Exploring Shakespeare’s fascination with the owl - the spookiest of them all

In the latest episode of our occasional series dealing with local birds that Shakespeare featured in his plays, Steve Sutherland explains the bard’s fascination with the owl.

“Hark! Peace!/ It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman/ Which gives the sternest good night/ He is about it.” Macbeth.

With the clocks turning back last weekend, the nights drawing in, Halloween lurking just around the corner and the Scottish play now showing at The Other Place, there could scarcely be a more appropriate time to examine Shakespeare’s relationship with that most mysterious of nocturnal predators, the owl.

The quote above, whispered by Lady Macbeth, waiting in secret for a sign that her husband has murdered the reigning King Duncan as he snores in his bed, is pretty typical of the bard’s treatment of our post-dusk raptor which he perpetually considered to be more feathered fiend than feathered friend, and a reliable harbinger of doom.

Hearing the owl, Lady Mac takes it as confirmation that the dreadful deed’s been done – the bird’s cry a long-assumed omen of impending disaster. She calls the owl “the fatal bellman” because, back in Tudor times, that was the name given to the night watchman who rang a bell to announce a prisoner had been called to execution and, according to some sources, also to alert locals that a neighbour was on their deathbed. The ringing of the Passing Bell was a signal for prayers to be offered up for the soul of the dying or doomed person and after they’d passed there would be one short peal which, in the manner it was rung, would indicate whether the deceased was female or male.

There are at least four more allusions to the owl being a right baddie in Macbeth alone. As MacDuff is on his way to rouse the sleeping Duncan, unaware that his king has been butchered, he’s informed by Lennox, another Scots nobleman, that the previous night had seen some strange and terrible things occur – chimneys blown down, unaccountable screams and lamentations heard from on high and the owl, referred to as, “the obscure bird”, “clamoured the livelong night”. It’s obviously an omen of wickedness, the owl “obscure” because, unlike other birds, it chooses to fly and hunt undercover of darkness rather than in daylight.

Not soon after, Ross, a messenger to the court, is gossiping about the regicide with an old man who informs him: “On Tuesday last/ A falcon, towering in her pride of place/ Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d”. Again, it’s a sign that evil doings are afoot. The falcon was flying high, the owl, normally scouring the ground for prey, flew up and attacked it, signifying a disruption of the natural order of things.

Given the bard’s largely unswerving conviction that nothing but harm can come from the presence of an owl, it comes as no surprise that, when the weird sisters are mixing up the ingredients for their witchy brew in the cauldron, along with the eye of newt, toe of frog, fillet of fenny snake, wool of bat, tongue of dog, adder’s fork, blind worm’s sting and lizard’s leg, there’s an owlet’s wing chucked in for good measure.

And when Lady MacDuff discovers that her husband has deserted his family and fled to England to raise an invading army, she thinks him a coward. “He loves us not,” she says. “He wants the natural touch: for the poor wren/ The most diminutive of birds, will fight/ Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.”

So, we can see, in Shakespeare’s view, the owl is synonymous with murder and disorder so we’d all better watch out because, of the five members of the species who make their home in the UK, three can commonly be found knocking about around Stratford. There’s the ghostly one, the barn owl, the silent swooper on gossamer wings, brilliant white when exposed by your torch or your headlights. As its name suggests, it likes to nest in barns where it can dine on mice and voles and rats to its heart’s content. Failing an available agricultural abode, a hollow tree will do.

Then there’s the more plentiful but less visually striking tawny or brown owl who makes up for what it lacks in flashy looks with its cry – the famously haunting “too-wit too-woo”, whereas the barn owl utters a blood-curdling screech. Both are prone to swallowing their prey whole and then, unable to fully digest bones, fur and teeth, cough up pellets of the stuff their guts can’t handle, much like cats chuck up furballs.

Finally, there’s the little owl which, as you’ve doubtless gathered, is smaller than the other two and mostly dines on beetles and bugs and issues forth a startling squawk. All are most comfortable out and about once the sun’s set which in large part accounts for Shakespeare and others down through the centuries associating the owl with shady dealings.

Arguably the most well-known Shakespearean reference to our featured bird comes in Julius Caesar when Casca, the duplicitous senator-cum-assassin reveals a sign of the treacherous times: “Yesterday the bird of night did sit/ Even at noon-day, upon the market-place/Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies/ Do so conjointly meet, let not men say/ These are their reasons; they are natural/ For, I believe they are portentous things/ Unto the climate that they point upon.”

In Henry IV Part III, King Henry mentions how, when Gloucester, who grows up to become the appalling Richard III, was born, “The owl shriek’d at thy birth, an evil sign,” and there are owls all over the place in the three parts of Henry VI. In Part I. Talbot/Shrewsbury is called an, “ominous and fearful owl of death!” And in Part II, when Gloucester’s wife summons a spirit from the dead to gain information about her husband’s prospects, her fellow necromancer instructs: “Patience, good lady; wizards know their times/ Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night/ The time of night when Troy was set on fire/ The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl/ And spirits walk and ghosts break up their graves/That time best fits the work we have in hand.”

A bit later in the same play, the Earl of Suffolk starts having a wobbler, screaming a stream of curses upon his enemies: “Poison be their drink!/Gall, worse than gall, the daintiest that they taste!/ Their sweetest shade a grove of cypress trees! /Their chiefest prospect murdering basilisks!/Their softest touch as smart as lizards' sting!/ Their music frightful as the serpent's hiss/ And boding screech-owls make the concert full!”

Part III finds Warwick in a pickle as the battle isn’t going much to his liking: “Our soldiers’, like the night-owl’s lazy flight/ Or like an idle thresher with a flail/ Fell gently down, as if they struck their friends,” and King Edward IV, later scoffing at those who doubted his prowess, says: “Bring forth that fatal screech-owl to our house, That nothing sung but death to us and ours…”

In Richard III, the final instalment of the Shakespeare histories dramatising this period, the exasperated king, sick of receiving nothing but bad news, interrupts the bringer of objectionable tidings thus: “Out on you, owls! nothing but songs of death?” And when Shakespeare want us to realise that Richard II is downcast and thinking about abdicating his crown, his character laments: “In the base court? Come down? Down, court! Down king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.”

This is a conceit the bard actually borrowed from himself, stating some four years earlier in his Henry VI part III: “The owl by day/ If he arise, is mocked and wondered at.”

By now you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Give it a rest will you Will. Why not pick on some other poor winged blighter,” and you wouldn’t be alone in that. But there are still a foul few more telling examples before we quit to take a look at our owls featured, hopefully more kindly, elsewhere. For example, in King Lear, when the dopey old monarch realises the inhospitable Goneril and Regan aren’t the dutiful daughters he expected them to be and decides to take his chances outdoors, he says: “Rather I abjure all roofs, and choose/ To wage against the enmity o’ the air/ To be a comrade with the wolf and owl/ Necessity’s sharp pinch!”

Even Shakespeare’s magical fairyfolk are wary lest they fall foul of Troilus And Cressida’s “vile owl”. In The Tempest Ariel lets on where he hangs out when not at Prospero’s beck and call: “Where the bee sucks, there suck I/ In a cowslip's bell I lie/ There I couch when owls do cry”, while in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy queen Titania, ready for some kip, instructs her sprites: “Then, for the third part of a minute, hence/ Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds/ Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings/ To make my small elves coats, and some keep back/ The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders/ At our quaint spirits.”

At the end of the play, Puck is wrapping up the action for the audience with his epilogue, encouraging us to head off home because it’s getting late and: “The screech-owl, screeching loud/ Puts the wretch that lies in woe/ In remembrance of a shroud.”

So, we can see that, whenever Shakespeare’s plots called upon some words to describe mischief or misdemeanour and he felt the urge to employ imagery from nature to express himself, the owl became his go-to his fall-guy. In Titus Andronicus , when Demetrius and Chiron ambush and rape Lavinia, cutting out her tongue and hacking off her hands in one of the playwright’s most gruesome scenes, they do so in a wood where, “never shines the sun; here nothing breeds/Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven”. And in Troilus And Cressida, Troilus ponders who would take on the unfortunate task of breaking the news of Hector’s death to Priam and Hecuba: “Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called,” he says. “Go in to Troy, and say there, Hector’s dead.”

There’s quite a weird owl-related bit in Hamlet too. Ophelia says, “Well, God dild you!/ They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.” This is in Act IV, Scene V where she has discovered that her one-time boyfriend, the titular prince, has murdered Polonius, her father. She is growing unhinged and expresses her distress in yoking the daughter’s domesticity to the owl’s darker properties.

This is apparently based on a popular tale doing the rounds at the time which told how Jesus went into a baker's shop and asked for some bread. The lady running the gaff put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but was reprimanded by her daughter, who, insisting that the piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a smaller size. The dough, though, began to swell enormously, whereupon the daughter cried out, making a noise like the cry of an owl, upon which our Saviour turned her into one.

There’s a more light-hearted bit in The Comedy Of Errors, when the newly-arrived Antipholus of Syracuse is exploring the town of Ephesus, and his servant Dromio grows nervous of their alien surroundings, declaring: “This is the fairy land: o spite of spites!/ We talk with goblins, owls and sprites/ If we obey them not, this will ensue/ They’ll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue”. Oh, and there are fair few owl-y mentions in Love’s Labours Lost too but enough already!

Aside from the plays, Shakespeare also had it in for the owl in his poems. In Venus and Adonis, “The owl, night’s herald, shrieks ‘tis very late!’/The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest,/And coal-black clouds that shadow heaven’s light/Do summon us to part and bid goodnight,” while in The Rape of Lucrece, “Now stole upon the time the dead of night, /When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes: /No comfortable star did lend his light, /No noise but owls’ and wolves’ death-boding cries…” And later: “Now serves the season that they may surprise/The silly lambs: pure thoughts are dead and still/ While lust and murder wake to stain and kill/ The dove sleeps fast that this night-owl will catch…”

Now and again, though rarely, you’ll be pleased to hear that Shakespeare relented a little in his condemnation. In Cymbeline, Innogen is welcomed by Belarius thus: “The night to the owl and morn to the lark less welcome”, and in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch, up for a bout of roister-doistering regardless of the hour, says: “Shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver?”

The bard shouldn’t shoulder all the blame for the besmirching of our subject’s reputation. Back in ancient Rome, Pliny called the owl, “the monster of the night… especially funereal… greatly abhorred”, and in the Aeneid, Virgil describes how an owl cries as a portent of Dido’s impending death, and Ovid also has an owl cry during the Metamorphoses to accompany the none-too-savoury bit where Myrrha sleeps with Cynadus, her own father.

We should also consider the ancient Greek tale of Ascalaphus who gossiped to his fellow gods about Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, claiming that she had been munching on forbidden pomegranate seeds.

When Demeter, goddess of the harvest, learned about this slander, she had Ascalaphus buried beneath a heavy rock in the underworld. Eventually Heracles free-ed him which angered Demeter even more, so she turned Ascalaphalus into a screech owl, according to Ovid, "the vilest bird; a messenger of grief; the lazy owl; sad omen to mankind."

Then there’s Hypnos, the Greek god of slumber, who took the form of an owl and flapped his wings to make men sleep, and there’s a Gaelic legend about Cailleach, the goddess of death, who rebelled against the other gods and was thrown to the moon, only to take the shape of a barn owl to revisit Earth.

Cheer up! Not all literary mentions of the owl are quite so grim. The fact that the owl has night vision, so can see things we can’t, plus, thanks to its 14 neck vertebrae (twice as many as ours), its ability to turn its heads 270 degrees in each direction, led to the theory that it was wiser than most other creatures.

Hence Owl presents himself as the sagest critter in A.A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh. He’s a mite scatter-brained, spelling his own name ‘Wol’, but he still rules the roost in the Hundred Acre Wood because, let’s face it, the bear himself was endowed with Very Little Brain.

Another fictional character, Archimedes, is the owl companion of the wizard Merlin in T.H. White’s The Once And Future King, adapted for Disney’s 1963 animated film The Sword In The Stone, and a mentor to Wart, the young soon-to-be king Arthur. Then there’s the traditional kind-of-nonsense rhyme The Owl And The Pussycat who head off deeply in love in their pea-green boat to get married. And don’t forget Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin which recounts the story of a group of brave/foolhardy squirrels who travel to Owl Island to offer Owl Brown a gift to gain permission to gather nuts. Squirrel Nutkin taunts the owl with riddles and eventually Owl Brown snaps and nearly skins him alive!

And last but by no means least in our brief catalogue, there’s obviously Hedwig, the snowy owl who acts as a messenger/ protector gifted to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter on his eleventh birthday by Hagrid, but you surely don’t need me to tell you all about her…

And so, to conclude, with Halloween almost upon us, best take heed of what the late great David Lynch repeatedly warned us in Twin Peaks but never deigned to explain why: “The owls are not what they seem.”