FullReads

“A king and officers of sorts”

(see “Henry V.”), whereas a colony of bees is an absolute democracy; the rulers and governors and “officers of sorts” are the workers, the masses, the common people. A strict regard to fact also would spoil those fairy tapers in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,”–

“The honey-bags steal from the
humble-bees,
And, for night-tapers, crop their
waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery
glow-worm’s eyes,”–

since it is not wax that bees bear upon their thighs, but pollen, the dust of the flowers, with which bees make their bread. Wax is made from honey.

The science or the meaning is also a little obscure in this phrase, which occurs in one of the plays:–

“One heat another heat expels,”–

as one nail drives out another, or as one love cures another.

In a passage in “The Tempest” he speaks of the ivy as if it were parasitical, like the mistletoe:–

“Now, he was
The ivy which had hid my princely
trunk,
And sucked my verdure out on’t.”

I believe it is not a fact that the ivy sucks the juice out of the trees it climbs upon, though it may much interfere with their growth. Its aerial rootlets are for support alone, as is the case with all climbers that are not twiners. But this may perhaps be regarded as only a poetic license on the part of Shakespeare; the human ivy he was picturing no doubt fed upon the tree that supported it, whether the real ivy does or not.

It is also probably untrue that

“The poor beetle that we tread
upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang
as great
As when a giant dies,”

though it has suited the purpose of other poets besides Shakespeare to say so. The higher and more complex the organization, the more acute the pleasure and the pain. A toad has been known to live for days with the upper part of its head cut away by a scythe, and a beetle will survive for hours upon the fisherman’s hook. It perhaps causes a grasshopper less pain to detach one of its legs than it does a man to remove a single hair from his beard. Nerves alone feel pain, and the nervous system of a beetle is a very rudimentary affair.

In “Coriolanus” there is a comparison which implies that a man can tread upon his own shadow,–a difficult feat in northern countries at all times except midday; Shakespeare is particular to mention the time of day:–

“Such a nature,
Tickled with good success, disdains
the shadow
Which he treads on at noon.”