“Gaoler’s Daughter. Give me your hand.
Gerrold.Why?
Gaoler’s Daughter. I can tell your fortune.”
It was once supposed that little worms were bred in the fingers of idle servants. To this notion Mercutio refers in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), where, in his description of Queen Mab, he says:
“Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid.”
This notion is alluded to by John Banister, a famous surgeon in Shakespeare’s day, in his “Compendious Chyrurgerie” (1585, p. 465): “We commonly call them worms, which many women, sitting in the sunshine, can cunningly picke out with needles, and are most common in the handes.”
A popular term formerly in use for the nails on the ten fingers was the “ten commandments,” which, says Nares,[918] “doubtless led to the swearing by them, as by the real commandments.” Thus, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the Duchess of Gloster says to the queen:
“Could I come near your beauty with my nails
I’d set my ten commandments in your face.”
In the same way the fingers were also called the “ten bones,” as a little further on in the same play, where Peter swears “by these ten bones.”
The phrase “of his hands” was equivalent to “of his inches, or of his size, a hand being the measure of four inches.” So, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), Simple says: “Ay, forsooth: but he is as tall a man of his hands as any is between this and his head,” “the expression being used probably for the sake of a jocular equivocation in the word tall, which meant either bold or high.”[919]