Extract

‘THE jewels of our father, with wash’d eyes / Cordelia leaves you.’ So Cordelia to Regan and Goneril in the first scene of King Lear.

Shakespeare occasionally refers to people as jewels.1 But Cordelia's words ring a suggestive bell. The persons in question here are a father and his daughters. Thus, it seems likely that Shakespeare is thinking of the famous anecdote from ancient Rome wherein the mother of the Gracchi, confronted by a woman keen on displaying her fancy jewelry, points to her sons and says, haec … ornamenta sunt mea (Val. Max. 4.4 praefatio), ‘these are my jewels’. The anecdote was certainly familiar in Shakespeare's day and is reported by his contemporary, Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy 3.2.2.3, who offers the mother's words in English as ‘These are my jewels’. Shakespeare may have thought it clever to put Cornelia's words in Cordelia's mouth.

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