Shakespeare introduced a huge number of new words into the English language. We quote him daily without realising it. According to a Washington Post article,

He gave us such verbs as 'puke', 'torture', 'misquote', 'gossip', 'swagger', […] He invented the nouns 'critic', 'mountaineer', 'pageantry', and 'eyeball'; the adjectives 'fashionable', 'unreal', 'blood-stained', 'deafening', 'majestic', and 'domineering'; the adverbs 'instinctively' and 'obsequiously' in the sense of 'behaving in the appropriate way to render obsequies for the dead'.

There is one legacy of Shakespeare's that would surely astound even the Bard himself: he is responsible for the name of the uilleann pipes, without ever having used the word, or even heard of this particular instrument, which hadn't been invented yet.

The Irish Pipes

Irish bagpipes come in two varieties: the war pipes (very loud, for outdoor use only) and the uilleann¹ pipes (mellifluous and sophisticated, with greater melodic range and extra harmonic notes and chords available to the player). The war pipes are mouth-blown like the Scots pipes; the uilleann pipes are blown by an elbow bellows, like the Northumbrian pipes.

Uilleann is the genitive of uille, the Gaelic word for elbow. But like many examples in the history of musical instruments, the derivation of the name is not that simple.

The bellows-blown pipes reached Ireland in the early 18th Century, when an enhanced form of musette² began to be developed between various instrument-makers in England, Scotland, and Ireland³. This instrument was given the name 'union pipes' by an Irish piper, Denis Courtney. The first appearance of the name 'union pipes' in print was in a newspaper advertisement for a concert in London in 1788⁴. After the 1801 Act of Union that annexed Ireland to the UK, hints were dropped that the name 'union pipes' celebrated this political event, but Courtney's dates disprove that claim. Eventually antagonism against the Act of Union prompted an Irish musicologist of the early 20th Century, William Henry Grattan Flood, to Gaelicise 'union pipes' into 'uilleann pipes', borrowing a suggestion from two eighteenth-century Irish chauvinists who had not heard the term 'union pipes', but who wrenched Shakespeare's words in order to make an unlikely point⁵.

Shakespeare's Woollen Bagpipe

Act IV, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice mentions 'a woollen bagpipe'. This makes so little sense⁶ that it was corrected in some editions to 'swollen'. The Oxford English Dictionary hesitantly files the Shakespeare quote under meaning (c) of the word 'woollen':

Silent, as if padded with wool: said of the feet or footsteps. Obs[olete].
After L[atin] pedes laneos or lanatos habere, 'to have woollen feet', to walk silently, to move unperceived.
¶The allusion in the foll[owing] quot[ation] is uncertain.
1596 SHAKES. Merch. V. IV. i. 56 There is no firme reason..Why he cannot abide a gaping Pigge?.. Why he a woollen bag-pipe.

The context of the speech could possibly support such a reading; it is an object of irrational aversion which Shylock cites to justify his whim in insisting on the pledged pound of flesh instead of accepting repayment of his debt:

Some men there are love not a gaping pig;
Some that are mad if they behold a cat;
And others, when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose,
Cannot contain their urine; for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be rend'red
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig;
Why he, a harmless necessary cat;
Why he, a woollen bagpipe, but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended;
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodg'd hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him. Are you answered?

A case could be made that Shakespeare is invoking the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which the sufferer's reaction goes beyond the sense proper to the stimulating source. What sets off the unfortunate listener's bladder is the bagpipe singing 'in the nose' – which could describe both the nasal tone of the instrument⁷ and also the itchy feeling it might induce. 'Woollen' may describe a similar itchy feeling; the sound of the pipes might irritate the nerves like the feel of scratchy wool next to the skin.

There is a much simpler solution, however. It is traditional in Spain to cover the whole bag with a decorative knitted cosy. Other countries, including England and Scotland, use covers woven from wool, complete with fringes, and some use a whole sheepskin for the bag, with the woolly side out. Indeed Grove⁸ (the musician's bible) suggests this explanation: there, surely, is your 'woollen bagpipe'.

Wrists and Elbows

Whatever the true explanation, Grattan Flood was convinced that Shakespeare was not referring to wool at all, but to Irish elbows. He was not the first claim this: in fact he merely quoted an earlier writer on Irish music, Joseph Walker, who himself claimed that he was merely quoting another historian, Charles Vallancey. Walker published his Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards in 1786, by which time the bellows-blown pipes were common in Ireland, though apparently not yet referred to as 'union pipes', a term neither he nor his friend Vallancey mentioned.

Walker quoted another 18th Century writer, Pennant⁹:

The oldest (Bagpipes) are played with the mouth, the loudest and most ear-piercing of any wind-music; the others, played with the fingers only, are of Irish origin.

The question of how ancient that origin was remained unanswered, but a clear attempt was made to establish a very early date. In their writings Walker and Vallancey extolled the antiquity and nobility of Celtic culture; much of Vallancey's agenda was to set out the clear descent of the Irish and their language from the ancient Etruscans, and he provided a comparative table showing the similarity of the Irish Ogham script to a Tree Alphabet 'lately discovered in an Arabian Manuscript in Egypt'.

Three years before Walker's Memoirs, in 1783, Vallancey had published a description of the banqueting hall in Tara¹⁰, transcribed from a supposedly ancient manuscript held in Trinity College Dublin. Of the 46 areas in the banqueting hall, one was labelled 'Cuislinnaigh' to which Vallancey simply supplied the translation 'Pipers'. This is the meaning of the word given in English-Irish dictionaries published in the 18th Century¹¹.

Walker quotes Vallancey with the following elaboration:

In the description of the Hall of Tamar […] we find a place allotted for the Cuislinnaigh; a word which, etymologically considered, evidently implies Bagpipers. At this day the pipers call their bellows, bollog na Cuisli, the bellows of the Cuisli, or veins of the arm on the inside, at the first joint; and as this joint on the outside is denominated Ullan or Uilean (ie Elbow), Vallancey concludes that Ullan Pipes and Cuisli Pipes are one and the same. In Ullan Pipes we have, perhaps, the woollen Bagpipe of Shakespear, to which he attributes an extraordinary effect.

Vallancey may have passed his conclusion to Walker in private conversation, since it doesn't appear in his book; but whoever made the leap, it was fairly heroic in its trajectory.

Cuisle¹² is explained thus in Begly and MacCurtin's English Irish Dictionary, 1732: 'Cuisle, corrupted from cuilse, Lat. pulsus¹³, a vein, also the pulse¹⁴.' Walker and Vallancey stretch a point in moving it up to the elbow: the pulse is traditionally felt at the wrist. Furthermore, it seems they have deliberately started counting their arm joints downwards, omitting the shoulder, in order to arrive first at the elbow, thereby connecting to Shakespeare's woolly quote. In any case the more recent Galic and English Dictionary, published by the Rev William Shaw in 1780, gave this definition of cuisle: 'A vein, a pipe¹⁵' – which calls for no further exegesis. The bollog¹⁶ of the Cuisli is straightforwardly the bellows (or bag) of the pipes, with no need to call into play any joint of the arm.

Grattan Flood extended the mental leap, identifying 'woollen' and 'uilleann' with 'union' in his 1905 History of Irish Music. He gave the date of 1588 for the uilleann pipes' introduction, but furnished no source for this information. He also stated, without producing any evidence, that the famous 1514 Dürer engraving of a bagpiper depicts an Irish musician.

The Part of Elsinore Will Be Played by Dalkey

Grattan Flood was notoriously unreliable. He claimed, among many other things, that Dowland came from Dalkey (near Dublin) and that every time Shakespeare called for the offstage band to play a Tucket, he wanted the tune of Eileen Aroon.

He published his theory on Dowland's birthplace in The Gentleman's Magazine in September 1906¹⁷. The proof is breathtaking in its reliance on wishful thinking: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1601, without ever having been to Denmark. However his friend, the famous lutenist John Dowland, held a post at the Danish court¹⁸, while continuing to publish in London. Dowland, Grattan Flood tells us, came back to London from Denmark in 1601 for a holiday, and also to purchase some musical instruments. Therefore Shakespeare must have asked Dowland to help him with some local colour. We can imagine how the conversation might have gone:

Dowland: Yes, Elsinore is on a bit of a hill but it doesn't amount to much, unlike my own Dalkey with its truly spectacular cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea …
Shakespeare: Hold on there a minute John, beetles o'er … yes, go on?

It is the phrase 'my own', implied by Flood, which makes one gasp and stretch one's eyes. There is one perfectly solid piece of evidence that Dowland came from Dublin¹⁹, but nothing to connect him with Dalkey beyond the name of a Dalkey dweller, John Dowlan, who died in 1577, identified by Grattan Flood as the lutenist's father²⁰, and the relative topography of Dalkey, Elsinore, and Hamlet. The story of Shakespeare consulting Dowland for local colour, merely mentioned²¹ in the Gentleman's Magazine article, was told with relish to your Researcher by his philosophy professor, EJ Furlong, at Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s.

Tucket

'Tucket' is one of Shakespeare's rare stage directions. It obviously calls for a fanfare, but it is not clear where Shakespeare got the word (a familiar problem). It is generally taken to be the Anglicisation of the Italian word toccata, which denotes a short instrumental piece, like a prelude. The connection Grattan Flood made from 'tucket' to Eileen Aroon (the tune known in England as Robin Adair) is the first word of the song: Tiocfaidh tú nó fanfaidh tú, Eibhlín a rúin? – Will you come or will you stay, Evelyn my dear?

Tiocfaidh is pronounced approximately as 'chucky', which was near enough for Grattan Flood to see in it the true explanation of 'tucket'.

Nowadays we may either smile or cringe, but the times were with Grattan Flood. The Easter Rising in 1916 repudiated the Act of Union, and soon a new Irish state emerged free from British rule. The union pipes are universally called uilleann pipes now, and there is a Dowland Memorial Park in Dalkey²².