Birdlime: Sticky Entrapments in Renaissance Drama

Summary

Eu'n as a bird that is with birdlime caught,

Doth beate her wings, and striues, and doth not cease

Vntill she hath her selfe all ouerwrought,

And quite intangled in the slimie grease. . . .

Renaissance theater held a mirror up to its audiences, reflecting the anxieties, emotions, and beauty of life, often in unsettling and challenging ways. Because theater served as a space for critiquing contemporary political, social, and religious structures as well as the personal challenges of life in this rapidly changing and often unstable society, much of the playwrights' subject material sprang from experiences of quotidian English life and landscape. Tapping into such shared daily experiences and natural phenomena provided cultural touch points that, as easily identified and widely understood metaphors, served to reinforce the sense of community in the audience and to propel catharsis and self-examination for individual spectators.

One such recurring image imported onto the stage from a common cultural vocabulary is the bird that has been trapped by alighting on a twig or string coated in sticky birdlime. Audiences were familiar with the picture of a bird caught by a hidden limed twig or string, crying and struggling to free itself, only to become more entangled in the sticky trap, sometimes to the point of ripping out its feathers.