A Fustian Riddle

[Sean B. Palmer]

"I haue a deuise to make all well."
— Bottom, A Midsummer Night's Dream (3.1)

Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, or What You Will in around 1601, one
of the last of the Tudor plays. There is a "good practise in it to
make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him, by
counterfeyting a letter as from his Lady in generall termes, telling
him what shee liked best in him", as John Manningham wrote in 1602
upon seeing a performance.

The letter was counterfeited by Maria, another of the Lady Olivia's
servants. After the steward Malvolio picks it up off the floor, he
finds the letter to contain amongst others the following lines:

I may command where I adore, but silence like a Lucresse knife:
With bloodlesse stroke my heart doth gore, M.O.A.I. doth sway my life.
— Malvolio, Twelfth Night, or What You Will (2.5)

He grapples with the meaning of M.O.A.I., which Feste the fool calls a
"fustian riddle". First Malvolio sees that M. begins his name, but he
gets confused when he sees that O. should follow and yet does not.
Eventually he resolves only that at least all of the letters are in
his name, whilst the others looking on from hiding snigger at his
behaviour.

The letter M. starts Malvolio's name, and the O. ends it. With the A.
we come back to the second letter at the start of Malvolio, and then
the I. is the second from last. Spelling out the name in full in this
way, skipping to the start and the end and taking off a letter each
time, we get: M.O.A.I.L.L.V.O. To reverse the algorithm, one needs to
build the word again inwards from the outside:

M.
M.O.
M.A.O.
M.A.I.O.
M.A.L.I.O.
M.A.L.L.I.O.
M.A.L.V.L.I.O.
M.A.L.V.O.L.I.O.

Could Maria's riddle help with an Early Modern English subtag? If only
we had a couplet that could guide us as a cynosure...

I may converse wherein I bore, but listen now to what I say:
Rejecting all that went before, E.E.M.D. may yet hold sway.

E.
E.E.
E.M.E.
E.M.D.E.
E.M.O.D.E.

Why, she loves EModE!

Using Maria's Fustian on EModE, we arrive at E.E.M.D.O., which as a
language subtag, en-eemdo, may be meet for the task?

-- 
Sean B. Palmer