Chapter Picts to Pietro of P by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Pierrot [Pe-er-ro], a character in French pantomime, representing a man in stature and a child in mind. He is generally the tallest and thinnest man in the company, and appears with his face and hair thickly covered with flour. He wears a white gown, with very long sleeves, and a row of big buttons down the front. The word means “Little Peter.”

Piers and Palinode, two shepherds in Spenser’s fifth eclogue, representing the protestant and the catholic priest.

Piers or Percy again appears in ecl. x. with Cuddy, a poetic shepherd. This noble eclogue has for its subject “poetry.” Cuddy complains that poetry has no patronage or encouragement, although it comes by inspiration. He says no one would be so qualified as Colin to sing divine poetry, if his mind were not so depressed by disappointed love.—Spenser: The Shepheardes Calendar (1579).

Piers Plowman (The Vision of), a satirical poem divided into twenty parts. The vision is supposed to have been seen while the plowman was sleeping in the Malvern Hills. First published in 1550; but the author, William Langland, a secular priest, lived 1332–1400. The poem is not in rhymes, nor yet in heroic blank verse like Shakespeare’s plays, but in alliterative verse containing from ten to twelve syllables, with a pause at the fifth or sixth foot. He preceded Chaucer, who wrote in rhymes.

(The Malvern Hills form a boundary between Worcestershire, Monmouthshire, and Herefordshire.)

N.B.—Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry does not require every word of a line to begin with the same letter, but that three words in two short lines(or one long line) should do so. Two words in the former part and one in the latter, as—

Mercy hight that Maid!! a Meek thing withal…
Her Sister at it Seemed !! came Soothly walking
When these Maidens Met !! Mercy and Truth.
   —From Piers Plowman.

But by no means was this method strictly observed.

Pietro , the putative father of Pompilia. This paternity was a fraud, perpetrated, unknown to Pietro, by Violante his wife, “partly to please old Pietro,”partly to oust the heirs of certain property which would otherwise fall to them.—R. Browning: The Ring and the Book, ii. 575 (1868-69).