What's in Shakespeare's Names

Murray J. Levith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

'What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.' So says Juliet in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet but, originally published in 1978, Murray Levith shows just how wrong Juliet was.

Shakespeare was extremely careful in his selection of names. Not only the obvious Hotspur or the descriptive Bottom or Snout, but most names in Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays had a more than superficial significance. Beginning with what has been written previously, Levith illustrates how Shakespeare used names – not only those he invented in the later comedies, but those names bequeathed to him by history, myth, classical literature, or the Bible.

Levith moves from the histories through the tragedies to the comedies, listing each significant name play by play, giving the allusions, references, and suggestions that show how each name enriches interpretations of action, character, and tone. Dr. Levith examines Shakespeare's own name, and speculates upon the playwright's identification with his characters and the often whimsical naming games he played or that were played upon him.

A separate alphabetical index is provided to facilitate the location of individual names and, in addition, cross references to plays are given so that each name can be considered in the context of all the plays in which it appears.

1 Juliet’s Question

Some of Shakespeare’s most familiar lines occur during the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet asks a hidden Romeo to “refuse” his name. “ Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” she reasons. “O, be some other name!”¹ There follows Juliet’s famous question: “What’s in a name?”

Her equally famous answer is nothing’s in a name:

That which we call a rose

By any other word [Quarto 1 has “name”] would smell as

sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title.

(II,ii,43-47)

Juliet to the contrary, however, names mean a lot—and certainly in Shakespeare.

Books explaining names in the Classics and the Bible began appearing in England toward the end of the fifteenth century. Late in the sixteenth, one William Patten published his exhaustively titled The Calender of Scripture, Wherein the Hebru, Calldian, Arabian, Phenician, Syrian, Persian, Greek and Latin names, of Nations, Cuntreys, Men, Weemen, Idols, Cities; Hils, Riuers, & of oother places in the holly By ble mentioned, by order of letters arset, and turned into oour English Toong (STC19476). In his “Praefatio” to De Sapientia Veterum, Francis Bacon explains that the ancients chose names for the characters of their fables most deliberately: “cum Metis uxor Jovis plane consilium sonet; Typhon tumorem; Pan universum; Nemesis vindictam: et similia.”² Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists were often obvious with character names, as for example Ben Jonson in Volpone. William Camden’s 1605 edition of Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (STC 4521) and the 1607 revision of Britannia (STC 4508) included glossaries to explain both men’s and women’s names from Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin roots. Camden observes in Remaines “that names among all nations and tongues... are significative, and not vaine senselesse sounds.” He cites examples even to “the barbarous Turks,... the savages of Hispaniola and all America,” and “they of Congo.” Thus, he concludes, “it were grosse ignorance and to no small reproach of our Progenitours, to thinke their names onely nothing significative, because that in the daily alteration of our tong, the signification of them is lost, or not commonly knowne” (p. 36).

This chapter appeared in somewhat different form in Renaissance and Modern: Essays in Honor of Edwin M. Moseley, edited by Murray J. Levith (Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Skidmore College, 1976).

Not until the nineteenth century, however, does the delib-erateness of Shakespeare’s names begin to attract notice. Perhaps this aspect of the playwright’s art seemed too obvious to mention earlier. In any event, in December of 1862 John Ruskin published sections from his Munera Pulveris, a treatise on political economy, which in asides and footnotes attempts to explain the significance of some of Shakespeare’s names. Ruskin notes that names in Shakespeare “are curiously—often barbarously—much by Providence,— but assuredly not without Shakespeare’s cunning purpose—mixed out of the various traditions he confusedly adopted, and languages which he imperfectly knew.”³ Focusing on etymology, Ruskin explains Desdemona as meaning “miserable fortune,” Othello as “the careful,” Ophelia “serviceableness,” Hamlet “homely,” Hermione “pillar-like,” Titania “the queen,” Benedick and Beatrice “blessed” and “blessing,” Valentine and Proteus “enduring” and “changeful,” and lago and Iachimo [Jachimo] both “the supplanter.” In another section, Ruskin relates Portia to “fortune’s lady,” Perdita to “lost lady,” and Cordelia to “heart-lady.” Ruskin promised a full-length study of Shakespeare’s names at some later date, but it never materialized. Perhaps the reason was Matthew Arnold’s scathing criticism of his first efforts.

Arnold responded to Ruskin’s excursions with feigned or real outrage. In The Cornhill Magazine, he summarizes Ruskin’s observations on Shakespeare’s names with a sentence of dismissal: “Now really, what a piece of extravagance all that is!”⁴ Taking Ruskin to task for faulty etymologies and particularly for giving nomenclature undue prominence, Arnold accuses Ruskin of being unbalanced and, undoubtedly worst of all, provincial. Perhaps this severity of rebuke deterred all but the most passing critical interest in Shakespeare’s names until quite recently.

Several prominent twentieth-century novelists, however, have evinced fascination with names in Shakespeare. James Joyce, for example, finds the biographical associations of several character names from the plays noteworthy. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus argues that Shakespeare’s “mother’s name lives in the forest of Arden.” Further, says Stephen, “He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert ... is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in the works of sweet William...In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, lago, Richard Crookback Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles’ names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.” Stephen also plays memorably with the playwright’s and his wife’s own names: “If others have their will Ann hath a way.”⁵

Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister contains a scene with the characters Krug and Ember discussing the names in Hamlet with reference to themes. “Krug suggests tampering with Hamlet’s name.... Take Telemachos,’ he says, which means ‘fighting from afar’—which again was Hamlet’s idea of warfare. Prune it, remove the unnecessary letters, all of them secondary additions, and you get the ancient ‘Telmah.’ Now read it backwards. Thus does a fanciful pen elope with a lewd idea and Hamlet in reverse gear becomes the son of Ulysses slaying his mother’s lovers.” Ember contends that the name Ophelia “can be derived from that of an amorous shepherd in Arcadia. Or quite possibly it is an anagram of Alpheios, with the ‘S’ lost in the damp grass—Alpheus the rivergod, who pursued a long-legged nymph until Artemis changed her into a stream, which of course suited his liquidity to a tee.... Or again we can base it on the Greek rendering of an old Danske serpent name. . . . Ophelia, serviceableness. Died in passive service.” In like manner, “Polonius-Pantolonius, a pottering dotard in a padded robe, shuffling about in carpet slippers and following the sagging spectacles at the end of his nose, as he waddles from room to room.” Or, of Yorick and Osric: “Hamlet has just been speaking to the skull of a jester; now it is the skull of jesting death that speaks to Hamlet. Note the remarkable juxtaposition: the skull—the shell; ‘Runs away with a shell on his head.’ Osric and Yorick almost rhyme, except that the yolk of one has become the bone (os) of the other. Mixing as he does the language of the shop and the ship, this middleman, wearing the garb of a fantastic courtier, is in the act of selling death, the very death that Hamlet has just escaped at sea.”⁶

G. Wilson Knight revives critical interest in Juliet’s question with a chapter in The Sovereign Flower, and his study is provocative and often insightful.⁷ He notices, for example, the power conveyed by the o’s in Oberon, Morocco, Othello, Orsino and, conversely, the “certain lightness” of “Ophelia’s name, with its rising vowel-sounds from ‘o’ through ‘e’ to “i.” Knight is always interesting even when he seems far afield, as with Yorick and Osric. He writes that contained in these names “may be an overtone of ‘joke’: one made jokes, the other is a joke.”

Harry Levin has written another chapter on the subject.⁸ In it he acknowledges the worth of Knight’s study, though recognizing its limitations. Levin is a bit more careful than Knight, but in the end goes over much the same ground. Levin’s essay does, however, offer an appealing invitation for further study of Juliet’s question: “Except for one or two German dissertations [perhaps Ernst Erler, Die Namengebung bei Shakespeare, Heidelberg, 1913, and Wilhelm Oelrich, Die Personennamen im Mittelalterlichen Drama Englands, Kiel, 1911], which are hardly more than annota...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Fm-chapter
• Fm-chapter1
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Fm-chapter2
• Epigraph
• 1. Juliet’s Question
• 2. Histories
• 3. Tragedies
• 4. The Comedies and Romances
• 5. Shakespeare’s Name
• Notes
• Index