“Three times to-day my foot-cloth horse did stumble,
And started when he look’d upon the Tower,
As loath to bear me to the slaughter-house.”
In the same way, stumbling at a grave has been regarded as equally unlucky; and in “Romeo and Juliet” (v. 3), Friar Laurence says:
“how oft to-night
Have my old feet stumbled at graves.”
Hair. From time immemorial there has been a strong antipathy to red hair, which originated, according to some antiquarians, in a tradition that Judas had hair of this color. One reason, it may be, why the dislike to it arose, was that this color was considered ugly and unfashionable, and on this account a person with red hair would soon be regarded with contempt. It has been conjectured, too, that the odium took its rise from the aversion to the red-haired Danes. In “As You Like It” (iii. 4), Rosalind, when speaking of Orlando, refers to this notion:[913] “His very hair is of the dissembling colour,” whereupon Celia replies: “Something browner than Judas’s.”
Yellow hair, too, was in years gone by regarded with ill-favor, and esteemed a deformity. In ancient pictures and tapestries both Cain and Judas are represented with yellow beards, in allusion to which Simple, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), when interrogated, says of his master: “He hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard—a Cain-coloured beard.”[914]
In speaking of beards, it may be noted that formerly they gave rise to various customs. Thus, in Shakespeare’s day, dyeing beards was a fashionable custom, and so Bottom, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 2), is perplexed as to what beard he should wear when acting before the duke. He says: “I will discharge it in either your straw-colour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow.”[915]
To mutilate a beard in any way was considered an irreparable outrage, a practice to which Hamlet refers (ii. 2):
“Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?”
And in “King Lear” (iii. 7), Gloster exclaims:
“By the kind gods, ’tis most ignobly done
To pluck me by the beard.”