Arcadia, " Now she brought them to see a seeled dove, who, the blinder she was, the higher she strove to reach." In an explanatory note to a passage in Ford's The Broken Heart, Gifford says: "It is told in The Gentleman's Recreation that this wanton amusement is sometimes resorted to for sport! The poor dove, in the agonies of pain, soars like the lark, as soon as dismissed from the hand, almost perpendicularly, and continues mounting till strength and life are totally exhausted, when she drops at the feet of her inhuman persecutors."
We have, however, not yet exhausted the allusions to falcony in Petrucio's speech. "I have a way to man my haggard," he says. "To man" was the technical term for gaining the mastery. An unmanned, that is, an untrained hawk, was called a haggard.
"If I do prove her haggard.
Though that her jesses were my dear heart strings,
I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune."
Thus, in his suspicious moment, Othello compares his wife to a haggard hawk. Oftentimes a hawk that had not been properly trained would turn aside while in the pursuit of prey in order to follow something else. This turning aside of a haggard was called checking, and is referred to in
