"Then these wretches full of all frowardnesse
Gave him to drink eisel temp'red with gall."
Lamentation of Mary Magdalen.
Todd, also, in his edition of Johnson, says that the old English aysel for vinegar is used by Wicliffe.
11. Next comes the consideration whether, if vinegar were intended, the expression drink up could properly have been used in reference to it. On this point Theobald says nothing, except intimating that "drink up" is equivalent to "swallow down." Steevens denies that if Shakspeare had meant Hamlet to say, "Wilt thou drink vinegar?" he would have used "the term drink up," which means "totally to exhaust." Malone, in his first edition, remarks on the subject as follows:
"On the phrase drink up no stress can be laid, for our poet has employed the same expression in his 114th Sonnet, without any idea of entirely exhausting, and merely as synonymous to drink:
'Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery?'
"Again, in the same Sonnet:
—— 'Tis flattery in my seeing