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Page 13
And the sea Pontus evermore floweth and runneth out into
Propontic, but the sea never retireth backe againe within
Pontus.
Othello replies thus to Iago's conjecture that he may change his mind
(Act iii, sc. 3):
Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love.
First Folio, "Tragedies", p. 326, col. B, lines 34-39.
There is, however, no trace of any familiarity on Shakespeare's part
with the precious stone lore of the Roman encyclop�dist, either from
the Latin text of his great "Historia Naturalis", or from the
translation published by Holland in 1601. This translator, who
Englished many of the chief Latin and Greek authors, Suetonius, Livy,
Ammianus Marcellinus, Plutarch's "Morals" and other works, was
pronounced by Fuller, in his "Worthies", to be "translator general in
his age", adding that "these books alone of his turning into English
will make a country gentleman a competent library". For his Ammianus
Marcellinus the Council of Coventry, his place of residence, paid him
�4, and �5 for a translation of Camden's "Britannia"--small sums,
indeed, for so much labor, but not so unreasonable when we think that
a half-century later the immortal Milton got but �5 for his "Paradise
Lost". He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had
studied and graduated; later he studied medicine, receiving a degree
of M.D., not from Oxford or Cambridge, however, but either from a
Scottish or foreign university.
Although Solinus, writing in the third century A.D., relies mainly
upon Pliny for his information on precious stones, still he here and
there gives evidence of a more critical spirit, as when he says of the
rock-crystal that the theory according to which it was frozen and
hardened water was necessarily incorrect, for it was to be found in
such mild climates as "Alabanda in Asia and the island of
Cyprus".[16] This is the more notable that the wholly incorrect view
persisted into the sixteenth century, so learned a writer as Lord
Bacon (d. 1626) restating it in his last work, "Sylva Sylvarum".
[Footnote 16: Collectanea rerum memorabilium, Cap. 15.]
One of the most curious gem-treatises, especially as a source of early
sixteenth-century beliefs in the magic properties of precious stones,
the "Speculum Lapidum" of Camillo Leonardo, published in Venice, 1502,
probably never came under Shakespeare's eye. Indeed, even in Italy it
seems to have been so neglected that Ludovico Dolci ventured to
publish a literal Italian version of the Latin original as his own
work in 1565. The English "Mirror of Stones", issued in 1750, is
frankly stated to be a translation of the Latin original bearing the
same name.[17]
[Footnote 17: Noted in the present writer's "The Curious Lore of
Precious Stones", Philadelphia and London, 1913, p. 18.]
In Marlowe's (1564-1593) "Hero and Leander", almost certainly written
before Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" (1593), although not published
until 1598, five years after Marlowe's death, "pearl tears" and the
"sparkling diamond" are used much in the same way as by Shakespeare,
as appears in the following verses:
Forth from those two translucent cisterns brake
A stream of liquid pearl, which down her face
Made milk-white paths.
Lines 296-298.
Why should you worship her! her you surpass
As much as sparkling diamonds flaring glass.
Lines 213,214.
There is a curious parallelism between a passage in _Troilus and
Cressida_, 1609, and one in Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_, 1588. Marlowe
wrote (sc. 14, l. 83):
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