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Shakespeare and Precious Stones
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, 1. 83):
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
This is followed very closely by Shakespeare,
with the substitution of "pearl" for "face."
She [Helen] is a pearl,
Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships.
Troilus and Cressida, Act ii, sc. 2,1. 82.
First Folio, at end of "Histories," unnumbered page
(596 of facsimile), col. A, line 19.
The greatest of the world's poets lived in a period midway between the highest development of Renaissance civilization and the foundation of our modern civilization, and he was thus at once heir to the rich treasures of a glorious past, and endowed with a poetic, or we might say a prophetic insight that makes his works appeal as closely to the readers of to-day as to those of his own time. 4 * 49
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