Shakespeare, Alcohol, and the Origins of ‘In a Pickle’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

An Elizabethan playwright and poet from Warwickshire (who, among other things, gave us the phrase ‘all’s well that ends well’) furnishes the Oxford English Dictionary with its earliest citation for ‘pickle’ in the sense of ‘a (usually disagreeable) condition or situation; a plight, a predicament’.

It’s often claimed that William Shakespeare (1564-1616) gave us the phrase ‘in a pickle’, but then it’s often claimed Shakespeare gave us lots of things which he didn’t. The number of words Shakespeare coined would be far, far smaller than the number he simply popularised. And to an extent the same is true of the phrases he did (and didn’t) invent.

And the OED’s first citation for ‘pickle’ to mean ‘plight’ or ‘predicament’ is another Warwickshire poet and playwright, John Heywood (c. 1497 – c. 1580), who, like Shakespeare, was a provincial lad who travelled to London to make his name as a writer (and actor) on the stage during the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

But whether Heywood should actually get the credit for being an early adopter (or even originator) of ‘pickle’ in the sense of ‘plight’ is itself questionable. Indeed, even the OED questions it, adding a note that the ‘exact sense’ of Heywood’s use of ‘pickle’ is ‘unclear’.

It’s in his Three Hundred Epigrammes of 1562 that the pickle appears, and specifically in this little poem:

Time is tickell.

Chaunce is fickell.

Man is brickell.

Freilties pickell.

Poudreth mickell,

Seafonyng lickell.

The precise meaning of this proverbial verse is unclear. But it’s clear that whatever ‘pickell’ is doing here, it’s meant to be an adjective. Heywood begins by describing time as ‘tickell’ (i.e., ‘tickle’), an archaic adjective meaning ‘unstable’. We simply don’t know how much time we have left on this earth.

Chance is fickle: that line seems fair enough. Man is ‘brickell’ or ‘brittle’: frail, or fragile. This adjective, ‘brickle’, is also in the OED and attested from the early Middle Ages.

To describe our frailties as ‘pickell’ (or ‘pickle’) is to use ‘pickle’ as an adjective, then. The OED, in placing this Heywood quotation under the sense of ‘pickle’ meaning ‘predicament’, implies that Heywood is suggesting frailties are put in a plight of some sort. But this makes less sense than if we read the attend to the poem as a whole and read ‘pickell’ as adjectival.

The OED does include an entry for ‘pickle’ as an adjective, where it is used to mean ‘pickled’. But a specific sense of ‘pickled’ is intended: namely, ‘thoroughly imbued with wickedness, mischief, etc.; out-and-out, downright, consummate’.

So, when Heywood describes our frailties as ‘pickell’, he means they’re downright, consummate, and ubiquitous. We are everywhere imbued with weakness.

As for the last two lines of Heywood’s little rhyme, ‘Poudreth mickell, / Seafonyng lickell’ forms a nice pair. ‘Poudreth’ is presumed to be a reference to something akin to ‘poudrette’, defined elsewhere in the OED as ‘manure made from dried and powdered human excrement, usually mixed with another substance such as charcoal or gypsum’. And ‘mickell’ (or ‘mickle’) is an old word for ‘much’, just as ‘lickle’ is an old word for ‘little’.

So, the crap in our lives is much, and the nice stuff that takes the edge off – the ‘seasoning’ or spice that gives life its enjoyment – is rare.

So much for Heywood. But Shakespeare isn’t the next citation under ‘pickle = plight’ either. That honour goes to Thomas Tusser, who features in my literary travelogue, Britain by the Book. Tusser (c. 1524-80) was the author of the Hundredth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557), a monthly guide to practical rural life written in rough rhyming verse, and perhaps the most influential proverb-book ever written.

And Tusser has a stronger claim, I’d say, to being the first (known) writer to use ‘pickle’ to refer to an unfortunate state or predicament: his proverb ‘Reape barlie with sickle, that lies in ill pickle’ appeared in the updated edition of Hundredth Good Pointes (1580) and leaves us in no doubt that ‘pickle’ is being used here in much the same way we use it in the modern idiom ‘in a pickle’.

So what of Shakespeare? He isn’t even next on the list (a sermon by the Protestant writer John Foxe from 1585 gets that honour: ‘In this pickle lyeth man by nature, that is, all wee that be Adams children’), but has to settle for fourth. The phrase ‘in this pickle’ (he never used ‘in a pickle’) makes an appearance in The Tempest from around 1611.

In Act 5 Scene 1, Alonso (the King of Naples) sees his ‘drunken butler’, Stephano, along with Trinculo, his jester. Alonso observes that Trinculo, too, is three sheets to the wind – or ‘reeling ripe’, as he puts it. He asks Trinculo where they got the ‘grand liquor’ that has made them both sozzled. Or, in his own words: ‘How camest thou in this pickle?’

Trinculo responds by saying, ‘I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last that, I fear me, will never out of my bones: I shall not fear fly-blowing.’

In other words, Shakespeare appears to be playing off the double meaning of ‘pickle’ here: the new meaning (plight, or trouble) and the older one (drunk). Pickling originally meant steeping something in pickle, brine, or alcohol, usually to preserve it, but the idea of using ‘pickled’ to refer to being drunk seems to have emerged early on, too. And since the subject of Alonso’s enquiry is liquor, having found his butler and jester in a state of drunkenness, the idea of ‘pickle’ here surely isn’t confined to the difficult plight of the two men. They are almost literally ‘in pickle’, having drunk their bodyweight in booze.

Trinculo’s comment that he has ‘been in such a pickle’ that he fears he will never get ‘out of my bones: I shall not fear fly-blowing’ confirms this. He’s saying his bones are so preserved by all the alcohol he’s taken that the maggots that would otherwise feed on his dead body will stand no chance. As always, Shakespeare took the simple wordplay on pickle/pickle and wrought a vivid and memorable image from it.