[225] "A hawk full-fed was untractable, and refused the lure--the lure being a thing stuffed to look like the game the hawk was to pursue; its lure was to tempt him back after he had flown."
[226] In the same play (iv. 2) Hortensio describes Bianca as "this proud disdainful haggard." See Dyce's "Glossary," p. 197; Cotgrave's "French and English Dictionary," sub. "Hagard;" and Latham's "Falconry," etc., 1658.
Further allusions occur in "Twelfth Night" (iii. 1), where Viola says of the Clown:
"This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit: He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time; And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye."
In "Much Ado About Nothing" (iii. 1), Hero, speaking of Beatrice, says that:
"her spirits are as coy and wild As haggards of the rock."
And Othello (iii. 3), mistrusting Desdemona, and likening her to a hawk, exclaims:
"if I do prove her haggard,-- I'd whistle her off."[227]
[227] "To whistle off," or dismiss by a whistle; a hawk seems to have been usually sent off in this way against the wind when sent in pursuit of prey.
The word "check" alluded to above was a term in falconry applied to a hawk when she forsook her proper game and followed some other of inferior kind that crossed her in her flight[228]--being mentioned again in "Hamlet" (iv. 7), where the king says:
"If he be now return'd As checking at his voyage."[229]
[228] Dyce's "Glossary," p. 77; see "Twelfth Night," ii. 5.
[229] The use of the word is not quite the same here, because the voyage was Hamlet's "proper game," which he abandons. "Notes to Hamlet," Clark and Wright, 1876, p. 205.
Another common expression used in falconry is "tower," applied to certain hawks, etc., which tower aloft, soar spirally to a height in the air, and thence swoop upon their prey. In "Macbeth" (ii. 4) we read of
"A falcon, towering in her pride of place;"
"My lord protector's hawks do tower so well;"
and in "King John" (v. 2) the Bastard says,
"And like an eagle o'er his aery[230] towers."
[230] See Dyce's "Glossary," p. 456; Harting's "Ornithology of Shakespeare," p. 39; Tuberville's "Booke of Falconrie," 1611, p. 53.