17, col. B, line 32.

Laced with silver, set with pearls.
_Much Ado About Nothing_, Act iii, sc. 4.
"Comedies", p. 112, col. B, line 65.

Moreover, we have a simile which might almost make us suppose that
Shakespeare knew something of the details of the pearl fisheries, when
the oysters are piled up on shore and allowed to decompose, so as to
render it easier to get at the pearls, for he makes one of his
characters say, speaking of an honest man in a poor dwelling, that he
was like a "pearl in your foul oyster". (_As You Like It_, Act v,
sc. 4.)

In the strange transformation told of in Ariel's song, the bones of
the drowned man have been turned to coral, and his eyes to pearls
(_Tempest_, Act i, sc. 2). The strange and sometimes morbid
attraction of opposites finds expression in a queer old English
proverbial saying given in the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_:
"Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes". The likeness to
drops of dew appears where we read of the dew that it was "Decking
with liquid pearl the bladed grass" (_Midsummer Night's Dream_,
Act i, sc. 1), and a little later in the same play we read the
following injunction:

I most go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act ii, sc. 1.
First Folio, "Comedies", p. 148, col. A, line 38.

And later still we have the lines:

That same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls.
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act iv, sc. 1.
"Comedies", p. 157, col. B, line 10.

The pearl as a simile for great and transcendent value, perhaps
suggested by the Pearl of Great Price of the Gospel, is used of Helen
of Greece in the lines (_Troilus and Cressida_, Act ii, sc. 2):

She is a pearl
Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships.
At end of "Histories", page unnumbered
(p. 596 of facsimile), Col. A, line 19.

This being an allusion to the Greek fleet sent out under Agamemnon and
Menelaus to bring back the truant wife from Troy. The idea of a
supremely valuable pearl is also apparent in the lines embraced in
Othello's last words before his self-immolation as an expiation of the
murder of Desdemona, where he says of himself:[1]

Whose hand
Like the ba