“I am disgrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here;
Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear,
The which no balm can cure, but his heart-blood
Which breath’d this poison.”
Once more, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), Benvolio relates how
“one fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.”
Cataract. One of the popular names for this disease of the eye was the “web and the pin.” Markham, in his “Cheap and Good Husbandry” (bk. i. chap. 37), thus describes it in horses: “But for the wart, pearle, pin, or web, which are evils grown in or upon the eye, to take them off, take the juyce of the herb betin and wash the eye therewith, it will weare the spots away.” Florio (“Ital. Dict.”) gives the following: “Cataratta is a dimnesse of sight occasioned by humores hardened in the eies, called a cataract or a pin and a web.” Shakespeare uses the term in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2), where Leontes speaks of
“all eyes blind
With the pin and web, but theirs;”
and in “King Lear” (iii. 4), alluding to “the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet,” says, “he gives the web and the pin.”[600] Acerbi, in his “Travels” (vol. ii. p. 290), has given the Lapland method of cure for this disease. In a fragment of an old medical treatise it is thus described: “Another sykenes ther byth of yezen; on a webbe, a nother a wem, that hydyth the myddel of the yezen; and this hes to maners, other whilys he is white and thynne, and other whilys he is thykke, as whenne the obtalmye ne is noght clene yhelyd up, bote the rote abydyth stylle. Other whilys the webbe is noght white but rede, other blake.”[601] In the Statute of the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII. a pin and web in the eye is recited among the “customable diseases,” which honest persons, not being surgeons, might treat with herbs, roots, and waters, with the knowledge of whose nature God had endowed them.
Chilblains. These are probably alluded to by the Fool in “King Lear” (i. 5): “If a man’s brains were in’s heels, were’t not in danger of kibes?” Hamlet, too, says (v. 1): “the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.”
Deformity. It was an old prejudice, which is not quite extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are marked by nature as prone to mischief. Thus, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), Margaret says of Richard, Duke of Gloster:
“Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that was seal’d in thy nativity
The slave of nature, and the son of hell.”
She calls him hog, in allusion to his cognizance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare’s day for a deformed person was a “stigmatic.” It denoted any one who had been stigmatized, or burned with an iron, as an ignominious punishment, and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature has set a mark of deformity. Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), Queen Margaret says: