Artist Paints All 65 Birds From Shakespeare's Plays

A college conversation about Shakespeare's genius sparked an artistic journey that's now bringing the Bard's feathered friends to life in vibrant detail.

Artist Missy Dunaway is painting all 65 bird species mentioned in Shakespeare's plays and poems, from blackbirds to pelicans. Each acrylic ink piece captures not just the bird itself, but the rich symbolism and folklore that surrounded these creatures in the 1600s.

The project began during a chat with a friend when Dunaway marveled at how many birds Shakespeare referenced. "I said, 'Just look at how many birds he mentions,'" she recalls. "And that's just birds."

After finishing a Fulbright grant studying textiles in Turkey, Dunaway returned to this idea in 2021. She consulted two historical texts to build her complete list, including James Edmund Harting's 1871 master work, The Ornithology of Shakespeare.

Her paintings go beyond simple bird portraits. The blackbird sits framed in a yellow garland with butterflies, symbolizing its connection to springtime in A Midsummer Night's Dream. A gold rosary nestles in its nest, nodding to St. Kevin, an Irish saint linked to the species.

Each piece includes an essay exploring what Dunaway calls "the cultural consciousness of the time." People in Shakespeare's era lived much closer to nature, and birds carried deep meaning in their daily lives.

Take the pelican, Dunaway's favorite. Early modern folklore portrayed mother pelicans stabbing themselves to feed their young with their own blood, creating a powerful religious allegory. In Hamlet, Laertes references this myth when vowing to avenge his father's death.

Why This Inspires

Shakespeare's descriptions of birds reveal something remarkable about the playwright himself. Literary critic Caroline Spurgeon noted he showed "intense feeling and sympathy" for trapped or snared birds, unique among dramatists of his time.

This empathy for animals, especially horses and birds, set Shakespeare apart from his contemporaries. He understood suffering from the creature's perspective, a radical viewpoint for the 1600s.

The Folger Shakespeare Library recognized Dunaway's work with an Artistic Research Fellowship and displayed her paintings in a 2025 exhibition. Haylie Swenson, who reviewed early pieces, says she and Dunaway had "really fun philosophical discussions" about bridging early modern and contemporary science.

The project reveals how much fundamental animal knowledge people once held. Everyone could tell a nightingale from a lark, and they understood which weather brought kingfishers to their riverside perches.

Through her brush, Dunaway is recovering this lost connection between humans and nature, one feathered subject at a time.