Folk-lore of Shakespeare by Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer (year 2 reading books .txt) 📖
- Author: Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer
- Performer: -
Book online «Folk-lore of Shakespeare by Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer (year 2 reading books .txt) 📖». Author Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer
Yellow hair, too, was in years gone by regarded with ill-favor, and esteemed a deformity. In ancient pictures and tapestries both Cain and Judas are represented with yellow beards, in allusion to which Simple, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), when interrogated, says of his master: “He hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard—a Cain-coloured beard.”[914]
In speaking of beards, it may be noted that formerly they gave rise to various customs. Thus, in Shakespeare’s day, dyeing beards was a fashionable custom, and so Bottom, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 2), is perplexed as to what beard he should wear when acting before the duke. He says: “I will discharge it in either your straw-colour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow.”[915]
To mutilate a beard in any way was considered an irreparable outrage, a practice to which Hamlet refers (ii. 2):
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?”
And in “King Lear” (iii. 7), Gloster exclaims:
To pluck me by the beard.”
Stroking the beard before a person spoke was preparatory to favor. Hence in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 3), Ulysses, when describing how Achilles asks Patroclus to imitate certain of their chiefs, represents him as saying:
As he, being drest to some oration.’”
Again, the phrase “to beard” meant to oppose face to face in a hostile manner. Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1), Douglas declares:
But I will beard him.”
And in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the Bishop of Winchester says to Gloster:
It seems also to have been customary to swear by the beard, an allusion to which is made by Touchstone in “As You Like It” (i. 2): “stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.”
We may also compare what Nestor says in “Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 5):
Our ancestors paid great attention to the shape of their beards, certain cuts being appropriated to certain professions and ranks. In “Henry V.” (iii. 6), Gower speaks of “a beard of the general’s cut.” As Mr. Staunton remarks, “Not the least odd among the fantastic fashions of our forefathers was the custom of distinguishing certain professions and classes by the cut of the beard; thus we hear, inter alia, of the bishop’s beard, the judge’s beard, the soldier’s beard, the citizen’s beard, and even the clown’s beard.” Randle Holme tells us, “The broad or cathedral beard [is] so-called because bishops or gown-men of the church anciently did wear such beards.” By the military man, the cut adopted was known as the stiletto or spade. The beard of the citizen was usually worn round, as Mrs. Quickly describes it in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), “like a glover’s paring-knife.” The clown’s beard was left bushy or untrimmed. Malone quotes from an old ballad entitled “Le Prince d’ Amour,” 1660:
With the beard of the bush.”
According to an old superstition, much hair on the head has been supposed to indicate an absence of intellect, a notion referred to by Antipholus of Syracuse, in the “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 2): “there’s many a man hath more hair than wit.” In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1), the same proverbial sentence is mentioned by Speed. Malone quotes the following lines upon Suckling’s “Aglaura,” as an illustration of this saying:[916]
To be like one that hath more hair than head;
More excrement than body: trees which sprout
With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit.”
Steevens gives an example from “Florio:” “A tisty-tosty wag-feather, more haire than wit.”
Excessive fear has been said to cause the hair to stand on end: an instance of which Shakespeare records in “Hamlet” (iii. 4), in that celebrated passage where the Queen, being at a loss to understand her son’s strange appearance during his conversation with the Ghost, which is invisible to her, says:
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up, and stands on end.”
A further instance occurs in “The Tempest” (i. 2), where Ariel, describing the shipwreck, graphically relates how
Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,
Then all a-fire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
Was the first man that leap’d.”
Again, Macbeth says (i. 3):
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair?”
And further on he says (v. 5):
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir
As life were in’t.”
In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) it is referred to by Suffolk as a sign of madness:
And, once more, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), Hastings declares:
Another popular notion mentioned by Shakespeare is, that sudden fright or great sorrow will cause the hair to turn white. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Falstaff, in his speech to Prince Henry, tells him: “thy father’s beard is turned white with the news.”
Among the many instances recorded to establish the truth of this idea, it is said that the hair and beard of the Duke of Brunswick whitened in twenty-four hours upon his hearing that his father had been mortally wounded in the battle of Auerstadt. Marie Antoinette, the unfortunate queen of Louis XVI., found her hair suddenly changed by her troubles; and a similar change happened to Charles I., when he attempted to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. Mr. Timbs, in his “Doctors and Patients” (1876, p. 201), says that “chemists have discovered that hair contains an oil, a mucous substance, iron, oxide of manganese, phosphate and carbonate of iron, flint, and a large proportion of sulphur. White hair contains also phosphate of magnesia, and its oil is nearly colourless. When hair becomes suddenly white from terror, it is probably owing to the sulphur absorbing the oil, as in the operation of whitening woollen cloths.”
Hair was formerly used metaphorically for the color, complexion, or nature of a thing. In “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1), Worcester says:
The quality and hair of our attempt
Brooks no division.”
In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Nice Valour” it is so used:
Hands. Various superstitions have, at different times, clustered round the hand. Thus, in palmistry, a moist one is said to denote an amorous constitution. In “Othello” (iii. 4) we have the following allusion to this popular notion:
Again, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2), Iras says: “There’s a palm presages chastity;” whereupon Charmian adds: “If an oily palm be not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot scratch mine ear.” And, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 2), Dromio of Syracuse speaks of barrenness as “hard in the palm of the hand.”
A dry hand, however, has been supposed to denote age and debility. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2) the Lord Chief Justice enumerates this among the characteristics of such a constitution.[917]
In the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), Launcelot, referring to the language of palmistry, calls the hand “the table,” meaning thereby the whole collection of lines on the skin within the hand: “Well, if any man in Italy have a fairer table, which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have good fortune.” He then alludes to one of the lines in the hand, known as the “line of life:” “Go to, here’s a simple line of life.”
In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 5) palmistry is further mentioned:
It was once supposed that little worms were bred in the fingers of idle servants. To this notion Mercutio refers in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), where, in his description of Queen Mab, he says:
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid.”
This notion is alluded to by John Banister, a famous surgeon in Shakespeare’s day, in his “Compendious Chyrurgerie” (1585, p. 465): “We commonly call them worms, which many women, sitting in the sunshine, can cunningly picke out with needles, and are most common in the handes.”
A popular term formerly in use for the nails on the ten fingers was the “ten commandments,” which, says Nares,[918] “doubtless led to the swearing by them, as by the real commandments.” Thus, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the Duchess of Gloster says to the queen:
I’d set my ten commandments in your face.”
In the same way the fingers were also called the “ten bones,” as a little further on in the same play, where Peter swears “by these ten bones.”
The phrase “of his hands” was equivalent to “of his inches, or of his size, a hand being the measure of four inches.” So, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), Simple says: “Ay, forsooth: but he is as tall a man of his hands as any is between this and his head,” “the expression being used probably for the sake of a jocular equivocation in the word tall, which meant either bold or high.”[919]
Again, in the “Winter’s Tale” (v. 2), the Clown tells the Shepherd: “I’ll swear to the prince, thou art a tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk; but I’ll swear it, and I would thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands.”
A proverbial phrase for being tall from necessity was “to blow the nail.” In “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 5) the king says:
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day, nor night.”
It occurs in the song at the end of “Love’s Labour’s Lost:”
Comments (0)