Shakespeare and Precious Stones
"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."
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
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:
16 Collectanea rerum memorabilium, Cap. 15. "Noted in the present writer's "The Curious Lore of Precious Stones," Philadelphia and London, 1913, p. 18.
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