“Next the clown doth out-rush
With the beard of the bush.”
According to an old superstition, much hair on the head has been supposed to indicate an absence of intellect, a notion referred to by Antipholus of Syracuse, in the “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 2): “there’s many a man hath more hair than wit.” In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1), the same proverbial sentence is mentioned by Speed. Malone quotes the following lines upon Suckling’s “Aglaura,” as an illustration of this saying:[916]
“This great voluminous pamphlet may be said
To be like one that hath more hair than head;
More excrement than body: trees which sprout
With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit.”
Steevens gives an example from “Florio:” “A tisty-tosty wag-feather, more haire than wit.”
Excessive fear has been said to cause the hair to stand on end: an instance of which Shakespeare records in “Hamlet” (iii. 4), in that celebrated passage where the Queen, being at a loss to understand her son’s strange appearance during his conversation with the Ghost, which is invisible to her, says:
“And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up, and stands on end.”
A further instance occurs in “The Tempest” (i. 2), where Ariel, describing the shipwreck, graphically relates how
“All, but mariners,
Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,
Then all a-fire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
Was the first man that leap’d.”
Again, Macbeth says (i. 3):
“why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair?”