Abrams and Sirens

Today I came across a Dante Gabriel Rossetti image I wasn't aware of. I was casually skimming his Wikipedia page to find a different image and this one popped out.

It's a coloured chalk illustration titled Ligeia Siren, from 1873. It's a beautiful picture. The soft colouring of the hair very warm and rich.

It was quite fitting as I was also going to post today for another reason. I recently read the Shakespeare play Coriolanus. It contained the following line:

Third Citizen: We have been called so of many; not that our heads are some brown, some black, some abram, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured.

The term abram caught my eye. In the context of the sentence it suggests a hair colour other than brown or black. So red and blond are the obvious contenders. With Abram being a variant of the name Abraham, the biblical patriarch, it also brings to mind other biblical connections to red hair. Which we've noted on here numerous times before - ruddy Adam, hairy Esau, and so forth.

Having had a search online it seems to be the case that abram is a variant of auburn (also given as abron).

I came across editions of other Shakespeare plays where the term is discussed. In the following link you'll find a discussion about the line from Romeo and Juliet, "Young Abraham Cupid". Which in some editions is rendered as "Young Adam Cupid".

A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet. 1871.

(Yes, variorum is a real word - I had to look it up. It's an edition of a text with notes by different people ..apparently. Don't say you don't learn anything here.)

An almost identical discussion can be found in this work. In fact, I'll quote from this one as it's a little more legible.

The Works of William Shakespeare (1875).

In Soliman and Perseda, 1599, we find,

'Where is the eldest sonne of Pryam, That abraham-coloured Troion [Trojan] ? dead.'

In Middleton's Blurt, Master Constable, 1602,

'A goodlie, long, thicke, Abhram-colour'd beard.'

In relation to that line from Coriolanus it states there's "no reason to doubt that in these passages 'abraham' (or 'Abram') is a corruption of 'abron,' i.e. 'auburn.'"

(a snippet from the text)

Here, at the end, we also get a mention that in the play Two Gentlemen of Verona auburn is used to mean yellowish.

Again, it's difficult to separate red and yellow when we look back to these historical works. With the line from Coriolanus mentioning, "..some brown, some black, some abram," yellowish would make more sense. As brown could be said to entail auburn as we would think of it - i.e. chestnut. Though it wouldn't quite cover red as in a brighter orange or ginger. Colours which likewise tend towards blond. So blond and red seem to fall under the one umbrella to some extent.