I know a hawk from a handsaw

"..............O, for a falconer's voice,
to lure this tassel-gentle back again!"

                                                     Romeo & Juliet      (II,ii)


Shakespeare's Juliet anxiously awaits the reappearance of Romeo, and slips into the parlance of falconry or hawking, that sport of kings and courtiers. A "tassel-gentle" or "tercel-gentle" is a male goshawk, one of a number of different types of birds of prey trained (by no means easily) to return to the falconer's familiar voice. Given the class-consciousness of Tudor and Jacobean society, it should hardly be surprising that there was even a perceived hierarchy of nobility among hawking birds that paralleled the existing social hierarchy.

In other words, a king could hawk with a gyrfalcon or perhaps even an eagle, but a tinker or tailor could not. He'd be lucky to be allowed to use a kestrel, regarded as a much less distinguished type of bird. An earl in Tudor England might use a peregrine falcon, of the breed depicted on the oil-on-panel portrait painted c.1593 and now in the collection of Agecroft Hall.

George Poulett was the son of Sir Amias Poulett, best remembered for being the keeper of Mary, Queen of Scots from 1576 until she met her date with the axe in 1587. The elder Poulett had also served as ambassador to France, and second son George became his heir when an older brother died young. George wears a large, three-layered cartwheel ruff around his neck, quite fashionable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Practitioners of falconry often had more than just open-air sport in mind: the small birds, rabbits, and other game that fell under the hawks' talons could bring additional meat to the dinner table, never a slight consideration. Largely for that reason, the best hunting hawks were held in the highest esteem.

It's interesting to note that the clergyman John Frith, who performed the wedding ceremony for William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway at the small village of Temple Grafton near Stratford, had a local reputation as a great healer of sick hawks. Some of his detractors claimed that Frith, whom they regarded as a clandestine Roman Catholic priest, knew far more about the birds than he knew about Holy Scripture.

In the above painting, the peregrine falcon that George Poulett holds fills the bill as a bird of sufficient status: the type hunted well and was responsive to proper training, yet was not so gaudy or regally-plumed a bird as to incite jealousy in the highest social stratum. Kind of like a Volvo.

Hamlet's line, "I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually does not make reference to a bird, but rather to a craftsman's tool: a "hawk" was one of the principal tools of the plasterer's trade, used to smooth and shape a plastered surface. But the phrase does have a nice ring to it.