Crocodile tears

Crocodile tears, or superficial sympathy, is a false, insincere display of emotion such as a hypocrite crying fake tears of grief. The phrase derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey, and as such is present in many modern languages, especially in Europe where it was introduced through Latin. While crocodiles do have tear ducts, they weep to lubricate their eyes, typically when they have been out of water for a long time and their eyes begin to dry out. However, evidence suggests this could also be triggered by feeding.

Quotes

• In that country and by all Inde be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.
  • Sir John Mandeville, Travels, Ch. XXVIII

• As when a wearie traveller that strayes
  By muddy shore of broad seven-mouthed Nile,
  Unweeting of the perillous wandring wayes,
  Doth meete a cruell craftie Crocodile,
  Which in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile,
  Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender teares:
  The foolish man, that pitties all this while
  His mournefull plight, is swallowed up unawares,
  Forgetfull of his owne, that mindes anothers cares.
  • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Canto V

• QUEEN MARGARET:
  Free lords, cold snow melts with the sun's hot beams.
  Henry my lord is cold in great affairs,
  Too full of foolish pity, and Gloucester's show
  Beguiles him as the mournful crocodile
  With sorrow snares relenting passengers,
  Or as the snake roll'd in a flowering bank,
  With shining chequer'd slough, doth sting a child
  That for the beauty thinks it excellent.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, III, 1

• OTHELLO:
  O devil, devil!
  If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
  Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.
  • William Shakespeare, Othello, IV, 3

• LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?
  MARK ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.
  LEPIDUS: What colour is it of?
  MARK ANTONY: Of its own colour too.
  LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent.
  MARK ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, 7

• Ellinor the Cooke, an Indian Negro woman, attended mee, for she being a Christian drudge, had more liberty to visit mee, than the slavish Infidell: who certainly (under God) prolonged then my languishing life, conveighing me for foure weekes space, once a day some lesse or more nourishment, and in her pocket a bottle glasse of Wine. Being no wayes semblable to the soule betraying teares of her Crocodilean sex which the Spanish Proverbe prettily avoucheth: las mugeres, engannan a los hombres, dellas lastimandoles, con sus lagrimas fingidas; dellas hallagandoles, con Palabras lesongeras: to wit, Women deceave men, some of them, grieving them with their fayned teares, and other fawning on them with flattering words.
  • William Lithgow, Rare Adventures & Painful Peregrinations, X, 478

• AENEAS:
  What shall lost Aeneas do?
  How, Royal Fair, shall I impart
  The God's decree, and tell you we must part?
  DIDO:
  Thus on the fatal Banks of Nile,
  Weeps the deceitful crocodile
  Thus hypocrites, that murder act,
  Make Heaven and Gods the authors of the Fact.
  • Henry Purcell & Nahum Tate, Dido and Aeneas (1689)