“With upsie freeze I line my head,” of our text, is in the play “Cromwell’s Coronation” printed “With tipsy frenzie.” But we often find the other phrase; sometimes, as in the ballad of “The Good Fellow’s Best Beloved” (i.e. strong drink) varied thus, “With good ipse he,” (about 1633). See Bd. Soc. Roxb. Bds. iii. 248, where is W. Chappell’s note, quoting Nares:—“It has been said that op-zee, in Dutch, means ‘over sea,’ which cones near to another English phrase for drunkenness, being ‘half-seas over.’ But op-zyn-fries means, ‘in the Dutch fashion,’ or à la mode de Frise, which perhaps is the best interpretation of the phrase.” In Massinger and Decker’s “Virgin Martyr,” 1622, Act ii. sc. 1, we find the vile Spungius saying, “Bacchus, the God of brewed wine and sugar, grand patron of rob-pots, upsie freesie tipplers, and super-naculum takers,” &c. Probably Badham’s conjecture is right, and in Hamlet, i. 4, we should read not “up-spring,” but
“Keeps wassail, and the swaggering upsy freeze.”
(Cambr. Essays, 1656; Cambr. Shakesp. viii. 30). T. Caldecott had so early as 1620 (in Spec. new edit. Shakesp. Hamlet) anticipated the guess, but not boldly. He brings forward from T. Lodge’s Wit’s Miserie, 4to, 1596, p. 20, “Dance, leap, sing, drink, upsefrize.” And again:—
For Upsefreeze he drunke from four to nine,
So as each sense was steeped well in wine:
Yet still he kept his rouse, till he in fine
Grew extreame sicke with hugging Bacchus shrine.
[The Shrift.]
A new Spring shadowed in sundrie pithie Poems by Musophilus, 4to. 1619, signat. l. b., where “Upsefreese” is the name of the frier. Like “Wassael” and “Trinkael,” the phrase upsie-friese, or vrijster, seems to have been used as a toast, perhaps for “To your sweetheart.”