Birds of Shakespeare: The loon

Folger Shakespeare Library: For August, we visit the loon, my favorite summertime bird. Despite this bird’s reputation for having a laughing call, there is nothing funny about its appearance in Shakespeare’s collected works. The Bard mentions this handsome diver just once, in Macbeth. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most bird-adorned plays, with 23 avian references, placing it behind Hamlet (24), The Taming of the Shrew (25), Romeo and Juliet (26), Troilus and Cressida (27), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (27), and Henry VI Part 3 (28).1 Compared to its overall word count, it has the second-highest bird density after A Midsummer Night’s Dream.