Shakespeare’s plays and poems are filled with birds—from familiar crows, swans, and sparrows to species that would have seemed rare, exotic, or unusual in Renaissance England. But these birds are more than decorative details. They carry symbolism, reflect the natural world Shakespeare knew, and reveal how people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the animals around them.
In this episode, artist and researcher Missy Dunaway joins us to explore her Birds of Shakespeare project, which documents all sixty-five bird species referenced across Shakespeare’s works. We’ll discover how she identified each bird, the historical sources behind her paintings, the plants and symbolism included in her compositions, and some of the most surprising birds to appear in Shakespeare’s writing.
Download the transcript for Ep 437 here
About Missy Dunaway
Missy Dunaway is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Maine whose work combines painting with research in the Humanities. She earned a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 and soon afterward moved to Turkey on a Fulbright Research Fellowship, which launched several years of international travel through artist residencies. Her sketchbooks from this period were later published in 2021 as The Traveling Artist: A Visual Journal. Missy is currently creating The Birds of Shakespeare, a long-term research and painting project documenting all sixty-five bird species referenced in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The project has been featured by the Folger Shakespeare Library and Smithsonian magazine. You can follow her progress at birdsofshakespeare.com.
What We Talk About
- How Shakespeare uses birds for symbolism, metaphor, and character insight, from crows and swans to pelicans and kingfishers.
- Which birds would have been common in Renaissance England, and how falconry shaped the way Shakespeare and his audiences understood hawks, falcons, herons, and other birds of prey.
- The surprising and exotic birds that appear in Shakespeare’s works—including ostriches, peacocks, turkeys, and the Bermuda petrel—and what their presence reveals about Shakespeare’s world.
- How Missy Dunaway researches and paints the 65 bird species of Shakespeare, using early modern natural-history sources, period illustrations, plants, eggs, habitat, and historical symbolism.
- …and more!
Resources Recommended by Our Guest
The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Collections
The JSTOR Understanding Shakespeare Series
The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, Edited by Karen Raber and Holly Dugan, 2021
Missy Dunaway lists all of her research sources (there are a lot!) on her project’s website: birdsofshakespeare.com
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