What Is The Origin Of (234)?…
A wild goose chase
I have been on many a metaphorical wild goose chase in my life but have never attempted to catch a goose, tame or otherwise, for real. I assume, like any sensible creature, it is reluctant to give up its liberty but why do we use this phrase to describe a futile exercise?
The starting point for our investigation is William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, written between 1592 and 1594 and first published in an unauthorised quarto in 1597, and in particular Act 2 scene 4. As a schoolboy I read the play in an unbowdlerised edition and well remember the scene for containing one of the Bard’s bawdiest jokes.
More germane to our enquiries, though, is the battle of wits between Mercutio and Romeo. Coming off second-best, Mercutio threatens to call upon Benvolio for assistance. Romeo responds by saying that he will declare himself the winner, “switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I’ll cry a match.” The beaten Mercutio responds, “nay, if thy wits run the wild-goose chase, I have done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five.”
Whilst generally accepted as being the first usage of the phrase, does it really refer to chasing a wild goose? That it may refer to something else can be seen from the context in which the Bard uses it. Romeo opens the exchange with an equestrian term, switch and spur, which meant at full speed, the switch being a type of whip and, along with spurs attached to the rider’s boots, was used to goad the horse into moving more quickly. As Mercutio was in a battle of wits, it would be reasonable to assume that he would respond with a reference to the world of horses.
That this is the case is confirmed by a passage from Nicholas Breton’s poem of 1602, The Mother’s Blessing; “esteeme a horse, according to his pace/ but loose no wagers on a wilde goose chase.” Indeed, it was a type of horse race, described in some detail by Nicholas Cox in The Hunter: A Discourse of Horsemanship, published in 1685. Two or more horses set off side by side for the first “twelvescore yards”, at which point, they were then free to jockey for the lead. The horses behind were obliged to follow as closely the route taken by the leader and to stay within “a certain distance agreed by Articles” of the leader. When the leading horse had outpaced the others by more than the distance stipulated in Articles, it was declared the winner. As a result, the race’s length and duration was uncertain.
Helpfully, Cox gave a derivation of the race’s name; “the wildgoose chase received its Name from the manner of the flight which is made by Wildgeese, which is generally one after another.”
In his Sporting Dictionary of 1803, William Taplin was astute enough to recognise that the term, wild-goose chase, had equestrian origins, he was a sportsman, after all, but, interestingly, he didn’t attribute its name to the flight of wild geese as Cox had. Instead, he saw it as a reference to the uncertainty, both of duration and distance of the event; “wild-goose chase – is neither more or less than a metaphorical allusion to the uncertainty of its termination. This originated in a kind of chase (more properly a match)…”
But others were not as perceptive as Taplin. During the seventeenth century, the phrase was being used figuratively to describe erratic behaviour, particularly where one follows their own impulses. In the tragicomedy, The Spanish Gipsie, first performed in 1623 and written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, Diego tells Lewys, “I have had a fine fegary,/ the rarest, wild-goose chase,” fegary being a version of vagary. By the time that the great but eccentric lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, came to compile his Dictionary of the English Language in the mid-eighteenth century, it had lost its associations with horse racing and we were stuck geese; “a pursuit of something as unlikely to be caught as a wildgoose,” and have been ever since.
Going back to Shakespeare’s use of wild goose in Romeo and Juliet, it is possible to detect both senses in play, not surprisingly as Mercutio is trying to demonstrate the sharpness of his wits. The first almost certainly refers to the horse race but the second may relate to the characteristics of the wild goose. Whatever the case, the racing connotation was lost to the mists of time and we are left with the image of someone vainly trying to grasp a goose.
