off."[227]

[227] "To whistle off," or dismiss by a whistle; a hawk seems
to have been usually sent off in this way against the wind when
sent in pursuit of prey.

The word "check" alluded to above was a term in falconry applied to a
hawk when she forsook her proper game and followed some other of
inferior kind that crossed her in her flight[228]--being mentioned again
in "Hamlet" (iv. 7), where the king says:

"If he be now return'd
As checking at his voyage."[229]

[228] Dyce's "Glossary," p. 77; see "Twelfth Night," ii. 5.

[229] The use of the word is not quite the same here, because
the voyage was Hamlet's "proper game," which he abandons.
"Notes to Hamlet," Clark and Wright, 1876, p. 205.

Another common expression used in falconry is "tower," applied to
certain hawks, etc., which tower aloft, soar spirally to a height in the
air, and thence swoop upon their prey. In "Macbeth" (ii. 4) we read of

"A falcon, towering in her pride of place;"

in "2 Henry VI." (ii. 1) Suffolk says,

"My lord protector's hawks do tower so well;"

and in "King John" (v. 2) the Bastard says,

"And like an eagle o'er his aery[230] towers."

[230] See Dyce's "Glossary," p. 456; Harting's "Ornithology of
Shakespeare," p. 39; Tuberville's "Booke of Falconrie," 1611,
p. 53.

The word "quarry," which occurs several times in Shakespeare's plays, in
some instances means the "game or prey sought." The etymology has, says
Nares, been variously attempted, but with little success. It may,
perhaps, originally have meant the square, or enclosure (_carree_), into
which the game was driven (as is still practised in other countries),
and hence the application of it to the game there caught would be a
natural extension of the term. Randle Holme, in his "Academy of Armory"
(book ii. c. xi. p. 240), defines it as "the fowl which the hawk flyeth
at, whether dead or alive." It was also equivalent to a heap of
slaughtered game, as in the following passages. In "Coriolanus" (i. 1),
Caius Marcius says:

"I'd make a quarry
With thousands of these quarter'd slaves."

In "Macbeth" (iv. 3)[231] we read "the quarry of these murder'd deer;"
and in "Hamlet" (v. 2), "This quarry cries on havock."

[231] Also in i. 2 we read:

"And fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling,
Show'd like a rebel's whore."

Some read "quarry;" see "No