This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Nightingale, lark, falcon, crow, snipe, loon, sidelene, seagull, heron, turtledove, magpie.

What do these birds all have in common? Well, here's a hint, in the form of a quote. The cuckoo then on every tree

mocks married men, for thus sings he. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. That's right. All these birds appear in

the works of William Shakespeare, which is perhaps a fancy way of saying that they were all

common knowledge in Elizabethan

England. Throughout the bard's works, birds are a flexible metaphor. They're symbols for

pining love, for men and women behaving like fools, for the devastation wrought by war. More than

60 species of birds come up this way. Romeo and Juliet famously argue over the call of a

nightingale or a lark, an argument that stands for the fear that dawn has come and Romeo must

flee for his life. Over the years, Shakespeare's work has been viewed through various

cultural lenses and experienced growing pains when it traveled from England to America.

As the new cultural identity of the United States emerged, British actors looked down on

Americans trying to perform the Bard's greatest works. Different acting styles emerged,

and arguments within the theatrical world began that continue to this present day. But did you know that Shakespeare's

influence on the new world was a little more than cultural. There was even an environmental

impact as well. In 1890, 51 years after the Macbeth-inspired Astor Place riots that we've

already covered on this show, a man named Eugene Shefflin

...