Some of the most vexing questions in life involve chickens.
Which came first—the chicken or the egg? Why did the chicken cross the road? In
a recent blog, “Fowl
question—Chicken or Cock?” I address another perplexing question—why does
English have two words for the domestic fowl, “chicken” and “cock”? To add some
perspective to these questions, I have posed another: What Does Shakespeare Say
About Chickens?
Contrary to popular belief, Shakespeare did not write in
“Old English” but instead wrote in Early Modern English—the same English that
we speak today, although the language has continued to evolve. When Shakespeare
was writing, French was waning as an influence on English. It makes sense that
Shakespeare uses “cock” more than he uses “chicken” in his works, according to
entries in Alexander Schmidt’s “Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary,”
because “cock” evolved in the English and French traditions and “chicken” in
the Germanic tradition.
Many of the usages of “cock” in Shakespeare’s
works involve their alarm clock function, crowing cocks. In “Hamlet,” the crowing
of the cock sends the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father away. In “The Tempest,” Sebastian
describes the rather verbose Gonzalo as “The old cock” and his prattling as
“crowing.” In “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Speed tells Valentine that he can tell
when Valentine is in love because [you are] wont, when you laughed, to crow
like a cock.” In “The Taming of the Shrew,” Petruchio and Kate have the
following conversation early in his attempt to woo Kate:
Kate: What is your crest? A coxcomb? (fool’s hat)
Petruchio: A combless cock (gentle rooster), so
Kate will be my hen.
Kate: No cock of mine; you crow too like a craven.
(a chicken chicken, that is one who will not fight)
Shakespeare makes very few references to chickens, and most
of those are metaphoric. In Sonnet 143, he
employs a simile of housewife leaving her child aside in order to chase an
errant chicken to evoke the feeling of neglect that an ignored lover might
feel. Near the end of “Macbeth,” MacDuff, after receiving the news that his
wife and children have been slaughtered, utters in disbelief, “What, all my
pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop?”
As the consummate artist, Shakespeare even addresses both
the chicken and the egg in one fell swoop. When Pandarus and Cressida discuss
whether Troilus loves Helen of Troy, Pandarus asserts, “Troilus? Why, he
esteems her no more than I esteem an addle [spoiled] egg.” Cressida replies,
“If you love an addle egg as well as you love an idle head, you would eat
chickens in the shell.”
As a lover of chickens, especially rubber chickens, I would
be remiss not to mention Chaucer’s
Nun’s Priest’s Tale. This tale,
widely acclaimed as perhaps the most artful one in the Canterbury Tales, has
chickens in major roles, although I must also admit the tale includes reports
of some smoking chicken sex. However, in the interest of family-friendliness, I
will say no more about Chanticleer’s conjugal life with his many chicken wives.
In closing, I will leave you with a little chicken trivia.
The first known appearance of the
chicken crossing the road joke goes back to “The Knickerbocker” (The New
York Monthly) magazine in March, 1847. Also, Harvard physicist David Morin
imagines how famous
physicists might answer the question. Finally, an anonymous site offers
answers that famous philosophically
minded characters—both real and fictional--might provide to the question.
Hamlet offers my favorite: “That is not the question.”
