The story
From crank + -le. Coined by Michael Drayton in 1596. According to the Poly-Olbion project, "Drayton probably derived ‘crankling’ from ‘crank’, a word which had its first recorded usage in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1594) where it describes a hare which ‘crankes and crosses with a thousand doubles’."
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.