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In “Twelfth Night” the clown tells VIOLA that

“Fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings–the husband’s the bigger.”

The pilchard closely resembles the herring, but is thicker and heavier, with larger scales.

In the same play, MARIA, seeing MALVOLIO coming, says:–

“Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.”

Shakespeare, then, knew that fact so well known to poachers, and known also to many an American schoolboy, namely, that a trout likes to be tickled, or behaves as if he did, and that by gently tickling his sides and belly you can so mesmerize him, as it were, that he will allow you to get your hands in position to clasp him firmly. The British poacher takes the jack by the same tactics: he tickles the jack on the belly; the fish slowly rises in the water till it comes near the surface, when, the poacher having insinuated both hands under him, he is suddenly scooped out and thrown upon the land.

Indeed, Shakespeare seems to have known intimately the ways and habits of most of the wild creatures of Britain. He had the kind of knowledge of them that only the countryman has. In “As You Like It,” JAQUES tells AMIENS:–

“I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.”

Every gamekeeper, and every farmer for that matter, knows how destructive the weasel and its kind are to birds’ eggs, and to the eggs of game-birds and of domestic fowls.

In “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” BIRON says of BOYET:–

“This fellow picks up wit as pigeons peas.”

Pigeons dp not pick up peas in this country, but they do in England, and are often very damaging to the farmer on that account. Shakespeare knew also the peculiar manner in which they feed their young,–a manner that has perhaps given rise to the expression “sucking dove.” In “As You Like It” is this passage:–

“CELIA. Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.

“ROSALIND. With his mouth full of news.

“CELIA. Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young.

“ROSALIND. Then shall we be news-crammed.”

When the mother pigeon feeds her young she brings the food, not in her beak like other birds, but in her crop; she places her beak between the open mandibles of her young, and fairly crams the food, which is delivered by a peculiar pumping movement, down its throat. She furnishes a capital illustration of the eager, persistent newsmonger.

“Out of their burrows like rabbits after rain” is a comparison that occurs in “Coriolanus.” In our Northern or New England States we should have to substitute woodchucks for rabbits, as our rabbits do not burrow, but sit all day in their forms under a bush or amid the weeds, and as they are not seen moving about after a rain, or at all by day; but in England Shakespeare’s line is exactly descriptive.

Says BOTTOM to the fairy COBWEB in “Midsummer Night’s Dream:”–

“Mounsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipp’d humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag.”

This command might be executed in this country,

for we have the “red-hipp’d humble-bee;” and we have the thistle, and there is no more likely place to look for the humblebee in midsummer than on a thistle-blossom.

But the following picture of a “wet spell” is more English than American:–

“The ox hath therefore stretch’d his
yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat; and
the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a
beard;
The fold stands empty in the
drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the
murrain flock.”

Shakespeare knew the birds and wild fowl, and knew them perhaps as a hunter, as well as a poet. At least this passage would indicate as much:–

“As wild geese that the creeping
fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in
sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun’s
report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep
the sky.”