"O devil, devil! If that the earth could teem with woman's tears, Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.-- Out of my sight!"
We may also compare the words of the queen in "2 Henry VI." (iii. 1):
"Henry my lord is cold in great affairs, Too full of foolish pity; and Gloster's show Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile With sorrow snares relenting passengers."
It is said that this treacherous animal weeps over a man's head when it has devoured the body, and will then eat up the head too. In Bullokar's "Expositor," 1616, we read: "Crocodile lachrymæ, crocodiles teares, do signify such teares as are feigned, and spent only with intent to deceive or do harm." In Quarles's "Emblems" there is the following allusion:
"O what a crocodilian world is this, Compos'd of treachries and ensnaring wiles! She cloaths destruction in a formal kiss, And lodges death in her deceitful smiles."
In the above passage from "Othello," Singer says there is, no doubt, a reference to the doctrine of equivocal generation, by which new animals were supposed to be producible by new combinations of matter.[398]
[398] Singer's "Shakespeare," 1875, vol. x. p. 118.
_Deer._ In "King Lear" (iii. 4) Edgar uses deer for wild animals in general:
"But mice, and rats, and such small deer, Have been Tom's food for seven long year."
Shakespeare frequently refers to the popular sport of hunting the deer;[399] and by his apt allusions shows how thoroughly familiar he was with the various amusements of his day.[400] In "Winter's Tale" (i. 2) Leontes speaks of "the mort o' the deer:" certain notes played on the horn at the death of the deer, and requiring a deep-drawn breath.[401] It was anciently, too, one of the customs of the chase for all to stain their hands in the blood of the deer as a trophy. Thus, in "King John" (ii. 1), the English herald declares to the men of Angiers how
"like a jolly troop of huntsmen, come Our lusty English, all with purpled hands, Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes."
[399] See Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes," 1876, pp. 66, 75, 79, 80, 113, 117.
[400] See "As You Like It," iv. 2; "All's Well That Ends Well," v. 2; "Macbeth," iv. 3; "1 Henry IV.," v. 4; "1 Henry VI.," iv. 2; "2 Henry VI.," v. 2; "Titus Andronicus," iii. 1, etc.