The Ornithology of Shakespeare Part 17

[Sidenote: ITS FOOD.]

The solitary habits of this bird during the nesting season are thus alluded to:--

"A barren detested vale, you see, it is; The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, O'ercome with moss and baleful misseltoe: Here never s.h.i.+nes the sun; here nothing breeds, Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven."

_t.i.tus Andronicus_, Act ii. Sc. 3.

And a curious belief is mentioned with regard to the rearing of its young:--

"Some say that ravens foster forlorn children, The whilst their own birds famish in their nests."

_t.i.tus Andronicus_, Act ii. Sc. 3.

[Sidenote: ALLEGED DESERTION OF YOUNG.]

It would appear, from some pa.s.sages in the sacred Scriptures, that the desertion of their young had not escaped the observation of the inspired writers. It was certainly a current belief in olden times, that when the raven saw its young ones newly hatched, and covered with down, it conceived such an aversion that it forsook them, and did not return to the nest until a darker plumage had shown itself. And to this belief commentators suppose the Psalmist alludes when he says:--"_He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry_." (Psalm cxlvii.

9.) And again, in Job, "_Who provideth for the raven his food? When his young ones cry unto G.o.d, they wander for lack of meat._" (Job x.x.xviii.

41.)

In Batman "upon Bartholome his book, 'De proprietatibus Rerum,' folio, 1582," we find the following pa.s.sage bearing upon the question:--"The raven is called _Corvus_ of Corax. It is said that ravens birdes (_i.e._, young ravens) be fed with deaw of heaven all the time that they have no black feathers by benefite of age." (Lib. xii. c. 10.)

Izaak Walton, in his "Compleat Angler," speaking of fish without mouths, which "are nourished and take breath by the porousness of their gills, man knows not how," observes that "this may be believed if we consider that when the raven hath hatched her eggs, she takes no further care, but leaves her young ones to the care of the G.o.d of nature, who is said in the Psalms (Psal. cxlvii. 9) 'to feed the young ravens that call upon him.' And they be kept alive, and fed by a dew or worms that breed in their nests; or some other ways that we mortals know not."

Shakespeare, no doubt, had the words of the Psalmist in his mind when he wrote--

"And He that doth the ravens feed, Yea, providently caters for the sparrow, Be comfort to my age!"

_As You Like It_, Act ii. Sc. 3.

[Sidenote: RAVENS' FEATHERS.]

We read in the First Book of Kings, xvii. 4, that when the prophet Elijah fled from the tyranny of King Ahab, and concealed himself by the brook Cherith, G.o.d commanded the ravens to feed him there. The remembrance of this pa.s.sage may have been in our poet's mind when he penned the following lines in the _Winter's Tale_. Antigonus, ordered by Leontes to expose the infant Perdita to death, says, with a touch of pity:--

"Come on, poor babe: Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens To be thy nurses!"

_Winter's Tale_, Act ii. Sc. 3.

As in the case of the owl, it appears that ravens' feathers were employed by the witches of old in their incantations; for it was believed that the wings of this bird carried contagion with them wherever they appeared. Marlowe, in his _Jew of Malta_, speaks of--

... "the sad presaging raven, that tolls The sick man's pa.s.sport in her hollow beak, And in the shadow of the silent night Doth shake contagion from her sable wings."

Hence the curse which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Caliban:--

"As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen, Drop on you both!"

_Tempest_, Act i. Sc. 2.

Here "wicked" may be taken to mean pernicious or destructive--the antonym being "virtuous," as in the expression "the virtuous properties of plants." A bad sore is described, in an old tract on hawking (Harl.

MS. 2,340), as "a wykked felone."

[Sidenote: A BLACK CHARACTER.]

As the type of blackness, both as regards colour and character, we find the raven frequently contrasted with the white dove, the emblem of all that is pure and gentle.

"Who will not change a raven for a dove?"

_Midsummer Nights Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.

"I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love, To spite a raven's heart within a dove."

_Twelfth Night_, Act v. Sc. 1.

"Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

Dove-feather'd raven!

Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st."

_Romeo and Juliet_, Act iii. Sc. 2.

The quarto (1599) and folio here read, "ravenous, dove-feather'd raven,"

&c.

As colour is intensified by contrast, so we read--

"Whiter than snow upon a raven's back."

So the undated quarto. Other editions have the emendation--

"Whiter than new snow on a raven's back."

_Romeo and Juliet_, Act iii. Sc. 2.

[Sidenote: VARIATION IN COLOUR.]

We have seen a variety of the jackdaw of a dirty yellowish-white colour; it could scarcely be called "amber-colour'd." No doubt other members of the genus _Corvus_ have occasionally been observed to vary quite as much in their plumage. Shakespeare says,--

"An amber-colour'd raven was well noted."

_Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iv. Sc. 3.

No doubt it was; quite as much as a white blackbird. This apparent contradiction of terms is in reality no myth. We have seen three or four albino varieties of the blackbird, and could give a tolerably long list of dark-plumaged birds of which pure white, or almost pure white, varieties have been found. This may be the result of disease, or of old age, drying up the animal secretions, and causing the absence of colour which we call white. According to ancient authors, ravens were formerly white, but were changed to black for babbling. The great age to which the raven sometimes attains has been alluded to in the first chapter, where some reference is made to "ancient" eagles, and tame ravens have been known to outlive several masters who owned them successively. But birds, like all things else, succ.u.mb to time. Shakespeare tells us,--

"Time's glory is to calm contending Kings, ...

To fill with worm-holes stately monuments, ...

To pluck the quills from ancient ravens' wings."

_Lucrece._