Telling the hawk from the handsaw

Felix Pryor

Iwas tinkering with a book I had written a couple of years ago. It was a study of the so-called 'little eyases' of Hamlet. These are the child-players that Hamlet and his ersatz chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern grumble about at some length, in what is always taken to be a reference to contemporary theatrical controversy on Shakespeare's part. An eyas was a fledgling falcon. These fledglings were apparently something of a nuisance. According to The Gentleman's Recreation of 1674 they had a reputation for being 'very troublesome in their feeding' and making a perpetual racket.

There were two companies of these child actors operating in Shakespeare's time. One was attached to the choir-school of the Chapel Royal acting at the Blackfriars, the other to St Paul's Cathedral, using a theatre in the cathedral precincts. My book attempted to show that when Shakespeare had Hamlet refer to the little eyases he was not grumbling about the Chapel Royal group (as had always been hitherto assumed), but rather about the boys of St Paul's.

Writing for the boys of St Paul's was the satirist John Marston. Before he took to writing for the stage Marston had had the distinction of having his works burnt in public by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. The Church of England, evidently, ordered things differently in those days. Marston has been described by Peter Levi as an odd fish. His plays tend to be chaotic, clamorous and over-the-top, almost as if he had set out to write as badly as possible. And the children acting in them were expected to play parts (such as the page- boys Dildo and Catzo) that would make Esther Rantzen blanch. They had to ham it up as much as possible. The idea, it seems, was to poke fun both at their own childish- ness and at the pretensions of professional grown-up actors. One theatrical historian has made the memorable pronouncement that 'any of Marston's plays may be defined as a five-act lapse in taste'.

In the course of my researches I had come up with some startling conclusions, one of which was that the troupe of actors that arrive at Elsinore should be acted by children not adults (to find out why you'll have to buy the book). I had also, I believed, settled once and for all the date of the first performance of Hamlet and, for good measure, Troilus and Cressida.

Nevertheless, the book was turned down by my regular publishers on the grounds that it was too 'specialised'. Not agreeing with them (of course), I decided to publish the thing myself. Anyway, it gave me an excuse to sell my collection of annotated first editions (which had begun to bore me) in order to raise the capital.

One day while at Sotheby's arranging for the sale of the said collection, I found myself browsing through a biography of Shakespeare. I came to a picture of a grant of arms which Shakespeare had applied for in 1599, the year, as I believed, of Hamlet's first performance. The drawing reproduced in the book showed that Shakespeare had for his crest a rather fierce-looking bird holding a spear. The image was familiar enough. But looking at it this time, a question suddenly occurred to me. What sort of bird could it be that held the spear?

The Elizabethan blurb told me: 'And for his Creast or Cognizance a falcon The penny dropped. That's why Shakespeare described baby actors as baby falcons. He, with the falcon for his crest, was the grown- up actor and man of the theatre. They were the little eyases, fledgling falcons. Baby Shakespeares. A speech which comes only a few lines after this discussion of the little eyases and after further references to fal- conry confirmed my hypothesis. This speech was crammed with heraldic jargon. So Shakespeare couldn't not have been thinking of his newly-acquired crest at this point.

Come to think of it (which no one hither- to had) it did seem odd that Shakespeare had referred to these children as little eyases. Tiresome children are more usually described as cubs, perhaps, or whelps. Minnows even. Or monkeys. Not usually baby falcons.

A few weeks later, while watching an indifferent production of Hamlet, I received a further shock. We had just had the discussion of our friends the little eyases (or would have had, had the passage not been cut). The off-stage trumpets had been sounded to announce the arrival of the players at Elsinore, when one of the most famous hawks in world literature put in an appearance. I had forgotten about him. This was at the point where Hamlet turns to Guildenstern and says

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly,

I know a hawk from a handsaw.

A jumble of possibilities came into my head. The person sitting next to me told me to stop muttering. Could this hawk be standing in for Shakespeare's falcon? A falcon is after all a type of hawk. If the hawk here represented Shakespeare, it might mean that he was contrasting him- self, or what he stood for in terms of the professional theatre, with a second party represented by the handsaw. How could the handsaw, then, be equated with either John Marston or the little eyases of St Paul's?

First stop was to consult the New Arden edition of Hamlet, published in 1982, together with the not-so-new Arden edition of 1899, the New Variorum edition of 1877, the New Cambridge edition of 1934 and the even newer New Cambridge edition of 1985, the New Penguin edition of 1980 (I didn't have the old) and the latest Oxford editions of 1986 and 1987. Their editors told me, with (it must be admitted) varying degrees of scepticism, that the hawk and handsaw could be explained away on the grounds that either the hawk was not really a hawk or that the handsaw was not really a handsaw. The most popular expedient has been to suggest that the handsaw is in fact A Ploughman's please.' A Director's please.' a young heron, or `heronshaw'. This misbegotten creature has even found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary under the entry for 'handsaw'. Other expedients have been to suggest that it is the hawk that is at fault, and that it is really a type of mattock or pick-axe. Or a hooked cutting tool. Or a plasterer's mortar-board. It has even been suggested that handsaw could be a corruption of Wandschuh', the German for glove.

An obvious idea occurred to me. If Shakespeare had a hawk for his crest, what did John Marston, his rival at St Paul's, have? A handsaw seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, I scurried off to the British Museum to check.

Harleian MS 1396, an early 17th-century volume containing 'visitations' of Shrop- shire (Marston's native county) gave me the answer. No, his family didn't sport a handsaw. In fact they didn't have a crest at all. But, being more firmly established than Shakespeare's, they did already have a coat of arms. The principal feature of the Marston arms was a jagged zig-zag band running horizontally across the centre of their shield, known to heralds as a `Fess Dencetty'.

So far so good. Quite saw-like, I thought, if not 100 per cent convincing. And then light dawned. The handsaw wasn't just an object. It was an action. It was the action that distinguishes a bad actor from a good. After all, I should know. I had been one myself. Hamlet knew all about it too. He gives the players a run-down on the art of coarse acting in his famous lecture on the subject in the next act: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus ...

But one further problem still remained: `I am but mad north-north-west', Hamlet says. When the wind is not blowing from the north-north-west, he can tell the hawk from the handsaw. What bearing can this precisely-stated wind direction have on Hamlet's ability to distinguish between the true performer and the ham actor?

I resorted to that most scholarly of tomes, the Geographers' London A to Z Street Atlas (edition circa 1974). Page 61b gave me my answer. I found the site of the Globe Theatre on the Bankside, just right of Southwark Bridge. And then tracking up a few inches and shifting slightly to the left hit St Paul's, where the pestilential little eyases 'performed their handsaws. It lay half a mile or so across the river as the hawk flies. Exactly north-north-west of the Globe.