him as a poet must be increased tenfold on perceiving that the beauteous thoughts, which he has clothed in such beauteous language, were dictated by a pure love of nature, and by a study of those great truths which appeal at once to the heart and to reason, and which infuse into the soul of the naturalist the true spirit of poetry.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTES.

[1] Such words are there enclosed in brackets [ ].

[2] Amongst the entries in the Council Book of the Corporation of Stratford, during the period that John Shakespeare, the Poet's father, was a member of the Munic.i.p.al body (he filled the office of Chamberlain in 1573), the name occurs one hundred and sixty-six times under fourteen different modes of spelling.

[3] "An Inquiry into the Authenticity of various Pictures and Prints, which, from the decease of the Poet to our own times, have been offered to the public as Portraits of Shakespeare." By James Boaden. London, 1824.

[4] "An Inquiry into the History, Authenticity, and Characteristics of the Shakespeare Portraits." By Abraham Wivell. London, 1827.