In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Nice Valour” it is so used:
“A lady of my hair cannot want pitying.”
Hands. Various superstitions have, at different times, clustered round the hand. Thus, in palmistry, a moist one is said to denote an amorous constitution. In “Othello” (iii. 4) we have the following allusion to this popular notion:
“Othello. Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.
Desdemona. It yet has felt no age, nor known no sorrow.
Othello. This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart.”
Again, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2), Iras says: “There’s a palm presages chastity;” whereupon Charmian adds: “If an oily palm be not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot scratch mine ear.” And, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 2), Dromio of Syracuse speaks of barrenness as “hard in the palm of the hand.”
A dry hand, however, has been supposed to denote age and debility. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2) the Lord Chief Justice enumerates this among the characteristics of such a constitution.[917]
In the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), Launcelot, referring to the language of palmistry, calls the hand “the table,” meaning thereby the whole collection of lines on the skin within the hand: “Well, if any man in Italy have a fairer table, which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have good fortune.” He then alludes to one of the lines in the hand, known as the “line of life:” “Go to, here’s a simple line of life.”
In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 5) palmistry is further mentioned: