Scan 101
Researches into the early history of the violin family, 1883
35 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 91. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE REBEC.
3Holofernes. What is this?
4Boyet. A cittern head.
5Dumain. The head of a bodkin.
6Biron. A death's face in a ring.
8John Marston ("The Scourge of Villanie;" sixteenth century):—
10 Shall brainlesse cyterne-heads, each jobernole,
11 Pocket the very genius of thy soule?
13John Ford ("Love's Melancholy," act ii., sc. I; about 1630):—
15C. I hope the chronicles will rear me one day for a head-piece.
16Rh. Of woodcock, without brains in 't; barbers shall wear thee on their citterns.
18Philip Massinger ("The Old Law," act iv., sc. I; about 1630):—
20Gnoth. And you have pipes in your consort, too.
21Draw. And sack-buts too, sir.
22But. But the heads of your instruments differ; yours are hogs-heads, theirs cittern and gittern heads.
23Bail. All wooden heads; there they meet again.
25Halliwell, in his "Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words," has the term cittern-headed, with the definition: "Ugly; in allusion to the grotesque figures with which the cittern was ornamented." And Nares, in his "Glossary," remarks: "A similar allusion to the head of a rebec was current in France." In Gargantua's lamentation for his wife Badebec, we read:—
27 Dead is the noble Badebec,
28 Who had a face like a rebec;
30on which the note is: "A grotesque figure, or monstrous chimerical face, cut in the upper part of a rebec, which is a three-stringed fiddle."
32The same kind of whimsical ornamentation was afterwards adopted on the viola-da-gamba, viola-di-bordone, and even still later occasionally on the violin and violoncello.
34The term ribible, which occurs in the following example,
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