Lizard's Leg and Howlet's Wing

In the film version of the story Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Hogwart's choir at the start sings a song that concludes with the line: "Something wicked this way comes" (Columbus, Heyman, Radcliffe & Cuarón, 2004). This line is copied from Shakespeare's opening scene in act IV of Macbeth, where the three witches are brewing up something nasty in their cauldron, but oddly missing from Shakespeare's list of ghoulish ingredients are spiders.

In "Smart approach to house spider survey", Ella Davies reports that biologists at York University studying British spiders have found, using results from a smart phone app which allows anyone to photograph and send a report of a spider sighting to the team, that the different species of house spiders appear to be becoming sexually active and hunting for mates earlier than in the past.

Although I think it's fascinating how widely and variously apps are now being put to use, and how modern technology is helping us to learn far more than ever before about the world around us, even such humble things as the behaviour of house spiders, this was not what I first thought of when I saw the article title on the BBC. No: I first thought of my mother, closely followed by Shakespeare's play.

Dinner at home

My family in Australia live in the country. It's a beautiful area about 700 kms north of Sydney. Our home is surrounded on three sides by the Richmond River, its banks lined with trees. This provides water for the crops and cattle that were my father's main business. Happily for us kids, my parents also left some of the land uncleared for agriculture: we used to love exploring in the virgin scrub, remembering which berries were safe to eat, watching out for the deadly snakes, and trying to avoid getting tangled in spider webs. Less happily, my mother hates spiders. She is, in fact, at least a bit arachnophobic, or perhaps just obsessive-compulsive. I remember her with can of insecticide in hand blasting away at any spider that ventured into her house, and living where we did, there a lot of spiders that wanted to make their homes in our family home. They came to a sticky end. And to help out, once a year she had the whole house professionally fumigated: it stank, and I'm really not sure that the lingering fumes of insecticide were the best thing for us children to be inhaling. We used to laugh at her when she even took her can of insecticide out to wage war on the spiders and other small creatures in her gardens. She's mellowed a bit with age, but even in her eighties, I sometimes come across her with a can in hand in her garden. I don't think she would be likely to help out an Australian equivalent of the British scientists: for her, a good house spider is a dead one.

I rather like spiders, and never intentionally kill the few that spin webs in my condo., where they seem to favour the bathroom, perhaps because other insects are more likely to wander in there through the window I normally leave open. They didn't worry me much as a child, either, even though I knew some were dangerous. Most are not dangerous, although it was a bit annoying walking at night and suddenly being entangled in a very strong web that had been strung between a couple of trees. I think some of the spiders at my family home aimed to catch pretty large snacks. But none of them ever tried to eat me.

However, as Davies notes in her article, many people are afraid of spiders, which is why, when I just reread act IV, scene 1, I was a little surprised to see that Shakespeare really doesn't mention spiders in his list of gross, disgusting, and repellent things for the witches to cook up as they are preparing to lead King Macbeth to his tragic end when he comes seeking advice from them, having already killed Duncan, the former king of Scotland, who was his house guest, because of a prophecy the witches make at the start of the play.

In fact, Macbeth is such a violent, blood soaked play that I'm surprised the sort of bossy people who want to ban violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and the like have not also tried to ban this and most of Shakespeare's other great plays. I'm very glad that any such efforts to ban has failed. English literature, and the world, would be a much more boring place without Macbeth murdering a king at his bloody minded wife's insistence, then having his best friend murdered, and so on, with a caste that includes not only the gruesome witches, but also ghosts, battles and generally lots of action leading to the inevitable bloody conclusion. Like GTA, Macbeth has everything to hold the attention of your average school boy, except spiders: there are no spiders in Macbeth. They're all laying wait to vex my mother.

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Reference

Columbus, C., Heyman, D.,  Radcliffe, M. (producers) & Cuarón, A. (director). (2004). Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. United Kingdom: Warner Bros. Pictures.

Davies, E. (2013, September 13). Smart approach to house spider survey. BBC Nature Features. Retrieved September 18 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/23898679