Virtual Grub Street: Shakespeare’s Crocodile Tears.

While I was picking through my notes to write the portion of Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff about Shakespeare’s use of a “crocodile tears” image in the 1589 version of Hamlet, it could only come to mind that he found the image so attractive that he used variations upon in it a number of plays. The variation in the 1589 version that we possess in German translation follows:

HAMLET. You weep? Prythee weep not, they are but crocodiles tears.[1]

It is perhaps most closely related, among Shakespeare’s works, to the quote from 2 Henry VI.

Gloucester's show

Beguiles him as the mournful crocodile

With sorrow snares relenting passengers,[2]

But just how much of 2 Henry VI was actually written by Shakespeare has long been a matter of debate. It must also be noted that the quote in the latter play is to a different effect and more detailed than any other crocodile tear image in Shakespeare. Still, an image recalling crocodile tears can be said to strongly suggest that he was the author of the passage and some portion at least of the play.

By best evidence, the idea of Crocodile tears originated in the 4^th century Greek bestiary of Physiologus.[3] The author of the work is actually anonymous. Physiologus is a Latinized form of the Greek word for “The Naturalist”. The manuscript was so popular that it was translated into Latin and the vulgar languages many times before Shakespeare’s day.

Those manuscript copies became the bases for entries in a number of Medieval encyclopedias, as well. Just which manuscript was used by which encyclopedist can often be determined by small differences in entries that are otherwise generally identical.

Like so much received knowledge from the Middle Ages, the old Greek’s mistakes were repeated again and again by in eye-witness and reputed eye-witness accounts. By the 1560s, the great seafarer John Hawkins noted the presence of crocodiles in the Rio de la Hacha, in Columbia. This he followed with his favorite bit of received knowledge about the beast.

His nature is euer when he would haue his praie, to crie, and sobbe like a christian bodie, to prouoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them, and thereupon came this prouerbe that is appleid vnto women when they weepe, Lachryma Crocodili [tear of the crocodile], the meaning whereof is, that as the Crocodile when he crieth, goeth then about most to deceiue, so doth a woman most commonly when she weepeth.

The adage of women weeping crocodile tears is not found in Physiologus. In Vincent of Burgundy’s Speculi maioris we find a nearly verbatim translation from the Greek naturalist.

Phisiologus. Happening upon a man, & being able to overcome him the crocodile eats him, & weeps as he does so.[4]

Slowly, over centuries, generations of less rigorous copyist’s had not been able to resist purling upon the original observation. By Hawkin’s time, at least, the crocodile was popularly said to cry, after the fashion of women, in order to lure men to their destruction. In this way the phrase “crocodile tears” was born.

Just what was Shakespeare’s own source for crocodile tears, it is difficult to be sure. There could well have been more than one. Perhaps, there is no need for a more precise source than general conversation among his peers. He seems to have been the rare author in late 1580s to early 1590s to have brought the phrase into his plays. Within the following decade it had been widely adopted by his fellows.

After the 1589 Hamlet he chose to refer to the adage more obliquely. Here, in a surprisingly modern image from Othello, the reader might be intended to see the tears themselves turn into crocodiles.

If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,

Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.[5]

The choice may have reflected the fact that he preferred to avoid what had become a cliché bawled in every vulgar mouth.

Long before the amateur naturalist cleric Edward Topsell had died (circa 1625) the phrase had become a “common proverb”.

The common proverb Crocodili lachrymae Crocodiles tears, justifieth the treacherous nature of this Beast, for there are not many brute Beasts that can weep, but such is the nature of the Crocodile, that to get a man within his danger, he will sob, sigh, and weep, as though he were in extremity, but suddenly he destroyeth him. Others say, that the Crocodile weepeth after he hath devoured a man. Howsoever it be, it noteth the wretched nature of hypocritical hearts, which before-hand will with faigned tears endevour to do mischief, or else after they have done it be outwardly sorry, as Judas was for the betraying of Christ, before he went and hanged himself.[6]

For all the Medieval mind was voracious for knowledge it was much too easily detoured into the realm of myth. Many centuries afterwards, the scientific mind found itself inadvertently still following those detours.

In the matter of the crocodile, even the Physiologus was long considered to have invented his less sexist crocodile tears. Only recently has it been verified that crocodile’s eyes shed protective tears when they leave the water… which they generally do in order to eat larger prey such as humans.

[1] Cohn, Albert. Shakespeare in Germany (1865). 275, 276. “HAMLET. Weint ihr? ach, lasts nur bleiben, es sind doch lauter Crocodillsthränen.”

[2] 2 Henry VI, III.i.

[3] De Naturis: Animalium

[4] Speculi maioris Vincentii Burgundi (1591), I.221. (XVII.106.) “Phisiologus. Crocodilus si quando inuenerit hominem, & postest eum vincere comedit eum, & postea super eum plorat.

[5] Othello, IV.i.

[6] Topsell, Edward, The history of four-footed beasts and serpents (1658). 688.