Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Eugene Schieffelin was a pharmacist who lived in the Bronx. He was an eccentric, an Anglophile, and a Shakespeare aficionado. Some say he was also an ecological criminal and a lunatic, but I would argue for a gentler description; perhaps “flawed.” As deputy of the American Acclimatization Society of New York, Schieffelin, it is believed, latched onto the personal goal of bringing every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to Central Park. Armed with his treasured copy of the exquisite Ornithology of Shakespeare, an 1871 volume in which James Edmund Harting assembled every allusion to birdlife in the whole of the Shakespeare canon, Schieffelin zeroed in on the Bard’s single reference to a starling, in Henry IV. It is a decisive scene: King Henry commands that the willful soldier Hotspur free his prisoners, but Hotspur replies that he will do nothing of the kind until the king agrees to pay the ransom that will free Hotspur’s brother-in-law Mortimer from the enemy. The king flies into a fury and forbids him to mention Mortimer’s name. After the king’s exit, Hotspur imagines a fanciful retribution, and here enters our star: He said he would not ransom Mortimer; Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer; But I will find him when he lies asleep, And in his ear I’ll holloa, “Mortimer!” Nay. I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him To keep his anger still in motion.

“Eugene Schieffelin was a pharmacist who lived in the Bronx. He was an eccentric, an Anglophile, and a Shakespeare aficionado. Some say he was also an ecological criminal and a lunatic, but I would argue for a gentler description; perhaps “flawed.” As deputy of the American Acclimatization Society of New York, Schieffelin, it is believed, latched onto the personal goal of bringing every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to Central Park. Armed with his treasured copy of the exquisite Ornithology of Shakespeare, an 1871 volume in which James Edmund Harting assembled every allusion to birdlife in the whole of the Shakespeare canon, Schieffelin zeroed in on the Bard’s single reference to a starling, in Henry IV. It is a decisive scene: King Henry commands that the willful soldier Hotspur free his prisoners, but Hotspur replies that he will do nothing of the kind until the king agrees to pay the ransom that will free Hotspur’s brother-in-law Mortimer from the enemy. The king flies into a fury and forbids him to mention Mortimer’s name. After the king’s exit, Hotspur imagines a fanciful retribution, and here enters our star: “ He said he would not ransom Mortimer; Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer; But I will find him when he lies asleep, And in his ear I’ll holloa, “Mortimer!” Nay. I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him To keep his anger still in motion.