Oberon
Titania has placed a flowery wreath on Bottom's head, and Oberon comments that the dew drops on the wreath’s flowers resemble tears, as if the flowers are crying from the disgrace of having to adorn something as detestable as Bottom’s ass-head.
Oberon notes that normally the dew drops resemble large beautiful "orient pearls." A pearl is created when a foreign object such as a grain of sand gets inside an oyster, and the oyster slowly builds up a hard lustrous covering around the intruder. It's only since the middle of the 20th-century that we've been able to commercially produce pearls by painstakingly placing grains of sand into farmed oysters. Prior to that, pearls were as valuable as the most precious of gems because it took looking through a ton of oysters to find a naturally occurring pearl.
The inhabitants of the British Isles have treasured pearls for over 2000 years (to get his hands on these valuable items was one reason Julius Caesar invaded Britain in the first century BCE). But British oysters are a fresh water variety that produces low-quality pearls. The best pearls in Shakespeare's day were imported from India. (Orient means from the east.)
