Shakespeare Referenced Dozens of Bird Species in His Work. This Artist Has Made It Her Mission to Paint Them All

Missy Dunaway’s colorful illustrations combine natural history, folklore and literature to depict the Bard’s birds

Michelle Mehrtens | Arts and Culture Correspondent

May 29, 2026

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Missy Dunaway’s idea to paint all of Shakespeare’s birds first took flight in college after a chat with a friend. During the conversation, while trying to quantify the playwright’s talent, Dunaway noted that he’d coined or popularized many common phrases, and then she cited his broad knowledge of nature. “I said, ‘Just look at how many birds he mentions,’” Dunaway recalls. “And that’s just birds.”

At the time, she was focused on other artistic projects, including studying textiles in Turkey on a Fulbright grant. But the imagery of the Bard’s birds stayed in the back of her mind. In 2021, after college, Dunaway returned to this vision and began her current project: “The Birds of Shakespeare,” a series of acrylic ink paintings depicting each bird in the playwright’s oeuvre.

To curate her roster of 65 fowl, Dunaway referred to two critical historical texts: James Edmund Harting’s 1871 master list, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, and Alexander Schmidt’s 1971 book, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary.

Her art blends literary interpretation with ornithological accuracy. She renders detailed birds, individual feathers, eggs and nests, and incorporates allusions to 16th- and 17th-century history and folklore, illuminating the world in which the famed dramatist wrote.

“People back then had so much experience with birds because bird life was more abundant and more enmeshed with human life,” notes Dunaway.

She also writes an accompanying essay for every piece to provide information on what she calls the “cultural consciousness of the time.”

In her painting of the blackbird, for example, she frames her subject in a yellow garland with leaves, berries and butterflies, symbolic of the bird’s connection to springtime. According to her supplemental essay, the animal pops up in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a comforting creature in a song. Historically called an “ouzel,” or “ousel,” the blackbird was linked to the Irish St. Kevin, a devout nature lover. Dunaway’s painting features a gold rosary embedded in the bird’s nest.

“What I love most about Shakespeare is that, since he’s such a maximalist for detail, he’s a really amazing time capsule if you like learning about the history of the early modern periods,” Dunaway says.

In early modern folklore, the pelican, Dunaway’s favorite bird, was a powerful symbol of motherhood and religion: Many stories portray a female pelican stabbing herself in the chest to feed her young with her own blood. Noting that this grisly image was an “allegory for the Eucharist,” Dunaway says that the visual moved her, deepening her appreciation for the bird and its mythic origins.

In Hamlet, Laertes, son of the murdered Polonius, passionately declares that he will act like a pelican to avenge his father’s death:

To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms
And, like the kind life-rend’ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood.

Shakespeare’s descriptions of birds “are remarkable for the intense feeling and sympathy they reveal for the trapped, limed or snared bird,” the literary critic Caroline F.E. Spurgeon writes in her journal article “The Use of Imagery by Shakespeare and Bacon.” She notes that he was “unique among the dramatists of his time” because he showed an “understanding of the animal’s point of view and sufferings which no one else in his age approaches. This is especially marked in the case of horses and birds, the two he loves best.”

Shakespeare grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, a rural market town lush with trees, flowers and birds, about 100 miles northwest of London. When he moved to the city, he continued to regularly interact with his local environment. Theaters in Southwark—like the Globe—inhabited undeveloped marshlands, and cormorants paddled in the Thames.

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Institute awarded Dunaway its Artistic Research Fellowship and displayed her work in a 2025 exhibition. Haylie Swenson, scholarly programs assistant at the Folger Institute, was one of the experts who reviewed Dunaway’s first paintings in late 2021. She says she and Dunaway had “really fun philosophical discussions” about early modern science versus contemporary science and how to “marry all those things together.”

Brian W. Ogilvie, a cultural historian of Europe, writes that early modern natural history was a “science of describing.” Rather than follow a rigid binary—human versus animal—early modern communities acknowledged a “larger cosmography,” the scholar Laurie Shannon explains in her article “The Eight Animals of Shakespeare; or, Before the Human.”

Swenson says that folklore can be a particularly helpful narrative tool linked to “real animal behavior,” highlighting connections in the natural world. She cites the kingfisher, a prominent bird in Shakespeare’s work. Kingfishers tend to perch above the river to better spot their prey, particularly on sunny, windless days when the water is clear. Early modern folklore often described the kingfisher as a bird that brought nice weather to an area.

During Shakespeare’s time, fundamental knowledge of animal behaviors and routines would have been common. Ingrid Rochon, a research assistant in the feather identification lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, points out the difference between the nightingale and the lark, both “fairly drab brown birds,” she says, but unlikely to be mistaken for one another. “As Shakespeare noted, one sings at night; one sings at morning,” says Rochon.

Indeed, Shakespeare depends on this wisdom to anchor a well-known scene in Romeo and Juliet. Midway through the play, the titular duo memorably squabble over whether the sun has risen, relying on bird calls to distinguish the change. Juliet says, “It is not yet near day. / It was the nightingale, and not the lark.” Worried about being caught in her room, Romeo argues, “It was the lark, the herald of the morn, / No nightingale.”

“A lot of times, the bird calls seem to be just as important to bird folklore as the way that they look or behave,” says Dunaway. While fine-tuning her list, she realized that she needed to include two types of owls: the screech owl and the tawny owl. Dunaway had noticed that Shakespeare mentions both “an owl that hoots and an owl that screeches—and screeching owls don’t hoot. So then I knew it was going to have to be two.”

By connecting the sciences and the arts, people can be “inspired to fully understand” nature and “perhaps protect it,” says Rochon.

“I think the humanities give us a little help in taking what is unique about those birds,” she adds, and “putting it into a relatable human context.”

For her project, Dunaway also sought on-the-ground experience with avian behavior. She volunteered at a wildlife center that rehabilitates birds, allowing her to interact with owls, cormorants and gray herons—all of which feature in Shakespeare’s plays.

In areas where different ecosystems overlap, like the shared boundary between forests and mountains, the environments heavily influence each other, says Dunaway. Such spaces tend to be rich in biodiversity. Dunaway believes that her intersecting passions—science, art, history—shape one another, too.

As a writer, Shakespeare repeatedly wove the natural world throughout his plays and poems, proving its inescapable power. Rochon, a proud birder herself, says that the ability to engage with nature is just outside our windows.

Michelle Mehrtens | Read More

Michelle Mehrtens is the manager of programming for Smithsonian Enterprises, where she oversees the production of original digital series for Smithsonian magazine.