Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/331

 ,G*S. xii. OCT. 24, iocs.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

323

boys, is, I submit, but an English variant of a shout in a game similar to the Welsh "hwch ddu gwta a gipio'r ola," while that variant is, just as obviously, connected with the game of dun in the mire. But the super- stition noticed by White takes us further. The object was of course to draw blood, and that by an indirect or ritualistic method. "A piece of bramble that grew at both ends " might be found in a boggy bit of ground, or on a hedge, or on a rough stone wall ; and I believe that the older scholars were right in deriving cu/zacria from af/^a. The consideration of this point shall be reserved for another paper. For the present I content myself with Prof. Rhys's remark (op. cit. sup.) on Dinas Dinlle, "Dinlle Ure- conn, which means the Uriconian or Wrekin Dinlle in the present county of Salop." The Wrekin would be the most likely of all hills in Wales to be connected with a worship similar to what we know to have been practised on Soracte in Italy. If the name of Mount Soracte is derived from sorex (Gk. vpa), a shrew-mouse, then we have a most suggestive chain of identical ceremonies and beliefs stretching from the Sminthian Apollo of the Troad to the Lug mac Edlend (or Eithne) of Ireland. To finish with a quotation : Pliny, 'Nat. Hist.,' ii. 41, says of sorices : " Quin et soricum fibras respondere numeroLunse exquisivere diligentiores " and the same thing of the entrails of mice, xi. 37.

J. P. OWEN.

SHAKESPEARIANA.

4 HAMLET,' I. iv. 36-8. Another addition to the many conjectural readings of ' Hamlet,' I. iv. 36-8, may be of interest, if not of assistance, to readers of 'N. & Q.' who believe that many of the mysteries of Shakespeare's text may yet yield themselves up to the labour of study and research. The famous

crux :

The dram of eale

Doth all the noble substance of a doubt To his own scandal,

has exercised the ingenuity of a host of commentators, and I will neither occupy your space nor weary the eye of the Shake- spearian student by setting out, for the purposes of comparison, the multitudinous suggestions which are to be found in any variorum edition.

Without going so far afield for references and derivations as some commentators have done, I wish to submit a plausible reading which suggests itself to me.

First, as to the word eale. The generally

accepted conjecture is that it is a^corrupt spelling of " evil " 'or " e'il," the ~v being omitted in the latter case, as it is in the Second Quarto reading of II. ii. 627, where we find "deale" for de'ile = devil.

It does not appear to have occurred to any one that this word is a syncopated form of "eisel," or, as the First .Quarto has it, "esile," from the Old French aisel= vinegar, gall (aiselle, according to Larousse in his ' Dictionnaire Universe],' is still in use as " Agric. nom d'une variete de betterave qui renferme peu de sucre ") ; in other terms, that it is the same word that occurs after- wards in ' Hamlet,' V. i. 264 [299 Globe ed.] :

Woo't drink up eisel? And in Sonnet cxi. 10 :

I will drink

Potions of eisel against my strong infection, No bitterness that I will bitter think.

The elision of an s is quite as probable as that of a v, especially in words derived from the French language, in which the s is so frequently unsounded.

Next comes the difficulty of the words " of a doubt." Here I surmise that " of a doubt " is a phonetic blunder for of a bout i.e., of a round of drinks, an expression clearly con- nected with the idea of the preceding lines :

The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels

And drains his draughts of Rhenish down.

This heavy-headed revel

They clepe us drunkards, &c.

And if, allowing for a further very probable phonetic error, we read gall for "all," the passage would then run :

The dram of e'ile

Doth gall the noble substance of a bout

To his own scandal,

meaning as is obvious from the context that as a man's character, though it be as pure as grace, shall in the general censure take corruption from one particular fault, so a dram of eisil in the wine served out in the general round will render bitter the entire bout. Compare Horace, Epist. I. ii. 55 : Sineeram est nisi vas, quodcumque infundis, acescit, and Ecclesiastes x. 1. "Bout" was used in the sense of a drinking bout in 1670 by Maynwaring (vide ' Vita Sana,' vi. 78).

V. ST. GLAIR MACKENZIE.

'THE RAPE OF LTJCRECE.' Shakspeare is supposed to have classical learning because Greek and Latin authors have expressed ideas similar to his own ; and not sufficient attention is given to the evidence of want of