Great White Pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus)

Painting Key

Fauna: 1 Great White Pelican and three chicks (Pelecanus onocrotalus)

Objects: 3 Great White Pelican feathers, down feathers, and 3 eggs

Plants mentioned by Shakespeare: Reeds (nesting material) and apricot

Shakespeare’s Pelican

Occurrences in text: 3

Plays: Hamlet, King Lear, Richard II

Name as it appears in the text: “pelican,” “pellicane”

The pelican, or pellicane, is found in Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays: Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard II, and the apocryphal King Edward III. Readers may expect the bird to be noted for its large appetite, a trait it shares with the cormorant and exceeds given its distinctive gular pouch. But in Shakespeare, the pelican is instead a symbol of maternal devotion.

According to legend, the pelican would pierce her breast with her beak to nourish her chicks from a self-inflicted wound.[1] Swounds! The mythical pelican could also revive dead chicks with its life-giving blood.[2] This image is found in bestiaries, manuscripts, and visual art spanning continents and centuries. Notably, we find it in De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (On The Art of Hunting with Birds), a Latin treatise on ornithology and falconry written in the 1240s by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.[3]

On the left, the title page of *Devotionis Augustinianae flamma, or, Certaine devout, godly, and learned meditations written, by the excellently-accomplisht gentleman, William Austin, of Lincolnes-Inne, Esquire* from 1633. On the right, a detail that includes a pelican feeding its young at the top of the cross, encircled in a nest of thorns. Folger Shakespeare Library

The pelican’s symbolism is found prominently in Christianity. In the Book of Psalms, Augustine describes Jesus as “a pelican in the wilderness.” In the King James Bible, Christ says to his disciples at the last supper “Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:27–28, KJV). The metaphor of drinking Christ’s blood forms the basis of Eucharistic symbolism and closely resembles the medieval legend of the self-wounding pelican.

A mother pelican feeding her chicks from a self-inflicted wound is a visceral and dramatic image, so it’s no wonder that the bird appears in moments of extreme stress and emotional intensity in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, Laertes invokes the pelican when he learns that his father, Polonius, has been murdered in the fourth act of Hamlet:

Hamlet (Act IV, Scene 5, Line 159)
KING: Good Laertes,
If you desire to know the certainty
Of your dear father, is ’t writ in your revenge
That, swoopstake, you will draw both friend and
foe,
Winner and loser?
LAERTES: None but his enemies.
KING: Will you know them, then?
LAERTES: To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms
And, like the kind life-rend’ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood
KING: Why, now you speak
Like a good child and a true gentleman.

Like the play’s titular character, Laertes vows to avenge his father’s death. In this excerpt, he declares he will punish his father’s enemies and embrace his father’s friends, like the “life-rendering’ pelican.” King Claudius confirms the pelican’s virtue by applauding Laertes for speaking “like a good child and true gentleman.”

The most famous reference to the pelican is in King Lear, a play about an aging monarch who abdicates his throne and divides his kingdom among his daughters. He proposes a public love test so he can divide the land according to which daughter loves him the most. Two daughters, Goneril and Regan, exaggerate their love to secure their inheritance, but his youngest and favorite daughter, Cordelia, rejects the performative game and is banished from the family. Once his eldest daughters assume control of his lands, they strip him of the last remnants of power and privilege, eventually casting him out of their homes as he descends into madness. Infuriated and betrayed, King Lear describes his kin as “those pelican daughters.”

King Lear (Act III, Scene 4, Line 73)

LEAR: Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air
Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!

KENT: He hath no daughters, sir.
LEAR: Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature
To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.
Is it the fashion that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?
Judicious punishment! ’Twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.

In this metaphor, Lear becomes the pelican, a symbol of self-sacrifice. But how should we interpret his “pelican daughters”? In a world where women are rarely granted power, can we fault Lear’s daughters for accepting their father’s gifts? Can we blame them for exaggerating their love for him when the honest daughter, Cordelia, is banished for speaking plainly? Lear himself is hardly innocent; he is rash, prideful, and unforgiving. Perhaps Regan and Goneril already recognized these qualities in their father and were wisely avoiding his spiteful nature.

The parallels between Lear’s daughters and pelican chicks have many layers: capturing the resentment of a father who is pecked clean by his offspring, and the offspring that are accepting a necessary gift for their survival that comes at a detrimental cost to the parent. It is worth mentioning that in ancient Egyptian mythology, the pelican was also seen as foolish—a fitting duality for Lear.[4]

An illustration of King Lear’s public love test with his daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia by William Francis Starling (1800-1850). Folger Shakespeare Library

The idea that the pelican chicks are aggressors is also present in Shakespeare’s Richard II. It appears in John of Gaunt’s final soliloquy:

Richard II (Act II, Scene 1, Line 131)
GAUNT: spare me not, my ⌜brother⌝ Edward’s son,
For that I was his father Edward’s son!
That blood already, like the pelican,
Hast thou tapped out and drunkenly caroused.
My brother Gloucester—plain, well-meaning soul,
Whom fair befall in heaven ’mongst happy souls—
May be a precedent and witness good
That thou respect’st not spilling Edward’s blood.
Join with the present sickness that I have,
And thy unkindness be like crooked age
To crop at once a too-long withered flower.
Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee!
These words hereafter thy tormentors be!—
Convey me to my bed, then to my grave.
Love they to live that love and honor have.
He exits, carried off by Attendants.

John of Gaunt, uncle to King Richard II, falls ill after his son, Bolingbroke, is banished by the king for unjust reasons. Gaunt uses his dying breath to chastise the King on his mistakes. He describes Richard as a pelican chick “drunkenly carousing” the power and status obtained from his parent’s royal bloodline.

Shakespeare may have been the first to shift the legend’s spotlight from the generous mother pelican to the devouring chicks. References to greedy pelican chicks did not appear in print before King Lear, but they surface in literary works thereafter. One example is found in the second volume of The Mirror for Magistrates by Joseph Haslewood, a poetic historical anthology that explores British legends and historical figures beginning with King Arthur. In the verse, there is a description of a painting of pelicans owned by Henry II, which he displayed as an insult to his ungrateful sons:[5]

The Mirror for Magistrtes (Vol ii, p. 132, ed. Haslewood, 1815)
Whereof to leaue a long memoriall
In minde of man euermore to rest,
A picture hee made and hung it in his hall
Of a pellicane sitting on his nest,
With four yong byrdes, three pecking at his brest,
With bloudy beakes, and furder did deuise,
The yongest byrde to pecke the father’s eyes.

Shakespeare’s Pelican and Scientific Accuracy

Pelicans do not, in fact, feed their young with their own blood. This seems like another opportunity to flag an ornithological mistake on Shakespeare’s part—a sign that he misunderstood avian behavior. However, literary texts can be a record of cultural values, not facts. The pelican’s role in folklore resonated with Shakespeare’s audience, so the symbolic imagery is what endures, regardless of biological accuracy.

But how did the pelican become the most famous bird in folklore to feed their young with blood? James Edmund Harting offers a theory: Perhaps the trait crossed over from the flamingo, the only bird to regurgitate bloody crop milk to feed hatchlings. At first, one may find the association between flamingos and pelicans difficult to accept, and several scholars have likewise expressed skepticism. However, the connection merits exploration.

The flamingo is the only bird to give red crop milk to its chicks, so it would have to be implicated if the pelican’s folklore is rooted in natural behavior, like many avian fables are. As it turns out, the pelican and flamingo enjoy each other’s company and can form giant flocks together. Moreover, the Great White Pelican’s plumage turns a soft pink during the breeding season—remarkably similar to the lighter shades of flamingo plumage. While it is unlikely that the colossal pelican was mistaken for the dainty flamingo, there is merit to the idea that these two birds could be associated with one another and, as a result, believed to share traits.

There are many colorful eye-witness accounts describing pelicans and flamingos written in the diaries and letters of famous explorers across the globe, from Francois Pyrard de Laval (Maldvies, 1653) to John Smith (North America, 1622).[6] Sir John Hawkins gives this account of viewing a pelican in Guinea in 1564:

Of the sea-fowle above all other not common in England, I noted the pellicane, which is fained to be the lovingst bird that is; but for all this lovingnesse she is very deformed to beholde; for she is of colour russet; notwithstanding in Guinea I have seene of them as white as a swan, having legs like the same, and a body like a hearne, with a long necke, and a thick long beake, from the nether jaw whereof downe to the breast passeth a skinne of such a bignesse, as is able to reeive a fish as big as one’s though, and this her big throat and long bill both make her seem so ougly! [7]

Behind the Painting

I try to balance scientific accuracy with literary symbolism in my Birds of Shakespeare paintings, but in this case, I tossed aside the bird’s actual behavior and embraced the myth. The image of a pelican piercing its body to feed her young was too juicy to resist. I depicted the pelican in its pink-hued breeding plumage to highlight its shared qualities with flamingos, and to create a striking contrast against the dark hatchlings. Great White Pelican chicks are born naked, and their skin becomes blue-black as their black down develops; a detail confirmed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s image archive.[8]

It is a tertiary goal of my project to include every plant mentioned by Shakespeare across the full span of bird paintings. For the pelican, I decided to include the apricot. This fruit does not have any connection to the pelican in nature that I know of, but it strikes a similar symbolic tone in Richard II.

Richard II (Act III, Scene 4, Line 32)
GARDENER, to one Servingman:
Go, bind thou up young dangling apricokes
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight.
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.—
Go thou, and like an executioner
Cut off the heads of too-fast-growing sprays
That look too lofty in our commonwealth.
All must be even in our government.
You thus employed, I will go root away
The noisome weeds which without profit suck
The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.

In this scene, a royal gardener instructs an assistant to brace an apricot tree weighed down by its own fruit. He refers to the apricots as the tree’s “unruly children” burdening their parent—similarly to the greedy pelican chicks pecking their mother. This quiet vignette of domestic labor within a courtly history play enriches the world of the drama and also offers a symbolic tableau that mirrors the play’s themes. The gardener’s description of the overburdened tree becomes a metaphor for the faltering state of Richard II’s kingdom. It may also recall Richard himself, whom John of Gaunt earlier describes as an “unruly child,” likened to a pelican chick.

The pelican’s mythic sacrifice, entwined with both Christian iconography and Shakespearean tragedy, reveals how symbolic meaning can eclipse biological fact. Whether misattributed or deliberately reimagined, the pelican remains a powerful emblem of familial love, betrayal, and regeneration that projects the hopes, fears, and moral lessons of Shakespeare’s characters and audience.

Endnotes

[1] Harting, James Edmund, The Birds of Shakespeare, London: John Van Voorst, Paternoster Row, 1871, p.

[2] Phipson, Emma. Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time, Facsimile ed., Glastonbury: The Lost Library, 1883, p. 285

[3] Yapp, Brunsdon. Birds in Medieval Manuscripts. The British Library, 1981, p.100

[4] Harting, J., The Birds of Shakespeare, London: John Van Voorst, Paternoster Row, 1871, p.

[5] Phipson, Emma. Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time, Facsimile ed., Glastonbury: The Lost Library, 1883, p. 285

[6] Phipson, Emma. Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time, Facsimile ed., Glastonbury: The Lost Library, 1883, p. 286

[7] Phipson, Emma. Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time, Facsimile ed., Glastonbury: The Lost Library, 1883, p. 287

[8] “Great White Pelican Pelecanus onocrotalus,” Birds of the World, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/grwpel1/cur/introduction. Accessed 4 July 2025.