OH RIGHT I FORGOT TO FINISH THAT
so in Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice snarks at Benedick
“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me”
which has always been one of my favourite lines, but, fool that I am, I took it at face value and thought it was just Beatrice saying that she finds a man’s love so undesirable and inconsequential she’d prefer to hear a dog yelling at a bird
BUT NO
IT FINALLY DAWNED ON ME WHAT THE BARD WAS SAYING WITH THAT LINE
the choice of a dog barking at a crow has a very specific connotation in context
There is a legend you may know, that of the Wild Hunt - people believed that when tempests blew, ghostly hunters and spectral hounds rode across the earth. Dogs would howl and bark in response to this spectral pack, and this was seen as a death omen. It’s tied up with hell hound legends from Germany, the Cŵn Annwn in Welsh, and our modern myths of hell hounds springing out of the underworld to kill or collect souls.
The crow was also a bad omen, but there was also a legendary bird variously called the “night-crow” or “night-raven” - also called nycticorax. This “night-raven” is a common literary device that is said to bode evil. Later on in Much Ado, in fact, we hear Benedick say of a man’s singing:
An he had been a dog that should have howled thus,
they would have hanged him: and I pray God his bad
voice bode no mischief. I had as lief have heard the
night-raven, come what plague could have come after
it.
Once again, dog and raven/crow imagery. Another example of the lovers unconsciously mirroring each other, BUT IMPORTANTLY FOR US Benedick specifically prays a howling dog “bode no mischief” and that he’d rather listen to the night-raven cry - even if it means calamity - than hear any more of this singing.
There is a theory that this legendary bird, the night-crow or night-raven which augurs death, is a misidentified owl or bittern; but there is another theory that the legend of the night-crow sprang up through the legend of the Hunt. There are folk tales which tell of two ravens following the Hunt (Odin’s two ravens, no doubt), and in Danish folklore the night raven precedes the Hunt. Basically, this idea of a nocturnal black corvid which presages death may come from the Wild Hunt and the death omens of tempests and clamouring dogs, all of which were adopted into literary symbolism. The night-crow/night-raven recurs a lot in Shakespeare and contemporary plays.
Thus, in Henry VI Part 3, it is said that at Gloucester/Richard III’s birth:
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howl’d, and hideous tempest shook down trees;
Storm, crow, dog. The Wild Hunt, in other words, and the worst omen of all, presaging death, evil and destruction.
So, to get back to the point, what Beatrice is saying when she declares “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me” is that she would rather listen to the most bone-chilling omen an Elizabethan could encounter, the sound of crows and dogs clamouring which presages imminent death and great evil rather than suffer for one instant a simpering confession of love from a man.
And to give Benedick his due, he makes a similar declaration that a man’s singing is so fucking atrocious he’d rather hear the same horrific omen than listen to one more verse of an insipid love song
#made for each other, amirite?