Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/45

 ID--s. iv. JULY s. 1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 33 universities or members of the inns of court, celebrated their loved Quirinus, or " Shake- spear," directly after Bacon's death. The poems in which they did so were collected by his chaplain llawley, and may be found in Blackburn's edition of Bacon (published 1730), or in vol. x. of the " Harleian Mis- cellany." No less than twenty-seven out of the thirty-seven pieces speak of Bacon as a great poet. Why, then, was this full and significant name yet not employed in 1598 on the edition of the first play published, as if bearing the name of the actor? Two explanations are possible of this fact. Some learned in this subject say that the variance in spelling was a mere printer's error, accidentally made. And they urge, with considerable force, that its weight is much diminished by the fact that the pecu- liar spelling employed on the publication of the first play in 1598 has not been found to be repeated in any one of the quarto or folio editions of the plays subsequently published. _Nay, more, the peculiar spelling employed in 1598 was corrected in a quarto of 'Richard III.' published in the very next year, bearing on it the classical "Quirinus" name of " William Shake-speare," properly divided. Weighty as this explanation is, yet I myself find another, extending such expla- nation still further, with which MR. CLARK will, perhaps, be even less pleased. Bacon had manufactured the name of the " Spear- Shaker," or Quirinus, as early as 1593 and 1594. To get it, he had turned the Stratford actor's first syllable of " Shag," or " Shax," as it was then commonly pronounced, into " Shake." He had also changed the second syllable of the patronymic into " Speare." Bacon was an extremely cautious man, and was in the habit, as we all know, of working by experiment. When he came to put forward an altogether new publication, by the man who had written 'Venus' and also 'Lucrece,' he felt timid about altering the second syllable in the play as well as the first, lest it should attract attention. So the first play was published with a name that only resembled the first syllable of the name of the author of the two earlier poems, and was published by a wholly new publisher, named Cuthbert Burby. He could, if necessity arose, be easily passed off as a mere "pirate" who had somehow stolen the then old play. His name, too, never appears again as the publisher of a play. ho one, however, noticed that Cuthbert Burby had even followed the first syllable in "Shake." So, in the next year, Bacon added the " Speare" in the second syllable; and1 even interjected the hyphen between the- two syllables to mark the change of signifi- cance in the mere word as a whole by the changes made in its spelling. MR. CLARK will, 1 feel sure, not suppose that I for a moment intended to charge- him with intentional misquotation. He and your readers will also, I hope, forgive me for, in the hurry of dictation, by a slip of the moment, using " folio " in place of " quarto " —a little slip which surely never misled any one. All readers will, I think, concur in thanking MR. CLARK for an instructive and well-meant discussion, for which I, at least, heartily thank him. G. PITT-LEWIS. [We cannot insert more on this subject.] PINCHBECK FAMILY (10th S. iii. 421).—Being a Lincolnshire Pinchbeck, I was much inte- rested in MR. UNDERDOWN'S note on the Pinchbeck family. I wonder if he has heard the following doggerel, which I often had chanted at me when I was a National School boy I—- Adam and Eve and Pinchbeck Went down to the river to bathe ; Adam and Eve got drownded. And who do you think got saved ? The chief object of the chanter was to get the answer to the question in the last line, and then demonstrate it by pinching you. I used to think it was only a Lincolnshire verse, and I was much surprised to hear it when I came into Lancashire, where Pinch- becks are very scarce. One wonders which Pinchbeck is referred to in the lines, and how on earth he got mixed up with Adam and Eve. Perhaps it is only a schoolboy ditty. In reference to the name being spelt Pinch- back, I might say that up here in Lancashire, where they reverse e'a and a's, calling Bailey Bealey, and Bealey Bailey, my name is generally pronounced Pinchback, with a decided smack on the "back." Lancashire folk seem unable to say "be_ek"; if they do not call it "back," they turn it into "beek." There is a Pinchback mentioned somewhere in Pepys's 'Diary.' Who was he? I think MR. UNDERDOWN'S definition of Pinchbeck as "a stream flowing in a narrow channel" nearer the mark than that given in Skeat's ' Etymological Dictionary':— "The name is French, and, like many surnames, was orig. a nickname. It means having a beak or month like pincers; from F. pince, "a, pineer* (Cot.), and bee, a beak." The name is certainly Norman French, and the Pinchbecks may be an offshoot of the family of Bee, Bek, or Beck, which came over