Thumb-rings. These were generally broad gold rings worn on the thumb by important personages. Thus Falstaff (“1 Henry IV.” ii. 4) bragged that, in his earlier years, he had been so slender in figure as to “creep into an alderman’s thumb-ring;” and a ring thus worn—probably as more conspicuous—appears to have been considered as appropriate to the customary attire of a civic dignitary at a much later period. A character in the Lord Mayor’s Show, in 1664, is described as “habited like a grave citizen—gold girdle, and gloves hung thereon, rings on his fingers, and a seal ring on his thumb.”[756] Chaucer, in his “Squire’s Tale,” says of the rider of the brazen horse who advanced into the hall, Cambuscan, that “upon his thumb he had of gold a ring.” In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), Mercutio speaks of the
“agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman.”
It has been suggested that Shakespeare, in the following passage, alludes to the annual celebration, at Venice, of the wedding of the Doge with the Adriatic, when he makes Othello say (i. 2):
“But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea’s worth.”
This custom, it is said, was instituted by Pope Alexander III., who gave the Doge a gold ring from his own finger, in token of the victory by the Venetian fleet, at Istria, over Frederick Barbarossa, in defence of the Pope’s quarrel. When his holiness gave the ring, he desired the Doge to throw a similar ring into the sea every year on Ascension Day, in commemoration of the event.
Agate. This stone was frequently cut to represent the human form, and was occasionally worn in the hat by gallants. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2) Falstaff says: “I was never manned with an agate till now”—meaning, according to Johnson, “had an agate for my man,” was waited on by an agate.
Carbuncle. The supernatural lustre of this gem[757] is supposed to be described in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3), where, speaking of the ring on the finger of Bassianus, Martius says:
“Upon his bloody finger he doth wear
A precious ring, that lightens all the hole,
Which, like a taper in some monument,
Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks,
And shows the ragged entrails of the pit.”
In Drayton’s “Muses’ Elysium” (“Nymphal.” ix.) it is thus eulogized:
“That admired mighty stone,
The carbuncle that’s named,
Which from it such a flaming light
And radiancy ejecteth,
That in the very darkest night
The eye to it directeth.”