Meaning & Analysis
Eating hare is believed to make a person cheerful for a week or improve their looks—producing a fair, lively complexion.
Insights
Dietary charisma
Treats certain foods as conferring visible charm—radiance, amiability, good spirits—so that consumption becomes a shortcut to social allure.
Sympathetic transfer
Assumes properties migrate from animal to eater; the hare’s quickness and lively blood are imagined to kindle brightness and mirth in the human face.
Ritualized optimism
Frames eating as a timed charm (‘seven days’) against dullness or gloom, turning a meal into a calendar-bound promise of good cheer.
Status signaling
Links particular game to refined complexion and ‘looking fair,’ implying that access to certain dishes doubles as a mark of cultivation.
Humoral crossfire
Early modern dietetics split on hare: one tradition brands it ‘melancholy, dry, hard of digestion’ (darkening mood), while this counter-saying grants it cosmetic and cheery effects for a week. The clash shows proverb-versus-proverb as a live folk debate over bodies and temperament.
Seven-day spell
‘Seven days’ borrows biblical and folkloric completeness; a week is a natural unit for promising efficacy without absurd permanence—long enough to be felt, short enough to be plausible.
Italian byword and social optics
Reports of Italian usage—‘he has eaten a hare’ meaning a fair or handsome look—reveal how cuisine and beauty talk intertwine, turning diet into a witty compliment or insinuation at table.
Ethnographic edges
Notes that some groups avoid hare altogether (e.g., Moors, in period sources), reminding us that dietary lore is as much identity and religion as physiology.
Proto-psychology of glow
Heavy, rich meals can produce flushed skin and convivial mood; feasting contexts (company, wine, warmth) may supply the ‘laughter,’ with the animal serving as the memorable emblem that carries the credit.
Rhetorical Devices
Hyperbole
‘Laughs seven days’ amplifies a transient lift into a week-long transformation, giving the promise sparkle and mnemonic force.
Temporal formula
The fixed time window (‘seven days after’) reads like a charm or prescription, lending faux-clinical precision to folklore.
Synecdoche
‘Hare’ stands for a class of game and for the imagined qualities (speed, liveliness) transferred to the eater’s visage and mood.
Antithetical resonance
By contradicting the ‘hare is melancholy meat’ strand, the proverb gains bite through implied debate—cheer vs. gloom—inviting listeners to choose their camp.
Euphonic balance
The light, trochaic swing of ‘eats a hare / laughs seven days’ gives the line a convivial, toast-like cadence suited to table talk.
Transcription
Quotations
Leporem non edit.
It is a receiued opinion, that vse of Hares fleshe procureth beautie, fresh colour, and cheerfull countenance for a seuen-night space: in so much as the Italians haue a by-word, which speaketh thus of a faire man, He hath eaten an Hare.
Hare.. maketh a man to looke amiably, according to the prouerbe: He hath swallowed up a Hare: But it is vnwholesome for lazy and melancholike men.
And the common sort of people are persuaded, that the meat of this kind of venison, hare's flesh, causeth them that feed upon it, to looke faire, lovely, and gracious, for a weeke togither afterwards.
For the Moors eat no hare's flesh.
Who eateth hares, laughs for seven daies together.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.