Hawk from a handsaw

February 29th, 2012 by admin

Page 2 of 2 | Previous page

Posted in columns, March 2012 | 8 comments

Previous post:
Next post:

8 comments on this post.

  1. Peter Cowen:

    March 8th, 2012 at 3:32 pm

    From G.K. Chesterton, Shakespeare and the Germans (public domain) :

    There is in Shakespeare something more godlike even than humour : something which the English call fun. The neglect of this by the Germans during the long night of German intellectual domination has produced some preposterous fruits in English, American and other criticism. 

    The notes in my school books used to be full of alternative explanations, frequently German, of such phrases as: ” I know a hawk from a hand-saw.” Grumpt says that ” hand-saw ” should obviously be heron-shaw, to put it in the same ornithological class with hawk; but Mumpt suggests that there may have been an Elizabethan tool called a hawk, to put it in the same mechanical class with hand-saw. 

    And all the time even a boy who had any flavour of literature, or any guess at the kind of man that Hamlet was supposed to be, could see at once that it was a joke. Hamlet said it as a piece of wild alliteration ; as he might have said: ” I know a baby from a blunderbuss ” ; or, ” I know a catfish from a croquet-hoop.” 

    By a deep and dry study of the million exaggerations, inconsistencies and ignorances of Shakespeare they build up a sort of rampart round the unfortunate poet to defend him from his real admirers ; for the sulky Ben Jonson had far more genuine sympathy with Shakespeare than the world-patronising Goethe.

    http://www.oldandsold.com/articles11/soldiers-8.shtml

  2. Candy Woodgate:

    March 10th, 2012 at 5:00 am

    to tell a hawk from a handsaw is to be able to distinguish between a carpentry tool and a plastering tool. A plasterers hawk is a board, about 30cm square with a handle in the centre on one side. the plasterer holds the wet plaster on the hawk and applies it in smaller amounts to the wall with another tool called a float.

  3. Clay Caldwell:

    May 31st, 2012 at 7:07 pm

    As was recently pointed out in a letter to the Wall Street Journal on 5/31/12 in response to the ornithological use of this term by Laura Jacobs in her book review…the hawk being referred to is more likely the mortar board Candy has referenced. Had Shakespeare been referring to a bird he probably would have said “I know a hawk from a hummingbird”…

  4. Tom Purdue:

    September 22nd, 2012 at 2:07 pm

    I live in Norfolk, and there is an old Norfolk word “harnser”, meaning a heron, which I believe became corrupted in Hamlet to “handsaw”. So I agree that the meaning of Hamlet’s comment is that he can tell a hawk from a heron, which makes a great deal more sense than comparing a bird to a carpentry tool!

  5. Anna S.:

    October 9th, 2012 at 3:38 am

    In response to your questions, yes I’ve heard someone use this phrase aloud; he used it very recently and has used it several times. The ‘world that I live in’ is one in which Canadians exist (I attend a US university, but we’re close enough that we get plenty of Canadian students as well). The person who said it was from Nunavut. It’s apparently a saying up there.

  6. Nathaniel Wander:

    October 15th, 2012 at 12:30 pm

    Given that the turtles in “Turtles from Jayes” were almost certainly turtledoves (as also in “The voice of the turtle shall be heard through the land.”), I would bet the metaphorical pair are avian hawks and herons.

    However, while Shakespeare would have been familiar with turtledove, jay, hawk and heron the chances of his knowing a hummingbird from a Hawker-Hunter are slim. Hummingbirds disappeared from most of the world 25 million years ago. Modern hummingbirds are confined to the Americas and only became know to Europeans in the course of the 16th century. How far that knowledge would have diffused by the start of the 17th century is anybody’s guess.

  7. Tony:

    March 29th, 2013 at 6:17 pm

    Shakespeare is a master of making words do extra work, and Hamlet is a play that can be peeled like an onion for deeper meanings. So it should come as no surprise that there is another dimension to the hawk and handsaw comparison.
    If we assume Hamlet is talking about a plasterer’s hawk, then by saying he can tell one tool from another, he is also saying he can recognize tools when he sees them. The subtext is that he is telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he knows they are tools for his uncle.

  8. Rox:

    May 1st, 2013 at 4:06 pm

    It’s a crafty pun, for goodness sake. It means BOTH the two birds AND the two tools.

    I was reminded of this, and looked it up on the internet today, having seen a hawk for sale in Aldi for £3 .

Leave a comment