[182] See Dyce's "Glossary to Shakespeare," p. 85.
In "King Lear" (iii. 2) Shakespeare speaks of the "cataracts and hurricanoes" as having
"drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!"
Vanes on the tops of steeples were in days gone by made in the form of a cock--hence weathercocks--and put up, in papal times, to remind the clergy of watchfulness.[183] Apart, too, from symbolism, the large tail of the cock was well adapted to turn with the wind.[184]
[183] See "Book of Days," 1863, vol. i. p. 157.
[184] In "King Lear" (iv. 6), where Edgar says:
"Yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight."
the word "cock" is an abbreviation for cock-boat.
_Cormorant._ The proverbial voracity of this bird[185] gave rise to a man of large appetite being likened to it, a sense in which Shakespeare employs the word, as in "Coriolanus" (i. 1): "the cormorant belly;" in "Love's Labour's Lost" (i. 1): "cormorant devouring Time;" and in "Troilus and Cressida" (ii. 2): "this cormorant war." "Although," says Mr. Harting,[186] "Shakespeare mentions the cormorant in several of his plays, he has nowhere alluded to the sport of using these birds, when trained, for fishing; a fact which is singular, since he often speaks of the then popular pastime of hawking, and he did not die until some years after James I. had made fishing with cormorants a fashionable amusement."
[185] For superstitions associated with this bird, see Brand's "Pop. Antiq.," 1849, vol. iii. p. 218.
[186] "Ornithology of Shakespeare," p. 260.
_Crow._ This has from the earliest times been reckoned a bird of bad omen; and in "Julius Cæsar" (v. 1), Cassius, on the eve of battle, predicted a defeat, because, to use his own words:
"crows and kites Fly o'er our heads and downward look on us, As we were sickly prey: their shadows seem A canopy most fatal, under which Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost."
Allusions to the same superstition occur in "Troilus and Cressida" (i. 2); "King John" (v. 2), etc. Vergil ("Bucolic," i. 18) mentions the croaking of the crow as a bad omen:
"Sæpe sinistra cava prædixit ab ilice cornix."
And Butler, in his "Hudibras" (part ii. canto 3), remarks:
"Is it not ominous in all countries, When crows and ravens croak upon trees."