By Any Other Name

Falcons appear several times in By Any Other Name and represent women’s status in Elizabethan society and their pursuit of agency and freedom. When Emilia comes to live with Hunsdon as his mistress, his hunting falcons enchant her. The falconer tells her, “Falcons be ladies” (82), meaning that the ones kept are always female. He explains the mechanics of keeping them to hunt, and Emilia is struck by the contrast between the birds’ available freedom and the way they are kept hooded and in the dark. Falconers also keep the birds hungry so that they will be willing to hunt. John tells her that defective birds are killed: “Well, no use keepin’ a girl that can’t serve her purpose, is there?” (83). His repeated use of “girl” and “ladies” to refer to the birds underscores the parallels between their captivity and Elizabethan women’s limited freedoms. Emilia writes a poem musing on the falcon’s captivity, an excerpt from The Taming of the Shrew, when Petruchio brags about how he will tame his wife, Kate, by speaking about a falcon he owns: “Another way I have to man my haggard / To make her come and know her keeper’s call” (83). He also compares his tame falcon to wild kites “[t]hat bate and beat and will not be obedient” (83). As she writes the poem, Emilia thinks about the tragedy of the falcon that could fly free but has been in captivity so long that she returns to her keeper’s hand.

When Hunsdon takes her to Mary Sidney’s salon, she begins to envision herself as an author, and that night she dreams of the falcon going free and losing its jesses: “Emilia stared at the sky, watching the bird fly away, growing smaller and smaller until it scraped the face of the sun” (119). Writing becomes, for Emilia, a means of pursuing freedom. When Emilia begins to write plays and meet with Christopher Marlowe, their meeting place is fittingly called The Falcon Inn. This is also where she first barters with Shakespeare to have her work published. The title of the inn emphasizes the idea that Emilia is pursuing her freedom as best she can in her limited circumstances. Toward the novel’s end, one of the female pupils in her school asks Emilia why she bothers to educate them when they will all end up married off. Emilia tells her the story of a kite that was trapped in the palace and killed itself flying into the glass. The girl finds it a “terrible story,” but Emilia continues and explains that the windowpane shattered every time someone tried to fix it. She tells her student, “Escape may not be possible in my lifetime. Mayhap I am like that bird, beating against the window for naught. But you—or your daughter, or your daughter’s daughter—may be the one to fly through the hole” (443). Though Emilia sees herself as a falcon who has lost the taste for freedom, she hopes that her work will allow future women to have lives of their own, not ruled by men. To her, these birds of prey represent the current and future possibilities for women’s lives.