The Swift, Savage, Maternal Tiger
What did early modern English readers learn about tigers? These exotic animals were thought to be exceptionally fast, ferocious, and possessing a killer maternal instinct. Some people falsely believed that they were the feline equivalent to a tribe of Amazonian women: fierce female warriors who could thrive (and even procreate) without male counterparts. Edward Topsell begins his detailed entry on the tiger by explaining that the animal’s name derives from the Armenian word Tigris, which means both a swift arrow and a great river. The first central characteristic of the tiger, therefore, is its speed. In strength and swiftness, Topsell emphasizes, tigers excel all other four-footed beasts. He continues to describe the tiger’s physical appearance and symbolism in literature as follows:
The similitude of the body of this beast is like to a lioness, for so is the face and mouth; the lower part of the forehead, and gnashing or grinning teeth, and all kind of creatures which are ravening, are footed like a cat, their neck short, and their skins full of spots, not round like a panther, nor yet diverse-colored, but altogether of one color and square, and sometimes long, and therefore this beast and the panther are of singular note among all the four-footed: yet Solinus [author of a classical Latin text known as “The Wonders of the World”] and Seneca [ancient Roman philosopher] seem to be of opinion that their spots are sometimes of diverse colors both yellow and black […] It were needless to speak of their crooked claws, their sharp teeth, and divided feet, their long tail, agility of body, and wildness of nature which getteth all their food by hunting. It hath been falsely believed that all tigers be females, and that there are no males among them, and that they engender in copulation with the wind.
[…] Generally the nature of this beast is according to the epithets of it: sharp, untamed, cruel, and ravenous, never so tamed but sometimes they return to their former natures, yet the Indians do every year give unto their king tamed tigers and panthers, and so it cometh to pass that sometimes the tiger kisseth his keeper as Seneca writeth [in Moral Epistles to Lucilius]. […] The female bringeth forth many at once like a bitch, which she nourisheth in her den very carefully, loving them, and defending them like a lioness from the hunters, whereby she is many times ensnared and taken. It is reported by Aelianus [ancient Roman author of “On the Nature of Animals”]that when they hear the sound of bells and timbrels, they grow into such a rage and madness that they tear their own flesh from their backs. […] Only the tiger, the Indians say, can never be conquered because when he is hunted, he runneth away out of sight as fast as the wind. For this cause they diligently seek out the caves and dens of the tigers where their young ones are lodged, and then upon some swift horses they take them and carry them away. When the female tiger returneth and findeth her den empty, in rage she followeth after them by the foot, whom she quickly overtaketh, by reason of her celerity. The hunter, seeing her at hand, casteth down one of her whelps. The distressed angry beast, knowing that she can carry but one at once, first taketh up that in her mouth without setting upon the hunter, contented with that one, returneth with it to her lodging; having laid it up safe, back again she returned like the wind to pursue the hunter for the residue, who must likewise set her down another if he have not got into his ship, for except the hunter be near the water side and have a ship ready, she will fetch them all from him, one by one, or else it will cost him his life. Therefore that enterprise is undertaken in vain upon the swiftest horses in the world, except the waters come betwixt the hunter and the tiger. And the manner of this beast is, when she seeth that her young ones are shipped away, and she forever deprived of seeing or having them again, she maketh so great lamentation upon the seashore howling, braying, and ranking, that many times she dieth in the same place, but if she recover all her young ones again from the hunters, she departeth with unspeakable joy, without taking any revenge for their offered injury. For this occasion, the hunters do devise certain round spheres of glass, wherein they picture their young ones very apparent to be seen by the dam, one of these they cast down before her at her approach; she looking upon it, is deluded, and thinketh that her young ones are enclosed therein, and the rather, because through the roundness thereof it is apt to roll and stir at every touch, this she driveth along backwards to her den, and there breaketh it with her feet and nails, and so seeing that she is deceived, returneth back again after the hunters for her true whelps, whilst they in the mean season are safely harbored in some house, or else gone on shipboard.
[…] it was feigned, not without singular wit by the poets, that such persons as satisfy the fullness of their wrath in extremity of revenge, are transformed into tigers.
Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (London, 1658), Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries, Wikimedia Commons.
Secular and religious writers used the parable of the tiger and the glass to instruct readers about appropriate behavior. Richard Brathwaite invites parents to judge themselves against the maternal tiger, and the Anglican devotional writer Christopher Sutton uses the parable as Pulter does: to urge Christians not to forget God.
It is written of the tiger, though a beast of a savage and truculent nature, that when they take away the young one, they set looking glasses or some transparent models in the way to stay the pursuit of the she-tiger; wherein seeing herself represented by reflection of the glass, she there solaceth herself with the conceit of her own form, while the hunters make way for escape. Whence we may take a view of the tender affection of the savagest creature to her cubs is an imaginary reflection on their feature. These unfeignedly love those who came from them, and no doubt by a secret instinct of nature are equally requited by a thankful remonstrance returned to them; and shall the Parthian tiger retain more impressive characters of a tender nature than the most noble and rational creature?
The hunter, when he seeketh to take the tiger’s young (which is only one), is said to set up looking glasses where the tiger should pass along in seeking this young, which she doth sometimes by straying abroad, lose; finding in the glass a resemblance of herself, leaves the pursuit and loseth her young. This old hunter, perceiving man’s industry, in the conservation of that which is one and only one—his dear soul—would by many goodly shows make us neglect this religious care and stay ourselves upon every frivolous delight, so long that we clean forget where about we go and so hazard that which the prophet calleth most precious, even the redemption of our souls. But the provident Christian man, knowing how dangerous it must needs be for the bird to take delight amidst the gins and snares of the fouler, makes no stay upon these enticing evils, soars aloft, and taking the wings of contemplation, thinks of the joys of heaven, the pains of hell, his own death, and the death of the son of God, for the salvation of us all.
There are many tigers in early modern literature. Shakespeare uses tigers as metaphors for savage women when Albany calls Lear’s daughters “tigers” in King Lear, and Lavinia calls Tamora a “tiger” in Titus Andronicus. Below is a narrative poem, best known today as Shakespeare’s main source for Romeo and Juliet, that tells the story of ill-fated lovers whose family feud ultimately leads to their suicides. When Juliet takes a potion to fake her death, the Nurse is the first to find her and assumes she is dead. When she calls in Juliet’s mother, Lady Capulet responds like a tiger in this excerpt:
The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet
- Now out alas (the mother cried)
- And as a tiger wild,
- Whose whelps whilst she is gone
- Out of her den to prey,
- The hunter greedy of his game,
- Doth kill or carry away:
- So, raging forth she ran,
- Unto her Juliet’s bed,
- And there she found her darling and
- Her only comfort dead.
For more on tigers in early modern literature and culture, see David Thorley’s “Naming the Tiger in the Early Modern World” in Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 70, 2017, pp. 977-1066 and Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), especially pp. 94-97.