Shakespeare’s

Names
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Shakespeare’s
Names
v

laurie maguire

1
 3
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For the aptly named Peter Friend
bonum nomen, bonum omen
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 acknowledgements

My interest in onomastics began in 1975 when my ‘O’ level English

teacher, Robert S. Fyall, gave me a copy of The Guinness Book of
Names. Little did he know that he was initiating a thirty-year project.
Since then I have accumulated debts to colleagues, friends, and
students in North America and Britain; my acknowledgements
here are poor recompense for all the time that they have spent
and the knowledge they have shared.
Colleagues in literary theory and Renaissance humanism stimu-
lated and helped with language theory and history. I am grateful to
Marlene Briggs, Dympna Callaghan, Don Childs, A. E. B. Coldiron,
Anthony Dawson, Stefan Hollstein, Ben Morgan, and Neil Rhodes.
Conversations with Gwen Guth extended my coverage of Canadian
novels and poems; Gwen was also unfailingly generous in her
response to queries and pleas for help. Diana Brydon and Irena
Makaryk’s seminar on Canadian Shakespeare at the Shakespeare
Association of America provided helpful feedback on Chapter 2. My
research on Helen of Troy was roadtested in lectures and papers
in Oxford, Cambridge, New Orleans, Columbus, Stratford, Bristol,
and Geneva. The audiences on all these occasions provided valuable
responses: I am grateful in particular to Stephen Orgel, Randall
Nakayama, Kay Stanton, Robert Logan, Catherine Richardson, Jim
Shaw, Tiffany Stern, Lukas Erne, Chris Cannon, and Ewan Fernie.
For discussions about anonymity in Chapter 4 I am grateful to my
colleagues Ben Morgan and Emma Smith.
viii Acknowledgements

At Magdalen College I have been singularly fortunate in my

colleague Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Robert repeatedly, voluntarily,
shouldered more than his share of administrative and pedagogical
duties to enable me to complete work on this project. He also asked
timely questions, located references, and was an endless source of
intellectual stimulus (as well as supplier of comestible stimulants).
My debt to him is enormous and, I fear, unrepayable. The President
and Fellows of Magdalen College granted me leave to complete this
project, and I am grateful to them, and to the English Faculty at
Oxford, for this sabbatical time. A fellowship from the Folger
Shakespeare Library and a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada funded the beginning of
this project; the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the
Wnal term of leave. To these institutions and organizations I am
profoundly grateful.
Friends and colleagues have offered conversation and informa-
tion on classical, textual, theoretical, theatrical, and historical sub-
jects: Sharon Achinstein, John Barnard, Tom Berger, James Binns,
Mark Bland, David Carlson, Ralph Cohen, Valentine Cunningham,
Frances Dolan, Sos Eltis, Barbara Hodgdon, Russell Jackson, David
Kastan, Chris Kyle, Andrew McNeillie, David Norbrook, Richard
O’Brien, Elizabeth Schafer, Laura Swift, Oliver Taplin, Gary Taylor,
George Walton Williams, Blair Worden, and Paul Yachnin. I have
been especially lucky in having Dympna Callaghan for conversa-
tion, correction, and encouragement throughout this project. Her
immense knowledge of literary theory and Renaissance literature,
and her generosity in allowing me to avail myself freely of her
expertise, have helped me at every stage.
My colleagues in Renaissance drama at Oxford have been end-
lessly helpful with ideas and companionship. I am fortunate to have
conversations with Katherine Duncan-Jones, Elisabeth Dutton, and
Emma Smith on a regular basis; their eagle eyes, experience of
drama, and intellectual energies have saved me from myself many
times. Gillian Woods provided exemplary research and secretarial
 Acknowledgements ix

assistance in the final stages of this book and proved a happy

collaborator when her own work on Catholicism, published else-
where, took an onomastic turn. Sam Thomson generously and
efficiently helped with last-minute checking; I am most grateful
to him for his assistance. All errors that remain are my own.
I am indebted to the two anonymous readers for Oxford Univer-
sity Press who offered astute suggestions during the preparation
of this book. In the non-Renaissance sphere my gratitude is due
to Kristine Krug, Rebecca Whiting, Martine Stewart, and Sarah
Pantin.
I have enjoyed superb library facilities at the Folger Shakespeare
Library and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC (with
particular thanks to Betsy Walsh and Georgianna Ziegler at the
Folger), in Stratford (my gratitude to Susan Brock at the Shake-
speare Centre Library and Jim Shaw at the Shakespeare Institute),
and in Oxford where I am particularly grateful to Sue Usher and her
staff at the English Faculty Library, Christine Ferdinand, Sally
Spiers, and Hilary Pattison at Magdalen College Library, and the
staff of the Bodleian Library.
Portions of Chapter 2 first appeared in Lois Potter and Arthur
Kinney (eds.), Shakespeare: Text and Theater (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1999). Material on Comedy of Errors appeared in an
earlier form in Robert S. Miola (ed.), Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays
(New York: Garland, 1997). One section of Chapter 4 appeared
previously in Gloriana’s Face, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion
Wynne-Davies (Brighton: Harvester, 1992). I am grateful to the
publishers for permission to reprint and revise this material.
Peter Friend has patiently borne my physical and mental ab-
sences from domestic life. To him this book is dedicated, with
gratitude: ‘my friend, j Not barely stylèd but created so’ (Sejanus
1.1.360–1).
‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.
‘Of course it must’, Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh:
‘my name means the shape I am.’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
 contents

abbreviations and conventions xii

Introduction 1
1. On Names 9

2. The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 50

3. The Mythological Name: Helen 74

4. The Diminutive Name: Kate 120

5. The Place Name: Ephesus 152

notes 185
works cited 215
index 243
 abbreviations and conventions

ARIEL A Review of International English Literature

ELH English Literary History
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
NLH New Literary History
RSC Royal Shakespeare Company
SEL Studies in English Literature
STC Short-Title Catalogue
TLN Through Line Numbering
YES The Year’s Work in English Studies

In all old-spelling quotations I have silently apdated v/u, i/j, and

long s, and I have silently expanded contractions.
 Introduction

So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the Weld, and every foule of
the heaven; and brought them unto the man to see how he would call them:
for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the name thereof.
The man therefore gave names unto all cattell, and the foule of the heaven, and
to every beast of the Weld.
(Genesis 2: 19–20)

Ursula Le Guin’s short story, ‘She Unnames Them’ (1985), oVers a

feminist sequel to Adam’s naming of the animals in Eden, in which an
unnamed Eve (the ‘she’ of the title) unnames the animals and removes
the ordering, but ultimately hierarchical and divisive, impositions of
language. The story begins with the view that names are not linked to
identity. Most of the animals accept namelessness ‘with the perfect
indiVerence with which they had so long accepted and ignored their
names’ (my emphasis). The kinetic appropriateness of the metaphors
used to describe the animals’ acceptance of namelessness indicates
that the animals’ identity is an ever-Wxèd mark, unrelated to linguistic
identiWcation. Thus, ‘whales and dolphins, seals and sea-otters con-
sented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as
into their element’; the names of the Wsh ‘dispersed from them in
silence throughout the ocean like faint, dark blurs of cuttleWsh ink, and
drifted oV on the currents without a trace’; the insects’ names
2 Introduction

departed ‘in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing

and stinging and humming and Xitting’; the dogs parted with ‘Linnean
qualiWers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years
like tin cans tied to a tail’. The animals in Eden are ontologically
themselves regardless of name.
If the animals are not attached to their linguistic labels, however,
someone else is: they ‘agreed enthusiastically to give their names back
to the people to whom—as they put it—they belonged’. The narra-
tor’s parenthetical distancing tactic (‘—as they put it—’) shows the
animals’ misunderstanding of her point in unnaming, for linguistic
transference is at odds with anonymity. When the yaks return their
name to its ‘donor’, or the domestic animals return their name to
those to whom it ‘belonged’, names are seen (à l’Aristotle) as inher-
ently attaching to someone: if a noun exists, there must be a nominee.
What kind of names are the animals asked to part with? The
names that Adam assigned to the animals in Eden were (in Le
Guin’s interpretation) not individual, personal names but generic
names of species. It is these that the animals now relinquish (‘any-
body who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even
Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so’). Obviously,
personal names are important, and the story is self-consciously
littered with them: ‘the poet named Eliot’ (who is cited on cats’
names), ‘Dean’ Swift, Plato, Linnaeus, Adam. Le Guin then raises
the question of whether these names are, like the animals’ generic
names, merely ‘useful to others’, or whether they ‘Wt very well’: in
other words, whether personal names, like nouns, are ad placitum
(arbitrary and conventional) or ex congruo (motivated and mimetic).
The terms are Bacon’s but the questions and categories go back
as far as Plato’s Cratylus, ‘the earliest extant attempt to discuss the
origin of language’ (H. N. Fowler in Plato, Cratylus 4).1 Cratylus
argues for essentialist nomination, asserting that ‘[n]ames have by
nature a truth’; they are an integral part of our identity (Oedipus,
‘swollen-footed’, has indeed the swollen foot which his name
reXects). For his interlocutor Hermogenes, however, ‘there is no
 Introduction 3

name given to anything by nature: all is convention and habit of the

users’ (Plato, Cratylus 391a–b, 384d). These binary positions domin-
ate the twenty-two centuries of language philosophy since Plato, for
the question of onomastics, as Plato well knew, cannot be separated
from the larger issue of language. The interface between onomas-
tics and semiotics is seen when Le Guin’s narrator returns her name
to Adam. ‘You and your father lent me this—gave it to me, actually.
It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to Wt very well
lately’. Given that the narrator acknowledges that she must do to
herself what she has done to the animals—abolish diVerence and
hierarchy by abolishing divisive linguistic labelling—the gift she is
returning must be the label ‘helpmeet’, ‘woman’, ‘wife’ (the biblical
Eve did not receive her name until after the fall). However, it is not
clear that this is not a postlapsarian story, and the conclusion, in
which ‘she’ leaves Adam, raises the possibility that her personal
name is also redundant.2 Genesis tells us that ‘The man called his
wives name Hevah (meaning ‘‘The life-giving one’’) because she
was ye mother of al living’ (Genesis 3: 20). An Eve separated from
Adam, single and celibate, choosing non-motherhood, will no
longer be Eve, the mother of all living.
The marital diYculty between the world’s Wrst husband and wife is
a diYculty of language, of communication. ‘She’ acknowledges that
‘[o]ne of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us
nowhere’. Adam only half-listens as ‘she’ announces the return of her
husband’s and father-in-law’s linguistic label. ‘Put it down over there,
OK?’ he says before continuing ‘with what he was doing’. Adam is
oblivious both to his wife’s identity and to her speech, and this
deWciency introduces the last part of the story which concentrates
on the nexus between name and language. When ‘she’ tries to explain
that she is leaving with the animals, ‘she’ hesitates over the choice of
noun: ‘ ‘‘I’m going now. With the—. . . . With them, you know.’’ . . .
I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain
myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for
granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative
4 Introduction

as the steps I took going down the path away from the house.’ ‘She’ is
now free to revalue language and herself. Namelessness enables her
to do both for she has wrested control of language and names from
the Wrst patriarch, the Wrst logothete and nomothete.
This is a book about the importance of names in Shakespeare’s
plays; it is also a book about the ways in which language (of which
names are a subdivision) relates to material objects. Le Guin’s
revisionist, feminist, anti-nominalist story is an appropriate starting
point for it brings together in one page what this book explores and
links throughout Wve chapters: onomastics, language, identity, cul-
tural inheritance. My premise is simple: names matter; and names
are matter—material entities capable of assuming lives and voices of
their own. Peter Holland illustrates both these points succinctly in a
discussion of Theseus and Egeus in Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Naming Hermia’s father Egeus cannot be a completely innocent act; it
was not up to Shakespeare to decide how much of this baggage should be
present—it is simply carried into the play with the name for the audience,
or, now, critic, to use. . . . The name cannot choose whether to be allusive.
Conjuring up Egeus in the play is to invoke his history.
(Holland, ‘Theseus’ Shadows’ 146)
Onomastics, as we shall see, provides an introduction to the lexical
and the local (awareness of etymology, associations, puns on names)
and to the intertextual and historical (characters’ encounters with the
cultural baggage of the name they bear: Helen, Theseus, Troilus,
Cressida, Henry) and to the theoretical, and feminist (control of
language equals control of names equals control of people). And, as
Le Guin’s short story illustrates, these areas frequently overlap.

My methodology in this book throughout is formalist; in a series of

case studies I oVer close analysis of the associations and use of
names in a range of Shakespeare plays, and in a range of perform-
ances. This is primarily a book for language lovers rather than
philosophers or historicists but it does not ignore the concerns of
the last two groups: it may eschew a philosophical focus but it
 Introduction 5

highlights the philosophical implications; it may skirt historicist

priorities but it is steeped in historicist concerns. It has serious
philosophical and historicist points to make about how language
does and does not work, and what it can and cannot do in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century society, but I have chosen to make these
points through textual and theatrical analysis rather than in the
abstract. Nonetheless the works of philosophers, theorists, anthro-
pologists, and linguists have been very important to my thinking,
and their Wngerprints are everywhere.
Chapter 1 takes its cue from Montaigne’s essay ‘On Names’ in which
Montaigne introduces his eclectic musings with a culinary analogy:
‘No matter how varied the greenstuVs we put in, we include them all
under the name of salad. So too here: while surveying names I am
going to make up a mixed dish from a variety of items’ (Montaigne,
Complete 308). The salad I assemble in Chapter 1 is a historical one: I
survey the debate about the problematic relation between names and
the named world from Genesis on. Like Montaigne’s salad, the chap-
ter’s ingredients are diverse: myth, the Bible, Greek literature, psycho-
logical analysis, literary theory, social anthropology, etymology,
baptismal trends, puns, diVerent cultures’ and periods’ social practice
as regards the bestowing and interpreting of names, and English
literature in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and
twentieth centuries. Shakespeare’s plays are my destination but the
path to them takes many deliberate detours. And what comes after
Shakespeare is as culturally interesting as what led up to him, for the
general interest in names has never gone away; hence the reader will
also Wnd illustrative material from contemporary journalism, Wlm, and
cartoons where these provide accessible depictions of classical points.
Chapter 2 turns to the patronym in Romeo and Juliet. I show how
the play embodies problems speciWc not to Verona or to sixteenth-
century England, to young love or ancient grudge, but to language
generally: the separation of signiWer and signiWed. Thucydides tells
us that in the Peloponnesian War words changed meaning (cited in
White 3). His observation applies equally to the civil feud in Verona:
6 Introduction

no longer identifying patronymics (if ever they were, if ever sur-

names can be just labels) ‘Montague’ and ‘Capulet’, fetishized into
onomastic icons of enmity, have become determinants and discrim-
inators of allegiance, and rallying cries to battle. As a later dramatist
concerned with language and identity writes: ‘I’ll use the words you
taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others.
Or let me be silent’ (Beckett, Endgame 32). In Chapter 3, I consider
the mythological name, Helen, and its abbreviation, Nell, in a
diverse group of plays: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cres-
sida, All’s Well that Ends Well, and the Henry 4/5 plays. In early
modern England, I argue, Helen had one primary referent—
Helen of Troy—and to name your daughter (or a character) was
tantamount to calling your child (or character) Adolf today. Other
historical and literary models for ‘Helen’ did exist and were much
closer to Shakespeare in time—St Helena, the virtuous mother of
the Emperor Constantine, for example, who was a popular Wgure in
the Middle Ages (she was allegedly British, and associated with the
coming of Christianity to the Roman Empire) and some authors,
like William Camden in his Remains (1605), viewed the name as
‘tied’ to this Helen. But for most Elizabethans there seems to have
been a one-to-one correspondence of the name Helen with the
Spartan ‘strumpet’; Shakespeare, however, tried to rehabilitate the
name, interrogating the circumstances in which female reputation
is lost and mythology made. In Chapter 4, I investigate the problems
of personal and theatrical identity as refracted in the diminutive name,
Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew. Performance studies feature through-
out this book (in Chapter 2, I analyse an inXuential bilingual produc-
tion of Romeo and Juliet, in Chapter 5, I oVer illustrative material about
women and Ephesus from a range of recent performances) but in
Chapter 4 my entire discussion is prompted by a production of The
Taming of the Shrew in 2006. Focusing on this production’s stress on
role-playing I consider the diVerence between role and character in
drama and relate it to the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice
Natanson. Natanson argues that anonymity is our dominant social
 Introduction 7

condition. His deWnition of anonymity is not literal: when charac-

ters are seen primarily in terms of their social role rather than in
terms of their individual personhood, he argues, we enter the world
of anonymity. In looking at the slippage between Katherine and
Kate, and the roles the character enacts, I argue that her diminutive
introduces a playworld in which multiple names and roles make
individuals slip from view as individuals, operating only as functions
(an issue particularly relevant to a play which feminist criticism has
argued is about gender and performativity). In Chapter 5, I develop
the question of gender when I turn my attention to the place name,
considering the implications of Ephesus in relation to women in The
Comedy of Errors. In altering his source, Plautus’ Menaechmi, Shake-
speare changed the setting from Epidamnus to Ephesus. Why?
I suggest that the complex history of Ephesus in relation to two
kinds of female—the independent Amazon woman and the submis-
sive Pauline wife—is crucial to Shakespeare’s portrayal of women in
The Comedy of Errors (women who are also resonantly named).

It is diYcult to write without using names. Note the discomfort

with which I deck my opening analysis of Le Guin’s story in
inverted commas (‘she’); note how much easier (and how untrue
to Le Guin) it would be to call the protagonist ‘Eve’. Note Romeo’s
dilemma: if Juliet wishes him to shed his name, how can he comply
with her request to identify himself ? ‘By a name j I know not how
to tell thee who I am’ (2.2.54). Note Milton’s awareness that the
fallen angels at the opening of Paradise Lost are nameless (their
names have been ‘blottted out and ras’d’), and that, in referring to
Moloch, Belial, Mammon, and Beelzebub, the poet uses names the
devils have not yet received (Leonard 69). And note the names we
choose to use in our critical discourse: ‘Kate’ rather than ‘Katherine’
in Taming of the Shrew, ‘Claudius’ rather than ‘the King’ in Hamlet,
‘Bertram’ rather than ‘the Count’ in All’s Well that Ends Well. It is
not that these labels are wrong but that they carry interpretative
weight. David Lodge writes that it is ‘not customary for novelists to
8 Introduction

explain the connotations of the names they give to their characters:

such suggestions are supposed to work subliminally on the reader’s
consciousness’ (Art 37). We as critics may be onomastically noncha-
lant in our choice, but the subliminal associations which David
Lodge describes are already, subtly, powerfully at work on our
readers.
In the same chapter Lodge says that in Wction ‘names are never
neutral. They always signify, even if it is only ordinariness’ (Art 37).
What is true of the novel is even more true of drama: where the
audience has so little time to become acquainted with a character,
the name must pull its weight. Let us now turn to drama and
consider the ways names ‘work’ (Ch. 1) and their subliminal asso-
ciations for audiences and readers of Shakespeare (Chs. 2 to 5).
 1
On Names

‘[A] girl you have not yet been introduced to . . . now comes forward from
the shadows of the side aisle, where she has been lurking, to join the others at
the altar rail. Let her be called Violet, no, Veronica, no Violet, improbable
a name as that is for Catholic girls of Irish extraction, customarily named
after saints and Wgures of Catholic legend, for I like the connotations of
Violet—shrinking, penitential, melancholy.’
(David Lodge, How Far Can You Go? 15)

‘I always thought it was a mistake calling you Hamlet. I mean, what kind of
name is that for a young boy? . . . I wanted to call you George.’
(Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Talks Back 16)

Names and Identity

All societies have ceremonies to name a new member, and one of the
Wrst phrases we learn in a foreign language, as in our native tongue, is
how to identify ourselves.1 Namelessness is the ultimate in ignominy,
as the root of the word attests: in-(g)nomen, no name. Non-Roman
citizens (and women) were legally nameless, denied the identifying
‘tria nomina’ of the Roman male citizen (Pulgram 151). The savages of
Mount Atlas in Barbary attract regular comment by authors from
ancient Greece to the Renaissance because they lack the two essentials
of personhood: they are nameless and dreamless (Camden 29).2
Names, like dreams, mark an individual as unique, as indiv-id-ual.
10 On Names

The Bastard’s elevation in status in King John enables him to imagine

insulting others by mistaking their names: ‘An if his name be
George, I’ll call him ‘‘Peter’’, j For new-made honour doth forget
men’s names’ (1.1.186–7). Names are necessary for renown—‘how
should a man uphold or remember the deeds of those men that have no
names?’ asks Edward Lyford in 1655 (a1r); half a century earlier
Shakespeare had characterized Caius Martius (soon to be agnomi-
nated Coriolanus) as unable to reward the poor man who sheltered
him in Corioles because he has forgotten his benefactor’s name
(1.10.89–90).
One of God’s most condign punishments, as John Donne points
out (Essays 44), is the erasure of name:
How often doth God curse with abolishing the Name? Thou shalt destroy
their Name, Deut 7.24. And, I will destroy their Name de sub caelo Deut 9.14.
And, Non seminabitur de Nomine tuo Nah. 1.14. With which curse also the
civill Ephesian Law punished the burner of the Temple, that none should
name him.
Institutions often follow God’s example, abolishing the name and
substituting a number (cf. Weidhorn, ‘Relation’ 303), a practice ma-
nipulated playfully by Noel Coward in 1930 when his friend
T. E. Lawrence joined the RAF under the pseudonym Ross (an
attempt to escape fame). Coward wrote to him: ‘Dear 338171 (May
I call you 338?) (Lawrence 443).
Only an Odysseus can manipulate namelessness to personal
advantage. In Book 9 of The Odyssey the Cyclops Polyphemus
imprisons Odysseus and his companions and eats two of the men
for dinner. Odysseus strikes a bargain with Polyphemus: Odysseus
will reveal his name if the Cyclops promises to delay eating him till
last. This agreed, Odysseus tells him that his name is no one (me tis
in Greek, translated variously as Noman or Nemo in English texts).
Odysseus sharpens a stick to use as a weapon against Polyphemus
and, when the Cyclops is intoxicated with strong Greek wine,
Odysseus blinds him. The other Cyclops respond to Polyphemus’
howls of pain, asking who is hurting him. ‘Noman’ comes the reply.
 On Names 11

Not unreasonably, Polyphemus’ fellows ignore the Cyclops’

screams, and Odysseus and his men escape. Given that one of the
recurrent formulaic epithets to describe Odysseus is ‘wily’, Odys-
seus here becomes his name twice over: he congratulates himself on
his metis (cunning) in having adopted the identity of me tis (no one).3
Names mark an individual as unique. Talthybius, the messenger
who reports the catastrophe of Euripides’ The Women of Troy, is
unusual in Greek tragedy in two respects: he involves himself in the
action (he cleans the corpse of Astyanax and prepares the ground for
his burial) and he is named. One cannot help but feel that the two
items are related: his dramatic importance is acknowledged with a
name. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta features two rival friars who appear in
only one scene, Act 4, Scene 1. The editor of the New Mermaids
edition, T. W. Craik, objects to those editors who identify the friars in
speech preWxes as Jacomo and Barnardine (they are identiWed in
dialogue) on the grounds that this ‘seems to impose more personality
on them than the nature of the play makes desirable’ (Marlowe, Jew
p. xix). The friars are not individuals (individuus: undivided, numeric-
ally one, single); they are a comic duo whose dramatic function lies in
their cupiditous rivalry. But if naming causes ontological trouble for
editors, anonymity causes problems for actors and critics. Imogen
Stubbs confessed to disappointment that her Wrst Stratford role (the
jailer’s daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen) did not even have a name (53).
Like Craik, she equated a name with individuality. (Had the play been
called The Jailer’s Daughter, however, her attitude might have been
quite diVerent. Few actresses express disappointment on being cast as
the anonymous—but eponymous—Duchess of MalW.) Helen Cooper
views John in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ ‘as a peripheral character: neither he
nor Alison is named when they are Wrst introduced, as the young men
are’ (99), and Ellen Pollak considers the Baron in The Rape of the Lock
‘relatively insigniWcant . . . a shadow. . . he doesn’t even have a proper
name’ (66).4 G. K. Hunter detects a falling-oV in Macbeth: ‘In the last
Act-and-a-half the name ‘‘Macbeth’’ is little used; he is ‘‘the tyrant’’,
‘‘the conWdent tyrant’’; [There is a] loss of personal identity’ (Hunter,
12 On Names

ed. Macbeth 26). This interpretative response to lack of names also

applies to incomplete names. Ian Watt observes that, apart from his
autobiographical narrators, all Defoe’s characters ‘are strictly second-
ary; and almost without exception, they lack the most elementary
requirements of completeness, a full name’ (323).

In the Beginning: Name versus Thing

Derek Walcott argues that ‘for somebody not to know the meaning
of . . . his or her name is to be nameless, not to have an identity’
(238). Vindice in Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy fulWls
Walcott’s desideratum for onomastic understanding:
l u s s u r i o s o Thy name? I have forgot it.
vi n d i ce Vindice my lord.
l u s s u r i o s o ’Tis a good name, that.
vi n d i ce Ay, a revenger. (4.2.169–70)
In knowing the meaning of his name Vindice has identity as a
revenger, an identity which he acts out—or fulWls.
This question of priority in the relationship between name and
behaviour is vexed. Which comes Wrst: the name, which determines
the identity? Must a Bernard be ‘brave as a bear’? must a Theophilus
be a ‘lover of God’? Must a Spielmann or Szpilman be a piano player,
as in this dialogue from the Wlm The Pianist:
—What’s your name?
—Szpilman [¼ player].
—A good name for a pianist. (Szpilman, The Pianist, 2002)5
Or does identity precede the name, and the name merely reXect it?
‘Septimus’ is unlikely to be other than a seventh son; ‘Coriolanus’
communicates Martius’ identity as the conqueror of Corioles; occu-
pational surnames—Wsher, cartwright, fuller, potter—originally des-
ignated their bearer’s profession. In Greek myth, Paris, the
Trojan prince, has, like the later Coriolanus, an additional name
which reXects his achievements:
 On Names 13

When I
Was hardly grown to man’s stature I regained
Our herds by killing an enemy.
For that I received the name I proudly bear.
(Ovid, Heroides 160)

[Paris’s other name, Alexander, means ‘the defender’.]

According to the theory which aYrmatively answers the Wrst of
the two questions above (do names determine identity?) reference is
not arbitrary but causal: Amanda will be lovable. Cinthio, whose
novella in the Hecatommithi (1565) provided the source of Othello,
blames Brabantio for the tragedy because of the ill-omened name
with which he burdened his daughter: Desdemona (unlucky). ‘The
name is the Wrst gift from the father to the child and therefore he
should give a splendid and auspicious one, as if in this way he could
augur for them happiness and distinction’ (Kahane 233). As William
Jenkin wrote in 1652, ‘Our baptismal names ought to bee such as
may prove remembrances of duty. . . ’Tis good to impose such
names as expresse our baptismal promise. A good name is as a
thread tyed about the Wnger, to make us mindful of the errand we
came into the world to do for our Master’ (quoted in Bardsley 47).
Jenkin’s causal premise is illustrated in many poems, novels, and
biographies. It is the premise behind Tristram Shandy:
His [Walter Shandy’s] opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange
kind of magic bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly
impressed upon our characters and conduct. . . . How many Caesars and
Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been
rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who
might have done exceedingly well in the world, had not their characters and
spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemused into nothing? (Sterne 77)6
Onomastic predestination is most obvious in allegorical texts,
from medieval morality plays to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but
the realist novel is not exempt. In Joseph Andrews the eponymous
hero writes to his sister: ‘I hope I shall copy your example, and that
of Joseph, my name’s sake, and maintain my virtue against all
14 On Names

temptations’ (Fielding, Joseph 64). In Richardson’s Clarissa, Mark

Kinkead-Weekes detects a link between Lovelace’s name and
his ‘view of life and relationships [as] remarkably loveless (as his
own name was pronounced at the time)’ (216). And the view that
names determine behaviour survives in contemporary life: in 2004 a
75-year-old British woman named Florence Nightingale explained
that ‘she’d tried to help people throughout her life, in part because
she wanted to live up to her namesake’ (Angel 10). In the beginning
was the word.
An alternative belief system holds that in the beginning was
the thing; names simply reXect and label a pre-existing identity.
Thus Socrates (as depicted by Plato): ‘A name is an imitation, just
as a picture is’ (Cratylus 430–1, Fowler 159). Thus Cato the Elder:
‘rem tene, verba sequentur’ (take hold of things and words will
follow) (Howell 131). Thus Thomas More: ‘a word is only an
image representing to you the imagination of my mind’ (Dialogue
117). Thus Francis Bacon: ‘words are but the images of matter’ (Ad-
vancement 26).7 For Shakespeare’s Juliet, ‘a rose j By any other
word [Q2; name Q1] would smell as sweet’ (2.2.43–4). Webster’s
Duke Ferdinand incredulously asks his sister, the Duchess of MalW,
‘Is it true thou art but a bare name, j And no essential thing?’
(3.2.85–90). In 1580 Sir Philip Sidney complained to his brother that
Oxford tuition concentrated on words at the expense of things
(cited by Shepherd in Sidney Apology 5, 35). Montaigne wrote that
‘there are names and there are things. A name is a spoken sound
which designates a thing and acts as a sign for it. The name is not
part of that thing nor part of its substance: it is a foreign body
attached to that thing; it is quite outside it’ (‘On Glory’ in
Complete 702). Mount Everest existed before anyone called it
Mount Everest (Zink 486).
The epithet is man-made, but it matches the God-made world.
This is the position put forward in Genesis 2: 19–20:
So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the Weld, and every
foule of the heaven; and brought them unto the man to see how he would
 On Names 15

call them: for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the
name thereof. The man therefore gave names unto all cattell, and the foule
of the heaven, and to every beast of the Weld.
In Milton’s expansion of Genesis, Paradise Lost, Adam’s narrative
recollection of his Wrst moments focuses on his attempts to match
the word to the world: ‘to speak I tried, and forthwith spake, j
My tongue obeyed and readily could name j What e’er I saw’ (8.271–
3).8
Nonetheless, the passage from Genesis is not as clear as early
modern exegetes would have liked, for it can be made to support
either an arbitrary and conventional or a motivated and mimetic
theory of naming. In other words, Adam assigned names arbitrarily,
and it is convention—the way we agree to use words—which gives
them their ‘meaning’: Mount Everest may have existed before
anyone named it, but Tibetans know it as Chomolangma (Mother
of the Universe) and the Nepalese call it Sagarmatha (forehead of
the sky). Or Adam gave the animals the names that suited their
personality and thus language reXects meaning.
One way to deal with this diYculty is to argue that there is no
diVerence between naming and being before the fall. Language and
reality, epistemology and ontology, are not yet diVerentiated. God
is identiWed with language in John 1: 1: ‘In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
Whether Adamic language creates or labels identity, in either case
the correlation between name and thing is perfect. It is only
with Babel that language and meaning become separated. All civil-
izations have some version of the story of Babel, in which linguistic
diversity and concomitant failure to communicate is inXicted
on mankind as a punishment. Before this, discourse was straightfor-
ward not just because a single tongue was used, but because
this Ursprache contained a perfect Wt between the word and the
thing (Steiner, passim; Haugen 33–5). The lost ability to match
name to thing Vico called onomathesia (1129–32; Novak ‘Friday’ 111).
Francis Lodwick’s Description of a Country Not Named (British Library
16 On Names

Sloane MS 913) presents a society where the citizens speak a

perfect language (Salmon 83–5). Sigurd Burckhardt writes, ‘the Fall
was a fall from the Eden of proper names into the world of common
nouns’ (3). He is punning on the literal sense of proper (from the
Latin proprius) as ‘one’s own’ (from which our word ‘property’ derives:
something which is one’s own); in Eden names Wtted the object, they
were its own.
Theologians point out that, despite its narrative appeal, Genesis
is hermeneutically one of the most diYcult books of the Bible.
Renaissance exegetes rose to the challenge: over forty commentar-
ies on Genesis, ranging from 300 to 1,000 pages, in English and in
Latin, were printed between 1525 and 1633 (see Arnold Williams, and
cf. Corcoran and J. M. Evans) in which the Wnest metaphysical
minds of the day—Babington, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli—wrestled
with the question of language. What was mankind’s Wrst language?
Could the animals speak? (Eve does not express surprise on encoun-
tering a talking snake.) Did Adam suit the animals’ names to their
nature or was his naming itself an act of creation? Was this the
founding of the Hebrew language? Was naming the animals a divine
ploy to make Adam notice the absence of a human helpmeet so that
he ‘might have a greater desire thereunto’ (Willet, C6v)? Did God
create Adam with onomastic ontological knowledge, or give it to
him soon after his creation, or was the naming procedure itself a
test? In D. J. Enright’s twentieth-century comic poem, Paradise
Illustrated, naming is a test which Adam fails (and Eve subsequently
passes):
‘Fido’, said Adam, thinking hard,
As the animals went past him one by one,
‘Bambi’, ‘Harpy’, ‘Pooh’,
‘Incitatus’, ‘Acidosis’, ‘Apparat’,
‘KraVt-Ebing’, ‘Indo-China’, ‘Schnorkel’,
‘Buggins’, ‘Bollock’—
‘Bullock will do’, said the Lord God. ‘I like it.
The rest are rubbish. You must try again tomorrow.’ (Enright 9)
 On Names 17

Onomancy
Those early modern commentators and thinkers who believed in
the causal theory of naming (that name creates identity) were
attracted by the power this attached to onomancy. As Bacon
explained: ‘if man could recover the names of animals [i.e. the lost
Adamic power of naming] he would once more command them’
(Works iii. 222). The nominator is dominator.9 Henry Ainsworth
comments, ‘This sheweth Gods bounty, in giving man dominion
over al earthly creatures, Psal. 8. for the giving of names, is a signe
of soveraigntie, Num 32.38.41.Gen 35.18 & 26.18’ (C1v). It was an easy
step for commentators to link Adam’s onomastic ‘dominion over al
earthly creatures’ to the moment in Genesis 3: 20 when, after the
fall, Adam gives another earthly creature, hitherto known only as
‘woman’, the personal name ‘Eve’. Nicholas Gibbens turns his
exposition of this passage into admonition:
Herein also the man beginneth in godlie sort to practise that authoritie
which God had given him over his wife, in calling her as it were by his own
name, which is a token among men, of their preheminence: and the woman
in receiving it declareth her obedience. Which godlie example the more
ancient it is, the more worthie to be followed both of man and wife, &
especiallie to be observed in this degenerate and declining age, in which the
duties of marriage societie are seldome and but slenderlie regarded. (Y4r)
In Notes Upon Every Chapter of Genesis Gervase Babington is more
temperately didactic about sixteenth-century marital relations, but
both Babington and Gibbens agree that naming, like language,
represents power: the power to create and, consequently, to con-
trol.10 In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s religious (and structuralist11)
allegory, reality resides in res, as Gary Waller points out, and ‘the
Wnal value of verbes is always outside the poem. . . . It is as if Spenser
sensed how language could no longer function as marks of a divine
order but was revealed as signs of power’ (187, 212).
Language and power are inextricably linked: most conquerors
attempt to impose their language on the conquered. Nowhere is
18 On Names

this more evident than in the history of conquest known as British

colonialism, which is, at one level, a history of control through
naming. In Robinson Crusoe Crusoe obsessively names areas, fea-
tures, and structures on the (‘my’) island, and when he meets (and
names) Friday ‘I taught him to say Master, and then let him know,
that was to be my name’ (Defoe 150).12 The central activity of Brian
Friel’s Translations is the ‘standardization’ (Anglicization) of Gaelic
place names in Ireland by the British Ordnance Survey team in 1833.
In Aimé Césaire’s postcolonialist revision of Shakespeare’s Tempest,
Caliban is not named Caliban but X. He has rejected the power that
Prospero has over him as namer, a rejection foreshadowed by
Shakespeare’s Caliban: ‘You taught me language, and my proWt
on’t j Is, I know how to curse’ (1.2.363–4). (In Coetzee’s Foe the
linguistic power of the colonizer over the conquered is literalized in
the amputation of Friday’s tongue.)
The relation between language and power applies to domination
of species and sex as well as of nation. Ursula Le Guin’s narrator in
‘She Unnames Them’ realizes this when she comments on the
absence of barrier between the newly nameless animals and herself:
‘They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between
myself and them. . . . [M]y fear of them and their fear of me became
one same fear. . . . [T]he hunter could not be told from the hunted,
nor the eater from the food.’ Nomination creates division. Mary Daly
made this point in a more polemical way in 1973 when she wrote,
Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free
to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God. The old naming
was not the product of dialogue—a fact inadvertently admitted in the Genesis
story of Adam’s naming the animals and the woman. Women are now
realising that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because
partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate. (Daly 8)
Shakespeare’s Katherine of France makes the same point without
language (or without the English language) when she three times
stalls Henry 5’s attempts at dialogue in English: ‘I cannot tell wat is
dat’; ‘I cannot tell’; ‘I do not know dat’ (Henry 5 5.2.177; 195; 211).
 On Names 19

Forcing him into French is a way of wresting back some of the power
she is about to lose as bartered princess of a conquered nation. He
‘Englishes’ her politically but she ‘Frenches’ him linguistically.13
The relation between language and identity, and the develop-
ment from iteration of name to creation of identity applies even
when the reiterated word is a common noun rather than a proper
name. In The Merchant of Venice the development takes place in a
single sentence in Shylock’s subtle (and perhaps unconscious) grad-
ation from past tense to present: he tells Antonio ‘Thou call’st me
dog before thou had’st a cause, j But since I am a dog, beware my
fangs’ (3.3.6–7). In Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s Witch of Edmonton,
the old, deformed, and poor Elizabeth Sawyer turns to witchcraft
under repeated accusations that she is a witch. As she herself
acknowledges, ‘’Tis all one, j To be a witch as to be counted one’
(2.1.117–18). The name creates the behaviour.
If names create identity (or are deemed to do so), the logical
corollary is that by changing the name one can change identity. This
is the psychological thinking which motivates people to change
their name by deed poll, or newly independent countries to rename
themselves. In ancient Greek society servants were given new
names when they changed master (Harris and Taylor 4). But the
process of resignifying is not always consistent or straightforward.
In the Orwellian world of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia the local
oYcials, the syphogrants, have been subject to linguistic reorgan-
ization (their new title is phylarch), yet the narrator, Hythloday
(whose name means nonsense), persistently uses the older name
throughout his narrative without oVering any explanation for this
retention. In fact the text elsewhere expresses scepticism that ‘one
could change the real nature of things just by changing their names’
(Logan and Adams 71).14 In Henry 8 the Wrst gentleman corrects the
third gentleman when the latter refers to the renamed Whitehall
(formerly York Place) by its previous name. The third gentleman
responds, ‘I know it j But ’tis so lately alter’d that the old name j Is
fresh about me’ (4.2.98–9). But having more time does not always
20 On Names

enable us to acclimatize to a new name. In All’s Well that Ends Well

editors and critics refuse Bertram his new title of Count Rossillion
(although this is the only form by which he is known in the play’s
source, Giletta of Narbona), consistently calling him (as I have just
done) Bertram.15 Despite the Bastard’s promotion in King John,
editors still label the newly named Sir Richard Plantagenet ‘Bastard’
in speech preWxes and stage directions (as does the play’s composi-
tor in the First Folio—a practice for which the Bastard himself
provides some authority in 2.1). Twenty years after the publication
of the Oxford Shakespeare, reviewers still protest about the change
of FalstaV to Oldcastle (Vickers, ‘By other hands’ 11). We talk of ‘the
former Yugoslavia’; ‘the Artist formerly known as ‘‘Prince’’ ’; a
street in Oxford bears the plaque ‘Pusey Street (formerly Alfred
Street)’. Label and identity may be more symbiotically linked for
personal names than theories of the arbitrary nature of the sign
would allow.16
In the Institutes (published about ad 95) Quintilian states that ‘the
best words are essentially suggested by the subject matter [literally: Wt
their things (‘‘rebus cohaerunt’’)] and are discovered by their own
intrinsic light’ (8. Proem, Butler iii. 189). For Richard Mulcaster in 1582
‘the word being knowen . . . the thing is half known’ (167). Hobbes
cautions: ‘Seeing then that truth consisteth in the right ordering of
names in our aYrmations, a man seeking precise truth, had need to
remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it
accordingly; or else he will Wnd himself entangled in words (105).
Derrida writes that ‘the name is not supposed to signify anything,
yet it does begin to signify’ (Derrida, ‘Signeponge’ 192, cited in
Hawkes 139 n. 20). Shakespeare’s Cassius is puzzled by this paradox:
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’. ( JC 1.2.142–7)
 On Names 21

But, as Frank Kermode points out, ‘it won’t; Caesar proves to be the
magically eVective name’ (197). Brutus is a name whose power is
exhausted. In republican Rome it lacks the power and authority of
the Brutus who banished the Tarquins in the very early days of
Rome’s history.

Names and Language

The above examples slide between proper names and common
nouns. The slippage is endemic to language because proper
names belong to a taxonomy of referring expressions; thus, the
questions raised by the dyad of name/identity are also posed by
language/meaning, the common denominator being the dyad
word/thing (or, to use the terms in which the debate was cast
from antiquity to the Enlightenment, res/verbum). Plato acknow-
ledges that not all words are names, but names, being little sen-
tences, are words (Sophist cited in Fine 292, 290).17 For Aristotle a
name was a word which belongs to someone or something (Harris
and Taylor 20). In De Magistro Augustine writes, ‘All things that are
words are also names’ (121), and his anecdote in The Confessions
about how he acquired language uses ‘name’ and ‘word’ inter-
changeably (29). The death of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens
intertwines names and language: Timon’s last words are ‘let . . . lan-
guage end!’ (5.1.220), and his epitaph reads ‘seek not my name’
(5.4.71).18 Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae (1584) explains
nomen as ‘A name is a nowne’, and Ramus’ Latin Grammar answers
the question ‘what is a word?’ with ‘It is a note by which everything
is called’ (2). Rhetorical Wgures are explained in terms of names: for
Puttenham onomatopoeia is the ‘New namer’, antonomasia is the
‘Surnamer’, metonymy the ‘Misnamer’ and catachresis ‘give[s]
names to many things which lacke names, as when we say, the
water run’ (Puttenham 180–2, cited in Ferry, Art 66). In 1609 John
Wynborne in The New Age of Old Names asked rhetorically ‘What
22 On Names

bee termes, but names?’ (B3v), and in 1655 Edward Lyford compared
those who did not know the meaning of their names to those who
spoke nonsense, not knowing the meaning of words (A2v).
Bishop Sprat, who attempted to improve the English language on
behalf of the Royal Society in 1667, uses name synonymously with
word: he instructs members to deliver ‘so many things almost
in an equal number of words’ and complains that the Royal Society
‘did not regard the credit of names but things’ (113, 105; my em-
phasis). In the eighteenth century Laurence Sterne’s great novel
about naming (après Locke) focuses on two related items: the
accidental baptism of the hero as Tristram (with its connotations
of sadness, rather than his father’s intended choice of Trismagistus,
meaning thrice great) and the characters’ failures in communication
(from Tristram’s inability to tell a linear story to Uncle Toby’s
conversational monomania). For Genette, ‘naming is really the
linguistic act par excellence’ (11). The debate about names is thus
consistently linked to the debate about language (indeed, ancient
Greek had only one word, onoma, to designate both personal name
and grammatical noun, and hence it was natural for Plato to
conclude that persons and objects received their names in the
same way (Hare 33)19).
The close relation between names and words is visible in the
number of early modern dictionaries, word lists, and other refer-
ence books which include glosses of proper names, either as an
appendix or interspersed throughout the alphabetical listings.
Names, like words, required translation or explication. The Geneva
Bible of 1560 adds ‘A Briefe Table of the Interpretation of the proper
names which are chieXy found in the olde Testament’ (this ‘Briefe
Table’ contains over one thousand personal names). William Pat-
ten’s Calendar of Scripture (1575) translates biblical names into Eng-
lish, including the names of men and women as well as ‘Nations,
Countries . . . Idols, Cities, Hills, Rivers’, as does Thomas Wilson’s
Dictionary of 1612. Edward Phillips’ New World of English Words, or A
General Dictionary (1658) contains ‘the Interpretations of Such Hard
 On Names 23

Words as are derived from other Languages . . . To Which are added The
SigniWcations of Proper Names’. Francis Gregory’s Onomastikon Brahn
(1651) includes among its glossaries classical and mythological
names, as does Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary (1632). Edward
Cocker’s The Young Clerk’s Tutor Enlarged (6th edition 1670), is not a
dictionary so much as a guidebook to behaviour and letterwriting,
but it sees Wt to include in its ‘usefull Collection’ a twenty-three
page listing of male and female names in Latin and English (119–42).
The same author’s English Dictionary (1704; published posthu-
mously) adds an appendix—An Historical Poetical dictionary:
containing The Proper Names of Men, Women, Rivers, Countrys . . .
With the Etymological Explication and Derivation of them—while the
anonymous Gazophylacium Anglicanum containing the Derivation of
English Words, Proper and Common (1689) includes at the end a
separate Etymologicon Onomasticon, or An Etymological Explication of
the Proper Names of Men and Women.
Although Renaissance dictionaries separate common nouns and
proper names, today’s dictionaries do not for it is sometimes diYcult
to know the diVerence between a noun and a name. Pandar, Lo-
thario, Romeo, Walter Mitty, Jezebel, Zoilus, Luddite, Judas retain
their majuscule when used as types (‘keeping up with the Joneses’;
Luddites; ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is
always Judas who writes the biography’ (Oscar Wilde; cited in John
M. Carroll 116)), thereby revealing their origins as a proper name.20
However, these words’ capacity to be used as a plural renders them
more noun than proper name. (As a rule of thumb, proper names
cannot be plural although there are a few notable exceptions: the
United States of America, the Bahamas, the New York Times, for
example; John M. Carroll 169.) At the other extreme, doll, spa, lido,
sandwich, mackintosh, tar, amp, volt, ohm, cardigan, limerick, to-
bacco, turkey, and china (note the minuscules) are rarely associated
with the people or places from which they derive, and Stentor and
Mausoleus have been morphologically metamorphosed (stentorian,
mausoleum). Ernst Pulgram highlights the diYculty in distinguishing
24 On Names

names from nouns with a rhetorical question: ‘If a woman is called

Violet, this is undoubtedly her proper name. But is Violet a common
noun, or is it the proper name of that little Xower?’ (157). A general,
albeit paradoxical, answer is that proper names become nouns when
their semantic content is reactivated: when a Potter becomes a potter,
the name once again has ‘meaning’.
Colin Burrow draws our attention to ‘James I’s wonderfully
named mason, Nicholas Stone’ (Spenser 1). His delight centres on
the happy coincidence of name and profession, rather like the
character in Edward Albee’s play, Tiny Alice:
ju lian You . . . you are the butler, are you not, but . . .
b u t l e r Butler. My name is Butler.
ju lian (Innocent pleasure) How extraordinary!
b u t l e r (Putting it aside) No, not really. Appropriate: Butler . . . butler.
If my name were Carpenter, and I were a butler . . . or if I were a
carpenter, and my name were Butler . . .
ju lian But still . . .
b u t l e r . . . it would not be so appropriate.
(Act 1, scene 2, p. 30)

But the arbitrary coincidence celebrated by Burrow was once a

causal connection, and, for Nicholas Stone, still was. Stone’s family
were so surnamed because they were stonemasons (the appellation
could be abbreviated to either Stone or Mason); and the Butlers
were butlers (originally a servant in charge of the wine cellar, from
the French bouteillier).
The return of proper names to nouns involves a further paradox
for this reconnection of the linguistic sign with the reality it reXects
(or creates) is a striking act of unnaming (Clarkson 61). To share
one’s name with a noun is to reduce one’s individuality because as
extensive meaning increases, intensive meaning decreases: Potter ¼
me becomes potter ¼ anyone who makes pots (Pulgram 170).21 In
literature this process is most obvious with type and allegorical
names, such as we associate with medieval morality drama
(Mercy, Mankind, Iniquity), but meaningful individual names test
 On Names 25

the boundaries. Marvin Carlson points out that Sir Fopling Flutter,
Lord Foppington, and Sir Novelty Fashion are not individuals but
generic fops (290).
As an illustration of the slippery overlap between proper name
and common noun, let us consider an example from Titus Androni-
cus. Searching for a suitable onomastic analogue for the wicked
Tamora in Titus Andronicus, Lavinia settles on Tamora’s own name
as being the truest expression of her wickedness: ‘Ay, come, Semi-
ramis, nay, barbarous Tamora, j For no name Wts thy nature but thy
own!’ (2.3.118–19).22 The Assyrian synonym is not an adequate
onomastic precedent for Tamora and her cruelty; Tamora is herself,
she is her name.23 But Semiramis has been invoked earlier in the
play in a positive context when Aaron describes Tamora as ‘this
queen, j This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph, j This siren’
(2.1.21–3). In this sentence the beautiful Semiramis is simply a
synonym for goddess, nymph, siren (fatal to others but not to
Aaron). What to Aaron is an equivalent noun (syno-nym: same
name) with a connotative function (the name as word) is to Lavinia
a proper name with a uniquely denotative function (the name as
thing, as essence). And the meaning, here as elsewhere in language,
is not germane to the word but is partly created (and understood) by
context. Semiramis is a type of beauty if you are Aaron but a type of
cruelty if you are Lavinia. A pippin refers to an apple if you are
reading Merry Wives of Windsor (‘there’s pippins and cheese to
come’; 1.2.12–13) but Charlemagne if you are reading Love’s Labour’s
Lost (‘when King Pippen of France was a little boy’; 4.1.120).24
The overlap between names and language is given a comic
reductio ad absurdum by Feste:
viola they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.
f e s t e I would therefore my sister had had no name, sir.
v i o l a Why, man?
f e s t e Why, sir, her name’s a word and to dally with
that word might make my sister wanton.
(Twelfth Night 3.1.12–17)
26 On Names

Feste here highlights in jest and en passant what philosophers

examine in earnest and at length: the relationship between names
and language. No book on Shakespeare’s onomastic discourse can
avoid situating the debate about names and identity in the history of
debates about language and meaning. Any explanatory excursus is
necessarily lengthy, covering twenty-two centuries of linguistic the-
ory, but I hope to have indicated the key positions in the summaries
and citations above. This chapter must now turn its attention to
names in early modern England.

Early Modern Naming

In the sixteenth century it was customary for godparents to select
the name for a newborn. Baptism was a ceremony for children
and godparents rather than for children and parents—the mother
was rarely present, having not yet been ‘churched’ after childbirth.
Whether the godparents chose the name in consultation with the
parents is not clear: Scott Smith-Bannister Wnds the evidence
ambiguous (25–30, esp. 28) although David Cressy states that
‘parents and godparents usually agreed in advance what the
child should be called’ (161). In the Middle Ages the child was
traditionally baptized with the name of ‘its principal godparent of
the same sex’ (Singman and McLean 41). For the sixteenth century
Marc’hadour talks more generally of a baptismal sponsor as being
responsible for choosing the name, a sponsor whom he says was
‘often one of the grandparents’ (559). Practice was no doubt
variable: Shakespeare’s twins were called Judith and Hamnet,
after their godparents Judith and Hamnet Sadler, and sixteenth-
century children still frequently bore their godparent’s name.
Parents might therefore indirectly choose a child’s name by their
choice of godparent.
However, Shakespeare’s plays speciWcally give the godparent the
responsibility of naming on four occasions. In King Lear Regan asks
Gloucester:
 On Names 27

What, did my father’s godson seek your life?

He whom my father named, your Edgar? (2.1.107–8)25
In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne satirizes the achievements of re-
searchers, belittling astronomers:
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,
That give a name to every Wxed star
Have no more proWt of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
And every godfather can give a name. (1.1.88–93)
In Richard 3 George, Duke of Clarence reveals his imprisonment as
the result of Edward’s superstitious belief that ‘G’ shall cause his
death. Richard responds to Clarence’s explanation (‘my name is
George’) with the sympathetic ‘that fault is none of yours; j He
should for that commit your godfathers’ (1.1.46–8). In Henry 8 the
infant Elizabeth is baptized in the play’s last scene. Henry enters and
asks ‘What is her name?’ to which Cranmer, the godfather replies,
‘Elizabeth’ (5.5.9–10). It is diYcult to know whether this last dia-
logue is a ritual, with the king taking over the role which the Book
of Common Prayer allots to the priest (see 5.4.48 n., McMullan 428),
or whether it represents a genuine request for information. The
historical Henry knew all too well the name of his new daughter, for
he had originally intended to call her Mary, replacing her half-sister
Mary in name as well as in lineage (Bassnett 18) but Shakespeare
need not have known that royal practice diVered from that of the
common man (if indeed it did: it is possible for Henry to have
considered and rejected Mary as a name but still not to have known
the eventual name before the christening).
All four plays’ references to godparents as providers of names
may simply be a shorthand, of course, referring to the godparents’
ceremonial function at christenings,26 but there are suYcient refer-
ences in the period to suggest that godparents regularly named
children and that parents were not always delighted by their choice.
Simonds d’Ewes (1602–50) tells us that his father was given the
28 On Names

name of his deceased elder brother Paul because of the ‘idle alter-
cation and striving of his godfathers at the font for the name . . . for
whilst his godfathers were in the heat of their unseasonable strife,
the minister, upon enquiry understanding he was born upon the
25th day of January, being the day allotted for the Apostle Paul’s
conversion that year, 1567, he gave him that name’ (i. 8). Sir Henry
Sidney reports with embarrassment to William Cecil that his latest
son—born in 1569 while his father was Deputy Governor of Ire-
land—has been called Thomas after his uncle the Earl of Sussex,
despite Sidney’s instructions ‘that if it were a boy it should have
been William, if a wench, Cecil’ (Duncan-Jones 50).
The onomastic inXuence of godparents changed during the
seventeenth century, with parents assuming more responsibility
for their children’s names (perhaps an indication of the evolving
nuclear unit) but the lines of crossover in baptismal practice are not
clear (Smith-Bannister 26 V.). Simonds d’Ewes concludes his ac-
count of his father’s baptismal Wasco with the moral ‘It therefore
becomes parents to take upon them the naming of their children,
and it becomes witnesses in common civility to leave that power
wholly to them’ (i. 8), and in 1622 William Gouge is quite clear that
‘it belongeth to Parents to give the name to their childe’ (522).
However, in 1599 a father’s attempt to name his son ‘Doe well’
was thwarted at the font by the minister who disapproved of the
name and substituted ‘John’, and in 1696 a Mr Clemens who
christened a child ‘Job’ upset the baby’s father so much that the
neighbours prevailed upon a second minister to rebaptize the child
Thomas (Smith-Bannister 28, 11). As late as 1762 the family of Gold-
smith’s Wctional Vicar of WakeWeld could represent both practices.
The vicar’s wife chose the name of the couple’s Wrst daughter—a
romance name, Olivia, from the books she had been reading during
pregnancy—but the godmother insisted on choosing the name of
their second daughter, Sophia. The vicar laments that he now had
two romance names in the family but ‘solemnly protest[s] that [he]
had no hand in it’ (3). In Tristram Shandy, Goldsmith’s contemporary,
 On Names 29

Laurence Sterne, debates the ethics of overriding a godfather’s

choice of an unsuitable name such as Judas (78). Not for Goldsmith’s
Vicar or Sterne’s Mr Shandy the ontologically autonomous outlook
of Cervantes’ Don Quixote: ‘yet will we give those very names we
Wnd in Books . . . which are to be disposed of publicly in the Open
Market; and when we have purchased them, they are our own’
(ch. 73, ii, 928). Sterne also oVers a comic variant of the strife
described by Simonds d’Ewes. Political relations between
Switzerland and France are cemented with the promise that Switz-
erland shall stand godfather to France’s next child; the republic ‘as
godmother, claims her right in this case, of naming the child’. France
agrees, expecting that Switzerland will choose a name ‘agreeable to
us’, for example ‘Francis, or Henry, or Lewis’ (298) but Switzerland
chooses Shadrach, Mesech, and Abednego. France consequently
declares war.
Whether a Wrst name originated with parent or godparent, it
signiWed. The signiWcance was not conWned to semantics or ety-
mology; as Lévi-Strauss points out, a name is an identifying mark
(181). The early modern Wrst name identiWed the bearer as human;
unlike today, animals were not normally given human names (Tho-
mas 96), and although Petruccio’s naming of his spaniel ‘Troilus’ is
appropriate in terms of canine loyalty, it is inappropriate in terms of
an early modern hierarchy of species.27 A Wrst name also identiWed
gender (androgynous names are a recent development),28 and it
identiWed status. The children of peers were distinguished by two
Wrst names; gentlemen often received surnames as Wrst names
(Smith-Bannister 129, 89–95), although this was a recent develop-
ment: Sidney, Howard, Neville, and Percy are now accepted Wrst
names but in 1605 William Camden reported concern about the
‘great inconvenience’ which might arise from this new practice of
turning aristocratic surnames into Wrst names (E4v, p. 32). William
Gouge opines that contractions and diminutives such as Jack, Tom,
Will, and Hal are ‘unseemly: servants are usually so-called’ (283).
Thus FalstaV is ‘Jack FalstaV’ or ‘Sir John FalstaV’, and Hal is ‘Prince
30 On Names

Henry’ or ‘Hal’: ‘Sir Jack’ or ‘Prince Hal’ would be an oxymoron

and ‘King Hal’ a terrible faux pas, one that FalstaV commits in
public when he addresses the new monarch as both ‘King Hal’ and
‘my sweet boy’ (5.5.41, 43). Diminutives with regal titles could be
used aVectionately—‘good King Harry’ or ‘good Queen Bess’, for
example—especially once a monarch was dead, but these would
never be used as signatures by a monarch or modes of address
from a subject to him/her. (Similarly, one might talk of the Princess
of Wales as ‘Lady Di’ but would never have addressed her as
such.) The monarch could use diminutives, however, as in ‘God
for Harry, England, and St George!’ (H5 3.1.34). The name also
identiWed the bearer as Christian. Gouge lists and explains ‘some
sorts and kinds of names, as be Wt, and beseeming Christians’. His
list has four categories: names which have some ‘good’ etymo-
logical ‘signiWcation’ (e.g. ‘John’ meaning ‘the grace of God’);
names which have ‘in times before us beene given to persons
of good note, whose life is worthy our imitation’; names ‘of our
owne ancestors and predecessors, to preserve a memorie of the
familie’; and ‘usuall names of the country, which custome hath
made familiar, as Henry, Edward, Robert, William and such like
among us’ (522–3).
The interest in ‘Wt’ names, in the relation of name to character,
spawned a number of early modern volumes designed to help
parents and godparents choose an inspiring and appropriate name
for a newborn, and to help others live up to (if good) or refute (if
bad) the meanings of their names: John Penkethman’s Onomatophy-
lacium, or The Christian Names of Men and Women (1626), Lyford’s
True Interpretation (1655), Anon’s Gazophylacium (1689). Even if one
did not consult such volumes the consequences of onomastic
choices were accessible everywhere. Camden relates a story of
two French ambassadors who visited Spain to choose one of two
Spanish princesses, the beautiful Urraca or the less beautiful
Blanche, as bride for the French King, Louis VIII. Everyone
expected the choice to be Uracca.
 On Names 31

But the Ambassadours enquiring each of their names, tooke oVence ate
Urraca, and made choyce of the Lady Blanche, saying, That her name
would be better received in France than the other, as signifying faire and
beautifull . . . So that the great Philosopher Plato might seeme, not without
cause, to advise men to be carefull in giving faire and happie names
. . . Bonum nomen, bonum omen. (30–1)
The Latin tag goes back to antiquity but was Englished into an early
modern proverb, ‘Names and nature do oft agree’ (Tilley N32 and
cf. Tilley N24).
There is, as this proverb shows, much more to proper names than
localized, lexical puns or etymology. As Foucault wrote (of author’s
names): ‘One cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple
reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an
indication, a gesture, a Wnger pointed at someone, it is the equiva-
lent of a description’ (‘Author’ 145–6).29 All societies attach import-
ance to names, but it makes particular sense that a theocentric
society—which seeks meaning in the quotidian—should read
names as signs. Nor was onomancy conWned to people: bonum
nomen, bonum omen held true for ships too, as we see in Webster’s
The Devil’s Law-Case:
r o m e l i o Is there any ill omen in giving names to ships?
Ariosto Did you not call one, The Storm’s DeWance;
Another, The Scourge of the Sea; and the third, The Great
Leviathan?
romelio Very right, Sir.
ar iost o Very devilish names
All three of them: and surely I think they were cursed
In their very cradles. (2.3.51–6)
There is a diVerence between an auspicious name and an arrogant
name. Ariosto complains that the latter tempts fate. Elizabeth
M. Brennan’s survey of ships’ names reveals the understandable
popularity of Bonaventure and the success of Drake and Hawkins’
Garland, Hope, Foresight, Concord, and Amity. Hawkins’ Voyage into the
South Sea (1622) ‘gave examples of vessels whose badly chosen
names, such as ‘‘The Revenge’’ and ‘‘Thunderbolt’’, brought them
32 On Names

ill fortune. Hawkins’s own ship, ‘‘The Repentance’’, had bad luck,
and in William Kidley’s poem Hawkins (1624), the hero is repre-
sented as protesting against this choice of name, made by his
mother’ (Webster, Devil’s Law-Case, 2.3.49–57 n., p. 51).

Etymologies
The early modern interest in etymology (whether actual or fanciful
in derivation) was inherited from ancient Greece where, as in
Renaissance England, it converged with the period’s passion for
wordplay. Greek tragedy regularly punned on the supposed associ-
ation of Helen with the root hele, meaning ‘destruction’:
Who was the unknown seer whose voice . . .
made choice
Of a child’s name, and deftly linked
Symbol with truth, and name with deed,
Naming, inspired, the glittering bride
Of spears, for whom men killed and died,
Helen the Spoiler? On whose lips
Was born that Wt and fatal name . . . ?
(Aeschylus, Agamemnon 66)

To the early modern English tongue the meaning of Helen equated

to its Wrst syllable hell, or, if you were Faustus, deWantly oppositional
in this as in so much else, to heaven: ‘Come Helen, come, give me
my soul again. j Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips’
(Marlowe, Dr Faustus A-text, 5.1.95–6). Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s
Lost, who Xuctuates between synonymizing and etymologizing,
muses on Ovidius Naso: ‘And why indeed ‘‘Naso’’, but for smelling
out the odoriferous Xowers of fancy?’ (4.2.123). His explanation may
be wrong but his etymological instincts are correct: Naso was a
nickname, assigned because of the prominence of Ovid’s nose.
Several early modern works focus in part or in whole on the
etymology of names. William Camden’s Remains (1605) devotes over
 On Names 33

half the book (148 of 294 pages) to an analysis of onomastic customs

in other cultures, to the history of surnames, to a list of male and
female names and to puns on Wrst names and surnames. It is a
seventeenth-century forerunner of the Guinness Book of Names (in-
deed, the latter draws its material heavily from the former). Richard
Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, which
appeared the same year as Camden’s Remains (printed in Antwerp),
provides a witty account of onomastic etymology. Verstegan the
philologist is evident in his discussion of Barnard (the ‘true orto-
graphy’ of which is ‘Bearn¼hart’), a name designed to inspire in the
named the admired qualities of the warlike bear:
[o]f which beast to have the lyke harte or the lyke cowrage, the parents
would somtyme give unto the child the name of Bearn-hart/ that is, Beares-
hart/ for n/ as well as s/ is in our ancient speech at the end of nownes the
signe of the plural number, as we yet in divers things do retaine it, as when
wee say, children/ bretheren/ Oxen/ and the lyke. (Hh4v, p. 248)
Verstegan the sceptical humorist emerges in his deconstruction of
others’ analysis of the etymology of Robert (bert from vert ¼ beard,
or from German wert ¼ worth; Rob from red, mistaken for the
colour):
For as children when their names are Wrst given can not bee praised for
their woorth or woorthynes, because it can not in them so soon appeer, no
more may they bee called after the colour of their beards when they have
none. . . . [Therefore] moste ridiculous it is to say. . . that Robert/ is to say
Red-beard/ as though the bearers in old tyme of that name, either had no
names until they had beards, or els when they gat beards they gat new
names according to the colour of them. (Hh2r–v, pp. 243–4)30
Verstegan here mocks the absurd extremity of essentialist nomination.
The egregiously logical narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a latter-day Verstegan: on
being told the etymology of his name (‘Christopher . . . means carrying
Christ . . . and it was the name given to St Christopher because he
carried Jesus Christ across a river’) he is puzzled: ‘This makes you
wonder what he was called before he carried Christ across the river’ (21).
34 On Names

The interest in naming created a fashion for authors playfully

‘translating’ the literal content of their names. Middleton’s Ghost of
Lucrece (1600) includes a prefatory Latin poem by ‘Thomas Medius
& Gravis Tonus’ [Middle and Tone] (STC 17885.5); in Heywood’s
Philocothonista (1625) the author signs his prefatory poem as ‘Tho:
Faenie-Lignum’ [Hay-Wood] (STC 13356). ‘De Fluctibus’ [Of Waves]
in a foreign publication of 1638 is Robert Fludd; ‘Gulielmus De
Insula’ [William of the Island] (1619) is William Lisle (STC 6206,
a2r; in Michael Dalton’s The Country Justice); ‘Paganus Piscator’
[rural angler] (1656; in Piscatoris Poemata) is Fisher Payne (STC
Wing F1034); ‘Authore Adamo Regio’ (1617; in Nostodia by members
of the University of Edinburgh) is the author Adam King (STC 7487);
and ‘Mr. Scintilla’ (1651; in The Historical Narrative of the First Fourteen
Years of King James) is the stationer and author Michael Sparke (STC
Wing S4818; see Franklin Williams 318). John Marston signed the
preface to The Scourge of Villainy (1598) as W. Kinsayder (101). Kinse
means to cut, and so a kinsayder—like a satirist—is a cutter; but it
also means a speciWc form of cutting—castration—and since stone
was a slang word for testicles, the relevance of Marston (mar-
stone)’s pseudonym is clear (Ruthven 23).
The fashion for translating one’s name through puns was not
conWned to authors. In 1599 the printer Richard Field printed a long
text in Spanish: Catholico Reformado (STC 19741). It was written by
Guillermo Perquino (William Perkins) and translated into Castilian
by Guillermo Massán (I do not know if this name is also an alias).
The title page proclaimed in Spanish that the book was printed
‘En casa de Ricardo del campo’,31 an imprint Field had used already
for the Spanish New Testament he printed in 1596 (STC 2959). Field
was a specialist in foreign language printing (he had been appren-
ticed to the French refugee printer Thomas Vautrollier, whose
widow he married in 1588, just a year after Field was made free of
the Stationers’ Company, and a year after Vautrollier’s death); his
foreign-language output includes texts in Latin, French, Spanish,
and Welsh. He frequently oVered bilingual versions of his name, or
 On Names 35

adopted the language of the text he was printing for all title-page
details except his name.32
Field was a Stratford man, the printer of Shakespeare’s Wrst forays
into poetry, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’; Shake-
speare and Field were contemporaries (Field was born in 1561,
Shakespeare in 1564; Field died in 1624) and the professional/per-
sonal association between the two has long been a source of interest
to biographers. Shakespeare includes Field in Cymbeline where the
disguised Imogen identiWes her (Wctitious) late master as Richard du
Champ (4.2.375).33 Field’s career shows that the Cymbeline reference
is not simply a one-way joke, a tribute to a friend, but a knowing
response to Spanish texts in which that friend had already translated
his name (or to French and Latin texts in which that friend had
translated everything but his name).34
In its least taxing form of onomastic play, English names are
simply Latinized (Robertus Smithus, Alexander Douglasius in STC
7487), or anagrammatized (Ryhen Pameach for Henry Peacham in
STC P944). This latter fashion is invoked in Jonson’s Epicoene in a
list of current trends: ‘Who will . . . make anagrams of our names,
and invite us to the cockpit, and kiss our hands all the play-time?’
(4.3.43–6). Richard Field playfully oVers pseudo-Welsh on the title-
page of a Welsh translation of John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesia Anglica-
nae: his imprint reads ‘Richard Field a’i printiodd ynn Llunden’
(STC 14595). At its most impenetrable, translations of names border
on cryptic crossword-style clues. Willobie His Avisa (STC 25755) is
written by ‘Vigilantius Dormitanus’; the ‘author’ may be two
Oxford fellows Robert Wakeman and Edward Napper, conjectures
Leslie Hotson (cited in Franklin Williams 318). The fashion was
encouraged among university students by the poetic tradition of
Vacation Exercises, as in Milton’s ‘At a Vacation Exercise in the
College’ which begins as a Latin speech with jokes, bilingual puns
(Hale 45) and ‘personal references to members of the audience’
(Carey 76).35 But it has a much longer tradition. The New Testa-
ment is full of onomastic puns: ‘And I tell you, you are Peter [Greek
36 On Names

Petros] and on this rock [Greek petra] I will build my church’

(Matthew 16: 18).
Such puns are called ‘allusions’ by Camden, who collects nine
pages of them. The allusions he cites are at times so strained that
they make Subtle’s sign for Abel Drugger, the tobacconist in Jon-
son’s Alchemist, seem far from preposterous:
He Wrst shall have a bell, that’s Abel;
And, by it, standing one whose name is Dee,
In a rug gown; there’s D and Rug, that’s Drug;
And right anenst him, a Dog snarling, ‘er’:
There’s Drugger, Abel Drugger. That’s his sign. (2.6.19–23)
In fact, Jonson’s comedy, here as elsewhere, simply satirizes the
recognizable: the rebus of the Jacobean printer Henry Bell (1606–38)
features a hen, a sprig of rye, and a bell (McKerrow, Printers
386, 388).36 The device of another printer, Lenoir, featured a
moor’s head (Marc’hadour 545). Camden describes ‘an Hare by a
sheafe of rie in the Sunne’ as the rebus for Harrison, and ‘a Maggot-
pie vppon a goate for Pigot’ (Camden V2v, p. 148). Bishop Fisher’s
coat of arms was a dolphin (a Wsh) plus three ears of corn, and
Archbishop Morton’s emblem was a mulberry tree (mor in Latin)
growing from a barrel (ton) (Marc’hadour 541–2; Camden V2v,
p. 148). Such visual/textual puns are widespread and are not
conWned to ephemeral texts. My guidebook to Florence explains
that in the church of Santa Maria Novella, built by the Dominicans
from 1279 to 1357, ‘the frescoes in the Spanish Chapel show
the Dominicans as whippets—domini canes or hounds of God’
(Catling 110).

Poetymologies
Early modern authors self-consciously refer to the meaning of
names in direct allusion, in Latin translations and polylingual
puns, in transliteration, wordplay and apheresis, in etymological
questions and answers, in anecdotes about the eVect of name on
 On Names 37

behaviour. Astrophil and Stella—star-lover and star—are Sidney’s

appropriate Wctional names for himself and his inamorata, Lady
Penelope Rich, whose real-life identity is acknowledged in a
concentrated sequence of puns in sonnet 37. Montaigne invokes
his own name in a pun on ‘mountain’ (Neill 402), Shakespeare
puns repeatedly on his own given name in his sonnet 135, and
Robert Greene manipulates Shakespeare’s surname to impugn
him as the ‘onely Shake-scene in a countrey’ (F1v). Erasmus
punningly dedicates Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) to Sir Tho-
mas More, ‘Grieve-ll’ in Caelica 84 is the author, Fulke Greville’s,
self-referential wordplay, and John Donne wittily advertises the
disastrous economic result of his secret marriage to his wife,
Anne: ‘John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done’ (Walton 14). Decades
later, in more serious mode in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’,
Donne asks God to forgive his sins but worries that ‘When thou
hast done [Wnished], thou hast not done’ [Wnished and Donne]
because the poet has yet more capacity for sin; the poem moves
to a triumphant and peaceful conclusion in which God removes
Donne’s fear and ‘having done that, Thou hast done’ (‘Hymn to
God’, lines 5–6, 17 in Poetical Works). Poignantly, Ben Jonson
invokes the name of his Wrstborn son in ‘On My First Sonne’
(Epigrams 43) when he apostrophizes the dead 7-year-old as ‘thou
child of my right hand’ (which is the literal meaning of the
Hebrew ‘Benjamin’). Milton repeatedly plays with names through-
out his poetry. In Paradise Lost Satan, whose name in Hebrew
means ‘antagonist’, boasts: ‘Satan (for I glory in the name, j
Antagonist of heaven’s almighty king)’ (PL 10, 386–7). The protag-
onist of Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy is resonantly named
D’Amville. The Puritan preacher in the same play, in reality a
chandler in disguise, boasts the moniker Languebeau SnuV;
when he exits the play in humiliation to return to his life as a
chandler (‘you may give j The world more light with that’, he is
told), he self-reXexively comments ‘Thus the SnuVe is put out’
(5.2.64–5, 67).
38 On Names

Jonson never misses an opportunity for onomancy (see Barton,

Jonson 170–93). In Cynthia’s Revels Crites asks the page his name.
On being told it is Cos (Latin for whetstone), he exclaims ‘Cos!
how happily hath fortune furnish’d him with a whetstone’
(Cynthia’s Revels p. 164), a joke repeated by Mercy in the next
act (170). In The Alchemist Subtle and Kastril have the following
conversation:
s u b t l e ’Pray God your sister prove but pliant.
kastr il Why,
Her name is so. . . .
Knew you not that?
subtle No, faith, sir.
Yet . . . I guessed it. (4.4.89–92)
Jonson even resorts to back formations, turning a Greek word into a
proper name so that he can hint at the derivation of an English
adjective from the Greek, as in Cynthia’s Revels 2.1: ‘His name is
Hedon, a gallant wholly consecrated to his pleasures’ (p. 165). We
are entitled to assume that hedonistic derives from Hedon. However,
no such classical or mythological character exists: hedonistic comes
from the Greek noun hedone meaning pleasure.
Angel Day’s The English Secretary (1599) calls attention to the
apheretic ‘secret’ in the title: ‘in respect of such Secrecie, trust and
assuraunce required at the humors of him who serveth in such
place, the name was Wrst given to be called a Secretarie’ (102). In
support of his case Day points out that our most private studies take
place in a ‘Closet’ (103). Thus, he concludes, for secretary and for
closet, ‘both Name and oYce agree’. But the doyen of manipulation
in making name and nature agree (what Ruthven calls poetymol-
ogy) is Edmund Spenser. In The Faerie Queene Spenser makes his
reader work. He consistently delays naming characters, providing
instead details which enable us to build up a picture of their
personality (a technique inherited from medieval allegory; Burrow,
Spenser 45). Only when we have assessed and assembled the charac-
ter are we told his/her name in a poetic punch line which forces us
 On Names 39

to appreciate the congruence of name and identity.37 Nor is this

technique unknown in modern Wction: in Doris Lessing’s BrieWng for
a Descent into Hell we meet a character identiWed as ‘Male Unknown’
and ‘it is not until much later in the novel that we can name him as
Charles Watkins. He grows into his name as he, and we, discover
who he is’ (Docherty 60). This technique works as well on stage as
on the page: it was also a characteristic of Aristophanes (Olson 306)
and of Middleton (Barton, Names 81).38
By the Caroline period John Ford could prepare a dramatis
personae list for his tragedy The Broken Heart and title it ‘The
speakers’ names, Wtted to their qualities’. He explains each name
(Ithocles is Honour of loveliness; Orgilus is Angry). So interested is
he in etymology that he provides an interpretation for the name of
a character who does not appear in the play (because he is dead
before it begins): Thrasus (Fierceness). This is very much a poety-
mologist’s list and not, as advertised, a practical list of ‘the speakers’
names’ (my italics).
Shakespeare’s characters share the period’s interest in onomastic
relevance. Even the pugnacious Pistol allows himself to be dis-
tracted by an etymological consideration on meeting Harry Le
Roy: ‘Le Roy? a Cornish name. Art thou of Cornish crew?’ (H5
4.1.49–50). In 2 Henry 4 FalstaV requests Pistol’s exit with a reference
to the multiple meanings of his anachronistic name: ‘Discharge
yourself of our company Pistol’ (2H4 2.4.106).39 In As You Like It
both Celia and Rosalind choose relevant disguise names (‘some-
thing that hath a reference to my state’; AYLI 1.3.127), Aliena (‘the
estranged one’) and Ganymede ( Jove’s epicene page), as does Imo-
gen in Cymbeline, whose ontologically suitable servant’s alias
(Fidele) is remarked approvingly by Lucius: ‘Thy name well Wts
thy faith; thy faith thy name’ (Cymbeline 4.2.381). In Richard 2 the
dying Gaunt discourses at length on the aptness of his name to his
gaunt appearance, causing Richard’s bemused reaction: ‘Can sick
men play so nicely with their names?’ (R2 2.1.84). In 2 Henry 6 York
wishes for SuVolk’s death with a pun—‘For SuVolk’s duke, may he
40 On Names

be suVocate’ (1.1.124). York’s wish is not fulWlled, but SuVolk does

indeed die because of an onomastic play on words: his death is by
Walter, rather than (as he had securely expected because of a
prophecy at birth) by the homonym water. (Cf. Sir Walter Ralegh
who called himself The Ocean.) In Hamlet Laertes greets Lamord
(whose name means ‘death’) with the punning exclamation ‘Upon
my life, Lamord!’ (4.7.91, my emphasis). Autolycus in The Winter’s
Tale introduces himself in Act 4, telling us not only his name but its
meaning: ‘My father nam’d me Autolycus, who being, as I am,
litter’d under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsider’d
triXes’ (4.3.24–6).40 For the heroines of Shakespeare’s late plays,
name and condition oft agree: Perdita’s name depicts her state as
one ‘lost for ever’ (Winter’s Tale 3.3.33); Marina is so named ‘for she
was born at sea’ (Pericles 3.3.13), and Prospero’s daughter is ‘Admir’d
Miranda, j Indeed the top of admiration’ (Tempest 3.1.37–8).
But as in life, literary characters may fulWl or refute onomastic
determinism. Although the names of Benvolio, Malvolio, Feste,
Philharmonus, Posthumus, and others match their disposition and
occupations, Shakespeare’s drama eschews onomastic predestin-
ation. Instead, Shakespeare shows characters struggling with ono-
mastic inheritance, trying through deeds to thwart or merit the
associations of their label. Thus, antiphrastic characters, like the
brave Francis Feeble, the garrulous (when drunk) Silence, the tardy
Speed, and Samson StockWsh—not a Wshmonger but a fruiterer—
are, as Anne Barton argues, ‘celebrations of human freedom, self-
conscious assertions that even Wctional characters can defy their
names’ (Jonson 182).

Onomastic Legibility
We no longer assign names with the expectation that the name’s
origin will reXect or inXuence the bearer: Kirk Douglas need not be
a Scotsman who lives near a church (‘kirk’) and a dark blue river
(Gaelic ‘douglas’). None the less, the popularity of book titles such
 On Names 41

as Names to Give Your Baby, complete with lists of etymologies,

biblical and literary precedents, and historical fashions, suggests a
degree of residual if temporary onomancy, and parents’ acknow-
ledgement that they chose a name because they liked its associ-
ations (with relatives, friends, or celebrities) is simply a diluted
variant of etymology (the name still has an origin). But some
cultures still come very close to Renaissance attitudes to names.
Petrie and Johnson report that in ‘the Iroquois tribes of North
America . . . the naming process clearly constitutes a message to
children about the characters they are expected to develop. Children
in Iroquois tribes are not only to assume the same character traits as
their namesakes but also to assume their social position within the
community upon the death of the namesake’ (Petrie and Johnson
2). Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2004) illustrates the diVer-
ence between American and Bengali naming practices. In Bengal
everyone has one name for family use and a ‘good name, a bhalo-
nam, for identiWcation in the outside world. . . . Good names tend to
represent digniWed and enlightened qualities’ (Lahiri 26).
Lahiri’s Indian experience overlaps with Amerindian experience
in another way. Lahiri’s narrator explains, ‘Names can wait. In India
parents take their time. It wasn’t unusual for years to pass before the
right name, the best possible name, was determined (ibid. 25). The
same is true of certain Amerindian tribes. I quote from John Barth’s
colloquial prose in Lost in the Funhouse: ‘The American Indians, he
declared now, had the right idea. They never named a boy right oV.
What they did, they watched to Wnd out who he was. They’d look
for the right sign to tell them what to call him’ (17). In both these
examples we see the name not as arbitrary sign but as deliberate
design.
If our naming practices are no longer demonstrably motivated,
our reading practices still are, at least if Reader’s Digest columns of
apt names and professions (Les Plack, a dentist; Mr Flood, a urolo-
gist; Shearer’s, a barber’s shop), or advertising slogans (‘Jonathan
Crisp. Crisp by Name, Crisp by Nature’) are anything to go by.
42 On Names

Critics and reviewers regularly comment on the chance relevance of

people’s names. In the wake of Richard Curtis’ Wlm, Love Actually
(2003) in which the Prime Minister falls in love with his tea lady, a
journalist interviewed tea ladies in high places, one of whom was
‘the splendidly named Patricia Beveridge’ (Patton 8). Reviewing a
recent RSC All’s Well that Ends Well, Christopher Gray analysed the
bed trick enabled by the character Diana, who was played by ‘the
aptly named Shelley Conn’.41 The reviewer of a documentary Wlm
about Addenbrooke’s Hospital pounced with delight on the reassur-
ing names of two consultant surgeons, Christopher Constant and
Peter Friend (Allison Pearson 21). When we consider that Van-
brugh’s The Relapse presents ‘Syringe, a surgeon’ (9) and Sylvia
Plath’s hospitalized narrator in The Bell Jar links names and profes-
sion—‘one of them had a queer name that sounded like Doctor
Syphilis, so I began to look out for suspicious, fake names, and sure
enough, a dark-haired fellow. . . came up and said ‘‘I’m Doctor
Pancreas’’ ’ (Plath 172)—art is simply imitating life.
Sterne warns the reader that ‘was your son called Judas,—the
sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would
have accompanied him through his life like his shadow’ (78). In 2001
a Brazilian father was prevented by the authorities from naming his
son Osama bin Laden; nine years earlier he had been prevented
from naming a son Saddam Hussein (Dillner 9). Legal intervention
was deemed necessary because these names have ‘meaning’ in the
form of a one-to-one association. Thus, the belief that names are
legible is still prevalent, albeit subliminally or sporadically. Our
attitude is that of Julian in Albee’s Tiny Alice (‘innocent pleasure’)
rather than early modern onomastic superstition but our semantic
associations are the same.
No society distributes names randomly or unsystematically; if a
name were merely an identifying tag, useful solely for its exchange
value, such care would not be considered necessary. This is even
more true of literature where authors regularly register their
concern in selecting names, or leave evidence of their care in
 On Names 43

doing so. Aristotle observed that tragedians use real or historical

names, comedians Wctitious names (Poetics, trans. Butcher 9). In
‘The Miller’s Tale’ Chaucer’s evident ‘care for local detail extends to
his use of proper names: Absalon is recorded as a town name, but
not within the university, in the fourteenth century; St Nicholas was
the patron saint of scholars’ (Helen Cooper 98). Henry Fielding
seems to have scrutinized the subscriber list to Gilbert Burnet’s folio
volume, History of his Own Time (1724), of which he had a copy,
where he found the names Thomas Jones, H. Partridge, and ‘several
Westerns’ (Watt 335). Henry James combed the London Times for
appropriate Anglo-American names (Levin 57–8). For Zola, a valu-
able source of what he called the ‘science’ of name selection was the
Paris directory over which he would ‘often spend days together’. He
was, he said, a ‘fatalist in the matter of names, believing Wrmly that
a mysterious correlation exists between the man and the name he
bears’ (Carlson 286). Beckett explained that the characters Shower
and Looker who Winnie imagines observing her in Happy Days
‘are derived from German ‘‘schauen’’ & ‘‘kuchen’’ (to look). They
represent the onlooker (audience) wanting to know the meaning of
things’ (Beckett, No Author 95).
Pamela (from the Greek, meaning ‘all sweetness’) may be a
familiar and popular twentieth-century name (it features in the
top Wfty Wrst names for girls in the United States and in England
and Wales; Dunkling 45–6) but when Samuel Richardson chose it
for his heroine it was so unusual that few knew how to pronounce
it: ‘a very strange name, Paměla or Pamēla: some pronounced it
one way and some the other’ (Fielding, Joseph 305). This remark is
from Fielding’s satiric sequel, of course, but Richardson himself had
called attention to the name: ‘Pamela—did you say?—A queer sort
of Name! I’ve heard of it somewhere! Is it a Christian or a Pagan
Name?’ and he had changed its accepted pronunciation to Paměla
(cited in Watt 325). As a printer Richardson had recently set part of
Sidney’s Arcadia for the 1724/5 edition of Sidney’s works and he
clearly had Sidney’s heroine in mind when christening his own (in
44 On Names

Part II Pamela refers to her Musidorus; Watt 325). Similar care was
taken with Clarissa, a popular romance name, and here, as in
Pamela, Richardson’s skill was to make the reader forget the ro-
mance associations and ‘think of [the name’s] bearer as a problem-
atic but convincingly real person’ (Watt 330). Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, a Yorkshireman, explains the origin of his name in the
Wrst paragraph of his narrative: his mother’s family name was
Robinson, his father (‘a foreigner of Bremen’) was called Kreutz-
naer, ‘but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now
called, nay, we call ourselves and write our name, Crusoe’. Critics
often remark the oddness of an ordinary, representative, middle-
class hero having such an unusual name: ‘What other Crusoes has
one ever heard of ? Has one ever met a Crusoe? Are there Crusoes in
the phone book?’ (Varney 11). They speculate on the sonic associ-
ations of ‘Kreutz’ and ‘Crus’ which ‘invite the ear to ‘‘cross’’ and so
anticipate the Christian theme’ (ibid.). But what do we make of the
discovery that Defoe’s classmates at school included a boy named
Cruso? (Backscheider 48). ‘Is Robinson simply named after the boy
at the next desk?’ (Varney 11).
The two positions (Crusoe as thematically relevant and biographi-
cally coincidental) are not incompatible. As David Lodge points out,
‘We don’t expect our neighbour Mr Shepherd to look after sheep, or
mentally associate him with that occupation. If he is a character in a
novel, however, pastoral and perhaps biblical associations will inevit-
ably come into play’ (Art 36).42 Naming is character creation in parvo.
For Wellek and Warren (219) ‘each appellation is a kind of vivifying,
animizing, individuating’. As Harry Levin says ‘the persona begins
with the name’ (55). Even in these post-structuralist times where,
following Lacan’s deconstruction of the subject, the uniWed persona
with mimetically real consciousness no longer exists, the name has
not lost its function. Although Peter Barry writes that ‘we can hardly
accept novelistic characters as people but must hold them in abey-
ance’, he continues ‘and see them as assemblages of signiWers cluster-
ing round a proper name’ (Barry 113).
 On Names 45

The Humanist World of Words

The sixteenth-century interest in names was to some extent a
constituent part of humanism, which asserted the primacy of the
word (Spitzer 21; Waller 186). This was, Robert Weimann explains,
expanding Spitzer’s and Waller’s point, a by-product of the refor-
mation: in a Catholic world signiWcation was ‘Wxed’ by the church
whereas in a reformed world, meaning, and the means of meaning,
had to be negotiated anew (25–30). And it was also tied to meta-
phors of language as money—for humanists both language and
money were systems with an exchange value—for if the value of
money could Xuctuate, so too could the value of language.
The Wrst topic—the humanist interest in language’s power—is
evident throughout the Shakespeare canon in the specialized form
of the pun (as Goldman points out (37), the pun ‘restores to us—
under certain very narrow conditions’—the Adamic power of nam-
ing) and malapropism, where deformed becomes Deformed the thief
in Much Ado and enfranchised creates Frances in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The second topic—the meaning of language in a reformed world—
takes us back to Genesis and the parallel problems of language in a
fallen world. Richard 2 is the play where Shakespeare investigates this
topic at greatest length. The play is heavily indebted to the language of
Genesis, often taken directly from the Geneva Bible: tropes of para-
dise, Eden, gardening, Adam, Eve, earth, a second fall, exile, banish-
ment, loss of language, serpents, adders’ tongues, deceit, trickery,
sibling bloodshed, Cain and Abel, curses, barrenness, cursed man,
inheritance, fertility, oaths, Xattery, slander, lies, falsehood, swearing,
forswearing, and childbirth occur and recur (Maveety). Richard 2 takes
place in a fallen world (in an action replay of Genesis, Richard 2 has
shed the blood of a kinsman, and his land, a garden which he should
have tended, is cursed for this sin).43 In this new and unfamiliar
world characters attempt to negotiate postlapsarian language and
the instability engendered by its Xuctuating values. The Duchess of
Gloucester relabels Gaunt’s ‘patience’ as ‘despair’ (1.2.33–4, 29),
46 On Names

explaining that what in ‘mean men’ is ‘patience’ is ‘pale cold cowardice

in noble breasts’. Bolingbroke is encouraged to interpret ‘exile’ as a
‘travel that thou tak’st for pleasure’ but he protests that this is not
creation through naming but a misnomer: ‘My heart will sigh when I
miscall it so’ (1.3.261–2). Richard 2 reposes conWdence in the power of
the king’s name (‘Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names? j
Arm, arm my name!’), but this conWdence is misplaced; later bereft of
royal title, he feels deprived of identity: ‘I have no name, no title, j No,
not that name was given me at the fount j But ’tis usurped. Alack, the
heavy day! j That I have worn so many winters out, j And know not by
what name to call myself ’ (4.1.254–8). In the last moments of his
decline he muses on how to Wt the name to the world: ‘I have been
studying how I may compare j This prison where I live unto the world’
(5.5.1–2) but concludes ‘I cannot do it’ (5.5.5).44 In the fallen world
names and things do not match. The tension in the play is not just
between a medieval monarch who believes in the divine right of kings
(Richard) and an early modern politician who believes in rule by merit
(Bolingbroke) but between a monarch who believes that his speech
embodies the seamless Wt of the prelapsarian sign and a would-be
monarch who knows that postlapsarian meaning is malleable, and
manipulates this knowledge to his advantage: ‘As I was banished, I was
banished Hereford, j But as I come, I come for Lancaster’ (2.3.112–13).45
The third constituent of early modern onomastic interest is the
link between language and money as systems of ‘arbitrary signs
which only the ignorant consider to be natural’ (Norbrook 24).46
For Thomas Blount language was a ‘sterling’ exchanged by society
(A4v); Thomas Cooper’s dictionary of words exploited the dual
meanings of ‘treasury’; and for Hobbes words were ‘wise men’s
counters, they do but reckon by them’ (106). Robert Cawdrey talked
about the problems of ‘counterfeyting the Kings English’ (A3r).
Montaigne wrote ‘Our controversies are verbal ones. . . . The ques-
tion is about words: it is paid in the same coin’ (‘On Experience’ in
Complete 1213). The Wscal receives sustained investigation in Shake-
speare’s most language-conscious play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, which
 On Names 47

experiments with various types of linguistic exchange: Holofernes’

endless chains of synonymity (‘a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, the
welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra,
the soil, the land, the earth’; 4.2.5–7); Armado’s neologisms (associ-
ated with coinage—‘a mint of phrases’; ‘Wre-new words’; 1.1.165,
1.1.178); Dull’s false translation (haud credo j old grey doe for pricket;
4.2), and the lords’ attention to words at the expense of meaning,
whether in cacozelic rhetoric (‘taVeta phrases’; 5.2.406) or in vows
(vows being society’s attempt to Wx the relation between signiWer
and signiWed). The lords’ semiotic carelessness is replayed in wooing
as in study: ‘we j Following the signs, wooed but the sign of she’
(5.2.469–70). For Costard the clown remuneration and guerdon may
be Wne words but all that matters is the object(s) they represent:
three farthings and one shilling. In 1.1 Costard displays no conW-
dence in synonymous words or phrases as tokens of exchange for
his identity. As William Carroll points out (17–18), only with the (his)
proper name does the relation between word and object become
reliable for him:
k i n g (reading Armado’s letter) —‘that low-spirited swain, that base min-
now of thy mirth’—
c o s t a r d Me?
k i n g ‘that unlettered small-knowing soul’—
c o s t a r d Me?
k i n g ‘that shallow vassal’—
c o s t a r d Still me?
k i n g ‘which, as I remember, hight Costard’—
c o s t a r d O! me. (1.1.247–57)

Language regularly slides into names in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Mote

the noun is also Mote the character; ‘costard’ is variously, and
sometimes simultaneously, a head, an apple, and the clown; juvenal
is both a young fellow and a Roman satirist (and possibly also
Thomas Nashe); enfranchise becomes Frances; Joan is similarly pre-
sent only in language as a type of the lowlife female. Nonetheless,
despite the play’s interest in names, and Costard’s conWdence in
48 On Names

their reliability as signiWers, the only communication that is un-

equivocally understood in the play, by all on stage, is silence:
me r c a d e The King your father—
pr incess Dead, for my life!
me r c a d e Even so. My tale is told. (5.2.719–20).
In Othello word and meaning are examined through name as a
synonym for reputation. Cassio’s professional demotion is linked to
loss of personal name: Othello moves from the closeness of
the given name (‘How comes it, Michael, you are thus forgot?’)
to the distance of the surname (‘Cassio, I love thee, j But never
more be oYcer of mine’; 2.3.188, 248–9, my emphases). Robert N.
Watson argues that Iago’s revenge tactic is to annihilate both
personal name and positional name (father, husband, wife, lieuten-
ant, general, governor): ‘Brabantio declares in anguish he no longer
has a daughter, Cassio that he has lost his name and rank, Desde-
mona that she has lost her lord, and Othello that his occupation is
gone, that he has no wife, and Wnally that he is no longer ‘‘Othello’’ ’
(339–40).47
Cinthio might blame Brabantio for the tragedy because of the
portentous name Desdemona but we might more validly blame
Shakespeare for giving the unnamed ensign of the source the name
Iago (the name of Spain’s patron saint, famous for conquering the
Moors).48 Iago’s role, as destroyer of Othello, the Moor of Venice, is
thus cued by his name; word matches thing, his behaviour supports
the sign.49 This is true too of Iago’s profession which is also to
uphold the sign—as ensign-bearer he carries the troop’s sign or
standard (Lucking, ‘Othello’ 113). But, as architect and manipulator
of the plot, Iago’s role is that of of de-signer: he sabotages Othello’s
trust in the relation between name and identity—‘Her name that
was as fresh j As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black’ (3.3.386).
In Act 4 Desdemona too examines the Wssure Iago has created
between name and identity:
 On Names 49

d e s d e m o n a Am I that name, Iago?

i a g o What name, fair lady?
d e s d e m o n a Such as she says. (4.2.118)
In the world of Othello conWdence in reference is ruptured: ‘Men
should be what they seem’ (3.3.128) becomes ‘I think my wife be
honest, and think she is not’ (3.3.384).50 The play ends not with
Othello but with ‘he that was Othello’ (5.2.284). In this last respect,
‘Nobody’ in Desdemona’s death-bed identiWcation of ‘who hath
done this?’ (5.2.123–4) becomes a synonym for Othello (Gross 843).
Similarly, the later Coriolanus, lacking his agnomen, becomes ‘a
kind of nothing, titleless’ (5.1.13). Personal name, personal identity;
professional name, professional identity: lose one part of the sym-
biosis and you lose the other.
Shakespeare’s concern, like Derrida’s, is ‘to problematize the
proper name and proper (literal) meaning, the proper in general’
(‘Of Grammatology’, p. lxxxiv). In the chapters which follow
I investigate the ramiWcations of proper names in Shakespeare’s
plays. My interest throughout is in names’ relation to language
and the named world rather than in Levin’s name-as-character,
although since names are not pure referents (they carry cultural
baggage) the question of character is relevant. John Velz tells us
that ‘much yet remains to be said about onomastics in Shake-
speare’ (36). His statement will be no less true at the end of
this book than at the beginning, but in the plays covered here
I hope to indicate some of the larger theoretical, cultural, and
literary questions which the subject of onomastics poses in Sha-
kespeare.
 2
The Patronym:
Montague and Capulet
(Romeo and Juliet)

‘Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-Wre Pape’.
(Seamus Heaney, ‘Whatever you say say nothing’ ll. 69–70)

‘[I]nside or between languages, human communication equals translation. A study of

translation is a study of language’.
(George Steiner, After Babel 47)

Names
‘What’s in a name?’ asks Juliet in the play’s most famous soliloquy
(2.2.43), contemplating the relation between onomastics and ontol-
ogy, words and things, signiWer and signiWed. ‘That which we call a
rose j By any other word [Q2; name Q1] would smell as sweet’
(2.2.43–4), she responds to her own question, the textual variants
ironically illustrating the very point she is making: that identity is
independent of label.1 But the language debate begins much earlier.
The play opens with puns on collier j choler j collar (1.1.1–5), the pun
being a rhetorical form based on the sounds of words divorced from
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 51

meaning. In 1.2 Benvolio oVers to rename a Rose (who, signiWcantly,

as James Calderwood points out (Shakespearean Metadrama 88),
exists only as a name in the play): he encourages Romeo to attend
the Capulet feast to observe ‘admired beauties of Verona’ (1.2.84),
an exercise in aesthetic collation that will translate Romeo’s dis-
dainful inamorata from beautiful to ugly (‘Compare her face with
some that I shall show, j And I will make thee think thy swan a
crow’; 1.2.86–7).
It is signiWcant, as both Kiernan Ryan and Manfred Weidhorn
(‘Rose’) have pointed out, that the protagonists are nameless when
they meet and fall in love; their subsequent identiWcation by family
labels brings with it emotional and cultural baggage. As if trying to
recreate the liberating and unprejudiced anonymity of their Wrst meet-
ing, Juliet muses on a Romeo who is not a Montague. But her speech is
fraught with diYculties, not just because of verbal and syntactical
variants between Q1 and Q2, but because of the extreme nature of
her vision, which posits a Romeo who is not simply not a Montague
but also not a Romeo. Thus she moves from the prejudicial power of
the patronymic to the limitations of the label, and rejects both.
The name of Montague is not problematic per se; it is so only
because Juliet bears the name of Capulet. Therefore one of the two
lovers must relinquish a surname if their love is to be feasible.2 It is
this choice which structures the Wrst few lines of Juliet’s soliloquy:

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. (2.2.34–6)

However, Juliet’s proposed alternative is not the namelessness im-

plied by these lines, but another name. Even as Juliet is disassociating
Romeo from Montague (‘Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. j
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot j Nor arm nor face, nor
any other part j Belonging to a man’; 2.2.39–42),3 even as she is
avowing that names are irrelevant (‘What’s in a name?’), she is also
paradoxically asserting their importance (‘be some other name’; my
52 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

emphasis), even as she did in her rhetorical question ‘wherefore art

thou Romeo?’ As Derrida points out, she does not say ‘Why are you
called Romeo?’; she says ‘ ‘‘why are you Romeo?’’ . . . his name is his
essence’ (‘Aphorism’ 426; cf. Belsey ‘Name’ passim). Romeo’s re-
sponse—to tear the written word of Romeo—shows his awareness
of this Platonic point: since he is his name, his oVer is synonymous
with suicide, as his frantic rephrasing of the oVer in 3.3 acknowledges:
In what vile part of this anatomy
Doth my name lodge? Tell me that I may sack
The hateful mansion.
friar Hold thy desperate hand. (106–8)

In another onomastically obsessed play, the poet Cinna is murdered

simply for bearing the same name as Cinna the conspirator:
c i n n a I am not Cinna the conspirator.
f o ur t h plebeian It is no matter, his name’s Cinna.
Pluck but his name out of his heart.
( Julius Caesar 3.3.32–4; my emphasis)4

Problem: to pluck the name out of the heart is to kill the individual.
The name is a physical self and, like the physical self, can give and
receive wounds. Juliet’s grief-stricken tirade against her husband is
characterized as a physical act against his name: ‘what tongue shall
smooth thy name j When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it’
(3.2.98–9; my emphasis).5 It was the name of Rosaline that both
attracted and wounded Romeo as appears from his announcement
to the Friar in 2.3.46: ‘I have forgot that name and that name’s woe.’
Existence is predicated on a name, any name, as Romeo’s statement
in the orchard indicates. ‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d’
(2.2.50) he says, oVering to trade one oVence-giving name for
another. But when Juliet asks who is there, Romeo realizes his
predicament: even if he does not call himself Romeo he still has
to Wnd some identifying label to answer Juliet’s question about who
he is (Lucking, ‘ ‘‘Balcony’’ Scene’ 8). Derrida unpacks the paradox
as follows: ‘Romeo is Romeo, and Romeo is not Romeo. He is
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 53

himself only in abandoning his name, he is himself only in his

name. . . . [H]e would not be what he is, a stranger to his name,
without this name’ (‘Aphorism’ 427).6
The orchard scene continues to demonstrate the simultaneous
Wssure between, and self-identiWcation of, names and identity, words
and things, language and communication. Juliet wishes to deny
what she has spoken; by the rules of courtship and formal speech,
such denial is not contradiction or mendacity but ‘compliment’. In
confessing that she would have spoken diVerently had she known
she was overheard (2.1.102–4), she acknowledges the diVerence
between public and private codes of speech. Her insistent factual
questions and statements about Romeo’s safety (‘How cam’st thou
hither, tell me, and wherefore? . . . j If they do see thee, they will
murder thee . . . j I would not for the world they saw thee here . . . j
By whose direction found’st thou out this place?’; 2.2.62, 70, 74, 79)
do not receive the satisfaction of a straight answer. Romeo’s re-
sponses are intoxicatingly metaphoric; and metaphor, in this situ-
ation, serves only to evade and frustrate communication (‘With
love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls . . . j [T]here lies more
peril in thine eye j Than twenty of their swords . . . j I have night’s
cloak to hide me from their eyes . . . By love, that Wrst did prompt
me to enquire’; lines 64, 71–2, 75, 80).7 Language communicates and
satisWes; it also does the opposite.
Jonson wrote that ‘Language most shewes a man: speake that
I may see thee’ (Timber 625). Mercutio anticipates this point less
succinctly: as Romeo greets him with energetic wordplay in 2.4,
Mercutio enthuses ‘Why, is not this better now than groaning for
love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou
what thou art by art as well as by nature’ (lines 88–91).8 Whereas
Juliet felt Romeo had an identity independent of language and of
name, here Mercutio recognizes the putative ‘true’ Romeo through
his speech. Although Mercutio’s position seems incompatible with
Juliet’s, both, it seems, are correct: our identity is both separable
and inseparable from language. And although the scene began with
54 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

Juliet sceptically exploring the relation between words and meaning

(in a soliloquy which of course, relies on words to express her
scepticism), it ends with a trust in words and their meaning: ‘Dost
thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘‘Ay’’, j And I will take thy word’
(2.2.90–1). Having asked Romeo not to swear his love because
lovers’ oaths are meaningless (‘At lovers’ perjuries, j They say, Jove
laughs’; 2.2.92–3), she immediately asks Romeo to take the one vow
she will trust: the holy vow of marriage.
It is surely no accident of structure that the two scenes that frame
the lovers’ marriage, 2.2 and 3.5, ponder the question of language,
the relationship between personal names and selfhood, nouns and
quiddity. Marriage is, in Christian tradition, the gaining of an
identity while losing an identity, the two-in-one of Ephesians. It is
also, in traditional patriarchal societies, the moment when the
woman abandons her family name to take that of her husband. In
Romeo and Juliet, however, both Romeo and Juliet are viewed as
capable of shedding their name in marriage (‘refuse thy name; j Or
if thou wilt not . . . I’ll no longer be a Capulet’; 2.2.34–6). This is not
onomastic reciprocity or equality so much as accommodation—a
motif we see again in the language exchange of 3.5. Whereas in the
orchard scene Romeo and Juliet oVer to abandon their names, in
3.5, the aubade, they abandon their adherence to ornithological
signiWers (lark/nightingale) with Romeo adopting Juliet’s term
and she his (see below for further discussion of this motif ). Love,
it seems, means learning to speak the language of the beloved.
But between 2.2 and 3.5 Juliet’s attitude to language has devel-
oped. In 2.2 she experimentally muses on language; in 3.5 she
conWdently uses it, appearing as experienced an equivocator as
any in Shakespeare:
ju li e t Villain and he [Romeo] be many miles asunder.
God pardon him! I do, with all my heart,
And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.
l a d y c a p u l e t That is because the traitor murderer lives.
ju li e t Ay, madam, from the reach of these my hands . . .
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 55

Indeed, I never shall be satisWed

With Romeo, till I behold him—dead—
Is my poor heart, so for a kinsman vexed. (3.5.81–95)

In the orchard scene when Romeo evades communication with

metaphoric answers, his equivocation playfully indicates his exhil-
aration; in 3.5 Juliet’s equivocation is a survival strategy, concealing
marital loyalty. Equivocation, like language in general, can be poetic
and duplicitous.

Language
Romeo and Juliet, as has long been realized, is a generic paradox
(a tragedy that begins as a comedy), a generic oxymoron (a city
tragedy, a romantic tragedy). It is a play of contradiction, contrast,
of clashes: Petrarchan lyricism with a Roman comedic plot struc-
ture (young lovers versus parents); artiWcial clichés of courtly love
(Romeo on Rosaline) versus experimental metaphoric daring ( Ju-
liet on Romeo); brash commercialism versus spiritual outpouring;
narrative choric ecphrasis in the unexpected form of a sonnet
versus the witty conceits of the lovers in the same verse form;
images of books and reading versus empirical lived experience; a
plot of aleatory chance within a pre-scripted narrative (arranged
marriage, family feuds; see Whittier); a play where upstairs is
juxtaposed with downstairs (Ralph Berry, Social Class 40; in no
other Shakespearean tragedy do the servants and their household
duties receive so much stage time); a play where chronological,
linear time is contrasted with cyclical, festive time (Philippa
Berry); a play where Juliet’s domestic conWnement (home, garden,
family tomb) is contrasted with her unbounded imagination,
which reaches to the solar system for images;9 a play where the
lovers declare their love in the very language they have just
rejected as inadequate; a play where ‘womb’ rhymes with its
conceptual opposite ‘tomb’ (2.3.9–10; Garber 126).
56 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

These clashes and inversions Wnd speciWc and localized represen-

tation in language: the play’s dominant linguistic mode is oxy-
moron. ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow’ (2.1.184); ‘The sweetest
honey j Is loathsome in its own deliciousness’ (2.6.11–12); ‘They
are but beggars that can count their worth’ (2.6.32); Romeo ac-
knowledges that the street brawl has ‘much to do with hate, but
more with love’ (1.1.175); Juliet ‘speaks, yet she says nothing’ (2.2.12);
Friar Lawrence’s herbs are both poisonous and medicinal (2.3.23–4);
Capulet jokes that ‘it is so very late that we j May call it early’
(3.4.34–5); Escalus believes that ‘Mercy but murders, pardoning
those that kill’ (3.1.197); when Romeo slays Tybalt, Juliet calls her
husband a ‘Beautiful tyrant! Wend angelical! . . . A damned saint, an
honourable villain!’ (3.2.75–9); to Romeo merciful banishment is
death; in Mantua he Wnds poison is cordial and gold is poison.
Thus, the drama’s extended paradoxes have local lexical equiva-
lents. Language, it seems, can do what the plot cannot: reconcile
opposites. This is true, however, only in a localized and Xeeting
way, for, as Friar Lawrence knows, Wre and powder, as they kiss,
consume.
Romeo and Juliet is, as critics acknowledge, a tragedy of lan-
guage,10 alert to the aporetic ambiguities and material power of
words. In the opening scene Sampson and Gregory shelter beneath
the legal protection of verbal ambiguity, the diVerence between
biting one’s thumb, and biting one’s thumb ‘at us’ (much virtue in
a prepositional phrase; 1.1.44). Romeo and Mercutio quibble over
the interpretation of ‘burn daylight’ (1.4.43); Friar Lawrence be-
comes impatient at Romeo’s chiasmic persiXage (‘One hath
wounded me j That’s by me wounded’), retorting ‘riddling confes-
sion Wnds but riddling shrift’ (2.3.50–1; 56); Mercutio characterizes
Benvolio as a quarreller, ‘as hot a Jack . . . as any in Italy’ (3.1.11–12),
whereas Tybalt is distinguished as a ‘duellist’ (2.4.24); Mercutio
loves to hear himself talk, but his words are meaningless (2.4.147–
9); Paris prematurely calls Juliet ‘wife’ (‘That may be, sir, when I may
be a wife’, she corrects; 4.1.19). By the second half of the play, words
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 57

have assumed the power of weapons. ‘Calling death ‘‘banished’’, j

Thou cutt’st my head oV with a golden axe’, weeps a desperate
Romeo to the friar (3.3.21–2). Juliet falls down at the mention of
Romeo ‘As if that name, j Shot from the deadly level of a gun, j Did
murther her’ (3.3.102–3).
But words, at least in their onomastic sense—Montague, Capulet—
have had murderous power since 1.1 (‘Draw thy tool, here comes two
of the house of Montagues’; 1. 1. 31–2), and, by implication, since
before the beginning of the play. It is the lovers’ attempt to negotiate
an identity independent of family name which leads to Juliet’s anti-
nominalist soliloquy. However, the connection she debates between
name and identity is but a subset of the larger (and equally problem-
atic) relation between words and things, and the solution she pro-
poses—anonymity—is no more practical than that oVered by Swift’s
Laputans, which lies at the other extreme: ‘Since words are only
Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry
about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular
Business they are to discourse on’ (Swift, Gulliver 175).
Linguists have long recognized the paradoxes inherent in human
speech.11 We speak to communicate, and to leave unspoken; thus,
language reveals but it also conceals (it is, in fact, this capacity for
mendacity that distinguishes us from beasts and, in part, ensures
our survival). Language is power—both interlingually, where ac-
cents and pronunciation diVerentiate class, and intralingually, where
conquerors impose their language on the conquered people—but
so is its opposite, silence.12 Language is an issue of identity (in the
case of conquest, national identity), but, although it represents
selfhood, it also represents society. We create community and
culture through language, yet language is reciprocally the creator
of community and culture: in short, we act on language and it acts
on us. Often, the more impoverished a culture, the richer its
language.13 Language has the power to say and also to unsay, to
name and unname. To learn a language is to absorb it, but also to
change it, to contribute to it.
58 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

Problems of linguistic communication are intensiWed in time of

strife. Thucydides states that in the Peloponnesian War words lost
their meaning: recklessness became patriotism, obstinacy became
courage, an ‘irresponsible gamble’ became ‘a brave and comradely
venture’. ‘In justifying their actions, they [the leaders] reversed the
customary descriptive meanings of words’ (White 3). Spenser makes
a similar observation about semiotic instability in Book 5 of The
Faerie Queene:
For that which all men then did vertue call
Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight
Is now hight vertue, and so us’d of all. (FQ 5, Proem, 4)

A later (Wctional) work on war makes an analogous point. In The

Ghost Road Pat Barker’s World War I hero observes:
words didn’t mean anything any more. Patriotism honour courage vomit
vomit vomit. Only the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme,
Arras, Verdun, Ypres. But now. . . I realize there’s another group of words
that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences
unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of
power, and long after we’re gone, they’ll lie about in the language, like
the unexploded grenades in these Welds, and any-one of them will take
your hand oV. (257)

Swift had earlier linked war and linguistic change. Stylistic ‘corrup-
tion’ (as he views it)
has made me of late years very impatient for a peace, which I believe would
save the lives of many brave words, as well as men. The war has introduced
abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more
campaigns; Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, palisa-
does, communication, circumvallations, battalions, as numerous as they
are, if they attack us too frequently in our CoVeehouses, we shall certainly
put them to Xight. (Swift, Prose 35)

Language is a subset of communication, which relies additionally

on gestures and silence;14 as we saw in Chapter 1 names are a subset
of language. One of the Wrst phrases we learn in a foreign language,
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 59

as in our native tongue, is how to identify ourselves, and every culture

has a ritual to name a new person, an occasion of celebration and
optimism. Brian Friel’s play about (national) language and (national)
identity, Translations (1980), unites these two aspects, self-identiWca-
tion and baptism, in onstage and oVstage action. The play begins
with Sarah (a woman with a ‘speech defect . . . so bad that all her life
she has been considered locally to be dumb’) struggling to articulate
her name: ‘My. . . my. . . My name . . . My name is . . . My name is
Sarah’; the oVstage action concerns the baptism of Nellie Ruadh’s
baby. These two motifs punctuate the main action, the British Ord-
nance Survey’s Anglicization or renaming of Irish place names in 1833:
‘A hundred christenings! A thousand baptisms! Welcome to
Eden. . . . We name a thing and—bang!—it leaps into existence!
Each name a perfect equation with its reality’ (11, 45).15 Writing, the
reiWcation of language, is a powerful act of naming, as Theseus
acknowledges in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘[T]he poet’s pen . . .
gives to aery nothing j A local habitation and a name’ (5.1.15–17).
The metaphysical paradoxes of language are obviously equally true of
naming, for, like words in general, a name can reXect or refuse
mimesis (Deane 108). It is thus impossible to talk of naming in
Romeo and Juliet without invoking language, and vice versa; indeed,
as saw in Ch. 1, the two subjects are often treated metonymically or
synecdochically (names as a paradigm of language).

Translation
The slipperiness of language become even more pronounced
when one enters the realm of translation. Translation is the
turning of one language into another, but it is never a question of
simple equivalence. Translation is interpretation and adaptation.
The Elizabethans were unselfconsciously aware of this. Thomas
Drant prefaced his translation of Horace, A Medicinable Moral, that
is, the two bookes of Horace his Satyres (1566) with the following
explanation:
60 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

I have interfarced (to remove his obscuritie, and sometymes to better his
matter) much of myne owne devysinge. I have peeced his reason, eekede,
and mended his similitudes, mollyWed his hardnes, prolonged his cortall
kynd of speches, changed, & much altered his wordes, but not his sentence:
or at leaste (I dare say) not his purpose. (aiiir–v)

What the Restoration called ‘adaptation’, and what we call ‘(re)ap-

propriation’ Drant called ‘translation’. And for Drant, as for his age,
translation was a creative act, a dialogue between the past and
the present, a cultural linking, an intertextual moment (see Bate,
Ovid 31).
However, in the spirit of paradox which inheres in all levels of the
language debate, translation was also perWdious, the ‘revealing of deep
matters to others’, and was associated etymologically with treason:
traduttore j tradittore (Edwards 5). In 2 Henry 6 Jack Cade targets Lord
Say as a traitor because he can speak French (4.2.166–7). FalstaV plots to
‘English’ Mrs Ford, to translate her from her husband’s bed to his own,
and Pistol comments that FalstaV has ‘studied her well (Q1; F: will],
and translated her will, out of honesty into English’ (MWW 1.3.49–50;
see Parker, Margins 116–22). Betrayal is how Brian Friel’s Translations
presents the central activity of its plot: the ‘standardization’ and
Anglicization of Gaelic place names in Ireland by the Ordnance Survey
team. ‘It’s a bloody military operation’, says Manus to his brother
Owen who is now employed as the Gaelic–English translator to the
English army. ‘What’s ‘‘incorrect’’ about the place-names we have
here?’ That translation represents a loss of culture, a severance from
the past, a rewriting of identity is made clear in the English army’s
onomastic error: they ignorantly call Owen ‘Roland’. Owen laughs it
oV: ‘Isn’t it ridiculous? They seemed to get it wrong from the very
beginning—or else they can’t pronounce Owen . . . Owen—Roland—
what the hell. It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t it?’ (32–3). As the
play makes clear, it is not the same Owen at all; Owen the linguistic
translator has inadvertently become Owen the cultural traitor. By
Act 2 Owen is defending the linguistic-cartographic project to the
English lieutenant, Yolland, who is experiencing moral doubts. Owen
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 61

reassures him, ‘We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there

something sinister in that? And we’re taking place-names that
are riddled with confusion and . . . ’. ‘Who’s confused? Are the people
confused?’ interrupts Yolland. ‘ . . . and we’re standardising those
names as accurately and as sensitively as we can.’16 But Yolland is
insistent: ‘Something is being eroded’. Owen’s response is a long
speech explaining the confusing cultural history behind the name
‘Tobair Vhree’, pointing out that parish inhabitants neither remember
nor understand the etymology of the name, which is hence already
‘eroded’ beyond recognition (43–4).
For the modern translator of Shakespeare the linguistic contra-
dictions in translation (Wdelity to or betrayal/erosion of an original)
coalesce in a position of theatrical rather than semantic logic. If a
translation is not ‘conducive to performance, it remains essentially
unfaithful to the original’, writes Jean-Michel Déprats. Aligning
himself with Drant and against Friel, he argues that ‘when translat-
ing into French, one should be trying less to manipulate the existing
forms and usual turns of phrase than attempting to create new ones.
And this to serve the demands of the original language rather than
those of the language we are translating into’. He concludes: ‘we
are less concerned with translating for the theatre . . . than with
translating theatre’ (347, 353, 355). Thus, by indirections the translator
Wnds directions out. Not just a representation or a reproduction of
meaning, translation is, as the Elizabethans well knew, a discovery.
Translation has cultural as well as semantic resonance, trans-
latio, the carrying of material across cultures, and foreign directors
often have remarkable success in discovering Shakespeare. One
need think only of the original and imaginative Japanese produc-
tions of Ninagawa (Macbeth (1990), Tempest (1991), Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1993), King Lear (1999), Pericles (2003), Titus Andronicus
(2006)) and of Seazer (see his King Lear by the Banyu Inryoko
Company for the Tokyo Globe (1991)) or of the Canadian Robert
Le Page’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at London’s National Theatre
(1992–3). Controversial though this last was, with its atmosphere of
62 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

Kottian, Freudian nightmare, its sexual threat, its rape (of the First
Fairy by Puck), its on-stage copulation between Titania and Bot-
tom, its set of water and mud, this production had at least the virtue
(to some critics, myself included, a dubious virtue) of preventing
audiences from viewing the events in the wood as a poetic Comedy
of Errors populated by Arthur Rackham-style fairies.17 Le Page
defended his approach: ‘The British have always done Shakespeare
but for them to restage Shakespeare is to set it in a diVerent
time. . . . It’s like a recipe: you Wnd a perfect time period and work
within that. But that is not necessarily reappropriating Shakespeare’
(35). Le Page’s ‘reappropriation’ is Drant’s ‘translation’. And no-
where was the nexus between appropriation and translation more
obvious than in the bilingual (French/English) Romeo & Juliette,
co-directed by Robert Le Page and Gordon McCall in Canada in
1989–90. To this production I now turn.

Romeo & Juliette

The Shakespeare-on-the-Saskatchewan festival, directed by Gordon
McCall, was approaching its Wfth birthday (1989), and McCall was
looking for an anniversary production. Toying with the notion of a
bilingual Shakespeare (McCall had already initiated several success-
ful bilingual dramas) McCall contacted Robert Le Page, the franco-
phone director in Québec and founder of Théâtre Répère (1980).
Peter Brook had inXuenced both men’s directorial styles; thus,
despite cultural and artistic diVerences, there was, as McCall ex-
plains, ‘a mutual Xuency in the language of the theatre’ (37).
The directors assembled a cast of twelve (six anglophones and six
francophones) for Romeo & Juliette. The ‘ancient grudge’ (Prologue
3) of the Capulets and Montagues was presented not as a speciWc
feud, not as a linguistic confrontation (although it was certainly
that), but more pervasively as a ‘clash between two cultures who
have never understood each other’ (Crook). The set’s long asphalt
road, a ribbon of the trans-Canada Highway (the connection
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 63

between eastern and western Canada), separated the estates of two

prairie farmers: the francophone Capulets and the anglophone
Montagues. The Capulet dialogue (about 20% of the play) had
been translated into (non-modern) French by award-winning Qué-
bec playwright Jean-Marc Dalpé. In a grim representation of what
bilingualism means in Canada, the Capulets automatically spoke
English to anglophones; the anglophones, by contrast, were con-
sistently monolingual, apart from Mercutio, who oVered Tybalt a
few incendiary French taunts, and Romeo, who falteringly tried to
communicate with Juliette, and, after his marriage, with his new
kinsman Tybalt, in French.
Although the production was set in 1989–90 (the years in which it
played), modernization was not the point. Le Page explains, ‘Direct-
ing is just Wnding where the winds are and then positioning yourself
to say ‘‘Well I think we should go there’’. You don’t decide where
the wind blows’ (31–2). As we have seen, the winds in Romeo and
Juliet blow on the topic of language, communication, and transla-
tion. And in Canada, language, communication, and translation
connote oYcial bilingualism and ongoing debates about the status
of the province of Québec.
Canada has a four-hundred-year history of French–English dis-
agreement. The Wrst European to reach Canada and advertise his
discovery in Europe was (ironically) an Italian in the service of the
British: John Cabot in 1497. The Frenchman Jacques Cartier reached
the Gaspé Peninsula in 1543, and planted a cross; in 1604 and 1608 the
French founded settlements in what are now Nova Scotia and
Québec. In the seventeenth century the English made a claim on
Canada through Cabot, and provoked a century of French–English
hostility. The antagonism over land seemed decisively concluded by
the fall of Québec to the British in 1760; British rule was oYcially
established in 1763. However, the French had inhabited the country
for one and a half centuries, and the British were but newly arrived;
the French were francophone Roman Catholic and the British
were anglophone Protestant. Cultural hostility was inevitable. The
64 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

British unknowingly created the milder francophone–anglophone

unease of the present by ghettoizing the French in Québec. Thus
Canada’s constitution today, with its oYcial policy of bilingualism
designed to acknowledge the founding role of the French in
the nation’s white history, seems undemocratically to privilege a
linguistic minority and a single province: Québec.
In 1987 the Canadian government put the province of Québec on
the political agenda. The Meech Lake accord, a document on con-
stitutional reform dealt with eight principal matters, but the one that
caused most controversy, received most media coverage, and even-
tually collapsed the accord in 1990, was the question of Québec as a
‘distinct society’ whose government was committed to ‘preserv[ing]
and promot[ing]’ the province’s francophone identity (Robertson,
Dunsmuir). Romeo & Juliette was thus conceived in an atmosphere
of speciWc cultural tension, although the directors’ aim was not to use
the play for contemporary statement but to allow it to speak ‘with its
own political, social and cultural voice’ (St Pierre). The production
opened in Saskatchewan in 1989, and its success led to a tour of three
Ontario cities the following summer. It opened in Ottawa, the
nation’s bilingual capital, in a venue pregnant with possibility or
irony (depending on one’s point of view): Victoria Island, a small
island lying in the middle of the river that separates Ontario from
Québec. Within twenty-four hours the case was conWrmed for irony:
the Meech Lake accord oYcially collapsed. As English- and French-
speaking Canada failed to reach constitutional agreement over cul-
tural diVerence, the Capulet and Montague parents grieved for
children who were sacriWced to an ‘ancient grudge’.
The production’s opening music—from the movie Paris, Texas—
wittily established the cultural yoking of two contraries.18 As might
be expected, some of the most resonant dramatic moments
stemmed from characters switching languages within a single
speech. Tybalt’s challenge to Romeo in 3.1 initially read (in Dalpé’s
translation) ‘Romeo, tout l’amour que je porte pur vouse s’exprime
le mieux ainsi: vous êtes une vilénie’. Altered in the course of
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 65

rehearsal, this last phrase became ‘thou art a villain’: Tybalt’s

bilingualism painfully facilitated communication in the interests of
severing social harmony. Romeo’s conciliatory four-line response in
determined French was rendered even more poignant by this con-
text. The audience saw two characters adopting foreign languages
for the contrasting purposes of inXaming and pacifying. This pat-
tern characterized the ensuing exchange. Tybalt’s French lines
concluded in a command delivered in clear English, lest he be
misunderstood—‘therefore, turn and draw’—and Romeo’s Wve-
line English response was punctuated with French phrases on
‘good Capulet—which name I tender j As dearly as mine own’
(3.1.71–2).
Usually however, speeches in two languages served to taunt, as in
Sampson’s lines in 1.1. To Grégoire’s advice ‘Dis ‘‘better’’, v’là qui
approche un parent de mon maı̂tre,’ Sampson responded ‘Oui, bien
‘‘better’’, monsieur’, the harsh unnaturalness of his bilingual collo-
cation calling attention to itself and its incendiary purpose. Else-
where, adoption of the French language expanded playful moments
in Shakespeare’s text, charging simple teasing with repressed ma-
lignancy. Mercutio used exaggerated French to curse ‘such phantas-
tims, these new tuners of accent! . . . these strange Xies, these
fashionmongers, these ‘‘pardon moi’’. . . . O, their bones, their
bones!’, amplifying the linguistic satire already implicit in Shake-
speare’s ‘pardon me’ and bones [‘bons’], and made more pointed
in the continuation ‘Signor Romeo, bonjour. There’s a French salu-
tation to your French slop’ (2.4.28–45; my emphases). Elsewhere the
contiguity of French and English made one alert to the bilingual
potential of Shakespeare’s text as, for example, when Juliette’s
lament (in Dalpé’s text) ‘Ah dieu’ was followed by Romeo’s farewell
(in Shakespeare’s text): ‘Adieu’ (3.5.54–9). Such bilingual punning is
rooted in the text. The lovesick Romeo is found under a sycamore
(sick amour) tree, and Capulet acknowledges Juliet as the ‘hopeful
lady of my earth’ (1.2.15; ‘Wlle de terre’ is, as Steevens Wrst pointed
out, the French term for heiress; Plays ed. Johnson 1.2.15 n.). Pierre
66 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

Iselin (263, 272) Wnds Latin–English puns on the Capulet name in

phrases like ‘By my head—here comes the Capulets’ (3.1.35; see also
4.2.16), and notes that such etymological paronomasia is characteristic
of all the personal names in the play, which possess a quasi-Jonsonian
legibility: Romeo (pilgrim (from French Roumieux)), Mont-ague
(Mount high), Capulet (little head), Escalus (ladder and scales), Juliet
(born in July), Paris (like his Trojan namesake, one of two suitors in a
love saga which aVects an entire city). Mercutio, Benvolio, Potpan,
Susan Grindstone, Simon Catling (a lute-string), Hugh Rebeck (a
violin), and James Soundpost have yet more obvious legibility. The
Le Page/McCall production followed the dramatist’s example in
attaching resonance to names: Paris was able to speak Xuent English
but he was clearly a francophone, as his name suggests.19
The two languages on stage in Romeo & Juliette, and characters’
use of one or other or both, attuned the audience to code-switching
within a single language. Two characters in Romeo and Juliet experi-
ment with diVerent idioms and/or language: the satiric Mercutio
and the romantic Romeo. Mercutio tries to appeal to Romeo in
language that he will understand (and hence, to which he will
respond):
I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her Wne foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie . . . (2.1.17–20)
Mercutio’s parodic lovesick inventorying shows that he does not
take this new language of Petrarchan idiom seriously; in fact, we
know from preceding and succeeding scenes that it is not language
with which he can identify (1.4; 2.3.37–43). More serious, although
almost as brief, is the linguistic exchange between Romeo and Juliet
the morning after the wedding night, when the couple debate the
time of day.20 In defence of her point that ‘it is not yet near day’,
Juliet identiWes the birdsong as that of the nightingale. Romeo
maintains that ‘it was the lark, the herald of the morn, j No
nightingale’. When Juliet insists that it is the nightingale and night
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 67

(and hence unnecessary for Romeo to depart) her husband yields:

‘I am content, so thou wilt have it so’ (3.5.18). He is not merely
content to stay however, but to adopt Juliet’s language:
I’ll say yon grey is not the morning’s eye,
’Tis but the pale reXex of Cynthia’s brow;
Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven so high above our heads . . .
Juliet wills it so (3.5.19–24)
In response to his volte-face Juliet now cedes:
It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps. (3.5.27–8)
Marianne Novy comments that this scene uses ‘a verbal transform-
ation of the world—a creation of a private world through words—as
a metaphor for a relationship’ (108–9). I agree that the scene is a
positive metaphor for a relationship, but see the metaphor as bilin-
gualism. Romeo and Juliet agree to speak each other’s language.
Although Romeo knows it is the lark that sings, he is ‘content’ to
change languages, identifying the bird as the nightingale, whereupon
Juliet reciprocally adopts her husband’s language. As each cedes to
the other, they provide an example of linguistic reciprocity.21 Thus the
motif that began as nominalism (or anti-nominalism) in the garden
scene (2.1) of Romeo and Juliet develops into something closer to
foreign-language learning or translation in 3.5.
That 3.5. is a scene of language exchange is made apparent by its
source: John Eliot’s Ortho-Epia Gallica, or Eliot’s Fruits for the French
(1593; see Lever 79–90). A series of dialogues (French on one page or
column with an English translation facing), Ortho-Epia takes student-
readers through daily situations—shopping, drinking, walking, thiev-
ing, book-buying, travelling, reading French literature—introducing
them, as language manuals still do, to basic functional vocabulary and
dialogue, and to cultural aspects of the foreign country whose
language the student is in the process of acquiring. The last chapter
introduces the student to the poetry of Du Bartas, and provides a
68 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

lyrical quatrain about the lark in the ‘vaulty heaven’ (R& J 3.5.22; ‘la
voute du Ciel’, Ortho-Epia, t1v, p. 146), followed by a change of
ornithological subject:
Harke, harke, tis some other bird that sings now.
Tis a blacke-bird or a Nightingale.
The Nightingale sings not but evening and morning
Where is she I pray thee?
Tis a Nightingale I heard her record.
Seest thou not her sitting on a sprig?
O how sweetly she sings without any stop,
and ceaseth not! (t3r, p. 149; Lever 82–3)22
Love, as I mentioned earlier, means learning to speak the language
of the beloved. This, at least, is the message from the aubade
scene, and, later in the canon, from 1 Henry 4 where the (politically
and emotionally) captive Mortimer vows to learn the language of
his (nameless) newly-wed wife (‘I will never be a truant, love, j
Till I have learn’d thy language’; 3.1.204–5).23 Romeo & Juliette made
this point in the context of Canadian cultural history, and Brian
Friel makes the same point in the diVerent colonial history of
Translations. The Irish Maire and the English Lieutenant Yolland
fall in love. Although neither understands the other’s language, they
quickly Wnd a way to communicate by reciting place names. Yolland
has learned the Irish names he was sent to standardize: ‘Carraig na
Ri. Loch na nEan . . . Machaire Mor. Cnoc na Mona . . . Mullach . . . -
Tor’ (62). Within a day Maire has learned ‘Winfarthing—Barton
Bendish—Saxingham Nethergate—Little Walsingham—Norwich—
Norfolk. Strange sounds, aren’t they? But nice sounds’ (72). In fact,
sounds (signs) have more meaning than do signiWers to the lovers:
ma i r e Say anything at all. I love the sound of your speech . . .
yo ll an d Say anything at all—I love the sound of your speech. (60)

To the audience this is a repetition. To the characters it is not, for

they do not understand each other. Friel brilliantly establishes a
convention in the play whereby the actors all speak English,
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 69

although their characters speak Gaelic or English. Friel, himself

bilingual in Gaelic and English, felt the supreme irony of Transla-
tions was that he wrote this elegiac lament for the Irish language in
English (Dantanus 201).24 However, the actors’ monolingual repre-
sentation of two languages deepened the play’s resonance. Not
just about a moment in Ireland’s past, the period when Gaelic
speakers became English speakers, the play belongs also to the
present, a period when two cultures who share a language—North-
ern Ireland and Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish republic,
Northern Ireland Catholic and Northern Ireland Protestant—fail to
communicate.
This returns us to translation in its interlingual and intralingual
senses, for, as George Steiner observes in the epigraph to this
chapter, ‘human communication equals translation’.25 In Romeo &
Juliette the lovers’ dialogue in the aubade scene took place in
English; as the lovers exchanged language—lark, nightingale—
the production showed that bilingualism is a motif for monolin-
gual societies too. This was illustrated, sadly, in the McCall/Le
Page collaboration in another way. McCall’s conWdent memory of
the way in which the directors’ ‘mutual Xuency in the language of
theatre’ compensated for cultural barriers was not shared by Le
Page. Although McCall worked alone with the francophone act-
ors, he did not permit Le Page the reciprocal privilege of working
alone with the anglophone actors. Throughout there were diVer-
ent ways of working ‘at every level, in every detail’; the actors
even belonged to diVerent unions. Consequently Le Page felt that
artistic/cross-cultural fertilization was frustrated. McCall’s pres-
ence when Le Page worked with the English-speaking actors
was, in Le Page’s view, intended to prevent the possibility of
contradiction. ‘But you have to allow people to contradict your
work because that’s when it thickens and become multilayered’.
Although Le Page anticipated that it would be ‘very exciting, the
idea of working with both sides’, in the end, he said, ‘I felt
cheated’ (32).
70 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

Unnaming, Renaming
Canadian literature has long concerned itself with acts of naming
and unnaming. Not only is the narrator of Thomas Haliburton’s
The Clockmaker (1836) nameless, he conspicuously refuses to name
himself, in episodes which highlight his anonymity. Addressed by an
innkeeper’s wife (‘Would you like, Mr —’) he realizes that ‘Here
there was a pause, a hiatus, evidently intended for me to Wll up with
my name. But that no person knows; nor do I intend they shall’ (30).
Like Romeo, however, the narrator Wnds that true anonymity is
impossible, at least when registering in a hotel: ‘At Medley’s Hotel,
in Halifax I was known as the stranger in No. 1’ (30). Robert
Kroetsch articulates the narrative paradox: ‘He names himself by
giving a name that leaves him nameless’ (42). A century later
Sinclair Ross’ As for Me and My House plays with the same tension
between name and namelessness. The novel is in the form of a
personal diary, but Mrs Bentley, the author of the diary, never
reveals her Wrst name. Given her recurrent interest in names,
from those of livestock to that of her husband and of their adopted
son, her strategy of namelessness is surprising, but Kroetsch points
out the underlying logic: ‘She names her world in great detail in
order to keep herself nameless’ (46).
Kroetsch identiWes an Adamic concern with naming as a key
feature of American and Canadian literature. Rejecting the ono-
mastic inheritance of the British, North American writers begin at
the beginning, linguistically. Unlike American writing, however
(Melville’s ‘Call me Ishmael’26), Canadian writing shuns onomastic
assertion. Not just anonymous, Canadian literature is also atopon-
ymous. Mrs Bentley lives in a town called Horizon (‘a no-place that
is tantalizingly visible but always out of reach: a version of name-
lessness’; Kroetsch 44), and the named identity of Haliburton’s
narrator as ‘the stranger in No. 1’ belongs, as Kroetsch observes,
to a past place, Medley’s Hotel in Halifax, rather than to his current
residence, Pugwash’s Inn.
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 71

Underlying this namelessness is interrogation of the sign and what

lies behind it, an interrogation also visible in contemporary Canadian
poetry. In a 1978 poem Raymond Filip puns: ‘I am the language that is
lost. j The name that is changed. . . . j I am the Canadian Mosaic: a
melting pot on ice. j I am always the next generation. . . . j You were
Commonwealth, j I am common loss’ (New 240). In 1982 Lola Lemire
Tostevin uses bilingual poetry to move towards ‘unspeaking’: ‘ ‘‘tu
déparles’’ j my mother says j je déparle j yes j I unspeak . . . baby lulled
by a lie byaliebyaliebyaliebyaliebyalie’ (New 265). Unnaming, unswear-
ing, unspeaking, deconstructing the sign, renaming the rose are at the
heart of Romeo and Juliet, and in responding to these concerns Le Page
and McCall presented a production that belongs Wrmly in a Canadian
literary and historical tradition. According to one history, Canada
began with a linguistic misunderstanding. Jacques Cartier sailed up
what we now call the St Lawrence river to the Amerindian settlement
named Hochelaga and asked where he was. The native Canadians
used the word kanata (settlement), which Cartier mistook for a
placename (Ashley 1). Filip and Tostevin turn linguistic misunder-
standing into poetic richness: the pun.
The pun is a sign not simply detached from its signiWer but
reattached to multiple signiWers. Thus, like the paradoxes and
oxymoron in Romeo and Juliet, it is a linguistic model of coexistence,
for Verona and for Canada. But what comes easily to the language-
sensitive poet is inevitably more diYcult for others. Dr Johnson
described language as the dress of thought, a sartorial motif also
employed by Juliet when she begs Romeo ‘DoV thy name’ (2.2.47).
However, as Mashay Bernstein points out, changing language or
name is not ‘as benign as changing clothes’ (267). It signals the
relinquishing of cultural memory, identity, history, the past, the
familiar, and the crossing of tribal boundaries. Romeo and Juliet
are prepared to give up such inherited identities in exogamous
marriage, but their kinsmen are not. Arthur Brooke’s (didactic)
version of the tragedy (itself a translation of Bandello but lacking
Shakespeare’s awareness of language and its problems) concludes by
72 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet

assigning punishments. Shakespeare’s conclusion focuses on lan-

guage: ‘Go hence to have more talk of these sad things; j Some
shall be pardon’d, and some punished: j For never was a story of
more woe j Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ (5.3.307–10). The
couple’s marriage and tragic deaths will be translated into narrative.
In comedy, narrative is not a problem. In Comedy of Errors Egeon’s
lengthy biographical monologue is (to the onstage characters) at
worst, a mild irritant, and, at best, an invitation to empathize; in
either case the monologue is invited and the play has time to indulge
the narrative. In Pericles, where the characters respond to misfortune
by recounting their woes, the act of narration assuages suVering: ‘My
Dionyza, shall we rest us here, j And by relating tales of others’ griefs,
j See if ’twill teach us to forget our own?’ (1.4.1–3). Even in its most
shorthand form, as in the reduction of Marina’s life to three nouns (a
tempest, a birth, a death; 5.3.33–4), language is never problematic, and
names unite families as quickly and easily as in Romeo and Juliet they
divide them: ‘Is it no more to be your daughter than j To say my
mother’s name was Thaisa?’ (Pericles 5.1.209–10).27 In Much Ado about
Nothing Dogberry’s linguistic imprecision becomes, paradoxically, a
direct route to truth: ‘Write down Prince John a villain’; ‘forget not
that I am an ass’ (4.2.41; 4.2.77–8).
In tragedy language is dangerous, and equivocation undoes us.
To Cordelia ‘nothing’ (1.1.87) is a declaration of honesty, to Lear
an instance of ingratitude. For Desdemona insistent questions
about Cassio’s reinstatement represent connubial intimacy, for
Othello marital inWdelity. In Hamlet stable family relationships col-
lapse linguistically (‘aunt-mother’, ‘uncle-father’; 2.2.376) just as in
Romeo and Juliet ‘my only hate’ becomes ‘my only love’ (1.5.138),
‘enemy’ becomes ‘husband’ and ‘foe’ becomes ‘wife’.
It may seem disconcerting then that Romeo and Juliet, like Hamlet,
gives the last word to language but, as the grieving families prepare
for narrative at the end of 5.3, the play registers a new civic attitude
to names. ‘Never was a story of more woe j Than this of Juliet and
her Romeo’ (my emphasis) says Escalus, identifying the young
 The Patronym: Montague and Capulet 73

couple not patronymically as Capulet or Montague but as persons

independent of family. The personal name still signiWes, of course—
a woman born in July, a pilgrim—but the signiWcation is local and
individual rather than historical and multiple. A play that began
with ‘two households’ ends positively (given the baggage attached
to the two households) with two individuals.
Umberto Eco concludes The Name of the Rose with a quotation
from the twelfth-century Benedictine Bernard of Morley: ‘stat rosa
pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus’. This is Bernard’s consol-
ing addition to the traditional ubi sunt lament: that departed things
leave pure names behind them. Chomsky writes that ‘languages do
not seem to have a category of pure names, in the logician’s
sense’.28 There is, as Romeo and Juliet shows, no such thing as a
‘pure name’ (if, by a pure name we mean one that does not signify),
but in the play’s concluding focus on the personal rather than the
patronymic, Shakespeare and Verona take a step closer to onomas-
tic purity.
 3
The Mythological Name:
Helen
(Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well,
Troilus and Cressida, Henry 4)

‘What was her name? It was Thelma. Thelma, was it? Not the kind of name to
launch a thousand ships’.
(Peter Barry, Beginning Theory 238)

‘O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!’

(MND 3.2.137)

Helen and Helena

The Xexibility of early modern orthography, which facilitated inter-
pretative Xuidity and ambivalence (bareness/barrenness in the son-
nets, for example1) as well as enabling compositorial justiWcation
(kindnes/kindnesse), also aVected the morphology of names. Kath-
erine in The Taming of the Shrew is both Katherine and Katherina, as
is Mathias’s mother in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Desdemona in
Othello is also Desdemon; Cressida is as often Cressid in early
modern literature (see Ch. 4 n. 2); and Helen in Bacon, Chapman,
 The Mythological Name: Helen 75

Greene, Heywood, Marlowe, Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare, and

Spenser is regularly, interchangeably, Helena.
The diVerence between the trochaic and anapaestic forms of
Helen, like that between the tri- and quatrosyllabic forms of Kath-
erine/a and Desdemon/a is often one of metrical convenience
rather than exact denotation.2 Helen and Helena are variant
forms of one name; Helen and Helena are the same character.
The Queen of Corinth in Sidney’s Arcadia is both Helen and
Helena.3 Hermia’s childhood friend in Shakespeare’s Midsummer
Night’s Dream is both Helen and Helena.4 In Marlowe’s Dr Faustus
we read:
Come, Helen, give me my soul again
Here will I dwell, for heaven is [A text: be] in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena. (5.1.98–100)

In Dido, Queen of Carthage, the eponymous Queen asks for news of

‘Helen, she that caus’d this war’ and is told ‘Helena betrayed
Deiphobus’ (2.1.292, 298). The narrative poem The First Rape of
Fair Helen (1595, attributed to John Trussell) regularly interchanges
the two forms:
my parentes mutually did mone,
the too long absence of their Hellena,
Wherto at length when that I had attained,
Passions anew poore passion’d Hellen pained. (ll.315–18)
As these last three quotations illustrate, the character we know
invariantly in the twenty-Wrst century as Helen of Troy was, like
other Renaissance Helens, also a Helena. Thus Spenser in The
Shepherd’s Calendar glosses the abducted ‘lasse’ of the July eclogue
as ‘Helena the wyf of Menelaus’ (Shorter Poems, 147).
‘Like other Renaissance Helens’? In fact, there was no other
referent for Helen/a. There was a one-to-one correspondence
between signiWer and signiWed; Helen meant only one Helen—
Helen of Troy. When Theseus in Midsummer Night’s Dream deni-
grates the stereotypical lovers’ rose-tinted vision, he accuses the
76 The Mythological Name: Helen

lover of seeing ‘Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’ (5.1.11). There is

no need to qualify the name, as we do, for to add the geographical
epithet ‘of Troy’ would be tautological. Thus, in Romeo and Juliet,
Mercutio taunts Romeo for believing his beloved to be more
beautiful than Laura, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero, and Thisbe
(2.4.39–42). In As You Like It Orlando blazons Rosalind as having
‘Helen’s cheek, but not her heart, j Cleopatra’s majesty, j Atalanta’s
better part, j Sad Lucretia’s modesty’ (3.2.145–8); and in sonnet 53
the young man is compared to both Adonis and Helen: ‘Describe
Adonis, and the counterfeit j Is poorly imitated after you; j On
Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set, j And you in Grecian tires are
painted new’ (ll. 5–8). Nashe writes ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s eye’
(in ‘Adieu, farewell’, l.19). On no occasion does the reference to
Helen require explanatory expansion.5
Marlowe’s Dido upbraids Aeneas:
Hast thou forgot how many kings
Were up in arms, for making thee my love?
How Carthage did rebel, Iarbus storm,
And all the world call me a second Helen
For being entangled by a stranger’s looks? (5.1.141–5)
She reiterates her shame just three lines later: ‘And I be call’d a
second Helena!’ (148). The ‘Wrst’ Helen(a) is the only Helen: Helen
of Troy. Other historical or mythological Helens—the virtuous St
Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, for example, whose
church in Bishopsgate made her part of the Elizabethan cultural
landscape—never displaced the Lacedemonian or Spartan (as Helen
of Troy was also called), and this despite a pre-Reformation predi-
lection for hagionymy.6 Camden’s glossary of names in his Remains
(1605) does oVer St Helena as the name’s primary referent; but his
view is unusual and does not seem to be shared by literary texts,
even when the association is speciWcally invited, as in the case of
the pilgrim Helen in All’s Well that Ends Well. (For an analysis of
St Helena in Shakespeare’s texts see Jean Roberts, Wild 145.) When
the Shakespeare canon invokes St Helen, she requires appositive
 The Mythological Name: Helen 77

explanation: ‘Helen, the mother of great Constantine’ (1 Henry

6 1.2.142).7
The false etymology of the ancient Greeks that saw in Helen the
root ‘hele’ [¼ destroyer] prevailed in Renaissance England, leading
to regular punning on Helen/hell/heaven. In Peele’s Edward 1
Mortimer plays on the name of his beloved: ‘Hell in thy name,
but heaven is in thy looks’ (1097).8 In whatever form it appeared
Helen’s name spelled disaster, a ‘goodly apple rotten at the core’
(Pippin 1519). Little wonder that Renaissance pamphlets implicitly
counselled against christening one’s daughter Helen: to bear a
name associated with sexuality, adultery, and the downfall of an-
cient civilization (the Wrst two causing the last) was simply too
much for a girl to bear.10
In the twentieth and twenty-Wrst centuries Helen has shed its
negative associations,11 but other names from our own recent
history function as narrowly and as ominously. In the Philippines,
where the pool of surnames was limited by Spain in the nine-
teenth century to a small number of generic Spanish names,
Filipinos are adventurous in their choice of Wrst names in an
attempt to assert their individuality. Hitler Manila (‘being called
Hitler stops people mistaking me for somebody else’), called
his two sons Himmler and Hess. Manila carefully points out
that he doesn’t share any of the dictator’s philosophies (Hookway
8), but the fact that he has to dissociate himself from his
namesake illustrates the Wxed union of some signiWers and sign-
iWeds. Nick Angel (10) speculates that the paciWsm of a Midlands
warehouse supervisor called Genghis Khan is a deliberate reaction
to his name and a childhood he describes as a ‘nightmare’. Such
Wxity of signiWer and signiWed is most visible when proper names
become common nouns: in As You Like It Troilus has become
‘one of the patterns of love’ (4.1.99–100). In The School for Scandal
Joseph Surface says ‘it doesn’t follow that one is to be an
absolute Joseph either’ (4.3.247). He refers to the Joseph of Genesis
39: 7–12 who ‘rejected the advances of Potiphar’s wife’ (Sheridan
78 The Mythological Name: Helen

4.3.248 n., p. 99); however, the editor points out (99) that ‘in all
but Puritan families’ the name referred to Joseph, husband of
Mary. Fielding gets mileage out of the discrepancy between this
biblical Joseph and Joseph Andrews in ironic similes (Paulson 5).
Dido fears being ‘a second Helen’, the indeWnite article indicating
the name’s function as noun.12 And as Adolf Hitler and Saddam
Hussein function in today’s culture, so Helen functioned in
the Renaissance: a byword for sexual appetite or disaster or
both. In this chapter I want to investigate what it means for an
author to name a character Helen in Renaissance drama. This
necessitates looking at the reception of the Helen of Troy myth in
both the ancient world and in the medieval and early modern
periods, but before we embark on this survey I want to turn to
Shakespeare’s most classically complex Helen play: Midsummer
Night’s Dream.

Theseus
In Midsummer Night’s Dream Hermia and Lysander try to escape
Theseus and the ‘sharp Athenian law’ (1.1.162) but they never reach
their destination, and the action takes place merely one league
from Theseus’s court. The wood is Athenian territory (Theseus
hunts there in Act 5) and its trees and fairy inhabitants are repeatedly
linked to Theseus. The Mechanicals meet ‘[a]t the Duke’s oak’
(1.2.110); the fairy king and queen accuse each other of romantic
interest in Theseus and Hippolyta (2.1.70–80). The wood is as confus-
ing as any labyrinth (the lovers’ ‘amazement’ reminds us of the noun’s
root in ‘maze’) and has at its centre not the Minotaur (a man’s body
with a bull’s head) but Bottom (a man’s body with an ass’s head).
Bottom’s very name, a weaver’s bobbin, reminds us of the thread with
which Theseus found his way out of the Cretan Labyrinth.13
The frame story of Theseus’ nuptials extends beyond the play’s
conWnes, reminding us of his past, and pre-echoing his future. The
artistic representation of the battle of the centaurs, oVered as part of
 The Mythological Name: Helen 79

the play’s wedding revels, concerns a riot which took place at the
wedding of Theseus’ best friend Pirithous (when the centaurs tried to
abduct Pirithous’ bride Hippodamia) and Theseus prepares to marry
not Antiope (the Amazon queen generally named as Theseus’ bride,
relegated in Midsummer Night’s Dream to a past aVair) but the variant
candidate Hippolyta: her resonant name is, as Peter Holland points
out, a backformation from Hippolytus (Theseus’ son with Antiope).
The aural associations with Hippolytus project the story forwards to
Hippolytus’ violent and unhappy end, contradicting Oberon’s optative
conclusion that Theseus’ ‘issue . . . j Ever shall be fortunate’ (5.1.405–6;
P. Holland 144). The luetic eVect of the Theseus references is either
infelicitous or deliberate: ‘too extensive . . . to be merely casual recol-
lections’ (D’Orsay Pearson 279). When one considers the name of
Hermia’s father—Egeus, also the name of Theseus’ father—Theseus
assumes a centrifugal force in the play. The story of Helen is, as we
shall see, intertwined with the story of Theseus.
Theseus’ story was available to the Renaissance from many
sources: Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and shorter poems, Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses (in Golding’s translation) and Heroides (both translated in
1567), Seneca’s Hippolytus (translated 1581), Plutarch’s Lives of the
Noble Greeks and Romans, for example14—but the most extensive
account appears in Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, where the dominant
narrative concerns Theseus’s track record of abducting, abandon-
ing, and occasionally marrying women: Ariadne, Antiope, Hippo-
lyta, Phaedra, and ‘other stories also about marriages of Theseus
which were neither honorable in their beginning nor fortunate in
their endings’—the abduction of Anaxo, the rapes of Perigune and
her sister, marriage to Periboea, Phereboea, Iope, Aegle, ‘and Wnally,
his rape of Helen . . . said to have Wlled Attica with war’ (67).
The rape of Helen is examined by Plutarch on three occasions.
The second is the lengthiest:
Theseus was already Wfty years old, according to Hellanicus, when he took
part in the rape of Helen, who was not of marriageable age. Wherefore
some writers, thinking to correct this heaviest accusation against him, say
80 The Mythological Name: Helen

that he did not carry oV Helen himself, but that when Idas and Lynceus
had carried her oV, he received her in charge and watched over her and
would not surrender her to the Dioscuri [her brothers] when they
demanded her; or if you will believe it, that her own father, Tyndareüs,
entrusted her to Theseus, for fear of Enarsphorus, the son of Hippocoön,
who sought to take Helen by force while she was yet a child. (71–3)

Having given the alternatives, Plutarch oVers ‘the most probable

account and that which has the most witnesses in its favour’ (73).
Theseus and his best friend Pirithous saw Helen and drew lots for
marriage to her, agreeing that the winner would help the loser Wnd
another wife. ‘Theseus won, and taking the maiden, who was not
yet ripe for marriage, conveyed her to Aphidnae. Here he made his
mother a companion of the girl, and committed both to Aphidnus,
a friend of his, with strict orders to guard them in complete secrecy’
(73). He then returned to Pirithous and the two attempted to steal
away Persephone as a bride for Pirithous.
Plutarch is a judicious if not neutral narrator but his moral disap-
probation of Theseus becomes increasingly clear. The extract above
hints at his agreement with those who viewed Theseus’ abduction of
Helen as ‘this heaviest accusation against him’, and his scepticism
about the likelihood of Tyndareüs’ choosing of Theseus as a protector
is clear (‘if you will believe it’). By the time he reaches his comparative
conclusion about Romulus and Theseus, his narrative openness is that
of Trinculo: ‘I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer’ (Tempest
2.2.34–5)—Theseus is selWsh and lustful (189–201).15
Theseus’ forgetfulness in raising the white sail as agreed to alert his
father to his safe homecoming—an oversight which prompted Egeus
to kill himself for grief—is, according to Plutarch, nothing short
of ‘parricide, be the plea of the advocate ever so long and his judges
ever so lenient’ (197).16 Furthermore ‘the transgressions of Theseus
in his rapes of women admit of no plausible excuse. This is true, Wrst,
because there were so many. . . . It is true, secondly, because
of the reasons for them; for the daughters of Troezenians and
Laconians and Amazons were not betrothed to him. . . . [O]ne may
 The Mythological Name: Helen 81

suspect that these deeds of his were done in lustful wantonness’ (197).
Plutarch reiterates the abduction of Helen as the worst oVence
because Theseus ‘was past his prime and she had not yet reached
her prime, but was an unripe child, while he was already of an age
too great for even lawful wedlock’ (197). There is a diVerence between
what Shakespeare’s Lysander calls ‘love . . . misgraVed in respect of
years’ and paedophilia. Trussell’s The First Rape of Fair Helen (1595),
presents Theseus’ raptus unequivocally as physical rape of a minor.17
Helen’s nurse consoles her: because she is pre-pubertal Helen cannot
get pregnant and therefore no one will know of her shame:
Thy bellie cannot manifest thy wrong,
Nor make the world a witnes of thy scape,
For why? The world will never once mistrust
Thy tender yeares to be deWled by lust. (552–8)

In contrast to Theseus, Romulus used abduction to create polit-

ical alliances. Of the ‘nearly eight hundred women’ he carried oV, he
married only one, and ‘distributed the rest among the best of the
citizens. . . . In this way he intermixed and blended the two peoples
with one another, and supplied his state with a Xowing fountain of
strength and good will’ (197–9). This marital stability lasted for over
two centuries. Plutarch observes, ‘[I]n two hundred and thirty years
no man ventured to leave his wife, nor any woman her husband. . .
whereas from the marriages of Theseus the Athenians got no new
friends at all, nor even any community of enterprise whatsoever, but
enmities, wars, slaughters of citizens’ (199). Plutarch’s litotical Wnal
line is unequivocal: ‘the birth of Theseus was not agreeable to the
will of the gods’ (201).
Plutarch’s condemnation is shared from antiquity to the early
modern. When Seneca’s Hippolytus opens, Theseus is in Hades for
the abduction of Helen and for the attempted abduction of Perse-
phone. In the Aeneid Virgil places Theseus in Hades with those
damned for adultery. Trussell’s First Rape of Fair Helen presents
Theseus as ‘disloyal, false and treacherous, j Unkind, unconstant,
82 The Mythological Name: Helen

and uncourteous: j Luxurious, lustfull, and most lecherous, j Untrue,

ungratefull, vile, and vicious. j In wedlocke, friendship and to chasti-
tie’ (97–101). In Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ Theseus is ambiguously
presented but in the shorter poems (Legend of Good Women, House of
Fame, Anelida and Arcite) he is ‘traitorous, pitiless and false’ (Elizabeth
Fowler 65). In Elyot’s The Book of the Governor Duke Theseus is
‘tourmented for dissolute and vicious lyving’ (D’Orsay Pearson 288).
As Peter Holland notes ‘the mere presence of Theseus in Midsummer
Night’s Dream makes the whole of the Theseus myth available’
(‘Shadows’ 151). We may see him preparing for marriage, but we are
reminded of his past inWdelities. Titania, Oberon alleges, led Theseus
‘from Perigenia, whom he ravished . . . j And [made] him with fair
Aegles break his faith, j With Ariadne and Antiopa’ (2.1.78–80). Helen
is conspicuously absent from this list because her abduction is yet to
come. But as Laura Johnstone (personal communication) points out, a
world ruled by Theseus is a frightening place for a character named
Helen. The danger is exacerbated when one considers that the women
in Midsummer Night’s Dream, unusually in Shakespeare, leave the city
without the beneWt of protective male disguise.
Critics stress the presence of Ovid in Midsummer Night’s Dream,18
whether in the theme of metamorphosis, the lyrical Ovidian
language, the references to myth (‘Apollo Xies and Daphne holds
the chase’), the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, or the shortlist of
entertainments oVered to Theseus in Act 5: ‘the battle with the
Centaurs’ and ‘the riot of the tipsy Bacchanals’. As Jonathan Bate
observes (Ovid 130–1) almost all Athens seems to be rehearsing
Ovid for Theseus’ nuptials. But there is a more diVuse classical
tradition in Midsummer Night’s Dream, not speciWcally Ovidian but
Greek. And the Theseus mythology, so wonderfully examined by
Peter Holland, goes hand in hand with that of Helen. ‘The story
shall be chang’d’ proclaims Helen (2.2.230) as she pursues Deme-
trius. She may think she is revising the story of Apollo and
Daphne, turning the female into the pursuer, but Shakespeare is
revising the story of Helen of Troy. ‘Helen being chosen . . . ’ begins
 The Mythological Name: Helen 83

Yeats’ ‘Prayer for my Daughter’. Emphatically unchosen, Shake-

speare’s Helen internalizes her rejection as ugliness, moving
from the conWdent assertion in Act 1 that she is as beautiful as
Hermia to the exaggerated despair of Act 2: ‘I am as ugly as a bear; j
For beasts that meet me run away for fear’ (2.2.94–5). Immediately
Puck’s mistake with the magic love juice restores Helen to her
rightful mythic position: adored, worshipped as a goddess, and
fought over by two men, who immediately compete in hyperbolic
compliments:
O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!19
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow! (3.2.137–40)
Much later, in Act 5, with all confusions resolved, Theseus mentions
the beauty of Helen of Troy. In the 1981–2 RSC production Harriet
Walter’s Helen received an aYrmative sideways glance from her
Demetrius (Philip Franks), acknowledging the appropriateness of
her name to her beauty.
The story of Theseus, as told by Plutarch, is a story of sexual
violence (unlike that of Romulus, with whom Theseus is unfavour-
ably compared); it is also a story of poor government (again in
contrast to that of Romulus). Shakespeare investigates these two
aspects in Midsummer Night’s Dream but he was not the Wrst English
poet to do so. Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ dwells on Theseus’ attempts
to aestheticize violence through ritual, turning conquest into cere-
mony, dominion into civil domesticity, oVering marriage (whether
his own to Hippolyta or Palamon/Arcite’s to Emilia) as a guberna-
torial solution.20 In Shakespeare’s later reworking of Chaucer’s tale
of Theseus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, he approaches this solution
sceptically, presenting marriage as a highly unsatisfactory outcome;
matrimony ‘triumphs . . . institutionally. . . not emotionally’ (Mall-
ette 44). In the earlier Midsummer Night’s Dream he is interested
less in the formal conclusion of marriage than in the ambiguous
nature of consent which precedes it.
84 The Mythological Name: Helen

Consent
The sundered Fairy King and Queen are of most interest in this
respect: marital reunion is conditional on female submission (‘give
me that boy, and I will go with thee’, demands Oberon at 2.1.143).
The condition is obtained by magic (a metaphor, as Jean Roberts
points out, for male power; ‘Shades’ 6321) and accompanied by
unnecessary humiliation. Oberon relates the (to him) positive out-
come of a meeting with Titania:
When I had at my pleasure taunted her,
And she in mild terms begged my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child;
Which straight she gave me. (4.1.57–60; my emphasis)

The nature of Hippolyta’s consent is similarly compromised. Eliza-

beth Fowler’s statement about Chaucer’s Amazon queen is applic-
able to Shakespeare’s: ‘if we wonder what Ypolita thinks of her
marriage, knowing what she said under the pressure of Theseus’s
sword would hardly satisfy us’ (60). The issue of consent is also to
the fore in Hermia’s matrimonial independence. Egeus’ anger is
caused less by his daughter’s choice of husband than by her attempt
to deny him authority:
They would have stol’n away, they would, Demetrius,
Thereby to have defeated you and me:
You of your wife, and me of my consent,
Of my consent that she should be your wife. (4.1.156–9)

Even in the romantic world of reciprocal love we are oVered the

negative concept of ‘enforced chastity’ (my emphasis) or the sophis-
tical riddles of Lysander’s attempts to get into Hermia’s bed: ‘One
turf shall serve as pillow for us both, j One heart, one bed, two
bosoms, and one troth’ (2.2.41–2). Hermia twice has to ask Lysander
to ‘lie further oV’ (44, 57). Contemporary productions have long
since ceased to play this as prissiness on Hermia’s part, seeing it
instead as part of the atmosphere of threat which characterizes the
 The Mythological Name: Helen 85

wood. Even the Fairy Queen requires a protective sentinel and a

prophylactic lullaby. Hermia’s attempts to evade premarital sex are
the thin end of a wedge which leads to Helen of Troy’s raptus.22 The
minatory tone becomes most overt in Demetrius’ threats to the
rejected Helena: he progresses from leaving her to the ‘mercy of
wild beasts’ (2.1.228) to becoming a beast himself: ‘I shall do thee
mischief in the wood’ (2.1.237).23
The (il)logic of this punishment—threatened rape of a woman in
whom Demetrius denies all romantic and erotic interest—is part of
the discourses of power in the play. We tend to think of rape as a
speciWcally sexual crime; in fact it is more signiWcantly a crime of
violence. The rapist’s motivation is not sex but power. (This is why
old women are as likely to be victims of rape as young women, and
why rape is frequently used as a metaphor for invaded and con-
quered countries.) Rape empowers the rapists by creating a victim,
like Helena, who is vulnerable. (See Brownmiller, passim; and on
rape as ‘the desire for violence and the violence of desire’ in
Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece see Fineman 176.) Demetrius’ threat
is also part of the disordered universe of the wood in which the
seasons, like human emotions and reason, are out of joint.

Sex and Language

Titania traces the climatic disorder to the marital quarrel between
herself and Oberon. In a long, lyrical passage she describes the
disruption in nature. Unseasonal winds, fogs, and Xoods have
arrested agriculture; cattle and sheep are dying; humans fall ill;
summer is characterized by frost and ice; ‘and this same progeny
of evils comes j From our debate, from our dissension; j We are
their parents and original’ (2.1.115–17). I suspect she is too generous
in assigning blame to herself and Oberon. Her catalogue of
environmental and agricultural disasters sounds remarkably like
that presented by Burgundy at the end of Henry 5 (5.2.34–67).
Burgundy attributes the disasters to war (or, in his diplomatic
86 The Mythological Name: Helen

euphemism, ‘mangled Peace’; 5.2.34). Shakespeare is ever alert to

the side eVects of war, and one can scarcely help but reXect that
Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with Theseus’ return from foreign
quarrels. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the play
in 2003 presented a world ravished by war and damaged by neglect:
statues and balconies were broken and crumbling. Like Henry 5,
Theseus conquers politically; he then seeks to cement this
conquest sexually. Royal (mortal) marriage is seen as the remedy
for ravage; not, as Titania believes, royal (fairy) marriage the cause
of disorder.24
Athens is the home of law, and Act 1, Scene 1 is pregnant with
legal references and allusions. The ancient laws of Athens are
regularly invoked by Theseus, Egeus, and Lysander; Demetrius
asks his rival to ‘yield j Thy crazed title to my certain right’ (91–2);
Hermia ‘plead[s]’ her ‘case’ (61–3); Lysander defends his entitlement
to ‘prosecute my right’ (105); Egeus claims ownership of his daugh-
ter ‘and all my right of her j I do estate unto Demetrius’ (97–8).25
In the wood law and love are continually associated: Puck describes
the mortal wooing as ‘pleading for a lover’s fee’ (3.2.113); Lysander
challenges Demetrius ‘to try whose right, j Of thine or mine, is
most in Helena’ (3.2.336–7). The mechanicals are concerned lest
their dramatic representation fall foul of the Athenian law: ‘that
were enough to hang us all’ (1.2.76–7). The lists which typify
characters’ speeches throughout Midsummer Night’s Dream function
as if evidence in a court of law. Egeus takes eight lines to itemize
Lysander’s incriminating ‘love tokens’ (1.1.28–35). Titania takes
thirty-six to list environmental damage (2.1.82–117). Even Peter
Quince piles up three persuasive descriptive phrases to convince
Bottom to play Pyramus: ‘for Pyramus is a sweet faced man; a
proper man as one shall see in a summer’s day; a most lovely
gentlemanlike man’ (1.2.85–8).26 Quince oVers a verbal contract
to his actors, adopting a pseudo-legalese series of synonyms:
‘Here are your parts, and I am to entreat you, request you, and
desire you to con them by tomorrow night’ (1.2.99–101). Convince,
 The Mythological Name: Helen 87

we remember, comes from vincere, to conquer, and the play’s sexual

and linguistic conquests are linked.
The quarrel between Oberon and Titania is partly fought over
semantics, the meaning of the word ‘wanton’, on which changes are
subtly rung three times in one scene (2.1). For Titania the adjective
refers to the luxuriant generosity of nature: ‘the wanton green’
(2.1.99), ‘the wanton wind’ (129). For her the word is associated
with growth, with fecundity, with careless and carefree abundance:
ships’ sails, full of wind, look ‘big-bellied’ like the pregnant votaress
(2.1.129); the grass in the maze is overgrown.27 Oberon sees the
word diVerently: he uses it as a noun, greeting his estranged wife
with ‘Tarry, rash wanton!’ (2.1.63). The luxuriance of nature (grass
growing, wind blowing) is now Wgured as lack of control, speciW-
cally sexual control; hence the word comes to mean a lascivious or
lewd person (usually a woman). Given that Titania’s transgression is
sexual abstinence, as we are told in the previous line (‘I have
forsworn his bed and company’), Oberon’s pejorative noun is odd.
Peter Holland’s gloss unpacks Oberon’s logic: ‘if Titania is not in
Oberon’s bed, she must be in someone else’s’ (p. 157). Her crime
must be sexual. The Riverside editor glosses ‘rash wanton’ more
generally as ‘impetuous and willful creature’—Titania is out of
(Oberon’s) control. Oberon’s choice of a sexual noun to castigate
a sexually inactive woman is important: as Laura Johnstone (per-
sonal communication) points out women in this play are damned if
they do and damned if they don’t. Demetrius accuses Helena of
sexual impropriety for pursuing a man (2.1.214–16); Oberon accuses
Titania of sexual impropriety for avoiding one. Thus Athens and its
environs depict legal, sexual, and linguistic contests.

Law and Language

If sex and language are related so are language and the law. As ruler
Theseus is lawmaker. He may claim in 1.1 that he cannot extenuate
the Athenian law but he does so in Act 5 (a typical comedic formula
88 The Mythological Name: Helen

in which initially insuperable barriers to young love are eventually

easily overruled). Although he subtly presents his act as overbearing
Egeus’ will, rather than extenuating the Athenian law, this is so-
phistical: like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Lord Chancellor, Theseus em-
bodies the law. Egeus is silent after Theseus’ legal about-face, at
least in the Quarto. In the Folio he is given the lines describing the
wedding entertainments which the Quarto assigns to Philostrate,
although the Folio attribution may mean no more than that the
actor of Egeus doubles as the Master of the Revels (Hodgdon,
‘Gaining a Father’). It is tempting to speculate that his mute reac-
tion indicates musings parallel to those of Bolingbroke in Richard 2
who contemplates royal power when King Richard arbitrarily re-
duces his banishment from ten years to four: ‘such is the breath of
kings’ (Richard 2 1.3.215). Theseus’ word, like Richard’s, has consta-
tive force. His style in Act 4 is illocutionary, performing what it
pronounces—‘with us j These couples shall eternally be knit’
(4.1.180–1), ‘Three and three, j We’ll hold a feast in great solemnity’
(4.1.184–5)—just as in Act 1 it was repeatedly jussive: ‘go’, ‘stir’,
‘awake’, ‘turn’, ‘look’, ‘question’, ‘know’, ‘examine’, ‘take time’,
‘prepare’, ‘look you arm yourself ’ (1.1.11–11728). Theseus’ power is
that of the dictator, one whose word is law, as the root of the noun
reminds us: dict-ator.
For Bourdieu law is not just about language but about naming: it
is the ‘quintessential form of the symbolic power of naming that
creates the thing named’ (838). As ruler Theseus is the play’s
supreme name-giver, but this does not prevent him scorning ono-
mastic power when it is used creatively by others, such as the poet
who ‘gives to aery nothing j A local habitation and a name’
(5.1.16–17). Theseus’ universe permits no rival name-givers.
Shakespeare’s, however, does. The mechanicals in the subplot
repeatedly confront language and naming as both a problem and a
solution (for Puttenham, as we saw in Ch. 1, the rhetorical terms
used in poetic language were speciWc forms of naming). Ninus’
tomb becomes Ninny’s tomb and Ninny consequently assumes a
 The Mythological Name: Helen 89

reality as tangible as Dogberry’s thief, Deformed, in Much Ado. The

mechanicals plan to prevent female fear through naming: ‘tell them
that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver’ and ‘let
him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner’
(3.1.20–1, 44–6).29 The mechanicals profess their names: Bottom the
weaver is named after the Elizabethan word for bobbin (see Will-
son, combating Stroup); quince is the plural of quoyn, wedges
which would be needed for Peter Quince’s profession of carpenter;
tailors, like Robin Starveling, were proverbially thin; Snug’s joinery
presumably Wts snugly; Francis Flute, the bellows mender, is appro-
priately named after a wind instrument; and Snout [¼ nozzle or
spout] is appropriate for a tinker who mends kettles.
What is most striking about the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe
is the mechanicals’ linguistic uncertainties as regards the diVerence
between a proper noun and a name. Peter Quince presents Lion,
Moonshine, and Wall as character names, not as generic names.
The Riverside edition takes its cue from Quince and capitalizes the
names accordingly (they are capitalized in both Q1 and F): ‘this
grisly beast, which Lion hight by name’, ‘her mantle . . . j Which
Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain,’ ‘Let Lion, Moonshine,
Wall . . . j At large discourse’ (5.1.139, 142–3, 150–1). The comments
of Theseus and Demetrius, with their use of the deWnite article and
numeral adjective—‘the lion’ and ‘one lion’ (152, 153)—return us to
the realm of generic nouns. Snout knows initially that he is ‘a wall’
(5.1.156, 157; my emphasis), before bidding us farewell in character
(again the Riverside edition, like the Quarto and Folio, registers the
change with majuscules):30

Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so;

And being done, thus Wall away doth go. (5.1.204–5)

Bottom also Xuctuates: Wve apostrophes to Wall as character

(‘O Wall’; 174–6; 182), and one explanatory reference to ‘the wall’
(184). Perhaps this is another example of the power of theatre which
the play extols throughout: actor becomes character, even if the
90 The Mythological Name: Helen

character is inanimate (wall) or inhuman (lion, moonshine). By the

end of the interlude, the nobles have picked up the mechanicals’
language—‘Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead’, ‘Ay,
and Wall too’—but now it is Bottom’s turn to correct them: ‘No,
I assure you, the wall is down’ (348–51). As in his earlier explanatory
interruptions about ‘the wall’ (‘I am to spy her through the wall’;
186) Bottom seems to distinguish between identity within the play
(Wall) and without (the wall), although his colleagues are not so
consistent. For them, naming is fraught.
This problem is not conWned to the mechanicals. For an example
of the diYculty in distinguishing nouns from proper names, we
need look no further than editors of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The
play’s last speech uses ‘puck’ as a common noun (the word means
mischievous sprite, from Old English pucá). ‘As I am an honest
Puck . . . j We will make amends ere long; j Else the Puck a liar
call’ (5.1.431, 434–5). The Riverside’s capitalization of Puck follows
the example of the mechanicals in elevating a common noun to a
proper name, even though the ‘shrewd and knavish sprite’ is iden-
tiWed on his Wrst appearance as ‘Robin Goodfellow’ (2.1.33–4), is
addressed as ‘Robin’ three times by Oberon (3.2.355; 4.1.46, 80), and
calls himself Robin in the play’s last line: ‘Robin shall restore
amends.’31
Nonetheless the text invites uncertainty as regards this charac-
ter’s name. When Oberon addresses Robin as ‘my gentle Puck’
(2.1.148) is he using the noun as a proper name? When Puck
apostrophizes himself as ‘Goblin’ (‘Goblin, lead them up and
down’; 3.2.399) is he addressing himself generically (the sprite’s
equivalent of ‘come on, man’) or personally? The Fairy in 2.1
suggests that the sprite called ‘Robin Goodfellow’ has nicknames
(‘those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck’; 2.1.40), but since
hobgoblin is a synonym for puck, the Fairy may be using the words
as epithets to indicate Robin’s mischievous activities.
Quintilian deWned metaphor as a way of ‘providing a name for
everything’ (8.6.5, Butler iii. 303). The various plots of Midsummer
 The Mythological Name: Helen 91

Night’s Dream provide names for everything: for law (the Theseus
plot), for behaviour (the lovers and the Oberon–Titania plot), for
Wctitious characters (the mechanicals plot). The mechanicals’ mala-
propistic misnamings (Flute’s ‘paramour’ for ‘paragon’ [4.2.112], Bot-
tom’s ‘odious’ for ‘odorous’ [3.1.82]) and solecisms (‘there is not a
more fearful wild fowl than your lion living’; 3.1.31–2) are a parodic
extension of the play’s concerns. Shakespeare could have found this
concern for naming in the Life of Theseus where Plutarch frequently
pauses to comment on the ways which characters receive or adopt
names (pp. 27–9, 37). But this is not unusual in the ancient world and
is a habit rather than a theme for Plutarch. Of more signiWcance to
Plutarch is the diYculty in adjudicating between competing myths,
as he attempts to ‘purify fable, making her submit to reason’. Before
continuing with names we need to investigate the relation between
Midsummer Night’s Dream and myth.

‘Love’s Stories Written in Love’s Richest Book’

(MND 2.2.122)

The myth of Helen of Troy is not single but several; her story was
told repeatedly, with revisions, throughout the ancient world. It
begins on Mount Ida with Paris who, asked to adjudicate the world’s
Wrst beauty contest, accepted the bribe (and bride) oVered by
Venus—the world’s most beautiful woman—and awarded Venus
the golden apple of victory over her rivals Hera and Pallas Athena.
On a visit to Sparta, when Helen’s husband, Menelaus, was absent
(attending a family funeral in Crete) Paris carried Helen back to
Phrygia, thereby causing the ten-year siege, and ultimate destruc-
tion, of Troy. Whether Paris abducted Helen or whether she con-
sented is a debate which has long exercised both commentators and
creative writers, and is complicated by the fact that the categories of
rape, abduction, and consensual adulterous sex were not distinct in
the culture of the Medieval and Renaissance writers who analysed
Helen’s story (‘raptus’ covers rape and abduction).
92 The Mythological Name: Helen

The parallels between this narrative and Genesis as myths of

origin are obvious. Both pagan and Christian traditions locate the
downfall of civilization in a woman, sex, and an apple.32 As in the
case of Genesis, we cannot take the Helen story literally.33
Whereas Christianity was to bifurcate the female into the trans-
gressive Eve and the immaculate Mary, classical tradition located
both the crime and the compensation in Helen. Her sexuality
caused a war; her beauty made it worth it. Helen’s beauty is so
important that it overrides temporal realism in the Iliad. We Wrst see
her on the battlements in Book 3, identifying the Achaean chiefs for
Priam, but it is highly unlikely that in the ninth year of the war
Priam would be unable to recognize his enemies (Bergren 19). The
scene exists not for Priam to be informed but for Helen to be
observed.34 Before her appearance the Trojan elders had been
complaining about the war. When Helen appears on the battle-
ments, their attitude changes: ‘surely there is no blame on Trojans
and strong-greaved Achaians if for long time they suVer hardship for
a woman like this one’ (104). The change is temporary—they
conclude ‘Still, though she be such [beautiful], let her go away’—
but for one brief moment they have thought that the war is worth it.
This sequence typiWes most accounts of Helen. In Aristophanes’
Lysistrata Lampito tells us that Menelaus intended to punish Helen
until he saw her breasts (p. 185). In Euripides’ Women of Troy (p. 124)
Hecabe advises Menelaus not to allow Helen to travel home to
Sparta in the same ship as him; she knows his inclination to punish
her will evaporate when he sees her.35 Helen was thus a byword for
two things: beauty and sexual transgression. The former never
comes under dispute; the second is much debated.
The tradition of absolving Helen begins early. In the sixth cen-
tury bc the Greek-Sicilian Stesichorus oVered a revision of Homer’s
story. According to Stesichorus Helen did not accompany Paris to
Troy; instead the gods sent an eidolon—a phantom or image of
her—and Helen spent the war in Egypt. We do not possess Stesi-
chorus’s palinode although we can access its contents indirectly
 The Mythological Name: Helen 93

from references in Plato’s Phaedrus (§243a–b) and the Republic

(§586c). In the Phaedrus Plato tells us that Stesichorus slandered
Helen in an acidulous minor epic, for which he was struck blind. His
recantatory palinode resulted in him regaining his sight.
When he lost his sight for speaking ill of Helen, Stesichorus . . . was
sagacious enough to understand the reason; he immediately composed
the poem which begins:
False is this tale. You never
Went in a ship to sea,
Nor saw the towers of Troy. (§243, pp. 44–5)
The gentleman doth protest too much. Stesichorus’ revision is self-
serving, the heavy repetitive denials (not a variant of Homer but ‘a
thorough repudiation of the Homeric story’; Austin 3) a desperate
attempt at optical cure through poetic sycophancy.36
In the Wfth century bc Herodotus recorded an Egyptian variant
without the eidolon story:
Within the enclosure there is a temple dedicated to Aphrodite the Stran-
ger. I should guess, myself, that it was built in honour of Helen the
daughter of Tyndareüs, not only because I have heard it said that she
passed some time at the court of Proteus, but also, and more particularly,
because of the description of Aphrodite as ‘the stranger’, a title never given
to this goddess in any of her other temples. I questioned the priests about
the story of Helen, and they told me in reply that Paris was on his way
home from Sparta with his stolen bride, when somewhere in the Aegean
Sea, he met foul weather, which drove his ship to Egypt, until at last, the
gale continuing as bad as ever, he found himself on the coast, and managed
to get ashore. (170–1)

Herodotus does not seem to have known of the eidolon story but it
is signiWcant that his story and that of Stesichorus agree in one
important detail: the Trojan war was fought over ‘the name and not
the thing’. The disjunction between Seeing and Being, the name
and the phenomenon, onoma (words) and pragma (deeds) haunts the
Helen story, and was also a burning issue among philosophers of
Wfth-century bc Athens. (It is this debate to which Plato’s Cratylus
94 The Mythological Name: Helen

contributes.) It receives its most extensive dramatic investigation in

Euripides’ tragicomedy Helen.
Euripides’ Helen mounts a full-scale defence of Helen. Helen has
spent the ten years of the Trojan war, plus a further seven years, at
the court of Proteus in Egypt. With Proteus’ death she is now
vulnerable because Proteus’ son Theoclymenus wishes to marry
her. A shipwrecked Menelaus (still attempting to reach Sparta after
the war) is washed ashore in rags. He is astonished to see Helen, or
what looks like Helen, since he is, he believes, travelling with his
wife, the eidolon whom he has secured in a cave on the Egyptian
seashore. When Helen asserts her identity, and husband and wife
are reunited, Menelaus’ excubant slave arrives with the news that
the Helen in the cave has ‘vanished into the air! She just went up
and disappeared! Now she’s out of sight, in the sky!’ (154). Before
Menelaus can plot their escape from Egypt, the priestess Theonoe
discovers them and has to be persuaded not to tell her brother
Theoclymenus of Menelaus’ arrival.
A plot is hatched: Menelaus will masquerade as a messenger
reporting Menelaus’ death and Helen will ask Theoclymenus for
ships to hold a memorial service at sea according to Greek custom.
With these ships she and Menelaus will escape. Euripides rescripts
the Helen story with the husband as legitimate abductor (Segal
606). The ruse is successful and Theoclymenus, outraged at being
‘so miserably outwitted by a woman’ (187) tries to take revenge by
killing his sister. Tragedy is averted by fratri ex machina, the Dio-
scuri, raised by Zeus to godhead, who convert Theoclymenus to
clemency and the play to comedy.
Even among Euripides’ experimental drama (one thinks of the
tragicomic Ion or Iphigenia among the Taurians, for example, or the
tragedy without a central character The Women of Troy), the Helen is
an unorthodox play.37 It is a recognition play, a romance, a ghost story,
and a satyr play; a comedy and a tragedy, or perhaps a parody of a
tragedy (Segal); an abstract philosophical play about identity, reality,
rationalism, language, name, and myth (even Helen does not know
 The Mythological Name: Helen 95

whether to believe in her own mythology: ‘that is the story of my

origin—if it is true’; 136), and a farce, worthy of Ionesco, where a
bewildered Menelaus, confronted with a second Helen, muses with
only limited intellectual ability on the possibility of two Zeuses,
Spartas, Tyndareuses, Lacedaemons, Troys, stopping short of the
logical consequence: two Menelauses (Pippin 153).38 It is a play of
antitheses—the virgin Theonoe/the wife Helen; seems/is; comedy/
tragedy; mind/body; shadow/substance; name/thing; death/restor-
ation; word/deed; absence/presence; psychological realism/super-
natural prestigidination.
Euripides makes much more complex use of the Helen eidolon
than does Stesichorus. Stesichorus’ purpose was exculpatory, vindi-
cating both himself and Helen. Euripides’ purpose is semiotic,
foregrounding an issue which has always been latent in the Helen
story: the gap between language and reality, the relation between
truth and metaphor. The eidolon makes this explicit.
Roman Jakobson views poetic language as an axis, with meta-
phor at one end and metonymy at the other. The eidolon is crucial
to this view for, like language, the double is ‘both likeness and
proximity, both metaphor and metonymy’ (Lock 21).39 Like lan-
guage (at least in connotative theory, where the name is only a word
for the thing named and not identical with the thing itself ), the
eidolon is the name but not the thing.
The Helen is saturated with onotological statements, questions,
and uncertainties—‘who are you?—but who are you?’ (152; cf. also
137)—and the dialogues about doubles, perception, and ambiguity
relate to language as much as to persons.40 The debate about the
doubleness of language is extended through structure for there are
two of everything: two Helens, two narratives of Helen’s birth, two
tales of the Dioscuri, two Menelauses (the living and the dead), two
scenes in which Theoclymenus is deceived, two promises of silence,
two scenes in which characters meet and are confused by the real
Helen, etc. (Segal 562). Menelaus declines Helen’s invitation to
recount his adventures at sea because ‘the distress of telling you
96 The Mythological Name: Helen

would make me endure it twice’ (160). Of the two diVerent accounts

of the Dioscuri Helen asks to be told the ‘truer’ (40). (Not, we note,
the truth: nothing in this play is certain, as the chorus observes
(144).) Her two brothers are not the sons of Zeus but ‘call[ed] the
sons of Zeus’ (144)—their origin, like Helen’s, is open to doubt.
The key debate about word and meaning is in the recognition
scene between husband and wife. Helen does not at Wrst recognize
her husband because his external appearance does not match her
remembered reality. However, she is quick to realign his appearance
with his name, acknowledging that this fusion has more to do with
faith than logic: ‘there is something godlike in recognition’ (152).
Menelaus is slower to catch on.41 He cannot allow himself to
recognize Helen as his wife because he has left a woman whom
he calls Helen in the cave. He clings stubbornly to the eidolon’s
name as proof of her reality, even though the woman in front of him
‘appear[s] to be exactly like Helen!’ Helen assures him: ‘I am not a
dream, Hecate has not sent me!’ to which Menelaus responds ‘but
neither am I the husband of two women’ (153). He cannot move
beyond a logic of literalism.
Menelaus then recasts a problem of onomastics as one of optics:
‘can there be something wrong with my sight?’ Helen explains that
the problem is linguistic, a fracture between word and referent: ‘a
name can be in any number of places: a person can only be in one
place’ (153). But for Menelaus names are singular as the beginning of
the scene illustrates. Arriving destitute in Egypt he conWdently
asserts ‘no man could be so uncivilized as to refuse me food—
once he heard my name. The Wre of Troy is famous; so is the man
who lit it—known all over the world: Menelaus!’ (151). The notion
that the name Menelaus might not be heroic, might not be a
passport to food in Egypt, that it might have a diVerent meaning
in the court of a man who wants to marry Helen, in short that it
might not be Wxed in meaning is beyond his conceit.42 The slave is
wiser than Menelaus, accepting with cheerful ease the disjunction
between name and identity. He is free in thought if not in name:
 The Mythological Name: Helen 97

‘there are slaves who are noble, who have the mind of a free man, if
not the name’ (159). The line is subtly witty, ‘as if to show that even a
slave could enter into the semiotic debates of his time’ (Austin 166).
It is a truth universallyacknowledged that Shakespeare’s acquaintance
with Greek myth and drama was mediated by Roman redactions:
Seneca, Ovid, Virgil. Yet critics (with embarrassment, with apology,
with a submerged sense of inconvenience) repeatedly note Hellenic
dramatic inXuence in Shakespeare, an inXuence they are obliged to
classify as aYnity. Thus for A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare ‘does on occasion
look with Greek eyes’ (220) and so his plays have ‘Greek eVects’ (215).43 For
Michael Silk Shakespearean and Greek tragedy have a shared tempera-
ment, ‘a common inner logic’ (246). For Emrys Jones ‘Titus is often
Greek in feeling . . . Its setting is Roman, but the story it tells is one of
Thracian violence’ (106). Repeatedly the argument runs: if Shakespeare
did not know Greek tragedy he imagined something very like it.
Several Elizabethan dramatists—the classical university-educated
men—did know Greek tragedy, of course. Peele translated one of
Euripides’ Iphigenia plays (we do not know which) while an under-
graduate at Oxford. Jonson alludes to Euripides in Timber (Lucas
111), and cites Euripides’ Helen in The Masque of Beauty, Orestes in The
Masque of Blackness, and Orestes or Ion again in the latter. Gascoigne
translated Jocasta in 1566 (and see note 37 above for a speech in
Supposes, also 1566, which seems to come directly from Euripides’
Helen), and he cites Euripides in A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573; STC
11635) and The Glass of Government (1575; STC 11643a). Chapman cites
Euripides in The Shadow of Night (1594; STC 4990). In Troia Brittan-
nica (1609; STC 13366) Heywood cites the Bacchae, and he invokes
Euripides in his Apology for Actors (1612; STC 13309). Sidney uses
Euripides’ Hecuba as an example of accomplished plot structure
in Apology for Poetry (1595; STC 22534.5). T. W. Baldwin has shown
that Euripides was studied at grammar school44 and several critics
remark that he was the most popular of the Greek tragedians
in Elizabethan times (as regards printed editions of his plays;
Baldwin 626, 648; Lucas 97–106; Jones 92) but all are understandably
98 The Mythological Name: Helen

hesitant to assume that Shakespeare’s acquaintance with, or

enthusiasm for, Greek tragedy matched that of his more classically
educated contemporaries. Even Emrys Jones who, in 1977, made a
very convincing case for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Hecuba
(‘Shakespeare’s Titus is in essence nothing else than a male
Hecuba’, 101) asserts that he is not trying to prove that Shakespeare
used Hecuba (105).
Reluctant to argue that Shakespeare’s grammar-school Greek
could read Euripides, critics resort to social supposition to argue
their case. Charles and Michelle Martindale suggest that ‘Wve minutes
conversation with a friend could have given Shakespeare all he
needed to know’ (96) as does Nuttall: ‘If we suppose what is simply
probable, that he [Shakespeare] talked in pubs to Ben Jonson and
others . . . ’ (217). I agree with these suppositions, as it happens, but
invoking the Mermaid tavern is not a methodology likely to convince
sceptics that Shakespeare knew Greek drama. There are alternative
routes to the same destination, however: printing history (informa-
tion about the market in imported Latin and Greek books in Eliza-
bethan England); references to Euripides and direct quotations from
him in numerous Renaissance texts, including those written by
Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists; the teaching of Euripides in schools;
ownership of Euripides’ texts in sixteenth-century households; and
the translation of Euripides’ plays by students and graduates in
England. I conWne myself to Euripides because it is the connection
between Helen and All’s Well which attracts my attention in this
chapter; and because this chapter is about the mythological name
(and not Greek drama) I further conWne myself to the minimum
amount of evidence necessary to present the case.

How Shakespeare Read his Euripides

Let me begin with the range of Euripides texts available in the
sixteenth century. Euripides’ plays, either in single editions, collections
of two or three, or complete works of eighteen were readily available
 The Mythological Name: Helen 99

in parallel-text (Greek–Latin) editions or in Latin translations.

The single-text editions are replete with explanatory notes at the
end. The Complete Works prefaces each play with a plot summary
and follows it with a general commentary which is in turn followed by
a scene-by-scene commentary. Even if one chose not to read a play at
all (whether in Greek or Latin) one could acquire a detailed sense of its
plot and concerns from the Latin apparatus which surrounds it. The
volumes have a helpful comprehensive index. Thus Shakespeare could
easily have read Greek drama even had he known no Greek.
All the volumes have a clear visual aesthetic of how to present a
dramatic text. Tabbed speech preWxes occupy the left-hand column
of the verso page, the right-hand column of the recto page. Not only
does the reader have a clear sense who is speaking and when but
one can see the size and shape of a role at a glance. All the texts
I have consulted have a dramatis personae list at the beginning;
many include an essay on the life of Euripides.
Single-text editions of Hecuba, Orestes, Electra, Andromache, Hippo-
lytus Coronatus, and Medea were popular (printed and reprinted in
Basle, Florence, Rome, Paris, Louvain, and Vincenza throughout
the century). Italian translations of Hecuba, Jocasta, and Iphigenia in
Aulis also appeared in single-volume editions. Erasmus’ translation
of Hecuba, often coupled with his translation of Iphigenia in Aulis,
was frequently reprinted (Basle, Florence, Paris, Vienna, Venice,
Louvain). One volume of three plays (Antwerp 1581) contains
Phoenician Women, Hecuba, and Andromache. Complete Works were
issued in Basle (1537, 1541, 1544, 1551, 1558, 1562), in Antwerp (1571), in
Venice (1503), in Frankfurt (?1558), and in Geneva (1602). (The dates
here are far from exhaustive: they simply reXect the editions I have
consulted so far.) The 1551 Basle edition was owned and annotated
by Ben Jonson (it is described in a bookseller’s catalogue of 1845 but
is no longer extant45); the Geneva edition of 1602 was the one
owned and annotated by Milton (now in the Bodleian Library).46
It was easy for all these books to make their way to the London
stationers’ market. Packed as unbound sheets in barrels, books from
100 The Mythological Name: Helen

Basle (for example) made their way down the Rhine to the Low
Countries where they were shipped to London (and sometimes to
Southampton).47 Port rolls (custom records) show that the market
for printing Continental printed books in Latin and Greek matched
that for home-printed books in the vernacular.48 A glance at any of
the Euripides editions listed above shows why: London printers
lacked the expertise and experience to print Latin and Greek texts
of this high quality. These editions appear repeatedly in English
households and libraries: Elizabeth Leedham-Green lists sixty-two
volumes (works, two or more works, individual plays; in Greek, in
Latin, in parallel-text editions) in Cambridge inventories of the
sixteenth century. Fehrenbach and Leedham-Green Wnd eleven in
private libraries of the sixteenth century, and their list is far from
exhaustive (see below for Jonson and Milton; see Bowden 15 and 29
for Mildred Burghley’s ownership of Euripides; Baldwin (540) re-
veals that James VI bought a Complete Works of Euripides c.1576; as
beWts one tutored by Buchanan, his volume was not a parallel-text
but ‘graece’).
Continental printing was superior to that in sixteenth-century
England. The type-letters in every Euripides text that I have exam-
ined are crisply deWned: the type has been perfectly inked and there
is no bleed-through. The Greek letters are as clear as the Roman
and the volumes are easy to read. In fact they are a pleasure to read.
Nor is the Latin particularly diYcult. Individuals who bought for-
eign imprints often acquired them with astonishing speed (on one
documented occasion but a month after publication; Armstrong
285). There was also an embryonic market in second-hand books.
Clearly Ben Jonson, born in 1572, did not acquire his 1551 Euripides
immediately on publication, nor Milton, born in 1608, his 1602
edition. And by 1575 there was a home-grown edition of one
Euripides play: John Day’s unadorned Greek text of The Women of
Troy (STC 10567.5).49
That Englishmen had the opportunity to read Euripides does not
mean that they did so. For that we must turn to the evidence of the
 The Mythological Name: Helen 101

nearly 140 texts between 1540 and 1623—sermons, plays, political

treatises, commonplace books—which allude to or quote Euripides.
Many of these texts do not conWne themselves to single quotations:
two is common, and nine, eleven, twelve, and thirty-six not un-
known (see below). The references range from extended analysis
through single lines to general allusion. Sometimes a paraphrase is
accompanied by the marginal note Eurip.
Helen is quoted speciWcally by William Vaughan (an MA, and a
law student) in The Golden Grove Moralized (1600; STC 24610). Jonson
provides a footnote in his Masque of Beauty (1608; STC 14761)
explaining the equation of Phosphore/Hecate/Helena (‘which is
Lucifera’) in Euripides’ Helen. Thomas Gataker, pastor of Rother-
hithe, was much taken by Euripides’ phantom Helen in two of his
sermons in 1619 and 1623 (The Joy of the Just 1619, STC 11665; The
Spiritual Watch 1623, STC 11677). George Buchanan provides an
extensive analogy based on the phantom Helen in his De Iure
Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (1579). (This inXuential and controversial
essay on politics is the exception to all other texts I cite here in that
it is written in Latin.50) His book was banned by the Scottish
Parliament in 1584 but had an extensive publishing history on the
Continent. There is no reason to doubt its availability in England:
copies of banned English books often occur in private collections
(Leedham-Green p. xxiii). References to Euripides’ Helen (as a
character) in other texts (e.g. Torquato Tasso’s Householder’s Phil-
osophy of 1588; STC 23703) cite material also available in Orestes and
Women of Troy so it is not possible to be precise about the source.
Fourteen other Euripides texts are cited and quoted by name—
Alcestis, Andromache, Andromeda, Bacchae, Hecuba, Ion, Iphigenia in
Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Jocasta, Medea, Orestes, Phoenician Women,
Rhesus, Suppliants, Women of Troy—and others by inference.51 Some-
times the quotations explain who Euripides is, although the fre-
quency with which the identiWcation is qualiWed by adjectival
compliment suggests that praise rather than need was the motive
for biographical explanation. Thus ‘Euripides that learned Greek’
102 The Mythological Name: Helen

(Lodowick Lloyd, The Pilgrimage of Princes, 1573; STC 16624), the

‘Laureate Euripides’ (A Poor Knight his Palace of Private Pleasures, 1579;
STC 4283), and ‘the eloquent poet Euripides’ (George Downam,
Abraham’s Trial, 1602; STC 7102) keep company with ‘Euripides the
Greek poet’ (Lodowick Lloyd, The First Part of the Dial of Days 1590;
STC 16621), Euripides ‘the tragedy writer’ (William Webb, Discourse
of English Poetry, 1586; STC 25172), and ‘the tragicall poet’ (Solinus,
translated by Golding, 1587; STC 22896.5). Single texts frequently
contain multiple quotations. In 1618 Thomas Gainsford’s Perkin
Warbeck (STC 11525) quotes twelve diVerent plays of Euripides; in
1613 Robert Dallington’s commonplace book (Aphorisms 1613; STC
6197) contains nine quotations from Euripides; and N. L’s Wit’s
Commonwealth (1598; STC 15686) has eleven quotations. North’s
Plutarch (Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, 1579; STC 20066)
references Euripides on thirty-six occasions. Sometimes authors
indicate the source of their acquaintance with Euripides: Erasmus’
translation is cited by Thomas Lodge (Protogenes 1579; STC 16663);
Victorinus Stingel quotes Hecuba in Latin (rather than in Greek) in
his Harmony of King David’s Harp (1591; STC 23359). Some authors
indicate their extensive acquaintance with Euripidean drama: Asc-
ham (as one might expect) has read every tragedy of Euripides
(Report and Discourse 1570; STC 830). John Pickeryng’s Horestes
(1567; STC 19917) does not quote Euripides but it does not need
to: it is possibly indebted to Euripides’ play of the same name.
Many of the texts which quote or refer to Euripides are sources of
Shakespeare’s plays: J. C. Solinus (Excellent and Pleasant Work of Julius
Solinus, translated by Golding, 1587; STC 22896.5); John Eliot’s Ortho-
Epia Gallica (1593; STC 7574); North’s Plutarch (STC 20066); Anthony
Munday’s Zelauto (1580; STC 18283); Drayton’s Heroical Epistles
(1597; STC 7193); and William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566; STC
19121). Several are works to do with theatre or works of literary
theory—Robert Allott (Wit’s Theatre 1599; STC 381); John Reynolds
(The Overthrow of Stage Plays 1599; STC 20616); Sidney’s Apology for
Poetry (1595; STC 22534.5); and Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579;
 The Mythological Name: Helen 103

STC 12097.5). Many are works it was unlikely or impossible for

Shakespeare not to have read: popular sermons; More’s Utopia
(1551; STC 18094); Lyly’s Euphues (1578; STC 17051); works by
Gascoigne (cited above); Lodge (Catharos 1591; STC 16654; Euphues
Shadow 1592; STC 16656); Elyot (Banquet of Sapience 1564, STC
7634); Spenser (Shepherd’s Calendar 1579; STC 23089); Mulcaster
(First Part of the Elementary 1582; STC 18250); Whetstone (Hepta-
meron 1582; STC 25337 and English Mirror 1586; STC 25336); Greene
(Mamillia 1583; STC 12269; Farewell to Folly 1591; STC 12241); Webbe
(Discourse of English Poetry 1586; STC 25172); Harvey (Pierce’s Super-
erogation 1593; STC 12903); Drayton (The Barons’ Wars 1603; STC
7189; and Polyolbion 1612; STC 7226); Davies (Microcosmos 1603; STC
6333); Hayward (Henry IV 1599; STC 12995); Chapman (Ovid’s
Banquet of Sense 1595; STC 4985); and translations by Holland
(Plutarch’s Morals 1603; STC 20063). Thus, from school textbook
to the commercial market for Latin editions to regular citations, it
was impossible for Shakespeare to escape Euripides.
Webster invokes Euripides in the prefatory epistle to The White
Devil (1612):
To those who report I was a long time in Wnishing this tragedy, I confess
I do not write with a goose-quill, winged with two feathers, and if they will
needs make it my fault, I must needs answer them with that of Euripides
to Alcestides, a tragic writer: Alcestides objecting that Euripides had only
in three days composed three verses, whereas himself had written three
hundred: ‘Thou tell’st truth’, quoth he, ‘but here’s the diVerence: thine
shall only be read for three days, whereas mine shall continue three ages.’
Webster accessed the anecdote in a text of 1607 (Lodowick Lloyd’s
Linceus Spectacles) and although the reference is eVective independ-
ently of any familiarity with the writers quoted, Webster’s interest
in classical tragedy elsewhere in the epistle, and his explanatory ‘a
tragic writer’ (denoting Alcestides, the reference to Euripides re-
quiring no explanation) suggests he knew more about Euripides
than his name. I think that this is also true of Shakespeare. The
availability of parallel-text editions with clear Latin translations and
104 The Mythological Name: Helen

explanatory apparatus made it easy for anyone with an interest to

read Euripides.
The way in which Shakespeare develops the Helen’s concerns
about name, identity, and language in All’s Well That Ends Well is
the subject of the next section.

All’s Well that Ends Well

What is striking about Euripides’ Helen is the way its generic and
structural quiddities are paralleled in Shakespeare’s Helen play All’s
Well That Ends Well. At the beginning Menelaus is like the King of
France in All’s Well That Ends Well: feeble, disabled, exhausted. So
ravaged is Menelaus—dressed in rags, buVeted by shipwreck—that
Helen initially does not recognize him. In the recognition and re-
union that follows Menelaus is revived: by language, by love (and by a
bath and fresh clothes). The motif is familiar from the dramatic
rituals of folklore—the reviviWcation of an impotent king. All’s Well
is similarly indebted to folk motifs (the clever wench, the winning of a
husband by passing a test, the curing of the king). This last episode in
2.1 is stylistically diVerent from the rest of the play: incantatory
couplets present Helen as more mantic than medical. It is unclear
whether Helen’s powers are sexual or spiritual (the BBC TV produc-
tion presents them as both). Similar liminality characterizes Helen’s
resurrection of Menelaus in the Helen where she is part theopneust
and part full-blooded female. Segal’s description of Euripides’
Helen—‘she stands on the lower rung of a ladder which leads
to . . . Prospero’ (582)—applies equally to Shakespeare’s Helen.
Although revived, Menelaus, like the King in All’s Well That Ends
Well, is a curiously powerless character. Euripides’ Helen is the one
with ingenuity, determination, and the ability to turn plans into
action. Nonetheless she cannot achieve this without help, and the
power in the play resides with women, more speciWcally the alliance
of Theonoe and Helen, as the priestess agrees to cooperate in
Helen’s scheme to deceive her brother Theoclymenus. One is
 The Mythological Name: Helen 105

reminded of the alliance of women which enables the dénouement

of All’s Well when Helen enlists the help of Diana, her widowed
mother, and their neighbour. The roles of Diana and Theonoe are
thematically important in parallel ways. In the Helen Theonoe is a
virgin priestess, Helen a wife; the positions of Diana and Helen in
All’s Well are equivalent. Diana may not be a professional priestess
but she bears the name of one, a fact that is underlined at the
opening of 4.2:
b e r t r a m They told me that your name was Fontibell.
d i a n a No, my good lord, Diana.
bertram Titled goddess,
And worth it, with addition! (4.2.1–3)

Diana’s emphatic correction of Bertram’s onomastic error is pre-

sumably designed to have the eVect on Bertram which another
Frenchman experienced when he tried to bed a woman with a
virginal name of Mary but reformed on hearing her name. Mon-
taigne relates the episode as follows:
Item, it is reported, that the foundation of our Lady the great of Poitiers
had this beginning; A licentious young man having his dwelling-house
where the Church now standeth, had one night gotten a wench to lie with
him, who so soone as she came to bed, he demanded her name, who
answered, Marie: The young man hearing that name, was suddenly so
struck with a motive of religion, and an awefull respect unto that sacred
name, of the virgin Marie, the blessed mother of our Saviour and Re-
deemer, that he did not onely presently put her away from him, but
reformed all the remainder of his succeeding life.
(Montaigne trans. Florio 301)
Bertram is deaf to such onomastic subtlety (as beWts one who
cannot see through a companion named Paroles52).
In one respect, however, the name Diana is a repetition of Fontibell,
not a correction. Fontibell means ‘beautiful fountain’, and fountains
are invariably associated with chaste women, with the goddess Diana
(as in Shakespeare’s sonnets 153 and 154), and with the virgin queen
Elizabeth, as in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels or in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
106 The Mythological Name: Helen

Diana is the name of the widow’s daughter (see below), Fontibell

possibly her nickname, but both names mean the same.
The widow’s daughter is elsewhere called Diana and there is no
suggestion in dialogue that this is not her correct name.53 She is
called Diana by her neighbour Mariana on her Wrst appearance in 3.5
when she is advised to preserve her chastity against Bertram: ‘Well,
Diana, take heed of this French earl. The honour of a maid is her
name and no legacy is so rich as honesty’ (3.5.11–13). When she next
appears for her conversation with Bertram in 4.2, the scene begins
with a curious stage direction: ‘Enter Bertram, and the Maide called j
Diana’ (F TLN 2017–18). The unusual explanatory interpolation ‘the
Maide called Diana’ suggests to some critics that Diana may be a
nickname, and this may motivate the conversation about Fontibell/
Diana with which the scene begins.
In 3.5 Shakespeare was either uncertain of the name he would
give the Diana character or did not signal his intention clearly in the
scene’s opening stage direction: ‘Enter Old Widdow of Florence, her
daughter Violenta j and Mariana with j other Citizens’ (F TLN 1603–5).
Excluding the Citizens, this direction requires four women, or three
if Violenta is in apposition, as the Widow’s daughter. Mariana is the
name of the Widow’s neighbour. Helen’s invitation at the end of the
scene establishes the number of Florentine women as three: ‘this
matron’ (the neighbour Mariana), ‘this gentle maid’ (the Widow’s
daughter), plus the Widow whom Helen is addressing (3.5.97). (Both
the Widow and the neighbour accept Helen’s invitation in the
scene’s last line, the Folio giving the speech preWx ‘Both’.) Violenta
in the stage direction is either a ghost character, or the name of the
Widow’s daughter, familiarly called ‘Diana’, as we learn in 4.2.54
Analogous stage directions from foul paper texts provide scant
help—‘Enter Adriana, Luciana, Courtizan, and a Schoole-/master,
call’d Pinch’ in Comedy of Errors (TLN 1321–2), and ‘Enter Lewis the
French King, his Sister Bona his j Admirall, call’d Bourbon: Prince
Edward, j Queene Margaret, and the Earle of Oxford’ in 3 Henry 6 3.3
(TLN 1721–3)—although Paul Marcotte argues valiantly that in both
 The Mythological Name: Helen 107

instances ‘call’d’ reveals a familiar name. In Venus and Adonis,

the phrase ‘call it’ does seem to indicate a renaming: ‘And trembling
in her passion, calls it balm’ (27), ‘And calls it heavenly moisture’
(64). This supports Marcotte’s interpretation although dialogue
in the plays provides either exiguous or ambiguous evidence—
‘He is call’d Aunchient Pistol’ (Henry 5 3.6.18); ‘this is called Penta-
polis, and our King the good Simonides’ (Pericles 2.1.99–100).
Pistol may be a nickname, but Pentapolis and Simonides are not,
although ‘called’ governs both fact (place and monarch) and opinion
(‘good’).
Marcotte views the alleged nicknames in Comedy of Errors and 3
Henry 6 as ironic. This leads him to argue that ‘called Diana’ in All’s
Well indicates the maid’s availability. Her mother encourages her to
view Bertram’s triumphant arrival from the balcony not to warn
her against the Frenchman but to whet her sexual appetite (as
Pandarus does to Cressida in similar circumstances).55
This, I think, is to ignore the stereotypical sexual binary which
Shakespeare sets up with the chaste Diana/Fontibell and the mar-
ried, sexually desiring Helena. If Bertram’s Wrst conversation with
Diana underlines her eponymous chastity, Act 1, Scene 3 reminds us
of the opposite associations of Helen. Asked by the Countess to
summon ‘my gentlewoman . . . Helen I mean’ (1.3.68–9), Lavache
immediately associates Helen with Helen of Troy. Although Sid-
ney’s medically skilled wandering Queen of Corinth seems an
obvious prototype for Shakespeare’s Helen, the text here stresses
the conventional associations of the name with Helen of Troy.
Lavache sings a popular song beginning ‘ ‘‘Was this fair face the
cause’’, quoth she, j ‘‘Why the Grecians sacked Troy?’’ ’ (1.3.70–1; see
Snyder ‘Shakespeare’s Helens’ and Jean Roberts, Wild 145–8).
Helen’s plot quickly challenges Lavache’s stereotyping showing
that someone named Helen can be sexual without being wanton,
can be desiring and chaste—can, in fact, incorporate elements of
both the Diana and the Helen paradigms. The heroine in Shake-
speare’s source (Boccaccio’s Decameron via William Painter’s English
108 The Mythological Name: Helen

translation, The Palace of Pleasure) was named Giletta: the (anti)hero

Beltramo. Shakespeare Englished Beltramo as Bertram but he
abandoned Giletta in favour of Helen. Given the associations of
Helen the choice is neither innocent nor careless.
In many respects All’s Well That Ends Well is an inverse Helen play.
Helen is shunned, not sought. Bertram goes to war to avoid her, not
for love of her. Helen becomes the pursuer, not the pursued, chasing
her man to Paris—a city with classical resonance. She places Bertram
in the Helen position—desired and pursued—and needless to say, he
does not like this emasculation one jot. His plea to the King, who
has sanctioned Helen’s choice of Bertram as husband, is a plea to be
given back the male power of gazing: ‘in such a business, give me
leave to use j The help of mine own eye’ (2.3.107–8). Given the stress
on eyes, eyesight, false vision, corrected vision in both Midsummer
Night’s Dream and All’s Well That Ends Well, there is something
Stesichorean about the recantations of both Demetrius and Bertram.
Demetrius declares that his senses are realigned, ‘the object and the
pleasure of mine eye j Is only Helena’ (MND 4.1.170–1). When the
King in All’s Well says in amazement ‘is there no exorcist j Beguiles
the true oYce of mine eyes? Is’t real that I see?’ (5.3.304–6), Helen
denies her reality: ‘’tis but the shadow of a wife you see, j The name,
and not the thing’ (5.3.307–8). Bertram realigns name and thing: ‘both,
both’ (5.3.308). Bertram, like Stesichorus, is self-interested. Although
there is something magical about his aYrmative repetition ‘both,
both’, he is cornered, not converted.
Both Helen and All’s Well feature central male characters (Mene-
laus, Theoclymenus, Bertram) duped by appearance; both question
the relationship between clothing and reality (Parolles’ scarves,
Menelaus’s rags); in both, power lies with women; in both the
central questions are linguistic and ontological; both move between
two worlds, reality and fairytale, and both prick the bubble, with
characters ‘waking from delusion’ (cf. Barton in G. B. Evans (ed.),
Riverside 503); both are generically experimental problem-plays.
Given the prevalence of Euripides in early modern England, the
 The Mythological Name: Helen 109

fact that Shakespeare wrote a drama very like Euripides’ Helen can
be seen not as coincidence but as inXuence.

Cressida
If in All’s Well That Ends Well Helen is associated with Helen of Troy,
she is also depicted as Cressida: Lafew, her escort to the King,
comments ‘I am Cressid’s uncle, j That dare leave two together’
(2.1.97–8). Cressida’s position glosses Helen’s in the play written
immediately before All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida.
From the outset the women are equated: Pandarus says Cressida is
‘as fair a’ Friday as Helen is on Sunday’ (1.1.76); when Paris’ servant
describes Helen in 3.1, Pandarus assumes from the description that
he is referring to Cressida.
s e r v a n t . . . the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, love’s invisible
soul.
p a n d a r u s Who? My cousin Cressida?
s e r v a n t No, sir, Helen. Could not you Wnd out that by her attributes?
p a n d a r u s It should seem, fellow, thou hast not seen the lady Cressid.
(3.1.32–8)
Troilus refers to both women as a ‘pearl’. In the RSC production of
1968, the women were visually indistinguishable, making a mockery
of a war fought over one of them, and illustrating the play’s premise
that value is subjective.
As Baswell and Taylor observe of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
the situations and seductions of Helen and Cressida are parallel
(302). Both women are loved by a Greek and a Trojan. Men put
Cressida in a position where ‘she must betray someone’: to cleave to
Troilus is to betray her father; to go to the Greeks means betraying
Troilus. Her options mean ‘she must be Helen either way’ (310).
‘You bring me to do and then you Xout me too’ (4.2.26)—Cressida
will be castigated for the position in which men place her.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the scene in which Cressida is
delivered to the Greek camp. Cressida’s situation replays Helen’s: a
110 The Mythological Name: Helen

beautiful woman is forced to leave her lover (Menelaus, Troilus)

and is carried away by a foreigner (Paris, Diomedes). Although
Helen’s complicity in her abduction was unclear, by the early
modern period her guilt was a foregone conclusion: one school
test of pupils’ debating skill required students to argue pro et
contra Helen (cf. Colie 8–9). In Edward 2 Lancaster compares
Gaveston to ‘the Greekish strumpet’ who ‘trained to arms j And
bloody wars so many valiant knights’ (2.5.15–17). Emilia Lanyer
inveighs against Helen for lack of virtue in Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum, lines 190–2. Shakespeare’s Lucrece accuses Helen as
‘the strumpet that began this stir’ (1471). In Troilus and Cressida
Shakespeare writes the scene which all other accounts leave out of
the Helen of Troy mythology—the scene of transition between
home and abroad.
Troilus has apparently abandoned Cressida emotionally: he talks
about the relationship in terminative terms; he passively accepts her
removal (contrast her passionate refusals to leave), and leaves her
with so many comminatory assumptions of her inWdelity that she,
not unreasonably, concludes ‘o heavens you love me not’ (4.4.82). On
arrival in the Greek camp she is exposed to further trauma—the
verbal and osculatory equivalents of gang rape, with a group of
soldiers making bawdy jokes and taking turns at kissing her: ‘our
general doth salute you with a kiss. j . . . ’Twere better she were kiss’d
in general’ (4.5.19–21). As Laura Johnstone (personal communication)
points out, the silence of this normally vocally assertive woman for a
full twenty to thirty lines after her entrance into the scene is striking.
She eventually Wnds her emotional feet, and her tongue, retaliating
wittily ‘In kissing do you render or receive? . . . I’ll make my match to
live, j The kiss you take is better than you give’ (4.5.36–8). This
defensive self-assertiveness, occasioned by the situation in which she
Wnds herself, is interpreted by Ulysses as coquetry:
There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body. (4.6.55–7)
 The Mythological Name: Helen 111

Cressida turns to her guardian in the Greek camp Diomedes but

he abuses his position. CliVord Lyons notes that the storyline of
Shakespeare’s Cressida–Diomedes plot is simple: Diomedes will
leave her if she will not submit (115). As Chris Cannon observes of
the equivalent scene in Chaucer, Cressida’s submission to Dio-
medes takes place under such ‘conditions of ‘‘force’’ and ‘‘fear’’
that it is hard to distinguish between rape and betrayal’ (87).
Shakespeare critics note that Cressida, like Helen, emerges as the
victim of a world which condemns her for behaving in the very way
it has forced her to behave to survive. Out of such self-protection is
reputation lost (cf. ‘upon my back to protect my belly’56)—and
legend born. The myth of Helen, Shakespeare suggests, may ori-
ginate in circumstances that are more complex than words like
‘consent’ or ‘abduction’/‘raptus’/‘rape’ suggest.
Shakespeare’s project in the problem comedies seems to me the
recuperation of women’s roles in myth.57 Nonetheless Helen herself
is presented critically in Troilus and Cressida, or so critics allege. She
seems indiVerent to the war conducted in her name; she is idle,
languorous, and ‘engages in such banal pastimes as counting the
hairs on her brother-in-law’s chin’ (Laura Johnstone, personal com-
munication); far from being a digniWed goddess she is reduced to
the homely abbreviation ‘Nell’. (This, of course, may be the point.
She is no longer a standard of beauty, a measure of male worth, or
an object for exchange, but an individual.)
It is not clear to me that the diminutive is pejorative, however
reductive it sounds to our ears. Helen is called Nell by Renaissance
authors other than Shakespeare. Fletcher, for example, refers to
‘Nell a Greece’ in The Tamer Tamed (2.4.17). The scene between Helen
and Paris in Troilus and Cressida is remarkable in the play for its
emotional reciprocity and conversational health. The couple con-
verse. Paris shares a joke with Helen (3.1.52–3); they assess Pandarus’
mood (3.1.127–30); Helen volunteers information in response to
Paris’s general question about Troilus (3.1.137–40); Helen compli-
ments Paris (3.1.99–100), and he compliments her (3.1.150–4). Paris’
112 The Mythological Name: Helen

mode of address to Helen is permissive and petitionary rather than

peremptory: ‘Let us to Priam’s hall . . . j Sweet Helen, I must woo you j
To help unarm our Hector’ (3.1.148, 149–50). Given his position in
Troy as Helen’s lord, he might put his requests more into command
than entreaty—as do Hector, Troilus, and Diomedes to Andro-
mache and Cressida. Instead, we have a scene of conversational
give-and-take remarkable in the play for its straightforward honesty.
The manipulative anger of Diomedes, which forces Cressida’s be-
trayal in Act 5, Scene 2, contrasts with Paris’ treatment of Helen and
her evident acquiescence in her sojourn in Troy. Together these
scenes raise the question of what consent means in the play and in
the early modern world.
This is an issue which permeates Midsummer Night’s Dream where
the capacity for genuine consent seems extinguished: Hippolyta
yields in war, Titania under taunting and magical drugs. Narratives
of Helen of Troy talk about ‘the rape of Helen’, but what does rape
mean in the early modern period?

Rape/Raptus/Abduction
1 Tamburlaine illustrates the diYculties which that question poses.
Zenocrate, engaged to the Prince of Arabia, is kidnapped by Tam-
burlaine, who unambiguously seeks her to ‘grace his bed’ (1.2.36).
Agydas later refers to Zenocrate’s ‘oVensive rape by Tamburlaine’
(3.2.6). Mary Beth Rose writes that Tamburlaine wins Zenocrate ‘by
kidnapping and raping her, a little noticed fact’. Her two verbs make
it clear that she is using rape in the sense of sexual violation not
abduction (which she distinguishes as ‘kidnapping’). She underlines
her point by repeating it immediately in a footnote: ‘I have not yet
encountered any discussion of the fact that Tamburlaine ‘‘wins’’
Zenocrate by raping her’ (106). But Agydas’ use of the noun ‘rape’
is a variant of ‘rapine’ with the same meaning as in 1.2 where
Zenocrate begs the marauding Tamburlaine ‘not to enrich thy
followers j By lawless rapine from silly maid’ (1.2.10). Both nouns
 The Mythological Name: Helen 113

come from the Latin rapere, to seize. It is inconvenient for us,

although no doubt convenient for the early modern legal system,
that rape could mean both abduction and sexual violation. At the end
of the play Tamburlaine assures the on-stage audience that he has
not violated Zenocrate’s virginity: ‘for all blot of foul inchastity, j
I record heaven, her heavenly self is clear’ (5.1.486–7). By this stage,
in fact, Zenocrate has fallen in love with her captor and the two
prepare to wed. The action is still legally rape however, a category in
which female consent (or lack of it) is irrelevant, for the crime is not
against the woman’s body but against the owner of the woman’s
body—her father or her Wancé, and his lack of agreement deWnes an
act of abduction or sexual violation as rape. (If this is what Rose has
in mind, she does not make it clear.)
Tamburlaine distinguishes between rape (as sexual violation) and
abduction, but other early modern texts, literary and legal, philo-
sophical and theological, are as likely to conXate the terms as they
are to clarify them; and this semantic obfuscation is paralleled
conceptually by the overlapping stages in the spectrum from force
to desire. Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia initially seems clear: ‘al-
though he ravisht her not from herself, yet he ravished her from
him that owed her, which was her father’ (406). The Wrst verb
apparently refers to Pamela’s body as an entity to be violated, the
second to Pamela’s legal status as a property to be stolen. Else-
where, however, as Jocelyn Catty observes, the Old Arcadia oVers
Wve senses of ravishment ‘which it distinguishes and conXates’ (42):
rape, attempted rape, illicit consensual sex, the violent eVect of love,
and emotional rapture. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is similarly
complicated. Lust lives on ‘ravin and on rape’. The nouns seem to
designate separate not synonymous activities with the former de-
noting abduction, the latter sexual violence. But as in Sidney, the
clarity is short-lived: the ‘rape’ of Hellenore by Paridell is deWned as
abduction or seduction (3.10.Argument.1; Catty 76). The Wrst few
pages of Heywood’s ‘Oenone and Paris’ oVer little speciWcity (see
stanzas 4, 12, 16). Legal texts are no more consistent. T.E.’s Laws
114 The Mythological Name: Helen

Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632), a work frequently dependent on

medieval legal authority, makes ‘little if any distinction . . . between
seduction and rape; coercion operates within both’ (B. Baines 76).
Christian ethics, dating back to Augustine, introduced a division
between consent of the mind and consent of the body (the former
being a sin) but this mind/body division was complicated by Gal-
enic theory which held that a woman could not conceive unless she
experienced orgasm; any rape resulting in pregnancy was ipso facto
not a rape. In the Old Arcadia Cecropia argues ‘Do you think
Theseus should ever have gotten Antiope with sighing and crossing
his arms? He ravished her. . . . But having ravished her, he got a child
of her—and I say no more, but that, they say, is not gotten without
consent of both sides’ (402).
The concept of consent was further problematic. If a woman
yielded to threats or force, she technically consented. Busyrane’s
tapestry in The Faerie Queene ‘depicts the rapes of women by gods in
a way that blurs the issue of consent’ (Catty 81). Angelo in Measure
for Measure wants Isabella’s agreement to her own violation. The
series of obstacles—doors, bolts—which obligingly ‘yield’ to Tar-
quin in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece as he makes his symbolic
journey from outside to inside, from Ardea to Rome, from guest
bedroom to Lucrece’s chamber, not only enact rape but raise the
troublingly ambiguous question of Lucrece’s consent (Fineman
passim). This was an issue which had long occupied commentators.
If Lucrece was innocent, why did she commit suicide? Hence the
frequent conclusion that she enjoyed Tarquin’s violence. So morally
ambiguous was Lucrece’s story that, like Helen’s, it became a topic
for formal disputation (Donaldson 40). Consent was thus a blurred
issue in early modern England.
With such ambiguity and confusion of ideology as well as lan-
guage, it is little wonder that some writers were driven to qualify
their terms in ways that seem to us tautological. Barbara Baines
surveys legal texts across four centuries and explains that ‘when
unwilled (involuntary) carnal pleasure is deWned by such phrases as
 The Mythological Name: Helen 115

‘‘consent of the body’’ or ‘‘the will of the body’’, then the phrase
‘‘consent of the mind’’ becomes necessary to represent what the
word ‘‘consent’’ alone should signify. ‘‘Consent of the mind’’ is,
however, as redundant as ‘‘forcible rape’’ or ‘‘rape with force’’ ’ (91).
Consent is a key concept in texts and debates even when it is not
explicitly invoked. For example, if coercion and resistance are con-
sidered steps in the mating dance, what is the diVerence between
rape and consent? What does it mean to consent when the alterna-
tive is death and infamy (the alternatives which Tarquin oVers
Lucrece when he threatens to kill both Lucrece and a slave, placing
them in each other’s arms, thereby bringing shame on Lucrece,
Collatine, and Collatine’s family). Shakespeare addresses these ques-
tions in The Rape of Lucrece.
The Rape of Lucrece begins and ends with consent in the political
sense of vote. The Argument tells us that the ‘people were so moved,
that with one consent . . . the Tarquins were all exiled’ (43–4); the
poem repeats the point in its last two lines: ‘The Romans plausibly
did give consent j To Tarquin’s everlasting banishment’ (1854–5). The
intervening narrative is about Lucrece’s failure to give consent; in
other words, the intervening narrative is about rape. Catherine
Belsey suggests that the ‘placing of consent as the rhyme-word of
the Wnal couplet in a story about rape might prompt us to give it
some weight’ (329).
Lucrece may resist Tarquin’s assault through lengthy verbal ap-
peals to logic and honour but none the less the poem problematizes
the question of her resistance. The physical impediments to Tarquin’s
progress both resist and yield—‘each unwilling portal yields him way’
(309)—and, like other rapists of the 1590s (and beyond) Tarquin
‘consters their denial’ as foreplay: ‘Like little frosts that sometime
threat the spring j To add a more rejoicing to the prime’ (331–2).58
Later, the lamenting Lucrece chastises her hand for ‘yielding’ (be-
cause her hand failed to deXect Tarquin by scratching him). And yet,
as Jocelyn Catty reminds us, Shakespeare rewrites his sources in Livy,
Ovid, and Painter to disambiguate the circumstances of Lucrece’s
116 The Mythological Name: Helen

rape. Whereas Painter and Ovid depict Lucrece as yielding (succumb-

ing to the threat of shame), Shakespeare’s Lucrece is gagged with her
own nightgown while Tarquin cools ‘his hot face in the chastest tears j
That ever modest eyes with sorrow shed’ (682–3; Catty 66). There can
be no ambiguity here: Lucrece is raped (in our modern sense).
The issue of consent explored by Rape of Lucrece (1594) and
Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) is raised obliquely in relation to
Helen of Troy in 2 Henry 4 (1597–8) and Henry 5 (1599). Given the
early modern use of Nell as an abbreviation for Helen, Nell Quickly
clearly merits inclusion in this chapter. She is fought over by two
suitors, Nym and Pistol; like Helen, she engages in needlework,
living (euphemistically) by the prick of her needle;59 when she and
Doll Tearsheet face arrest we are told, in an ambiguity of personal
pronoun which could apply to either woman, ‘there hath been a
man or two kill’d about her’ (2 Henry 4 5.4.6). In fact, in an apt
textual crux, Nell the wife is conXated with the whore. ‘News have
I that my Doll is dead’ says Pistol in Henry 5 5.1.81, presumably
intending his lawful loving wife but giving her the name of the
prostitute who accompanies her.60 Of particular interest then is the
Hostess’ unusual collocation in Henry 5 2.1 when Nym and Pistol,
her rival suitors draw: ‘O welliday, Lady, if he be not hewn now, we
shall see willful adultery and murther committed’ (2.1.36–8). The
Riverside gloss suggests that ‘the Hostess here perpetrates a double
blunder, intending assaultery, her own version of assault and battery’
(2.1.37 n.). This gloss is based on the assumption that ‘wilful adul-
tery’ (¼ consenting adultery) is both a malapropism and a tautol-
ogy. The Wrst it may be, but the second is only valid in
contemporary terms where we take for granted that the OED
deWnition of adultery—‘violation of the marriage bed’—refers to
voluntary violation. Involuntary violation goes by another name:
rape. But in early modern times, as noted above, the question of
consent is irrelevant legally, if not emotionally. In T.E.’s Law’s
Resolution of Women’s Rights T.E. devotes a section to adultery
with and without consent, yet classiWes both as rape (390; Catty
 The Mythological Name: Helen 117

13). Although T.E.’s text is seventeenth-century, much of its legal

authority derives from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and
there is no sense that his deWnition here is novel.
Like rape and abduction, the concepts of rape and adultery were
inextricably intertwined in the early modern period: what the law
has joined together critics cannot put asunder. But early modern
women, like Nell Quickly, can. For women the two categories—
wilful and unwilful adultery—are inevitably distinct. Mistress
Quickly, in the linguistically feminized space of the tavern, reap-
propriates for herself the Adamic power of naming. Cannon sees
the legal problem of raptus/rape/abduction as one of renaming:
‘the crucial distinction between an act and the names that might be
given it’ (82).
For Fineman too the central theme in Rape of Lucrece is naming.
The poem begins with Tarquin inXamed not by the sight of
Lucrece, or even solely by the description of her, but by ‘that
name of ‘‘chaste’’ ’ which ‘set j This bateless edge on his keen
appetite’ (8–9; Fineman 172). At the poem’s climax Lucrece fails to
name her rapist; when she eventually manages to do so his name is
reiterated by Collatine. The poetic focus now moves from speech to
inscription: the poem ‘associates the act of naming with writing and
speech’, Fineman argues, and examines ‘what happens to a person
when he ‘‘begins to talk’’, something the poem ampliWes as an
inaugural moment of constitutive subjectifying tradition’ (213). But
as we saw in Chapter 2 Collatine utters Tarquin’s name as if tearing
it between his teeth; the name is the individual, the name is the
inaugural moment of constitutive subjectifying tradition.
If the name is equated with the subject, so too is sexual identity,
and in the early modern period ‘the violation of the body became an
invasion and domination of the inner subject, an absolute deper-
sonalising’ (Wynne-Davies 132). We see this most obviously in a
statute change of 1597 which separated abduction from rape. Rape
was no longer a crime of property, a crime against male owners,
but a crime against the female body. This indirectly introduced a
118 The Mythological Name: Helen

concept which has become key in rape law and debate ever since:
consent.61
Public thought and practice did not change overnight, however:
historians document a gradual shift in the seventeenth century
towards seeing rape as a crime against the woman rather than against
her father or husband and Nazife Bashar goes so far as to say that the
‘same medieval laws applied for the period 1558–1700’ (41).
Shakespeare’s work in the 1590s shows a recurrent interest in the
issue of consent, and it is hard not to see this as a topical concern. As
Marion Wynne-Davies notes, the very fact of new rape legislation
‘after a century’s inactivity reveals a peak of interest in, and concern
about, sexual assault’ (131). The concept of consent has long been a
key issue in the Helen of Troy myth, where the crucial question
from antiquity was: did Helen go willingly or was she abducted? In
the 1590s questions about abduction and rape, wilful and unwilful
adultery, coercion and desire were in the air. It was a highly
appropriate time to re-examine the myth of Helen (and her sister
in ambiguity, Lucrece).
Nor did the issue cease to preoccupy Shakespeare after the
statute change of 1597. In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare probes
the circumstances which lead to consent. He has denied himself the
opportunity of investigating these circumstances through Helen,
given the domestic bliss in which he, like Chaucer, intends to place
her (Cannon 79) but, like Chaucer, he articulates these concerns on
Cressida’s behalf ‘since, on Phrygian shores, she is in precisely the
condition Helen was in before her raptus’ (Cannon 79). Stesichorus
and Euripides recuperate Helen’s story by focusing on the eidolon
post-abduction. Shakespeare revises the myth by showing us the
double at the moment of sed-/ab-duction.
Throughout this play Shakespeare is interested in the discrepancies
between belief and behaviour, between words and acts, between sign
and referent. We see this most clearly in the Trojan council scene
where Hector gives a long, passionate speech explaining his reasons
for supporting Helen’s return to Greece. ‘Hector’s opinion j Is this in
 The Mythological Name: Helen 119

way of truth’ (2.2.188–9; my emphasis). His proposed action, however,

diVers from his beliefs: ‘yet ne’er the less, j My spritely brethren,
I propend to you j In resolution to keep Helen still’ (2.2.189–91).
Circumstances often compel people—reasonable, good, well-meaning
people—to behave in ways that contradict their beliefs. What is
true of politics is also true of gender (and in a play about a war fought
for ‘a placket’ the two cannot be separated). Cressida’s behaviour
in Act 5, Scene 2, where she feels one way but acts another, is no
diVerent from Hector’s in Act 2, Scene 2. What names do we give
such behaviour? What is the boundary between consent and force (a
fraught question in a period whose literature, as we have seen,
frequently presented violence as seduction)?
Ernst Pulgram writes, ‘The name of a man is like his shadow. It is
not of his substance and not of his soul, but it lives with him and by
him’ (149). From early in the sixteenth century Helen’s name
narrows in meaning to one Helen, Helen of Troy, and it functions
(appropriately, given her revisionist history in Stesichorus and Eu-
ripides) as a ghost, a shadow which haunts any woman or dramatic
character called Helen. Jean Anouilh’s comment about his modern
heroine, Antigone, is applicable to Renaissance Helens: ‘Antigone is
young. She would much rather live than die. But there is no help for
it. When your name is Antigone, there is only one part you can
play’ (9). So too with Helen: when your name is Helen (in the
sixteenth century at least) there is only one part you can play. It is
this associative onomastic straitjacket from which Shakespeare tries
to liberate his Helens.
 4
The Diminutive Name:
Kate
(The Taming of the Shrew)

‘There is something Wctional about all people, something susceptible to

anonymity, in the vanishing space beyond generality. . . where pure interior-
ity. . . and pure exteriority. . . coincide.’
(William Flesch, ‘Anonymity’ 475)

‘Anonymity, in general parlance, means the state of being unknown, without

identity, a kind of hiddenness.’
(Maurice Natanson, Anonymity 22)

This chapter title is a misnomer as the two epigraphs on anonymity

may already have suggested. Although some of what I have to say
concerns the diminutive name—the reduction, diminution, or re-
labelling of Katherine Minola as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew—
my argument is about theatre, role-play, and (un)knowability. To
that end this is a chapter about anonymity.
It is not about the anonymous. Katherine does not lack names or
labels. Far from it: she has a plurality of both. Katherine; Katherina;
Kate; Kate the curst (‘a title for a maid of all titles the worst’, says
Grumio); a ‘shrew’; a ‘devil’; ‘wasp’; ‘wild-cat’; ‘mad Petruchio’s
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 121

wife’; a ‘lovely bride’; ‘a lamb, a dove, a fool’ (‘to him’: that is, in
comparison with Petruchio).1 Katherine is not unnameable. But she
is, I argue, unknowable; and this unknowability starts with the
diminutive name.
Katherine is not unusual among Shakespearean characters in
being given an abbreviated name. In 2 Henry 6 Margaret of Navarre
is once Meg, as are Margaret in Much Ado and Mistress Page in Merry
Wives; in 2 Henry 6 Duke Humphrey addresses his wife, Eleanor, as
Nell three times in one scene. Katherine of Aragon is called Kate on
one occasion in Henry 8; Desdemona is reduced to Desdemon in
Othello. But Kate Minola diVers from other dramatic diminutives in
being bombarded by her abbreviation (Petruchio uses it eleven
times in his Wrst seven lines)2 so that we come to think of it and
use it as her ‘real’ name. Following Petruchio’s lead, critics rarely
refer to her as Katherine: the play’s acoustic experience is of ‘Kate’
(58 times) rather than ‘Katherine’ (19 times) and it is Petruchio who
is responsible for this (all but three of the ‘Kate’ usages are his).
None the less, Katherine never relinquishes her full form: ‘Kather-
ine’ re-emerges and coexists with ‘Kate’. It is possible to argue3 that
the two names represent two diVerent personalities and are used to
cue diVerent behaviours (for example, public/private; submissive/
shrewish; wife-by-rote/independent) but that is not my concern
here. I am interested not in what the names indicate or the charac-
ter(s) they designate but in the character they conceal; for the more
names a character has, the more unknowable her identity becomes.
Kate is not anonymous; but she enters the realm of anonymity.
Let me explain the diVerence between the two terms. The noun
‘anonymity’ Wrst entered the English language in the 1820s, used of
an author or his writings. Its meaning there is etymologically literal:
the absence of a name. The adjectival form ‘anonymous’ had been
in use for over two centuries; it Wrst appears, according to the OED,
in Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601,
although the OED quotes from the edition of 1634 ), followed shortly
by Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostors
122 The Diminutive Name: Kate

(1603), both works known to Shakespeare. Like the later noun, the
adjective is used in its literal sense: ‘Anonymos, Wnding no name to
be called by, got therupon the name Anonymos’ (OED a. 1) and
three devils in Harsnett are ‘Killico, Hob and a third anonymos’
(OED a. 1b). Emma Smith has discovered three examples which
predate the OED citations. In the First Part of the Catalogue of English
Printed Books (1595; STC 17669) Andrew Maunsell refers to ‘Books
which are without Authors names called Anonymi’ (Letter ‘To the
Worshipfull Master, Wardens and Assistants’). In John Bodenham’s
England’s Helicon (1600; STC 3191) one poem is attributed to ‘Anoni-
mus’ (R3r), others to ‘Ignoto’. And in A Poetical Rhapsody (1602, STC
6373) poems are attributed to ‘Anomos’ (A4r), ‘Ignoto’, and ‘Incerto’.4
Note that ‘anonymous’ functions in all these instances as a name;
reference is not problematized. In texts, in footnotes, and in bibli-
ographies (this book is no exception), ‘anon.’ is a nameable source
(cf. Natanson, Anonymity 22); it is not unknowable. Anonymity, on
the other hand, is. The bus driver, the shop assistant, the postal clerk
with whom we conduct our daily lives are named; but to us they are
anonymous, writes Maurice Natanson, just as we, despite being
named selves, are anonymous to them (Anonymity 24). Not to know,
not to be known: this is the realm of anonymity.
I want to take Natanson’s argument one stage further. If ano-
nymity resides in what is hidden behind the name, it also resides in
what is hidden behind multiple names. If characterization and per-
sonality (in Wction and in life) are a set of actions or attitudes
attached to a proper name (Docherty 46), it follows that multiple
names destabilize any notion of continuous uniWed identity. At the
intersection of dual or plural names is an identity gap, and in the
identity gap between diVerent names, we Wnd anonymity. It is in
this sense that I invoke Katherine’s anonymity.
In her study of unnamed biblical characters Adele Reinhartz
observes that anonymity forces us to focus ‘not on what is present
within the text but on what is absent from it’ (188).5 Consequently
anonymity calls attention to other gaps in the text: in the case of The
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 123

Taming of the Shrew, the lack of soliloquies, motivation, a conclusion

to the Christopher Sly induction, and the absence of a Wnal ‘exit’
stage direction for Katherine with Petruchio.6 This, then, is a chapter
about lacunae: ontological, textual, theatrical. It is about the gap
between Kate and Katherine, between Sly the beggar and Sly the
lord; it is about the gap between the deWnite and indeWnite article—
the taming of the shrew (an individual), the taming of a shrew (a
generic role); and it is about the gap between the theatrical and the
real. And where there are gaps there are thresholds, so this is also a
chapter about liminality, confusion, and blurred boundaries—in text,
life, and theatre.
But let’s begin with the diminutive.

Kate
On marriage a woman surrenders her name—like her honour, her
property, her identity—to her husband, as Peter Stallybrass points
out in relation to the alternative readings for Othello, 3.3.386: ‘ ‘‘Her
name . . . is now begrim’d’’, [and] ‘‘My name is now begrim’d,’’
make equal sense. Desdemona’s ‘‘name,’’ like her handkerchief is
Othello’s’ (137). Petruchio (like the later Hotspur and Henry 5)
determines his wife’s sense of identity, not merely in his (conven-
tional) imposition of a surname but in his idiosyncratic manipula-
tion of the Wrst name ‘Katherine’.7
Katherine Minola is referred to by all in the play, including herself,
as Katherine.8 On Wrst meeting her, Petruchio, without hesitation,
uses the abbreviated form ‘Kate’: ‘Good morrow, Kate, for that’s
your name, I hear’ (2.1.182). What weight does a diminutive have
in early modern England? In 3 Henry 6 Edward 4 calls his wife and
son ‘Bess’ and ‘Ned’, from which Howard and Rackin conclude
that ‘Edward seems devoted solely to his domestic pleasures’
(99). ‘Kate’ may be domestic (Henry 8 addresses his Katherine
aVectionately as ‘Kate’ in Henry 8, as does Dumaine in Love’s Labour’s
Lost; on the contexts in which ‘Kate’ occurs in The Shrew see below)
124 The Diminutive Name: Kate

but William Gouge views diminutives not as domestic (what Oscar

Wilde would later call ‘a notorious domesticity’9) but as downmar-
ket: ‘servants are usually so-called’ (T6r, p. 283). Boose shares Gouge’s
interpretation of diminutives, viewing ‘Kate’ in The Shrew as ‘an
instant demotion’ from ‘the aristocratic ‘‘Katherine’’ by which she
deWnes herself to the distinctly common ‘‘Kate’’ ’ (217).10 Certainly,
Katherine seems to view her diminutive as a class insult, returning it
with interest: she calls Petruchio a ‘moveable’ (someone who is
upwardly mobile) and a ‘swain’ (country bumpkin). Soon after, she
uses Gouge’s ‘unseemly’ socially inferior contraction ‘Jack’ as a
common noun to describe Petruchio, protesting about her father’s
attempts to wed her to a ‘a madcap ruYan and a swearing Jack’, and
she is quick to correct Petruchio’s use of the diminutive, rejecting its
socially insulting connotation, its attempt to diminish her, and its
imposition of an alien identity:
Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing:
They call me Katherine that do talk of me. (2.1.183–4)
Petruchio ignores this hint, calling her Kate Wfty-eight times
throughout the action of the play.
Henry 5 follows Petruchio’s example when courting Katherine of
France. In Holinshed’s Chronicles Katherine is identiWed by her full
name throughout (usually in the form ‘the ladie Katharine’11) but in
the course of the wooing episode (5.2.99–374) Henry calls her Kate
thirty-one times, while addressing her as Katherine on only six
occasions. There is no reference to Lady Percy’s full name in 1
Henry 4 where she is called Kate throughout; but since Kate is an
abbreviated form of Katherine, it is logical to assume that ‘Kate’ is
Hotspur’s familiar way of addressing his Katherine. (The name later
became a stand-alone form, but had not yet done so.12) Hotspur
addresses his wife by name eleven times in their two brief encoun-
ters. Katherine Percy is doubly rechristened, by dramatist as well as
husband. The historical Lady Percy was called Elizabeth; Holinshed
calls her Elinor (‘Elianor’), as does Hall (‘Elinor’). Shakespeare
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 125

renames her Kate. ‘I don’t for a moment think there’s any particular
signiWcance in Kate,’ writes Northrop Frye (72). Pace Frye, I think
that this coincidence in The Shrew, 1 Henry 4, and Henry 5 is a
deliberate attempt by the males to re-create the Katherines as
Kates: in other words, to tame them by (re)naming them.13
Just as Shakespeare can rename a character he is manipulating
(Elizabeth/Elinor Percy), so Petruchio can rename a character he
wishes to control. In this The Taming of the Shrew shows its indebted-
ness to the hierarchical theology of Creation (traditional to shrew-
taming literature, yet generally considered absent from Shakespeare’s
version): ‘So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the Weld,
and every foule of the heaven; and brought them unto the man to see
how he would call them: for howsoever the man named the living
creature, so was the name thereof’ (Genesis 2: 19–20). Petruchio’s wife
is, like his ox and ass, part of his household stuV—a creature to name
as he pleases, as Katherine herself eventually capitulates when she
sanctions his right to rename more than the sun and the moon: ‘What
you will have it nam’d, even that it is’ (4.5.21).
In The Taming of the Shrew nomenclature and identity are inter-
twined from the outset with the verbal blunder of Sly’s ancestral
claim (‘we came in with Richard Conqueror’; Induction 1.4–5) and the
Lord’s theatrical reminiscence of Soto, ‘a farmer’s elder son’, in which
the Lord tells the actor ‘I have forgot your name; but sure that part j
Was aptly Wtted and naturally perform’d’ (Ind. 1.84; 86–7). In every act
the relationship between the name and the thing itself is tested:

Call you me daughter? (2.1.285)14

[Thou] feed’st me with the very name of meat. (4.3.32)
[T]his is Xat knavery, to take upon you another man’s name. (5.1.36–7)
In a crucial exchange in Act 5, Vincentio confronts Tranio (in
Lucentio’s attire), while Baptista tries to smooth over the fracas:
b a p t i s t a You mistake, sir, you mistake, sir. Pray what do you think is his
name?
126 The Diminutive Name: Kate

vincentio His name! as if I knew not his name! I have brought him up
ever since he was three years old, and his name is Tranio. (5.1.79–83)
Vincentio clings to the belief that identity and onomastics are Wxed:
to be called Tranio must mean to be Tranio.15 The Lord, on the
other hand, privileges personality over nomenclature: Soto’s
Wctional behaviour is more important than his Wctional name.
Petruchio complicates the issue of naming. He begins by insisting
on the correlation between name and identity, replacing the old
Katherine–shrew equation (‘Katherine the curst’; 1.2.128) with a
new formation: ‘a Kate j Conformable as other household Kates’
(2.1.278). In adopting this abbreviation Petruchio may have taken his
cue from Baptista’s question: ‘shall I send my daughter Kate to you?’
(2.1.167), the only time Baptista refers to Katherine by the abbrevi-
ated form in the course of the play. Bianca once addresses her sister
as Kate (‘I prithee, sister Kate, untie my hands’; 2.1.21) and Horten-
sio calls her ‘Mistress Kate’ in a compassionate moment at 4.3.49.
These are the only non-Petruchian uses of Kate in the play, and all
seem to relate to moments of domestic sympathy (or, in the case of
Bianca’s plea, attempted domestic sympathy).
The personal associations of two of these references (‘daughter
Kate’, ‘sister Kate’) are worthy of note, for one of Petruchio’s tactics
is to inWltrate the Minola family by using terms normally reserved
for intimates: he prematurely addresses Katherine as Kate, just as he
calls Baptista ‘father’ (2.1.130). Although this latter title is a generic
mode of address to older men (compare the greetings to Vincentio
in 4.5.45, 60–1), Petruchio’s use jars with the etiquette adopted by
others in the scene (2.1.39–40, 46, 74)—including Petruchio himself,
who begins formally with ‘Signior Baptista’ (2.1.114) but progresses
speedily to ‘father’. (In the 1988 production of the play at Stratford,
Ontario, directed by Richard Monette, Colm Feore pronounced
‘father’ with a self-conscious silkiness, accompanied by a slightly
embarrassed laugh.16) As in the later meeting with Vincentio,
Petruchio uses familiar terms before he is entitled to such closeness.
Conveniently, on both occasions marriage enables him to validate
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 127

the title. Petruchio understands the psychological verity that to

articulate something is halfway to creating it.17
Not content with the simple act of renaming, Petruchio bom-
bards Katherine with her new name:
You lie, in faith, for you are call’d plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation. (2.1.185–90)
Christopher Sly’s new identity is similarly heralded and reinforced
by a new name, the repetition of which is instrumental in convin-
cing him of his transformation. In the opening lines of the Induc-
tion, Scene 2, the new style of address is stressed by three of the
Lord’s servingmen:
f i r s t s e r v i n g m a n Will’t please your lordship drink a cup of sack?
s e c o n d s e r v i n g m a n Will’t please your honor taste of these conserves?
third s e r v i n gm a n What raiment will your honor wear to-day?
(Induction 2.2–4; emphasis added)
Sly, like Katherine, initially clings to his old name: ‘I am Christo-
phero Sly, call not me honor nor lordship’ (Induction 2.5–6). Grad-
ually he accepts his new identity, in which he acquires not just an
ability to speak blank verse but an interest in the way to address a
wife:
sly What must I call her?
lord Madam.
sly Al’ce madam, or Joan madam?
lord Madam, and nothing else, so lords call ladies. (Induction 2.108–11)18

As the Lord had earlier recognized when instructing his servants in

role-playing, nomenclature is crucial to the successful transform-
ation of identity. Not only is Sly to be called ‘your honor’ and ‘your
lordship’, but Bartholomew the page is to be addressed as ‘madam’,
and it is the escapade’s change of names which the Lord anticipates
128 The Diminutive Name: Kate

with most relish: ‘I long to hear him call the drunkard husband’
(Induction 1.133). The Taming of a Shrew expounds the new-name
tactic more explicitly when the Lord urges ‘And see you call him
Lord, at everie word’ (A2v).
However, having insisted on the change to Kate, Petruchio capitu-
lates in the Wnal scene, when he publicly mixes the two styles of
address. The banter begins with a barbed comment from the widow
which piques Katherine. Petruchio encourages her to retaliate: ‘To
her, Kate! . . . A hundred marks, my Kate does put her down’ (5.2.33,
35). Petruchio is here urging in Kate the behaviour he had tried to
subdue in Katherine, whose spirited temperament is still recogniz-
able. Petruchio’s two apostrophic Katherines come ninety lines later
with the two injunctions to demonstrate uxorial subjugation—the
behaviour, apparently (paradoxically) of the ‘Kate’ persona:
Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not,
OV with that bable, throw it under-foot. (5.2.121–2)
Katherine, I charge thee tell these headstrong women
What duty they do owe their lords and husbands. (5.2.130–1)
Kate and Katherine here compete or coexist, a point cued in the
sun/moon debate in 4.5, where ‘Kate’ agrees to subservience in a
statement which slyly reasserts her version of her name:
What you will have it nam’d, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine. (4.5.21–2)
According to the New Critical orthodoxy of the 1950s–1970s, the
woman who, in 4.3, demanded ‘leave to speak’, who wanted to be
‘free j Even to the uttermost . . . in words’ (73, 79–80), realizes that
Kate can achieve more in this respect than Katherine can. As North-
rop Frye pointed out long ago, at the end of the play we see
Katherine doing what she did at the start of the play—lecturing
Bianca—only this time she has learned how to do it with male
approval and hence societal sanction.
What Frye observes approvingly, feminist critics note unhappily.
Linda Bamber writes: ‘Kate’s compromise is distressing’ (35); Coppélia
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 129

Kahn laments that ‘Kate . . . is trapped in her own cleverness. Her

only way of maintaining her inner freedom is by outwardly denying
it, a psychologically perilous position’ (113). (We might note, en
passant, that both these critics—and many others who complain
about Katherine’s position—deny the character her most basic
request—a full name.) I agree that a Pyrrhic victory is hardly likely
to satisfy today’s audiences, male or female, for what proWt it a
woman if she gain the world (or food, clothing, sleep, which in the
early modern period counted for as much) but lose her soul (or its
secular, theatrical equivalents: language, individuality)? If she gain a
voice but not her voice?
The issue is made opaque by Katherine’s phrasing in 2.1
when she corrects Petruchio’s renaming of her: ‘They call me
Katherine that do talk of me’ (2.1.184; my emphasis). Compare
this with Christopher Sly’s phrasing when, in parallel circumstan-
ces, he corrects the servingmen who address him unfamiliarly:
‘I am Christophero Sly’ (Induction 2.5; my emphasis). There is a
world of diVerence between the two: Sly is the authority behind
his own named existence, Katherine is not.19 In Shakespeare, as
in early modern literature generally, to ‘call’ is an act of agency.
Here is Venus: ‘And trembling in her passion, calls it balm’
(27), ‘And calls it heavenly moisture’ (64). Heather Dubrow notes
that Venus is trying to change things through language, ‘re-
naming things’ (22). And to ‘call oneself ’ is an act of self-
determination:
Francis the Wrst of France did much dislike that Charles the v. should call
himself King of Naples and Sicily. ( John Selden, Titles of Honour, E4r)
An Impostour who durst call himself Duke of York. (Giovanni Francesco
Bioni, An History of the Civil Wars of England between the two houses of
Lancaster and York, Dd2r)
How rich were he j Could call himself lord of such a jewell. (Heywood,
The Fair Maid of the West, 5.1, K2v)
A Gentleman of this City, j And calls himself Petruchio. (Fletcher, The
Chances, 2.2, E2r)
130 The Diminutive Name: Kate

One that did call himself Alphonso j Was cast upon my Coast, as is
reported. (Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 4.1, G2r)20
‘They call me Katherine’: ‘Katherine’ may be textually anterior to
‘Kate’ but it (she?) is not ontologically primary. This unsettles any
neat binary one might wish to propose between the ‘original’ or
‘true’ personality of a Katherine and the imposed personality of a
Kate. The diminutive may be an externally imposed name (and
identity) but it is not clear that ‘Katherine’ brings us any closer to
the character.

Interpreting Identity
If names in Wction provide continuity and unity of character (‘elem-
ents of personality which are consistently attributed to the occur-
rence of the proper name’; Docherty 46), Katherine’s multiple
nominations serve to make her identity frangible, malleable, and
relative. As Coppélia Kahn points out (108), the description of
Katherine’s behaviour in her Wrst scene—she ‘began to scold, and
raise up such a storm j That mortal ears might hardly endure the
din’ (1.1.172–3)—does not Wt the character we saw who speaks only
twelve lines. Directors are usually driven to provide violent stage
business to justify the description. But the point may be that there
are labels (verba) and personalities (rei) and the two are not always in
accord. Or that roles are relative: in comparison with Bianca’s
‘modest’ and ‘mild’ four lines Katherine’s opinionated twelve lines
must seem ‘shrewish’.21 In Act 2 Katherine is a ‘lamb, a dove, a fool’,
but only in comparison with Petruchio (‘to him’; 3.2.157) who
becomes ‘more shrew than she’ (4.1.81). By the end of the play we
have no idea who she ‘is’ (inasmuch as it is possible to talk about the
identity of a character whose existence is so deeply, multiply Wctio-
nalized: an actor in a play acting in a play, left in the world of
Wction). This familiar critical conundrum is usually expressed in the
form of an interrogative binary: is Katherine tamed (and her Wnal
speech genuinely submissive) or triumphant (and her Wnal speech
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 131

qualiWed by exaggeration or irony)? But this question of gender is

embedded in questions of theatre (role-playing being common to
both); the Induction scenes and subsequent interruption(s)22 of
Christopher Sly are here crucial in that they underline the play’s
status as Wction.
The play’s self-reXexive theatricality was a staple of the New
Criticism of the mid- to late twentieth century23 but it received its
most insightful expression in two major works of feminist criti-
cism—the Wrst books by Juliet Dusinberre and Coppélia Kahn, in
1975 and 1981 respectively. The following quotations concentrate on
doubleness, on detachment, on disguise. Here is Dusinberre talking
about Bianca’s ability to turn on tears as required (a skill of which
Kate accuses her at 1.1.78–9) and the boy player’s use of an onion in
a handkerchief when playing a stereotyped woman’s part:
The boy feigns the woman’s sorrow, and the woman’s sorrow is
feigned . . . Disguise makes explicit in women what one writer describes
as ‘an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided
between surveyor and surveyed’ . . . The woman observes her disguised
self. But when the woman is played by a boy, she watches two people,
herself disguised and the boy who plays her. (Dusinberre 248)
Kahn’s argument is diVerent but it also invokes theatrical layering.
She argues that we watch not the taming of a (or the) shrew, but an
exposé of the way society conditions men to believe that women
need taming: ‘this play satirizes not woman herself in the person of
the shrew, but the male urge to control woman’ (104).
These theatrical observations, made in the service of other
arguments, slipped from view in the high feminism of the 1980s
which had other issues to foreground. In the introduction to her
Cambridge edition of the play (1984), Ann Thompson oVered a
political protest: ‘The real problem lies outside the play in the fact
that the subjection of women to men, although patently unfair and
unjustiWable, is still virtually universal. It is the world which oVends
us, not Shakespeare’ (41). Four years later Shirley Nelson Garner
voiced a similar social observation: ‘The play seems written to
132 The Diminutive Name: Kate

please a misogynist audience, especially men who are gratiWed by

sexually sadistic pleasures. Since I am outside the community for
whom the joke is made and do not share its implicit values, I do not
participate in its humor’ (106). But with feminist critical battles no
longer requiring such urgent articulation recent criticism has
expanded the Weld of enquiry. Emily Detmer uses the concept of
Stockholm syndrome, in which captives fall in love with their
captor, to illuminate the complex psychology of Katherine’s capitu-
lation. In Stockholm syndrome ‘the victim works to see the world
from the abuser’s perspective so that she will know what will keep
the abuser happy’; in The Shrew, ‘Kate must bond with her abuser in
order to survive’ (287). Natasha Korda situates the play in the nascent
commodity culture of the 1580s and 1590s in which the housewife
becomes consumer rather than producer, and a producer of cates
(delicacies) at that: the shrew, Kate, indulges in excess of language
and must be tamed to indulge in excess of things (114).24 Rather than
oppose language and things, Lena Orlin links them: she argues that
both function as forms of exchange in the play (167, 183–5).
Lynda Boose and Jean Howard both analyse the agricultural
problems of land enclosure, a problem particularly acute in Warwick-
shire (whence Christopher Sly, like his creator, hails) to present the
play as a ‘middle- and lower-class male viewer’s fused fantasies
of erotic reward, Wnancial success and upward social mobility’, fan-
tasies which redound on Kate who ‘resists submission in the arena
of gender’ only to be ‘punished by degradation in the arena of class’
(Boose 215, 219). For the viewer of the cognate text, The Taming of
a Shrew (in which Sly returns at the conclusion), class and gender
are even more intertwined, as Howard observes, for Sly’s conWdent
assertion that he ‘know[s] now how to tame a shrew’ reminds
us that ‘there is always something lower than a beggar—a beggar’s
wife’ (Howard in Greenblatt (ed.), Norton 139). Several recent
productions have illustrated the current critical interest in
class, foregrounding not shrew-taming but the ways in which people
in positions of power misuse that power (Dolan (ed.), Shrew 24;
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 133

Schafer 37–46). This topic has received sustained investigation in

Frances Dolan’s work on domestic violence where ‘Katherine’s vio-
lence towards characters other than Petruchio is . . . not invariably
depicted as something she must not learn to do’ (‘Household’ 209).
Dolan concludes: ‘it is too easy to draw sharp lines between innocent
victims and evil perpetrators, and to side with the former. Inhabitants
of a culture of violence participate in and perpetuate it in ways that
blur those distinctions . . . The double position of the wife in the early
modern culture of domestic violence troubles the satisfying prospect
of resistance’ (ibid. 222).
It is Dolan’s notion of blurred distinctions and double positions
which I want to explore now. My indirect stimulus is Dusinberre’s
haunting extended metaphors of ambiguity, disguise, and self-
survey, the doubleness of a woman observing herself play her
role as a woman.25 But my immediate prompt is a production of
the play by the Oxford Shakespeare Company in the summer of
2006. In this open-air production the onstage theatre company
was ‘a man down’ (at moments of personnel pressure, sotto voce ad
libs, and scripted extra-textual explanations occurred). Conse-
quently Sly was pressed into service in situations of increasing
theatrical desperation (for the onstage company) and theatrical
challenge (for the real actor): he played Baptista, Grumio, the
tailor, the pedant, Vincentio, the jailer, and the widow. This
doubling (if that is le mot juste) led to a scene in which Sly had
to play four roles simultaneously (5.1): the pedant-impersonating-
Vincentio confronted by the real Vincentio, interrupted by Bap-
tista, and threatened with incarceration by the jailer. The scene’s
increasing theatrical challenges led to a climax of thespian exas-
peration when Sly-as-Baptista instructs Sly-as-jailer to arrest Sly-as-
pedant and carry himself oV to prison; Sly-as-Sly momentarily
baulked at the impossibility of the request. The OSC had primed
us well for this scene: in watching Sly perform throughout, in
focusing on the performance(s) we were watching anonymity, the
roles, the gap between multiple names.
134 The Diminutive Name: Kate

Playing Roles and Performing Sincerity

Before I turn to 5.1 (and the way it prepares us for 5.2), I want to
chronicle the production’s self-reXexive awareness of itself as per-
formance and Sly’s initiation into and journey through the world of
theatre. Although he warmed to the unfamiliar and initially alarm-
ing experience of acting, he slipped in and out of his role as Sly.
Sly-as-Baptista was visibly taken aback by (scared of ?) the virago
Katherine when she barked her Wrst lines in his face, ‘I pray you, sir,
is it your will j To make a stale of me amongst these mates?’ (1.1.57–
8). Her imperative ‘Father, be quiet’ at 3.2.217 when Baptista has said
nothing had Sly checking his script in bewilderment lest he have
missed a line, an action he repeated in diVerent circumstances as
Sly/Vincentio in 4.5: here, when Petruchio greeted Vincentio as
‘gentle mistress’, Sly scanned his text to correct what he believed to
be his misunderstanding of the plot. Instinctive real-life honesty
overtook Sly’s theatrical eVort in 4.2 when Tranio asked him (Sly-
as-pedant) ‘Know you one Vincentio?’. ‘I know him not’, Sly replied,
to the company’s on-stage alarm before quickly correcting his
blunder:‘BUT—I have heard of him’ (4.2.96–7).26 The stress on the
contrasting conjunction and the auxiliary verb turned Shakespeare’s
text into an improvised rescue line (a rescue of which Sly was visibly
proud). As the tailor in 4.3, Sly had three attempts at his opening
line—‘Here is the cap your worship did bespeak’ (4.3.63)—before
Wnding an interpretation and accent (and thus, a characterization?)
which met the company’s approval.
The importance of onomastics to identity was underlined
throughout this production in stage business with names. Sly ini-
tially hesitated over the unfamiliar names in his script: ‘If you
[pause], Hortensio j Or, Signior [See-nee-or] Gremio’ (1.1.95–6). Two
lines into his Wrst speech as Baptista, Sly tells the suitors of his
resolve not to marry his ‘youngest daughter’ before the ‘elder’.
Accompanied by two actresses he had no means of knowing
which was which; the actresses tried to assist (a small squeak at
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 135

‘youngest’, a cough at ‘elder’) but the information did not prevent

Sly initially moving towards Bianca on his following line ‘If either of
you both love Katherina’ (1.1.50–2). Lucentio-as-Cambio persistently
responded to his own name when it was addressed to Tranio-as-
Lucentio or voiced by others, even to the point of bounding in from
oVstage for an apparently missed cue:
pet r uc hi o What is his name?
vi n ce n t io Lucentio, gentle sir. (4.5.58)
l u c e n t i o [entering in haste]: Yes?

When Baptista addressed Tranio-as-Lucentio at 2.1.102—‘Lucentio

is your name?’—he was unable to get beyond the Wrst word.
Lucentio’s instinctive response cut the sentence short and Tranio
had to correct and complete it: ‘ . . . is MY name’. Act 3, Scene 2
began with Lucentio running forward in response to Baptista’s
apostrophe ‘Signior Lucentio, this is the ’pointed day’ (3.2.1) to be
hastily replaced by Tranio; the scene concluded in like manner with
Lucentio overeagerly responding to Baptista’s instruction that
‘Lucentio . . . shall supply the bridegroom’s place’ (3.2.249). Al-
though Lucentio initially admonishes Biondello (a servant cut in
the OSC production) to take care in aligning real names with
disguised identity (‘not a jot of Tranio in your mouth, j Tranio is
chang’d into Lucentio’; 1.1.236) and although Tranio had reinforced
this instruction (‘When I am alone, why, then I am Tranio; j But in
all places else your master, Lucentio’; 1.1.243–4)27 the production
illustrated that one cannot simply doV one’s name (a predicament
encountered by Romeo and Juliet in Ch. 2).
Lucentio’s onomastic instincts applied logically in reverse: he
failed to respond to Cambio. In 4.4 Tranio (using Biondello’s line)
had to call ‘Cambio’ several times before Lucentio realized the
summons was for him. But this scene ends with Lucentio’s Wrst
reference to himself as Cambio: ‘It shall go hard if Cambio go
without her’ (4.4.108). At the point when Lucentio is about to
wed Bianca, he starts to think of himself as Cambio.28 He is a slower
136 The Diminutive Name: Kate

student than Sly but, like the tinker, he Wnds that language, and
others’ role-playing, starts to change his sense of who he is.
In this production names, like language, had a tendency to
unslip from their mooring or attach to another. Sly was charmed
by the apheretic discovery of his surname in ‘slide’—‘Let the
world Sly-de’ (Induction 1.5–6). He repeated the line (where Sha-
kespeare’s text gives us ‘let the world slip’) at Induction 2.143.
Petruchio exploited the onomatopoeic potential of ‘roahhr’ and
‘neeighing’ (1.2.200, 206). Lucentio relished the pun in idly/love-in-
idleness at 1.1.150–1, took oVence at Hortensio’s ‘pedascule’ (3.1.50),
and queried ‘pithy’ (‘full of pith’, explained Hortensio) at 3.1.68—a
query motivated by Hortensio’s s/th lisp throughout. Hortensio
was enthusiastic about language’s double entendres. At ‘Madam,
before you touch [my] instrument’ (3.1.64)29 he hesitated before
the noun then trembled as he voiced it. Gremio, a caricature,
performed enthusiastic if arthritic hip movements on phrases
such as ‘He that runs fastest gets the ring’ (1.1.140) and ‘my
deeds shall prove’ (1.2.176), the latter prompting Hortensio’s re-
buke (and an interpretation of ‘vent’ unknown to the OED),
‘Gremio, ’tis now no time to vent our love’ (1.2.178). Names and
words assumed lives of their own, a shrewish existence, making
themselves heard uncontrollably30—words within words inside a
play within a play.
In fact, the play is not just one play-within-a-play but a series.
When Baptista and his daughters enter, Lucentio expresses surprise:
‘What company is this?’. Tranio suggests, improbably, that it is
‘some show to welcome us to town’ (1.1.46, 47) and the two stand
aside to watch the performance of the Minolas. In 1.2 Hortensio,
Grumio, and Petruchio ‘stand by awhile’ (142) to watch Gremio and
Cambio. Hijacking the pedant in Act 4, Tranio tells him ‘In all
these circumstances I’ll instruct you; j Go with me to clothe you
as becomes you’ (4.2.120–1), a line one imagines being spoken
regularly oVstage in the South Bank theatres; in 4.4 the pedant
practises his role as Vincentio (2–5). In 5.1 when the two Vincentios
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 137

come to blows Petruchio and Katherine ‘stand aside and see the end
of this controversy’ (5.1.61–2).31 The text aVords many more oppor-
tunities for inset dramas. In the 1988 Stratford, Ontario production,
for example, Hortensio sat down on his suitcase in 4.5, a happy
spectator of the trick on Vincentio (‘’A will make the man mad to
make a woman of him’; 4.5.36). In the RSC production of 1995–6
(directed by Gale Edwards) Petruchio’s speech in 1.2 (‘Think you a
little din can daunt mine ears?’; 199) was delivered as a much-
rehearsed audition speech which Grumio watched, and occasionally
mimed (wearily familiar with all the accompanying gestures). Sup-
poses is similarly attentive to over-hearings and over-observings, as
well as to characters’ performance. Boasting of his success in
beguiling the travelling Sicilian, Dulippo stresses his theatrical ges-
tures, facial expressions, pauses, and sighs: ‘I would you had heard
mee, and seene the gestures that I enforced to make him beleeve
this’ (C6v); ‘I feigning a countenance as thogh I were somewhat
pensive and carefull for him, paused a while, and after with a great
sigh said . . . ’ (C7r).
The Oxford Stage Company seized every opportunity to under-
line The Shrew’s Wctionality. The onstage company applauded the
nervous Sly/Baptista’s Wrst speech in 1.1. In 1.2 Petruchio began his
Wrst speech twice, irritated by Sly’s edge-of-stage conversation with
the page and servingman. The Induction’s third servingman (here a
servingwoman), initially selfconscious and wooden in her lines,
grew into her role to the evident unease of her fellows: they felt
her description of ‘Daphne roaming through a thorny wood’ (In-
duction 2.57) overdone and had to restrain her. An oversalivated
Hortensio speaking heavily alliterated lines (4.2.29–31) came out of
character to apologize for splashing Tranio/Lucentio. In the same
scene Sly was accused of showing oV when delivering the pedant’s
fulsome thanks (4.2.113–14). Acting the role of Grumio, Sly followed
Hortensio’s proposal that Petruchio woo Kate with delight; the plot
was new to him, and in watching his reactions we watched our-
selves.
138 The Diminutive Name: Kate

With this metatheatrical background, Sly entered his key scene of

multiple identities in 5.1. The scene began with Sly unable to
synchronize his knocking at Baptista’s door with the oVstage
sound eVects despite several attempts and subsequent coaching
from Tranio. (The coaching soon moved onstage for an extra-
diegetical acting lesson.) The scene found its climax in Vincentio’s
response to Tranio’s summoning of an oYcer. The oYcer is
instructed ‘Carry this mad knave to the jail. Father Baptista, I charge
you see that he be forthcoming’ to which Vincentio objects ‘Carry
me to the jail?’ (5.1.92–4). He objects because he is the innocent
party. Sly-as-Vincentio, however, protested not about his character’s
innocence but about the impossibility of the stage business for him
as Sly. It was not judicial outrage but theatrical incredulity which lay
behind his wail, ‘Carry me to the jail?’ But he rose to the challenge,
twisting his own arm up behind his back and hitting himself on the
head with his truncheon as he frogmarched himself away.
Sly’s understanding of, and theatrical grasp of, the complexities
of this scene as he realized that he had consecutive speeches as
diVerent characters (speeches, moreover, which required a change
of location from up a stepladder, peering over a screen as ‘out of the
window’ (TLN 2397) back down to ground level and therefore always
involved a pause in dialogue while we watched the actor manoeuv-
ring role and space) meant that the company bravely eschewed this
scene’s potential for classic knockabout farce. Farce is dependent on
speed, on quick-Wre contradictions, on moving the action so quickly
that the audience and onstage characters have no time to think. But
here we had ample time to think. The scene was helplessly funny,32
as it invariably is in performance, but for unusually diVerent
reasons. In this scene of plural names for one character—Baptista,
two Vincentios, the jailer—we watched not the characters Sly was
acting but Sly acting the characters. In Paul de Man’s terms, we
watched the dancer not the dance; in the terms of this essay we
watched the gap, we watched absence. Multiply nameable but
completely unknowable, Sly’s thespian dilemma foregrounded the
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 139

world of impersonation, the world of role-play, the world of ano-

nymity.
Natanson’s discussion of anonymity links the unknowable to
role-play. Our interaction with the named but unknowable bus
conductor or postal clerk is interaction with a role not a person.
We do not know the person but the type. Furthermore, any concept
we may have of the person is derived from our concept of the role.
In enunciating the phrase, or thinking of the person, ‘postal clerk’,
we necessarily imagine a deWnition of the job (this is what Natanson
calls the ‘course-of-action’ type). From this construct we then
construct the ‘person who performs this job’ (this is the ‘personal
ideal’ type). The persons of the bus conductor or bank clerk or post
oYce worker are constructs—and distanced, derivative constructs
at that, derived from the contexts we have imagined as appertaining
to their roles. Anonymity, then, occurs not just because or when
these named characters function anonymously in our world but
because or when they function as functions. Anonymity means
seeing people not as agents but as typiWed roles (Natanson, Ano-
nymity 37). The dramatis personae of Gascoigne’s Supposes makes
this point clearly, linking the characters to functions through the
deWnite article: ‘Balia, the nurse. j Polynesta, the yong woman. j
Cleander, the doctor’ (B2r).
In an irreverent variant of Brecht (irreverent because Verfremdungs-
eVekt is never comic let alone farcical), the OSC staging of 5.1 exposed
Sly’s life as a series of roles: from beggar/tinker to Lord to father-of-
daughters, servant, pedant, tailor, father-of-son, and jailer. And
because Sly stands in for us (the spectator involved in the play)
5.1 exposes our life as a series of roles. Amanda Bailey makes a similar
point in a diVerent context in a discussion of service in the play
(a play which, she points out, contains ‘more sets of masters
and servants than any other dramatic text’; 91). Service was not
a permanent condition but ‘a developmental phase’ (111); servant
was a mobile and relative identity like shrew. (As Frances Dolan
observes (Dangerous Familiars 63–4) servants and masters exist in a
140 The Diminutive Name: Kate

symbiotic relationship: Prospero depends on Caliban for his identity

as master, just as Caliban is dependent on Prospero.) Consequently
Bailey’s investigation of service emphasizes ‘positions and modalities
rather than . . . stable representations or Wxed identities’ (119). Her
phrasing here provides an apt summary of the OSC’s Act 5, Scene 1.
This scene contains more references to name and identity than
does any other scene in the play. After 100 lines, the dialogue
about name culminates in a caveat, a challenge, a capitulation,
and a (misplaced) declaration of conWdence. Gremio cautions
Baptista: ‘Take heed, Signior Baptista, lest you be cony-catch’d
in this business. I dare swear this is the right Vincentio’ (5.1.98–
100). By ‘this’ he presumably means the real Vincentio. If Gremio
correctly realigns identity and name as he seems on the point of
doing, the disguise plot is in danger of being unravelled. This
danger prompts the pedant-Vincentio’s rearguard challenge,
‘Swear if thou dar’st’ (100), an attempt to get the disguise plot
back on track.33 His challenge is successful; Gremio crumbles:
‘Nay, I dare not swear it’ (102). This capitulation gives Tranio an
opportunity to reinforce the advantage just gained by the ped-
ant—‘Then thou wert best say that I am not Lucentio’ (which
boldly reminds the audience that he is not even as he asserts that
he is)—to which Gremio replies conWdently ‘Yes, I know thee to be
Signior Lucentio’ (OSC emphasis; 103–5). The emphasis here was
dismissive, impatient, weary: it declared ‘we hold these truths to
be self-evident’.
Shakespeare’s dialogue and structure here are those of a master
plotter, with characters boldly playing with the boundaries of
reality. Casting Sly quadruply in this scene raised the theatrical
and ontological stakes. Almost every time a character addressed
Sly (as Vincentio, the pedant-as-Vicentio, Baptista, or the jailer) or
emphasized an assertion with a gesture towards one of these
characters (‘this is the right Vincentio’), he gestured towards blank
space. We bent our eye on vacancy. Not only was this unproblem-
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 141

atic, it was the point: in theatre ‘this’ is what you say it is, even when
‘this’ is nothing.
To focus on Sly’s roles and his negotiation of a situation’s chan-
ging demands was to focus on characters as functions not as
mimetically real beings with interiority. This stress on function
takes us back to Natanson’s view of anonymity: anonymity, we
recall, is ‘human beings translated into their typiWed functions’
(Anonymity 44). And Natanson’s statement works in Taming of the
Shrew on two planes: theatre and gender. The Oxford Shakespeare
Company used the former to anticipate the latter. The sun/moon
scene of 4.5 was but the Wrst of three sequential scenes (4.5, 5.1, 5.2)
about theatre. Katherine’s ‘performance’ in 4.5 paved the way for
Sly’s tour de force in 5.1 which paved the way for Katherine’s lengthy
submission speech in 5.2.34
The sun/moon debate of 4.5 exploited all the usual performance
markers of cognition, re-cognition, and exaggeration. In capitulat-
ing, Katherine even smiled for the Wrst time; she was playing with
Petruchio and was deliberately overlapping theatre, identity, and
language. Plays, like identity, are about roles; roles begin with
language (‘I say it is the sun’); and language works by agreement
(‘But sun it is not when you say it is not’). If language plays a role
deWned by convention (agreement) or context (crib has diVerent
meanings depending on whether you are playing cards, preparing
for exams, or putting the baby to bed) so too does theatre: in
Plautus’ Menaechmi the prologue says ‘All this is Epidamnus—as
long as this play lasts, anyway. In another play it will be another
place’ (trans. Watling 104). Gascoigne’s Supposes is also aware of this:
below the dramatis personae we read ‘The comedie presented as it
were in Ferrara’ (B2r, my emphasis). The OSC open-air performance
made a point which Shakespeare’s canopied stage structure with its
painted heavens would also have made: identity (of time, persons,
location) in theatre is what you say it is.35 Debating the sun and
moon beneath a London canopy painted with moons and stars, or
in the open-air gardens of an Oxford college during a sunlit matinee
142 The Diminutive Name: Kate

or moonlit evening, reminds us of the social agreement which

underlies all verbal identity. Things are what they are only because
we agree to agree that that is what they are. (Katherine is aberrant
in the play’s Wrst half not because she speaks but because she fails to
agree with society’s deWnition of femininity: if she agreed with it,
she would not speak.) As M. J. Kidnie observes, contrasting 5.1 with
the scene preceding it, ‘the unravelling of the disguise plot depends
on discerning names and matching them accurately to the things
they are supposed to represent. The taming plot, by contrast, [is]
brought to its resolution through exactly the opposite means—an
agreement to call the sun anything Petruchio wills it to be’ (85).
The presence of Sly in 4.5 as Vincentio removed any possibility of
this being a scene of literal taming, coercion, or submission. It was
clearly a scene of theatre, of Wction, of make-believe. Sly-Vincentio’s
role as an audience or plaything for Petruchio and Katherine
reminded us of the play’s raison d’être (and by extension that of
the sun/moon debate) as a performance for Sly. And his temporary
disorientation when addressed as a woman further prevented us
from reading the scene and the play literally (as his namesake does
in A Shrew).36 Sly was no more a woman than he was Vincentio (or,
for that matter, Sly); he was no more a woman than the property-
horse was a real horse. Kate and Petruchio entered this scene on
hobby-horses (Kate riding side-saddle). Dismounting, Petruchio
continued the Wction, entrusting his horse to an audience member,
stroking its nose and mane, speaking tenderly to it. Kate simply
dropped hers; having served its purpose as a Wctional horse, it was
now merely a material prop. At the end of the scene, having entered
Petruchio’s playworld, Kate leapt up on the horse which Petruchio
had retrieved and sat astride behind him: a couple united, sharing a
stance, ideological and equestrian. She had entered his world of
(continuous) Wctional play. But Kate’s previous prop lay on the
ground, a material reminder that sometimes a hobby-horse is just
a hobby-horse.
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 143

This sequence of scenes highlighting the ad hoc functions of

people and props led us to Katherine’s long speech in 5.2. To ask
if or when she was performing as Katherine and when as Kate was
a redundant question. The point was: she was performing. No more
than Sly can she be two people at once, in two places at once.
She cannot be the actor and the acted upon, the triumpher and the
tamed, the person who imprisons herself. The Oxford Shakespeare
Company production played the speech neutrally—not devoted
obedience, not irony, nor anything on the signifying scale inbetw-
een. Consequently we watched the gap; we watched Kate’s
unknowability. The name was irrelevant; she had slipped between
the two, into the gap which is the space of anonymity. She was an
actor (as are we all) saying her lines.37
Katherine’s speech was pre-echoed in the country-house scene of
4.3 when Petruchio instructs her to say thank you: ‘The poorest
service is repaid with thanks, j And so shall mine before you touch
the meat’ (4.3.45–6). Manners, reduced to their most basic function,
are a performance for a reward. (Some psychologists argue that to
teach toddlers ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is to teach them hypocrisy:
they perform these codes without sincerity simply as a means to an
end.) Katherine’s line ‘I thank you sir’ became a lengthy comic turn
as she proved unable to say the words (‘I th- . . . I th- . . . I th- . . . ’).
When she Wnally succeeded, she repeated the line to herself six
times with a variety of emphases and intonations (‘I thank you sir;
I thank you, sir’, etc.). Practice, repetition, rehearsal: the line may
well have been sincere but what we watched was the performance
of sincerity—a performance we saw again in 5.2.

Fictionality
There was no unity of character at the end of this production of
Taming of the Shrew because there was no character, only roles.
(And, of course, Shakespeare writes only roles: it is actors who
provide characters.38) To play a role is to relinquish or bracket
144 The Diminutive Name: Kate

personhood; and this bracketing, this anonymity, serves to draw

attention to the interplay between the role and the performance
(Natanson, Phenomenology, cited in Reinhartz 12). As a character,
Katherine has a unique experience but we are only allowed to see
her as a representative of the generic category called ‘shrew’. This is
made clear in the title of her play, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ (not
‘The Taming of Katherine’). Nonetheless the deWnite article pin-
points her experience more individually than that of the 1594 Q
where she is reduced to a type: a shrew.
But my caveats here about titles miss the point: anonymity is not
about the generic ‘commonality of human life but its Wctionality’
(Reinhartz 13). Theatre directors have long acknowledged and rel-
ished this aspect of the play. Trevor Nunn posed the following
rhetorical question in the programme for his Stratford production
in 1968: ‘When anybody is acting or posing, what do we accept and
what reject?’ (quoted in Gay 99). (Supposes answers Nunn’s question
by indicating in the margins the play’s many ‘supposes’, which it
deWnes as an ‘imagination of one thing for another’; B2v.) In the
OSC programme, director Chris Pickles wrote: ‘Isn’t life about
pretending? Not necessarily literally pretending to be another per-
son, but don’t we all get through life by partially hiding who we
really are and what we really feel?’ William Flesch makes the same
point in this chapter’s Wrst epigraph: ‘there is something Wctional
about all people, something susceptible to anonymity, in the van-
ishing space beyond generality. . . where pure interiority. . . and
pure exteriority. . . coincide’ (475). Anonymity for Flesch, as for
Natanson, is about role-play: Wctionality is to enact a part, to play
someone (or someone else).
Flesch observes that Wctionality (Natanson’s anonymity) needs
our ‘deepest attentiveness even if it perpetually defeats our acknow-
ledgement’ (475). If by acknowledgement he means our understand-
ing, our closeness, our response-ability, his statement is appropriate
to the theatricality of The Taming of the Shrew. We have to work hard
imaginatively in watching the several levels of drama and role-play
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 145

in The Shrew and in so doing our instinct to read characters as

mimetically real is rebuVed. If we are attentively watching the gap—
the anonymity between names or across roles—we cannot respond
to characters as if they are fully real.
I want to explore how readers and audiences Wll this absence
but I need Wrst to mention one particular absence and its oppos-
ite, plenitude, in the text of The Shrew. The plenitude is linguistic:
the text oddly duplicates itself in language. Repetitions and minor
echoes are numerous. Grumio twice cites the proverb ‘My cake is
dough’ (1.1.108–9, 5.1.139). Both Lucentio and the pedant declare
‘Pisa renowned for grave citizens’ (1.1.10, 4.2.95). Kate and Bianca
independently wish ‘to please myself ’ (3.1.20, 3.2.209). As a servant
Tranio is ‘tied [obliged] to be obedient’ (1.1.212) while Bianca is
literally tied (‘I prithee, sister Kate, untie my hands’; 2.1.21).
Chiastic structures are frequent: ‘My husband and my lord, my
lord and husband’ (Induction 2.105–6; cf. 1.1.217–18, 2.1.136). The
Wrst stage direction oVers a duplication of denomination for Sly:
‘Enter Begger and Hostes, Christophero Sly (TLN 1; my underlining).
Language and meaning at times double back on themselves: ‘The
oats have eaten the horses’ is Grumio’s way of stressing the
passage of time (3.2.205–6). The play has an astonishing number
of proverbs, often combined, and Sly’s quotations from The Span-
ish Tragedy are uttered as if they have proverbial status. But if
words and phrases are repeated, doubled, and rehearsed, the name
is left vacant. This vacancy begins with the characters habit of
referring to mythological characters by their relative positions
rather than their given name—‘the daughter of Agenor’ (1.1.168),
‘Leda’s daughter’ (1.2.242), the ‘patroness of heavenly harmony’
(3.1.5). It is we who supply and complete ‘Europa’ and ‘Helen’ and
‘Caecilia’.39 Petruchio has the same habit: he swears by ‘my
mother’s son’ before revealing ‘that’s myself ’ (4.5.6). From start
to Wnish the text forces us to make an eVort to Wll gaps in names,
whether of phrases (‘Leda’s daughter’) or of subject positions
(Kate/Katherine).
146 The Diminutive Name: Kate

In The Merry Wives of Windsor Mistress Page fumes about

FalstaV’s temerity in addressing love letters to both herself and
Mistress Ford: ‘I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ
with blank space for diVerent names’ (2.1.74–6). She has inadvert-
ently provided a deWnition of Wction. The name in Wction is always a
blank space inasmuch as it is a shorthand for a series of traits/
activities/attitudes which become a character. As Thomas Doch-
erty explains, the Wrst mention of a character’s name ‘or even the
pronominal ‘‘I’’ which becomes [a name] creates a gap, a blanc
sémantique . . . which prompts us to read on and ‘‘Wll’’ with mean-
ingful signiWcance the empty space in the name as it occurs in the
Wctional world’ (47).
We see this overtly in postmodern texts, even those postmodern
avant la lettre such as Tristram Shandy where Sterne, in typical
Shandean playful fashion, extends an invitation to the reader. He
(and it is only the male reader who is addressed) is invited to draw
his own picture of the beautiful Widow Wadman, for which pur-
pose Sterne has left a blank page: ‘Call for pen and ink—here’s
paper ready to your hand.—Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own
mind—as like your mistress as you can—as unlike your wife as your
conscience will let you—’ (vi. ch. 38. 422–3). Then, after the blank
page, he rhapsodizes: ‘Was ever anything in Nature so sweet!—so
exquisite’ (424). Three hundred years before Sterne, Bernard An-
dreas was unable to represent the epic battle of Bosworth in his
History of Henry VII (1502), giving us one and a half pages of blank
space instead. We as readers cannot Wll this space with writing (like
Andreas we did not witness the battle) but we can Wll it (like the two
minutes’ silence at today’s remembrance services) with thoughts. In
this way we write ourselves into the text.
When authors abdicate narrative responsibility, as in Sterne or
Andreas, or when contemporary Wction removes or fragments the
narrator, we move centre-stage. The play-within-the-play structure
of The Shrew has the same eVect: faced with a decentred text and
multiple, discontinuous, and incoherent voices we become not just
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 147

response-able but responsible. I said earlier that Christopher Sly

represents us, watching the performance of a play. (In productions
he often comes from the audience, most memorably in Michael
Bogdanov’s RSC production of 1978–9 where he drunkenly argued
with an usherette before climbing on stage and destroying the set.)
He dramatizes the reader’s/audience’s active involvement. And
when a character vacates a subject position, we are forced to
enter the vacancy. The more unknowable Kate is, the more the
respondent (reader/audience) becomes the central character. We
‘perform’ in the etymological sense of bring to a conclusion: we
supply pictures of the Widow Wadman, visions of the Battle of
Bosworth, readings of Kate’s ending, interpretations of Sly’s story.
We imagine and provide completion and continuity. Decentring
turns readerly into writerly texts. And what is true of decentred
Wction (whether plays-within-plays or postmodernism) is also true
of anonymity. Adele Reinhartz concludes: ‘anonymity, like identity,
exists in the relationship between ourselves and others’ so ‘we not
only construct their identities but also our own’ (189, 191). We
inscribe our own names.
Investigating the plural and discontinuous voices of postmodern
Wction, Thomas Docherty ‘doubt[s] the continuity of the human
person’ and asks ‘who is this present self which transcends and
perceives all these past or anterior selves. It at least is an unnamable’
(68, my emphasis). Docherty’s terminology here meets Natanson’s
and redirect us to The Taming of the Shrew where, in Act 5, we are
forced to ask: who is Katherine’s present self ? It is an unnameable.
Or, to pose and answer the question in Shakespeare’s language:
‘What’s her history?—A blank’. This exchange from Twelfth Night
(2.4.109–10) sums up Katherine’s journey in Taming of the Shrew. At
the centre of The Shrew is blank space, Philippe Haman’s blanc
sémantique, and not just that of Katherine but of Bianca whose
name means both ‘white’ and ‘blank’. The Latin blancus/blank
comes to serve both the English adjective (OED 1) for ‘white, pale,
colourless’ and the description (OED 2) for paper ‘left white, not
148 The Diminutive Name: Kate

written upon’. A recurrent observation of 1980s feminist criticism

was the Renaissance depiction of women as blank sheets for men to
inscribe: from Othello’s diatribe about Desdemona (‘Was this fair
paper, this most goodly book, j Made to write ‘‘whore’’ upon?’;
4.2.71–2) to the predicament of the suggestively named Blanch(e) in
King John: she is a ‘book of beauty’ in whom the Dauphin Wnds an
image of himself (2.1.485, 496–503). But in The Taming of the Shrew,
I am suggesting, the characterization at the centre of the play
remains deWantly blank, like the centre of the archery target on
which Petruchio puns at the end: ‘’Twas I won the wager though
you hit the white’ (5.2.186). Christopher Sly loses his identity and
speaks blank verse; in a diVerent sense Katherine’s verse is equally
blank. And as in archery it is the blank which attracts our attention.
Critics have noted this blank space in their contradictory impres-
sions of Bianca whom the text depicts as both chaste and obedient
and as the opposite. The text begins with Bianca’s obedience and
ends with her Wnal disobedience, both in her refusal of Lucentio’s
summons and in her castigation of her husband’s presumption in
betting on her behaviour; but it is productions which must decide
the extent of her (un)chastity: in the 1992 RSC production (directed
by Bill Alexander) Bianca Xirted with her wooers, was ‘sexually
responsive with the disguised Tranio’ and, in the last scene, sat by
Tranio ‘on the sofa . . . for Kate’s Wnal speech—impervious to its
marital lessons, the pair still evinced strong evidence of mutual
sexual attraction, suggesting that there may be quite another
story to follow the play’s conclusion’ (Smallwood, ‘Shakespeare’
1993: 345, 346). As Lorna Hutson points out, Bianca is not the
sexually active Polynesta of Supposes (who has allowed Erostrato,
disguised as Dulippo, into her bed for the past two years, whose
activity becomes a known scandal, and whose behaviour leads to
speculation about pregnancy) but neither is she the totally innocent
maid of Lucentio’s Wrst imagining. Bianca is, like her name, a blank,
and this, for Hutson, is the point: ‘the play works to create uncer-
tainty around Bianca’s speech and action’ (215) so that we have to
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 149

work hard to decipher her. ‘Decipher’ (as we will see in Comedy of

Errors in Ch. 5) is a textual verb applied to an ontological enigma.
The verb is stressed repeatedly in Supposes: ‘I will rest here awhile to
discipher him’ (C7v); ‘now shal I be openly disciphered’ (D7r; further
examples occur at B2v and E7r). Both the modern and early modern
speech preWxes (de/dis) underline the word’s literal meaning: to
uncover what is obscure. And what is apparently white and open in
The Taming of the Shrew may nonetheless be an obscure blankness
(Hutson refers to the ‘soiled white’ of Bianca (218)).
In contrast to Bianca, Hutson Wnds ‘openness’ in Petruchio (219).
However, like the obscurity of Bianca’s whiteness, there is nothing
clear in this openness. As Michael Siberry complains, Petruchio
‘may tell you what he is doing but he won’t explain why’ (45).
This may be because Petruchio’s mode is improvisation. Baptista
observes as much when he accuses Petruchio of attending his own
wedding ‘so unprovided’ (3.2.99). ‘Unprovided’ and ‘improvise’ have
the same Latin root in in-providere. Supposes twice uses improviso (¼
unexpectedly) as a stage direction for actors’ improvised WsticuVs at
D3v and for the sudden and unexpected entrance of the parasite
at D6r. Petruchio’s wedding attire thus provides a sartorial summary
of his (and the play’s) theatrical modus operandi: the blank space of
improvisation parallels the blank space of anonymity.
There is of course a conspicuous onomastic blank at the centre
of this chapter. Despite my lengthy discussion of a remarkable
production of The Shrew, not once have I mentioned the actors’
names. This gap may be a by-product of (and a tribute to) the play’s
metatheatricality. There was only one ‘real’ character in the play, a
tinker called Sly; consequently I think of the name of the actor
playing Baptista et al. as ‘Christopher Sly’; and the many layers of
play-within-the-play left Katherine and others in a world so deeply
Wctionalized that I have no points of reference outside the Wction.
Like the Lord in the Induction who can remember the actor’s role
but not his Wctional name I remember Katherine’s role but not the
actor’s real name: ‘I have forgot [her] name; but sure that part was
150 The Diminutive Name: Kate

aptly Wtted and naturally performed’. I cannot even say this much,
however, for the point of her performance was to question what
‘natural performance’ in the ‘real’ world is.
If one consults actors’ biographies in theatre programmes to Wnd
out who the actors ‘are’, one encounters an endless chain of
deferred signiWers: a list of previous and current roles. Who is
Katherine? She is Kali Peacock. Who is Kali Peacock? She is Dunya-
sha (The Cherry Orchard), Rachel (The Sea), Wiggen (The Old Wive’s
Tale), Snout (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Slave of the Ring (Alad-
din), and in the 2006 OSC season, where Wilde’s Importance of Being
Earnest (another comedy about name and identity) played in reper-
toire with The Shrew, Gwendolyn Fairfax. The theatre programme
emphasizes the link between the world of theatre and the world: so
many names, so many roles. We are, it seems, a collection of parts.
Studying unnamed characters in the Bible, Adele Reinhartz re-
minds us of the old cliché that you can’t tell the players without a
programme (13). Studying multiply named characters in The Taming
of the Shrew reveals that you can’t tell the players even with a
programme.

Taming and Naming

What Shakespeare shows us in The Taming of the Shrew is how
doubling—the Elizabethan thespian ability to act two (or more)
people in close succession, on diVerent occasions, but not at the
same time—becomes anonymity. The verbal doubling of Katherine
with Kate proves to be a highly signiWcant theatrical trope in a play
which examines the tools of the dramatist’s art: language, imagin-
ation, disguise, illusion, willing suspension of disbelief, behavioural
psychology. Katherine has two names, is two people, just as the boy
playing her is two people, male and female, just as the play is two
plays—one for Sly and one for us. That this theatrical exploration of
doubleness extends to personal names is made patently clear
throughout, from the Italian signiWcance of Lucentio’s assumed
 The Diminutive Name: Kate 151

name, Cambio (‘change’), through Petruchio’s pun on ‘Bianca’ to

the disappearance of the literal Sly in favour of a Katherine who,
performing as Kate, becomes Wguratively ‘sly’ (see Burns).40 The
way in which the investigation of dramatic change, role-playing, and
anonymity permeates all levels of The Taming of the Shrew makes
this a remarkably accomplished comedy for such an early date—not
a crude farce about the taming of the shrew, but a sophisticated
exploration of the multiple naming of the shrew.
 5
The Place Name:
Ephesus
(Comedy of Errors)

‘How can she thus then call us by our names, j Unless it be by inspiration?’
(Errors 2.2.166–7)

In adapting Roman source material(Plautus’ Amphitryo and Menaechmi)

for The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare made two particularly signiWcant
changes: he doubled the number of twins; and he changed the setting
from Epidamnus to Ephesus. Critics frequently observe the eVects
of these changes. The Wrst increases ‘the incidents of error in the play
from seventeen to Wfty’ (Miola 22) for, although the resident twin in
Menaechmi can be mistaken, there is no one whom he can mistake; and
the second introduces the occult, Ephesian deception, sorcery, ‘empha-
sizing witchcraft instead of Plautine thievery’ (Miola 26). Both changes
seem to me to be linked, relating to Shakespeare’s investigation of
duplicity (in both its literal sense of doubleness and its metaphoric
sense of deceit), and his analysis of marriage, that institution in which
‘two become one Xesh’ (Ephesians 5: 31).
Although my departure points are names and source material
(Shakespeare’s decision to change location and double the twins),
 The Place Name: Ephesus 153

my destination is women and marriage in The Comedy of Errors, for

Ephesus is associated with a pair of models for female conduct (one
independent, one submissive) whose polarity resonates throughout
the play in the characters of Adriana and Luciana. I want to approach
this subject through a survey of binaries in Errors in order to accentu-
ate a critical mode (thinking and seeing with double vision) which
may prove useful in my subsequent discussion of Ephesian women. In
considering the conditions of Adriana’s marriage, and the thematic
double to which they lead—the ‘double standard’, which Adriana
protests against in her rhetorical question, ‘Why should their liberty
than ours be more?’—this chapter will also focus on twentieth-century
stage treatments of Adriana and her society. My subject, then, is not
‘the boys from Syracuse’ (although the play is presented from the
viewpoint of the Syracusans)1 but ‘the girls from Ephesus’.

Double Vision
It is impossible to talk about The Comedy of Errors without invoking
duality, polarity, antithesis, symbiosis, fusion, binary oppositions.
Shakespeare combines Pauline and Plautine sources, mixing one of
antiquity’s most spiritual writers with one of its most salacious. He
gives us two kinds of supernatural power, the prestigidatory exor-
cisms of Dr Pinch and the holistic religion of the Abbess. He explores
two kinds of personality loss, the negative in the fragmentation
caused by grief, the positive in the sublimation of love (Stanley
Wells 30). Lodgings are characterized by division and duality: the
Centaur (half man, half beast) and the Phoenix (death and rebirth).
There are two lock-out scenes, one each for husband (Antipholus of
Ephesus) and wife. Emendations by Hanmer and Johnson notwith-
standing, the play ends most Wttingly, as it began, with a double birth:
And you, the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossips’ feast, and go with me—
After so long grief, such nativity! (5.1.405–7; my italics)2
154 The Place Name: Ephesus

‘Who deciphers them?’ asks the Duke of the two Antipholi (5.1.335),
adopting a verb from reading practice, the compare-and-contrast
exercise of the interpretative critic, the collation work of the editor.
The characters come only belatedly to a critical mode forced upon
the audience from the beginning.
Egeon’s romance narrative frames the central scenes of farce,
prompting Charles Whitworth to describe the generic hybrid as
‘two works living under one title’ (114). The Antipholi twins (also,
we note, two works living under one title3) have antimeric experi-
ences: Antipholus of Syracuse has a ‘delightful dream’, Antipholus
of Ephesus a ‘nightmare’ (Hamilton 96); Antipholus of Syracuse is
afraid of foreigners, Antipholus of Ephesus is disoriented by a
domestic threat; Antipholus of Syracuse is welcomed and recog-
nized, Antipholus of Ephesus is rejected and denied. These inverse
parallels also Wnd expression within individual characters. Thus,
Adriana catalogues her husband’s faults but concedes, ‘I think him
better than I say’ (4.2.25); Luciana has two speeches on marital
relations, the Wrst of which oVers a textbook defence of female
subservience, the second ‘a picture less of cosmic determinism
than circumstantial pragmatism’ (Grennan 151).
Appropriately, the linguistic medium of this play is paradox and
the pun (those Wgures wherein two opposites coexist) and duplica-
tion. Antipholus of Syracuse decides to entertain ‘sure uncertainty’
(2.2.185) and employs, as Karen Newman points out (81), antithesis,
anaphora, chiasmus. Adriana Wnds conceit to be both her ‘comfort
and [her] injury’ (4.2.66). Egeon is asked to ‘speak . . . griefs unspeak-
able’, and gives a narrative Wlled with paradox: pregnancy is a
‘pleasing punishment’,4 maritime disaster separates the family leaving
husband and wife ‘what to delight in, what to sorrow for’ (1.1.32, 46,
106). Dromio of Syracuse oVers the sage tautology ‘every why hath
a wherefore’ (2.2.43–4), only to Wnd his master responding in kind:
he beats Dromio twice, ‘Wrst—for Xouting me, and then . . . j For
urging it the second time’ (2.2.44–6). The puns, so often dismissed
as the rhetorical embellishments of a youthful Shakespeare are, as
 The Place Name: Ephesus 155

Grennan points out, the linguistic equivalents of the play’s dual

subjects; thus, when identity is re-established and family reunited in
Act 5, the puns all but disappear and language is ‘restored to a happy
singularity’ (Grennan 162).
It is Wtting, if only serendipitously so, that the textual cruces,
such as they are, in this single-text play (the only authority for
which is the Folio) relate to duplicity (see n. 2) and division.
Adriana’s sister is given two names (Iuliana in stage direction
[speech preWx: Iulia.] on her appearance in 3.2 (TLN 786–7),
Luciana elsewhere). The Wrst is possibly a compositor’s misreading
of the second, or an authorial change of mind; whatever the cause,
the Folio text preserves a divided identity for Luciana, as for her
sister, brother-in-law, and future husband. Adriana’s kitchen-maid
has also made division of herself. Introduced as ‘Luce’ on her Wrst
appearance at 3.1.47 (TLN 670), she is elsewhere rechristened
‘Nell’, apparently for the sake of a pun at 3.2.109–10 (TLN 900–
1); this, like the later ‘Dowsabel’ (4.1.110) is most plausibly a local
improvisation of Dromio’s, and, appearing only in dialogue, does
not confuse (Werstine 240).5
Following McKerrow’s ‘Suggestion’, textual critics have long
conWdently believed that the manuscript copy underlying the
printed text of Errors is authorial ‘foul papers’.6 The titles which
distinguish the Antipholi vary (and are easily confused with the
consistent titles which distinguish the Dromios) before settling into
consistency in Act 3; furthermore stage directions provide narrative
information unnecessary for a prompter (e.g. ‘Enter. . . a Schoole/
master, call’d Pinch’; TLN 1321–2) and hence assumed to be the
literary explanations of an author. Paul Werstine has recently dis-
puted this assumption, showing that when ‘one addresses the stage
directions of Comedy of Errors with questions about whether their
origin is authorial or theatrical, one Wnds that they oVer divided
testimony’ (233, my italics). ‘Foul papers’ and ‘promptbooks’, it
seems, like the Antipholi, may be mistaken for each other. Confu-
sion and duplication are inherent in all aspects of this play.
156 The Place Name: Ephesus

Needless to say, productions capitalize on such doubling, under-

lining the thematic with the visual. In the Regent’s Park production
in 1981 (directed by Ian Talbot) Dr Pinch was cast against the text:7
a stocky actor, described as a ‘lean-fac’d villain’, a ‘mere anatomy’, a
‘needy hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch’, a ‘living dead man’
(5.1.238–42) served as a reminder that, as in the case of Antipholus
of Syracuse, verbal identiWcation may be at odds with reality. The
Luce of the Folio became two maids in Trevor Nunn’s 1976 RSC
production, a spherical kitchen-maid (Nell), aYanced to Dromio of
Ephesus, and a tall, slim maid (Luce), servant to Adriana, who was
subsequently paired oV with Dromio of Syracuse. In the 1990 RSC
production (directed by Ian Judge), the First Merchant (1.2) was not
one but two, dressed identically, sharing lines and speaking in
unison. In the same production the Antipholi and the Dromios
became one, ‘each pair . . . played . . . by one actor in two minds
about the whole thing’ (Daily Express 30 Apr. 1990), although a
double was necessary for the reunion of the last scene.8 This
production presented Dr Pinch as a fairground performer who
encased the ‘possessed’ Ephesian master and man in wooden
boxes and sawed them in half. Thus, in demonstrating his show-
manship, Dr Pinch inadvertently symbolized the twins’ divided
states.
Productions also draw attention to the similarities between Errors
and the late plays. The Manchester Royal Exchange production in
1993 had the enthroned Duke descend from on high to hear Egeon
and pronounce sentence: one felt as if one were hearing an early
Shakespearean comedy but watching a late Shakespearean ro-
mance. Romance is, as often observed, a narrative genre, and in
Pericles, as we saw in Chapter 2, the characters themselves frequently
resort to storytelling as if narration will alleviate their woes. Thus
Cleon asks his wife,
My Dionyza, shall we rest us here,
And by relating tales of others’ griefs,
See if ’twill teach us to forget our own? (1.4.1–3)
 The Place Name: Ephesus 157

The Comedy of Errors has several narrative high spots—the woes of

Egeon, Adriana, and Antipholus of Ephesus, for example (1.1.31–139;
5.1.136–60; 5.1.214–54). In most productions it is clearly the power of
Egeon’s narrative which motivates the Duke’s (relative) leniency in
1.1.9 Dromio of Ephesus also has an opportunity to relate his griefs
(4.4.29–39). In CliVord Williams’ 1962 production for the RSC,
Dromio addressed his complaint to the oYcer, who sat down
leisurely to hear this latest narrative.
Williams’ production also showed itself most fully aware of the
conventions of the romance dénouement with its reliance on an
item of personal jewellery to clear up confusions. Antipholus of
Ephesus seized gratefully on the courtesan’s introduction of the
ring: ‘’Tis true, my liege, this ring I had of her’ (5.1.278). The action
was halted for relieved exclamations, examination of the ring, and
attendant stage business, all of which clearly had the status of
conclusion for Antipholus. Only when the courtesan introduced
the new complication—that she had seen Antipholus enter the
Abbey—did the tone change, the happy ending vanishing as Anti-
pholus fainted.
Thus, productions, sources, text, language, genre, and theme com-
bine to make sure that we view Errors with double vision, that we
look both back and ahead, that we think in duplicate, seeing Pericles
as we watch Errors, hearing St Paul as we see Plautus, observing
language, identity, families, genres, fragment and unite. Although
confusion is inherent in Shakespeare’s Plautine sources, duplication
on this scale is not.
Nowhere are the duplications and polarities more evident than in
the play’s discussion of marriage, an institution both spiritual and
social, sometimes both romantic and farcical; an institution which
cruelly reverses the rhetoric and power of courtship, transforming
the worshipping male servant into household master and the fe-
male mistress into obedient conjugal servant; an institution in
which personalities may struggle for individuality or unity (or
both); an institution in which one’s most intimate companion can
158 The Place Name: Ephesus

sometimes seem a stranger. Adriana inhabits a society which does

not permit her the wry bluntness of the twentieth century (‘Mar-
riage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institu-
tion?’) but she anticipates this image of restraint in her dialogue
with Luciana:
lu ciana [H]e [Antipholus] is the bridle of your will.
ad r ia n a There’s none but asses will be bridled so. (2.1.13–14)
Adriana’s marital predicament, in which ‘bridal’ doubles with
‘bridle’, is clearly another of the play’s dominant binaries, but it
has received less attention than it deserves. Starley Wells dismisses it
in a generalization (‘the wife is brought to an understanding of Xaws
in her relationship with her husband’; 28) and Ralph Berry makes it
but an introduction to another subject: ‘There is domestic drama,
certainly, in the tensions between Adriana and her husband. . . . More
interesting, perhaps, is the master and servant relationship’ (Social
Class 22; my italics)’.10 C. L. Barber and Germaine Greer are in a
critical minority in articulating the complex dualities in the topic:
marriage’s ‘irritations and its strong holding power’ (Barber 497),
the diYculty of ‘creating a durable social institution out of volatile
material of lovers’ fantasies’ (Greer 119). Before considering this
‘social institution’ it will be necessary to examine the society in
which Shakespeare chooses to locate Adriana’s marriage: Ephesus.

Ephesus
Errors is often compared with The Tempest, these being the only two
plays in which Shakespeare observed the classical unities, but the
plays also invite comparison by contrast. The Tempest is notable for
its lack of female characters, Miranda being the sole representative of
womankind.11 The Comedy of Errors, by contrast, provides a range of
examples of womankind: wife, sweetheart, kitchen-maid, courtesan,
mother/nun/priestess. Whereas in The Tempest maritime travel and
shipwreck lead to isolation, an anonymous, uninhabited isle, in The
 The Place Name: Ephesus 159

Comedy of Errors, the ‘consequences of shipwreck are teemingly

social’ (Independent 9 Mar. 1993), a point usually well brought out
in production. The nineteenth-century Italian setting of the 1981
Regent’s Park production was plastered with posters for ‘La Favorita’
and Garibaldi. Trevor Nunn’s 1976 Greek island setting was charac-
terized by tavernas and souvenir stalls, all cameras and postcards,
newspapers and straw hats, tables and sun-umbrellas; waiters and
prostitutes hovered to serve the onstage native and tourist popula-
tion. The bare stage of CliVord Williams’ 1962 production conveyed
a similar atmosphere: the decision of Antipholus of Syracuse to leave
Ephesus was followed by a procession of removal men carrying his
belongings shipwards—belongings which included exotic souvenir
purchases: an erotic Greek statue, a dried crocodile skin, a live snake.
In the 2005 production for Creation Theatre Company in Oxford,
Dromio of Syracuse carried an A–Z of Ephesus and an ice-cream
cone, wore sunglasses, and drank cocktails at seaside bars.
Certainly, for Shakespeare, Ephesus is synonymous with a social
life of revels. In 2 Henry 4 FalstaV roisters in a tavern with ‘Ephesians,
my lord, of the old church’ (2.2.150) and in The Merry Wives of
Windsor the Host of the Garter Inn characterizes himself as FalstaV’s
‘Ephesian’ (4.5.18);12 yet both 1 and 2 Henry 4 also associate Ephesus
with spiritual regeneration, dramatizing imagery from Ephesians
5: 16 and 4: 22–4, making Paul’s metaphor for Christian renewal
(‘putting oV the old man and putting on the new’) actual and visual
(see Palmer ‘Casting OV’ and ‘Ephesians’).
Such duality is inherent in the history of Ephesus. Ephesus was a
major commercial centre, connecting with the West via the sea
routes of the Adriatic (the term used loosely for the Aegean, Ionian,
Eastern Mediterranean, and Adriatic seas) and with the East via
excellent road communications. Ephesus as St Paul found it when
he arrived in ad 54 was, however, a city with a divided identity.
Greeks and Jews struggled to live together as fellow-citizens; the
theme of Paul’s subsequent letter to the Ephesians was the trans-
formation of racial diVerence into racial unity, the removal of the
160 The Place Name: Ephesus

metaphoric wall of division through Christianity. Although Paul

converted the Ephesians to Christianity, pagan beliefs continued
(and were tolerated) alongside the new religion well into the fourth
century ad. Thus, Ephesus retained its former pagan reputation for
occult magic while developing renown as a Christian centre. Magi-
cians continued to sell oracles and tell fortunes (Trell 82); extant
pottery lamps from late antiquity bear more mythological than
biblical scenes (Foss 11); and, in an ironic inversion which would not
be thematically out of place in Errors, the philosophy teacher of the
young Julian (Emperor ad 361–3), seeking to expose the beliefs of
Ephesian theurgists as ‘specious and meretricious’, inadvertently
converted his charge to magic. ‘He described how Maximus [a native
Ephesian and a teacher] had performed the theatrical miracle of
causing a statue of Hecate to smile and laugh, and the torches in
her hand to burst into Xame. . . . The narrative so impressed Julian
that he immediately left for Ephesus to study with Maximus’ (Foss 23;
the story is told by Eunapius in Lives of the Philosophers; see Philos-
tratus and Eunapius 433–5). Even as Christianity became the domin-
ant religion, Ephesian history was still characterized by religious
division. The second Council of Ephesus (ad 449) debated ‘whether
the Divinity had a singular or dual nature’. Eusebius, the losing
bishop in the debate, was punished appropriately for his beliefs: ‘let
him be torn in two. As he divides, let him be divided’ (Foss 41).
Maximus’ magic, as Eunapius describes it, is at once awesome
and frightening. To the non-hierophant, however, magic is simply a
species of duplicity: it is illusion, sleight of hand, trompe l’œil,
trickery. The brother of the lovesick Aurelius in Chaucer’s ‘The
Franklin’s Tale’ knows the impossibility of granting Dorigen’s re-
quest that Aurelius clear the rocks from the coast of Brittany. But he
is conWdent that ‘ther be sciences j By whiche men make diverse
apparences’ (1139–40). Accordingly, the magician whom he hires
performs magic in which the coast only appears to be cleared:
‘But thurgh his magik, for a wyke or tweye, j It semed that alle the
rokkes were aweye’ (1295–6; my emphasis). Although accredited as
 The Place Name: Ephesus 161

‘magik’, performed by a ‘magicien’, the act is explicitly linked with

‘swiche illusiouns and swiche meschaunces j As hethen folk useden’
(1292–3; my emphasis).
Magic’s property is that of duplicity, of juxtaposing appearance
and reality: one does not know how the rabbit vanishes, how the sea
appears rockless, how the statue of Hecate smiles and laughs; one
does not know how the women know one’s name and that of one’s
servant. Stage magic and party tricks might arouse the audience’s
admiration of the (unknown) technique but, in real life, magic
arouses fear. Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse ‘wander in illu-
sions’; ‘everyone knows [them], and [they] know none’ (4.3.44;
3.2.156). CliVord Williams’ production presented Dromio of Syra-
cuse on his knees, cowering in fright as he lamented:

We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites;

If we obey them not, this will ensue:
They’ll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue. (2.2.190–2)

His worst fears were realized instantly as Luciana, approaching

from behind, pinched him to attract his attention: ‘Why prat’st
thou to thyself, and answer’st not?’ (2.2.193). For the victim of the
illusion, magic is fearful.13
Not surprisingly, given the duality of Ephesus’ fame as a centre of
commerce and of magic, ‘possession’ in Errors has both a commercial
and a demonic meaning. Trevor Nunn’s production stressed the
demonic side of possession. St Paul believed that immorality was
partly the result of demonic powers (Ephesians 2: 2–3; see also
Harvey). Judi Dench’s Adriana terriWed the onstage audience with
her eldritch confession ‘I am possess’d’ before continuing, conversa-
tionally, ‘with an adulterate blot’ (2.2.140). This reading Wts logically
in a text where everyone’s Wrst reaction to a character’s unexpected
behaviour is to assume madness (3.2.53; 4.1.93; 4.3.81).14 The produc-
tion further capitalized on Ephesus’ reputation for magic: on arrival
in the city, Roger Rees’ Antipholus of Syracuse consulted his Blue
Guide to read that Ephesus ‘is full of cozenage’ (1.2.97).
162 The Place Name: Ephesus

The Wnancial fame of Ephesus, and its related motif in Errors

(where a merchant places the Wscal proWt of business before the
spiritual proWt of friendship; 1.2.24–9) were also eVectively to the
fore in Nunn’s production. Angelo, the goldsmith, wore an osten-
tatious gold pendant with a large Wsh (the symbol of Christianity);
this prominent prop suggested that Angelo had shrewdly found a
way to change his spiritual allegiance without compromising his
business interests, unlike the Demetrius of the New Testament who
made a lucrative living by selling silver idols of Diana and so
protested against St Paul’s teachings on the grounds of prospective
Wnancial ruin (Acts 19: 24–7).15
Ephesus united its commercial and spiritual identities in the
Temple of Diana, which functioned as ‘a kind of bank for the
province’ (Rogers 11). One of the wonders of the ancient world,
the Temple of Diana was a triumph of beauty, Wnance, architectural
technique, and human endeavour, the product of ‘the arts of Greece
and the wealth of Asia’ as Gibbon expressed it in 1780 (i. 207). ‘The
beauty of Ephesus is the Temple of Diana’ reads William Warner’s
translation of Solinus’ Excellent and Pleasant Works (1587; sig. Aa3v).16
‘Ephesus was renowned for the great temple of Diana, one of the
Wonders of the World, 425 feet long, 220 broad, having 127. pillars
the workes of so many Kings, 220. Yeares in building’ explains
Sampson Price in a Paul’s Cross sermon of 1615. Edward Chaloner
describes the Temple of Diana as ‘a place so magniWcent for the
structure’—a structure so magniWcent that Xerxes spared it when he
destroyed all the other temples of Asia. Pericles’ journey ends, like
Egeon’s, in Ephesus, and it is logical to conclude that the ‘Abbess’
and the ‘priory’ of Errors Act 5 are but superWcially Christianized
references to the pagan Temple of Diana. In fact, Gower’s Confessio
Amantis (one of the sources of Pericles) contains a version of the
story of Apollonius of Tyre in which Lucina dedicates herself to
‘religion’, becoming ‘Abbesse’ in the temple at Ephesus, so that, as
R. A. Foakes explains (ed. Errors p. xxxii), ‘the change from temple
to priory was already half-made’.
 The Place Name: Ephesus 163

Ephesus was allegedly founded by Scythian Amazons and it is

they who are responsible for the Temple (as Solinus, Heywood,
Raleigh and others tell us17), dedicated to Artemis. The renown of
Ephesus and its temple derives in part from this presiding goddess, a
colourfully active participant in the life of the city: she allegedly
helped the suicidal architect of her temple erect the lintel over the
entrance (Trell 82–3). The Greek travel writer Pausanius (second
century bc) explains that ‘all cities [in Greece] worship Artemis of
Ephesus, and individuals hold her in honour above all the gods. The
reason, in my view, is the renown of the Amazons, who tradition-
ally dedicated the image’ (4 [Messenia]. 31.8, Jones et al. 345).18
The polymaste Amazon Artemis (probably a fertility goddess)
resembles the Greek Artemis in name only, but became identiWed
with Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo, when Ephesus came under
Greek rule. It was believed that the twins of Zeus and Leta were
born in Ephesus, whither Leta had Xed to avoid Hera’s wrath. The
Temple of Artemis became the Temple of Diana under Roman
hands. ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’ chant the rioting silver-
smiths in Acts 19. That the Greek Artemis, goddess of maiden
purity, the Roman Diana, should develop from an Amazon fertility
goddess is ironic, and that Ephesus should be associated with twins
from its early history is doubtless coincidence, but the opposition
and the doubling are undeniably appropriate.
Myths of Ephesus’ founding, like those of so many ancient cities,
credit it with multiple foundations: the founding by Scythian Am-
azons and a subsequent refounding by the Emperor Hadrian.
(Hadrian’s interest in Ephesus stemmed from his fascination with
the occult.) The Elizabethans were profoundly alarmed by Amazons,
primarily because of the tribe’s refusal to accept the female state of
obedience. ‘They disdained to marry with their neighbours, calling it
rather a servitude than Wedlock. A singular example to all ages’
writes Heywood sternly in Gunaikeion in 1624 (V2v), reiterating this
point, but moderating his disapproval, in 1640 in The Exemplary Lives
and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World:
164 The Place Name: Ephesus

‘Wnding the sweetnesse of liberty. . . they refused to take Hus-

bands . . . accounting Matrimony, no better then a miserable servi-
tude’ (O2v).19 Antonio in the induction to Marston’s Antonio and
Mellida expresses anxiety over his role as an Amazon, ‘an hermaph-
rodite, two parts in one’, only to be reassured by Alberto: ‘Not play
two parts in one? away, away; ’tis common fashion’ (ll. 70–1, 77–8).
The Amazon, like the actor, is both male and female. It is hard to
dissociate Adriana, that ‘warrior against double standards’ (the phrase
is Ruth Nevo’s (25)) from her Amazon forebears in Ephesus, and one
cannot but wonder whether her name—the female form of Hadrian,
the Ephesian patron—is coincidental.20
Certainly in changing the Epidamnus of Plautus to Ephesus,
Shakespeare chose a city whose history added thematic resonance
to his dramatic topoi. From its legendary Amazon foundation (the
Amazons had two queens, one each for military and domestic rule),
its reigning goddess Artemis/Diana, and its Pauline themes of
separation and division to its fame as a centre for commerce and
religion (whether pagan or Christian) binaries/duplication/twins
have a long association with Ephesus.21

Marriage
Given the thematic emphasis on twinning, doubling, fusion, it is
appropriate that Paul’s letter to the Ephesians contains advice about
marriage, that state in which ‘two become one Xesh’ (Ephesians
5:31). Identical twins, separate but the same, provide an ideal
metaphor for the theme of division and reconciliation, not just of
two pairs of siblings but of two pairs of marriage partners. One
marriage (that of Egeon–Emilia) is disrupted by external hostility
(shipwreck), the other by internal (domestic) strife; both marriages
are characterized by separation (Egeon is a Renaissance commercial
traveller, Antipholus a straying husband), and both wives object to
their husband’s absence (Emilia makes provision to follow her
spouse (1.1.47–8), Adriana protests).
 The Place Name: Ephesus 165

Marriage is a diYcult business to negotiate (I use both noun and

verb advisedly). Both Adriana and Antipholus refer to their mar-
riage as an arranged marriage. Antipholus describes Adriana as the
woman ‘whom thou [the Duke] gav’st to me to be my wife’
(5.1.198), a reference made independently by Adriana: ‘Antipholus
my husband, j Who I made lord of me and all I had, j At your [the
Duke’s] important letters’ (5.1.136–8). Adriana, it is implied at
5.1.161–4, was the Duke’s reward to Antipholus for military service.
Marriage may be a transaction, the woman an object traded by
men, but it also, paradoxically, is as far removed from transaction as
is possible: a holy union, characterized by mutual spiritual giving.
Thus St Paul: ‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ’
(Ephesians 4: 21). The commercial and the spiritual seem strange
bedfellows (as it were) but they are no more paradoxical than the
dramatic hybrid which results from Shakespeare’s Pauline and
Plautine sources. Shakespeare negotiates the thematic and generic
tensions in his disparate source material to create a successful
partnership.22 Adriana has more trouble synthesizing polarities.
Adriana’s diYculty derives in part from a duality in Renaissance
attitudes to women. Viewed as both divine and dangerous, women
and their beauty could lead men to an appreciation of higher things
(the spiritually beautiful, the celestial) or to physical temptation
(lust, gratiWcation, damnation). Both extremes of these female
stereotypes are represented in Errors. The love-stricken Antipholus
of Syracuse employs the vocabulary of the worshipping Petrarchan
wooer: ‘your grace’, ‘more than earth divine’, ‘Are you a god?’ are
the terms he uses for the resisting Luciana in 3.2. In the contrasting
episode, which follows immediately, Dromio of Syracuse describes
his pursuit by the sexual Luce in the language of demonology: Luce
‘haunts’ him, she is a ‘diviner’ [witch], she knows ‘what privy
marks’ he has, so that he ‘amaz’d, ran from her as a witch’
(3.2.144). The common root of these two women’s names (Luce
and Luciana) shows that the demonic female (the diviner who
would possess the male) and the divine female (the goddess
166 The Place Name: Ephesus

whom the male wishes to possess) are but two sides of the same
female stereotype.
This duality is pushed further in Errors with the representation of
the demonic and divine two female stereotypes by the professional
extremes: by the Courtesan (whom Antipholus and Dromio of
Syracuse characterize as ‘Sathan’, ‘Mistress Sathan’, ‘the devil’,
‘the devil’s dam’: 4.3.48–51)23 and by the Abbess (characterized in
dialogue as ‘a virtuous and a reverend lady’: 5.1.134). Emilia’s dual
role as procreative mother and chaste Abbess (during a surely sign-
iWcant period of thirty-three years, the number of years Christ lived
on earth24) links her even more obviously with that other chaste
mother, the Virgin Mary. Adriana attempts to unite both extremes,
attending to her husband’s body and soul: she oVers dinner/sex and
confession (‘Husband, I’ll dine above with you to-day, j And shrive
you of a thousand idle pranks’; 2.2.207–8).
Whether Adriana oVers Antipholus of Syracuse dinner or sex is, in
fact, a moot point. Stanley Wells views the rendezvous as innocent:
‘Shakespeare raises the moral tone by substituting the dinner party
of Menaechmi for the bedroom setting of Amphitruo’ (17). However,
there is an association between food and sex (the former a meta-
phor for the latter) in the brothel scene in Pericles (see Anthony
J. Lewis), and Ralph Berry (Awareness 39) suggests that the ‘audience
would . . . receive the impression of sexual congress behind locked
doors’.25 ‘Your cake here is warm within: you stand here in the
cold’ says Dromio of Ephesus to his master (3.1.71), where ‘cake’
euphemistically indicates ‘woman’, and the scene concludes with
‘standard slang for sexual entry’, Antipholus’ decision to ‘knock
elsewhere’ since his ‘own doors refuse to entertain [him]’ (Berry,
Awareness 39–40).26
Certainly, the argument from stage symbolism is persuasive: ‘the
house [was] perceived from earliest times as the coding for woman,
and the knocking at the gates, the male attempts at entry’ (Berry,
Awareness 40). This is the symbolism in plays as diverse as Aristopha-
nes’ Lysistrata (where the women deny their husbands sex, and lock
 The Place Name: Ephesus 167

themselves in the Acropolis only to be threatened by phallic

weapons) and Henry 5 where Henry’s invasion of France is analogous
to his conquest of Catherine. ‘Enter our gates, dispose of us and ours, j
For we no longer are defensible’ says the yielding Governor on the
walls of HarXeur (3.3.49–50) in a line no less appropriate to the
Princess. However, practical considerations support the notion of
culinary rather than sexual oVerings. Luciana chaperones the meet-
ing; given Antipholus of Syracuse’s fear of Adriana and love of her
sister, it seems unlikely that he would engage in sexual intimacies
with his hostess; and in the Shakespeare canon adultery is not the
comic matter that fornication is.27 What is clear is that Adriana’s
attempt to unite female physicality and divinity involves ministering
to her supposed husband’s body and soul: she provides dinner (or its
less euphemistic equivalent) and confession. For Adriana, wifehood is
a fusion of two opposing female stereotypes.
‘Why should their liberty than ours be more?’ Adriana protests in
2.1, the noun subtly hinting at the kind of freedom men enjoy, that
in which they visit the Liberties.28 Elizabethan marriage may be a
mixture of otium (the social niceties of leisurely dinners) and nego-
tium (‘If thou didst wed her for her wealth’) but Antipholus looks
elsewhere for Erotium. I choose the word deliberately, for Shake-
speare elects not to: Erotium is the name of the courtesan whom the
resident twin visits in Menaechmi. In The Comedy of Errors the cour-
tesan is ‘pretty and witty; wild’ (3.1.110), a provider of hospitality
(‘thanks for my good cheer’: 5.1.393), a woman ‘of excellent discourse’
(3.1.109). Critics remind us that discourse is not what courtesans were
renowned for; but in Greek society hetairai certainly were. High-class
escorts (‘hetaira’ literally means ‘companion’), distinct from concu-
bines, prostitutes in brothels, or streetwalkers, hetairai provided
intellectual conversation as equals, socializing with men at dinner
and drinking parties (see Just and Pomeroy). By turning Antipholus’
sexual and social needs into a business, the courtesan in Errors
achieves outside marriage what Adriana has not managed within:
the fusion of otium, negotium, erotium.
168 The Place Name: Ephesus

Lest we be in danger of admiring her for this, Shakespeare

qualiWes the courtesan’s triumph in two ways: he makes her the
only deliberate deceiver in a play of chance; and he denies her a
name. The play concludes with baptism, that act of naming which
bestows identity, strengthens family, celebrates society. For as long
as she is nameless, the courtesan is kept outside that society.
Onomastics in The Comedy of Errors are not without thematic or
character relevance. ‘Egeon’ recalls the father of Theseus who gave
his name to the Aegean Sea, drowning himself from grief at the
(supposed) loss of his son. Luciana is associated with light (from the
Latin lux) and Lucian, that exposer of follies (cf. the role of Lucian in
Titus Andronicus). Angelo is an apt name for a goldsmith, angels
being gold coins. Adriana, as indicated above, is the female form of
Hadrian, the Roman ruler from whom the Adriatic Sea takes its
name; Adriana also appears in Chaucer and Gower as a variant of
Ariadne, the princess whom Theseus abandoned on Naxos and
Dionysus subsequently wed.29 Ariadne thus has a dual aspect—the
mourner and the joyful bride—a duality inherent in another ety-
mology of Adriana as the female form of Janus, the two-faced god.
The kitchen-maid Luce, as we have seen, is also referred to as
‘Nell’.30 Although Shakespeare uses ‘Nell’ as an abbreviation for
Eleanor in 2 Henry 6, he also views it as an abbreviation for Helen, as
we saw in Chapter 3: Paris twice calls Helen of Troy by this diminutive
in Troilus and Cressida. There are more Helens in Shakespeare than
there are Eleanors, and they may provide a clue as to how to view
the kitchen-maid in Errors. One dominant pattern stands out, that of
the sexually assertive female who pursues her chosen mate. Helena
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream trails Demetrius through the wood
outside Athens, a role reversal of which she is only too aware: ‘Your
wrongs do set a scandal on my sex. j We cannot Wght for love, as
men may do. j We should be woo’d, and were not made to woo’
(MND 2.1.240–2). This generalization, in which she moves from
the impropriety of her own behaviour to that of all women, illus-
trates her awareness of society’s automatic reaction in which her
 The Place Name: Ephesus 169

weakness ‘will be taken as female weakness rather than as an

individual weakness’ (Dusinberre 55).
As we saw in Chapter 3, the link between individual transgression
andfemale transgressionwas,infact, alreadyimplicit in theRenaissance
in the name Helen, by association with Menelaus’ Helen, who
accompanied Paris to Troy (whether by force or choice is open to
doubt, but the Renaissance assumed her willing compliance). In
Troilus and Cressida Thersites presents Helen in unXattering terms
(a ‘whore’, a ‘placket’) and Shakespeare continually associates the
name with female sexual eagerness. Critics note that Helena in All’s
Well that Ends Well seems more eager to lose her virginity than is
deemed proper for a heroine. In conversation with Parolles she
defends the female right to have and enjoy sex, and subsequently
engages in a marathon cross-country pursuit of a man who does
nothing to encourage her: she follows Bertram to Paris (a destination
with classical overtones), before conveniently arriving in Florence
(where Bertram is) despite her intention of travelling to the shrine of
St Jacques le Grand in Spain. To this sexually assertive trio—the
Helens of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well
that Ends Well—we must add another Helen, Mistress Quickly (‘Nell’)
of Henry 4 and 5, whose vocabulary is full of unintentional sexual
innuendo. Shakespeare’s Helens/Nells are cast in the same mould.
To Shakespeare, it seems, all Nells are chastised as loose;31 in The
Comedy of Errors Nell is both loose and Luce.
The dramatis personae in Errors are aware of the way in which
name confers identity. Dromio of Syracuse reacts noticeably to his
Wnding out the name of the kitchen-maid; he comments on her
name and uses it immediately in apostrophe: ‘if thy name be called
Luce—Luce, thou hast answer’d him well’ (3.1.52–3). Dromio’s
master, Antipholus of Syracuse reacts similarly to not Wnding out
the name of Luciana. His opening apostrophe and ensuing com-
ment (‘Sweet mistress—what your name is else, I know not’; 3.2.29)
implies that he would use her Christian name if he could. The fact
that Adriana identiWes the Syracusans by their names is taken as
170 The Place Name: Ephesus

proof that she does recognize and know them (‘How can she thus
then call us by our names, j Unless it be by inspiration?’: 2.2.166–7)
although, as confusions escalate, both Antipholus and Dromio of
Syracuse grow more hesitant in assuming that name and identity
are synonymous. ‘Do you know me, sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your
man? Am I myself ?’ asks Dromio in anguish at 3.2.73–4. His master
reassures him ‘Thou art Dromio, thou art my man, thou art thyself ’
(75) but just 100 lines later he is unable to apply the same conWdence
to his own situation. ‘Master Antipholus’, hails the goldsmith at
3.2.165; ‘Ay, that’s my name’ is Antipholus’ guarded response.32 In a
play which is sensitive to names—their meanings and their confu-
sions—the anonymity of a courtesan who is named in the source is
conspicuous.
In the reunion of Act 5 Antipholus of Syracuse immediately
identiWes his father as Egeon, and Egeon and Emilia exchange
Wrst names Wve times in their Wrst six lines of dialogue (5.1.342–7).
Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana have no opportunity to use
Christian names in the last scene, as Shakespeare does not provide
them with a dialogue opportunity for reconciliation. Their mar-
riage is, as Leggatt observes ‘quietly placed in the background and
no great hopes are pinned on it’ (Comedy 18).The only grounds for
optimism lie in the Courtesan’s anonymity in a play whose conclu-
sion stresses rebirth and baptism, a gossips’ feast, and in the fact that
the Courtesan is not included in the Wnal pairing-oV (although the
BBC production does match her with the Duke). Any optimism is
necessarily limited, however, by the fact that Antipholus of Ephesus
has more to say to the Courtesan than he does to his wife: he
addresses the Courtesan in ten words (‘There take it [the ring], and
much thanks for my good cheer’), of which the last six may be a
termination of a relationship, a salacious reminiscence, or a genuine
expression of gratitude. The husband–wife reunion must be real-
ized on stage wordlessly, if at all.
Directors rise to this interpretative challenge. A happy ending is
most easily suggested by the simple expedient of Antipholus giving
 The Place Name: Ephesus 171

his wife the promised chain so that objects, as identities, are re-
stored to their rightful owners. (Although the BBC Antipholus does
give his wife the chain—a large, heart-shaped pendant—his emo-
tional discomfort at the family reunion is made clear by the uncer-
tain looks which pass between himself and Adriana.) Adriana’s
question, ‘And are not you my husband?’ (5.1.371) is addressed
not to her husband but to her dinner companion, Antipholus of
Syracuse. She posed the question in resigned sadness in CliVord
Williams’ production, already aware of the negative answer she
would receive, and in urgent desperation in the 1983 RSC produc-
tion, willing the answer to be positive. This latter production gave
Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana an embrace into which Adriana
drew Dromio of Ephesus, showing the importance of servants to
the family unit in early modern England. Adriana then moved
to exit with her sister; Antipholus pulled his wife back to him but
she slowly propelled her husband in the direction of his twin.
Deliberately eschewing or postponing a marital reunion, this Adri-
ana showed (as does Shakespeare’s dialogue) that the re-establish-
ment of the family unit—parents/children, sibling/sibling—was
to take precedence over conjugal communion. Her actions with
servant and husband left her Wrmly, if a triXe regretfully, in control
of tone.
This Adriana’s inclusion of Dromio in the embrace reminded us,
albeit in an aVectionately twentieth-century way, that the Eliza-
bethan household was an extended family unit. The master-
husband held sway over a group of social subordinates: wife,
children, servants. The link between the treatment of wives and
servants is seen in the linguistic instruction oVered by a husband
and a ruler in an early comedy and a late romance, respectively. In
The Taming of the Shrew 4.5 Petruchio ‘teaches’ his wife the diVerence
between the sun and the moon.33 In The Tempest Prospero gives his
slave Caliban the same lesson. He teaches Caliban ‘how j To name
the bigger light, and how the less, j That burn by day and night’; as a
result, Caliban tells him, ‘I lov’d thee’ (1.2.335–6).
172 The Place Name: Ephesus

Marriage may be a spiritual world-without-end bargain, a selXess

service; but it may also be little better than slavery. As More’s
Raphael reminds us, the diVerence between service and servitude
‘is only a matter of one syllable’.34 In The Tempest, Ferdinand, in
service to Prospero, takes pleasure in a ‘mean task’ which would be
as ‘heavy. . . as odious’ were it not for Miranda’s sympathy and love
(3.1.1–15); his heart is a willing ‘slave’ to Miranda (3.1.66). This love
leads Ferdinand to enter Miranda’s service in marriage, paradoxic-
ally ‘with a heart as willing j As bondage e’er of freedom’ (3.1.88–9).
Miranda, reciprocating Ferdinand’s feelings, mirrors his vocabulary:
‘I’ll be your servant’ (3.1.85). In contrast, Helen in All’s Well that Ends
Well does not enjoy reciprocal love, and the consequences are
voiced by Diana: ‘’Tis a hard bondage to become the wife j Of a
detesting lord’ (3.5.64–5). Thus, marriage may be a pleasurable
bondage or a hard bondage, service or servitude.
In Errors Luciana counsels her sister in obedience, patience, and
the domestic hierarchy which makes men ‘masters to their females’
(2.1.24); Adriana responds with sisterly sarcasm, ‘This servitude
makes you to keep unwed.’ Servitude, asses, bridled: these are the
terms Adriana associates with married life. Renaissance matrimony
can indeed be ‘hard bondage’ for the female because Renaissance
culture associates wives with servants. In the letter in which Paul
counsels wives to be obedient to husbands, he also advises servants
to be obedient to their masters (Ephesians 6: 5–9). Claudius Holly-
band links the two social inferiors in a succinct aphorism: ‘he is
happie which hath a good servant, and a good wife’ (French School-
master 24). Before continuing with Adriana we need to consider
servants and service.

Servants
The Elizabethan household, like Elizabethan life, was hierarchical.
Husbands ruled over wives who ruled over children; at the bottom
of this pecking order came servants. However, my generalization
 The Place Name: Ephesus 173

distorts, Xattening as it does the permutations possible. Thus, in

many instances, servants were viewed as a variant of children, not
inferior beings but dependents. In Claudius Hollyband’s dialogue,
The Citizen at Home, the Father’s admonition to his servant William
reminds one more of parental frustration than employer’s dissatis-
faction: ‘William, give here some bread . . . you will never learn to
serve; why do you not lead it with a trencher plate, and not with the
hand? I have told it to you above an hundred times’ (French School-
master 28). At the other extreme is the treatment which William
Gouge describes: ‘sometimes . . . masters oVend in the qualitie of
that food which they give to their servants, as when it is kept too
long, and growne musty, mouldy, or otherwise unsavoury: or when
the worst kinde of food, for cheapnesse sake, is bought, even such as
is scarce Wt for mans meat’ (Vv8v; treatise 8, para. 24, p. 670). Given
an inferior diet, servants were thus daily reminded that they ‘did not
belong to their employer’s family’ (Houlbrooke 176). Although
masters were expected to care for their servants, attending to
their physical and spiritual needs and caring for them when ill,
Thomas Becon’s admonition makes it clear that many masters did
not behave in this way. Becon corrects those who ‘curse, and lame
them [servants], cast dishes and pots at their heads, beat them, put
them in danger of their life’ (362). Compare Vives, whose discussion
of the treatment of wives by husbands illuminates the treatment of
servants by masters: ‘some [husbands] there be, that through evyll
and rough handelynge and in threatenynge of their wives, have
them not as wives, but as servauntes’ (Kviiiv–Li).
The Elizabethans understood the term ‘family’ more in the sense of
domestic household than sentimental attachments. The components
of this household are made clear in Gouge’s Treatises on Domestical
Duties (an exegesis on Ephesians (1622, SR 1620)), which outlines the
duties of three sets of people: Wives–Husbands, Children–Parents,
Servants–Masters. Treatise 7, ‘Duties of Servants’ stresses the import-
ance of obedience, referring the reader to the previous treatises on
wives and children for the reasons why obedience is desirable: ‘The
174 The Place Name: Ephesus

reasons alleadged to move wives and children to obey, ought much

more to move servants’ (Qq6v; treatise 7, para. 10, p. 604). In paragraph
36 (Ss7r; p. 635), ‘Of servants endevour to make their judgement agree
with their masters’ the reader is referred to Gouge’s precepts for other
inferiors since the same principle applies. Antipholus of Syracuse
corrects his man’s behaviour, reminding Dromio that the servant
should ‘fashion [his] demeanor to my looks’ (2.2.33), a classic textbook
rule for wives: ‘it beseemes an honest wife to frame her selfe to her
husbands aVect, and not to be merry, when he is melancholy, not
iocund when he is sad, much less Xiere when hee is angry’ (Snowse 54).
Although social historians are unsure about the extent of the
similarity between the roles of servant and wife in the early modern
period, in one startling criminal category servants and wives were
yoked together. Husband-killing and master-killing were both clas-
siWed as petty treason. Masters feared betrayal from within, insub-
ordination by servant or wife, those whom Frances E. Dolan
characterizes as ‘dangerous familiars’. Petty treason embodies the
fear ‘that the other and the enemy might be the person who makes
your Wre, prepares your food and lodges in your own cell’ (67).
Antipholus of Ephesus perceives himself as betrayed by both wife
and servant. His wife bars him from the house, his house. His servant
purloins a bag of gold, his gold. And both servant and wife compound
the villainy by denial. Adriana: ‘I did not, gentle husband, lock thee
forth’; Dromio of Ephesus: ‘And, gentle master, I receiv’d no gold’
(4.4.98–9). Adriana transgresses, albeit unknowingly, by inviting a
lover and a strange servant into the marital home; she commits
infractions of mensa and suggestively of thoro, welcoming the ersatz
husband to her table and, by implication, her bed. Alice Arden did as
much and was burned at the stake for her sins.
But Shakespeare is not interested in petty treason—this is a com-
edy of errors, not of murders35—so much as he is in the parallels
between two sets of relationships: master–servant and husband–
wife. We see more of the former relationship than we do of the
latter; this is perhaps why Ralph Berry views the master–servant
 The Place Name: Ephesus 175

relationship as of more interest (see above). Berry fails to realize,

however, that we are invited to consider Antipholus–Adriana by ana-
logy with Antipholus–Dromio. Which Antipholus–Dromio? Both.
The two Antipholus–Dromio relationships, very diVerent, provide us
with two possible paradigms of marriage.
If the literature of the period associates wives with servants, the
language of Errors links Adriana with Dromio (either and both). Both
Dromios are called ‘ass’. Luciana insults Dromio of Syracuse so, and
he agrees: ‘’Tis true she [Adriana, or possibly Luciana] rides me and
I long for grass. ’Tis so, I am an ass’ (2.2.200–1). In the next scene
Antipholus of Ephesus applies the insult to Dromio of Ephesus who
also agrees: ‘Marry, so it doth appear j By the wrongs I suVer, and the
blows I bear. j I should kick, being kick’d, and being at that pass, j You
would keep from my heels, and beware of an ass’ (3.1.15–18). In 4.4
Dromio of Ephesus expands on the motif, summarizing his suVerings
at the hands of his master: ‘I am an ass indeed; you may prove it by
my long ears. I have serv’d him from the hour of my nativity to this
instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows’
(4.4.29–32). Although in all three cases the insult from master/mis-
tress to man could be left as a one-line criticism, on each occasion the
analogy is expanded. It is diYcult, then, not to be reminded of the
earlier dialogue between Luciana and Adriana:
lu ciana O, know he is the bridle of your will.
ad r ia n a There’s none but asses will be bridled so. (2.1.13–14)

Wives, like servants, like asses, endure wrongs and blows from the
master whom they serve.
It is noticeable in reading, and particularly marked in production,
that the Antipholi enjoy diVerent relationships with their respective
Dromios. The Syracusans are friendlier, less hierarchical, more sup-
portive of each other. In one sense this equality is the result of the
circumstances in which they Wnd themselves, strangers in a strange
land; as the BBC production showed, they ‘cling to each other
for support’ (Shakespeare, BBC TV, Errors 25). The aVectionate
176 The Place Name: Ephesus

relationship between Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse

was established from the Wrst in the CliVord Williams production, to
the evident perplexity of the Merchant. Thus, Antipholus’ ‘A trusty
villain, sir, that very oft, j When I am dull with care and melancholy, j
Lightens my humour’ (1.2.199–21) was delivered as a half-apologetic
explanation. The Merchant’s refusal of the dinner invitation was due
to his desire to get away from the strange duo, his ‘I commend you to
your own content’ (1.2.32) emphatic, terminative, relieved at his
success in extricating himself.
In this production Dromio’s concern for his master was tellingly
shown. To Antipholus’ reprise of Dromio’s alleged misdemeanours—
‘thou didst deny the gold’s receipt, j And tolds’t me of a mistress, and
a dinner’ (2.2.17–18)—Dromio looked (understandably) uncompre-
hending, before reacting in delight at this evident example of his
master’s recovery from depression: ‘I am glad to see you in this merry
vein’ (2.2.20). Later Dromio anxiously felt his master’s forehead when
Antipholus of Syracuse asked him about the bark. ‘Why, sir, I brought
you word an hour since’ replied Dromio (4.3.37–8), concerned that his
master might be running a fever. In the 1983 RSC production Anti-
pholus’ ‘As you love strokes, so jest with me again’ was a genuine
invitation to his man to replay his earlier absurd answers, each
question followed by a pause for Dromio’s anticipated (but not
forthcoming) music-hall reply (2.2.8–10). I reline:

You know no Centaur? (Pause)

You receiv’d no gold? (Pause)
Your mistress sent to have me home to dinner? (Pause)

In contrast to his Ephesian brother, Antipholus of Syracuse describes

his man as a ‘heedful slave’ (2.2.2) who acts ‘in care’ of him (2.2.3), and
he acknowledges his ‘love’ for the servant (2.2.28). As Alexander
Leggatt points out (Comedy 13), both Antipholus of Syracuse and
Dromio of Syracuse are willing to sacriWce their own happiness and
safety for the sake of the other (3.2.145–9; 4.4.151–3), an example of
mutual selXess love, the kind that ideally characterizes marriage.
 The Place Name: Ephesus 177

Very diVerent is the relationship between Antipholus of Ephesus

and his Dromio who are never alone on stage together and are thus
denied the intimate friendly chats of their respective siblings. In
production, as in the text, Antipholus of Ephesus is clearly a more
violent man than his brother. Although both masters beat their
servants, productions diVerentiate the types of beatings. In Trevor
Nunn’s production, Antipholus of Syracuse used only a rolled-up
newspaper to hit his man; the BBC Antipholus of Syracuse
employed a soft Tudor bonnet; in both productions Antipholus of
Ephesus hit his man with the Xat of his hand or with the property
rope. This distinction motivated a moment of amazement in the
BBC production when Syracusan Dromio’s news of the bark in
port, delivered to the wrong Antipholus, met with a slap across the
face; the close-up of the servant showed his emotional, rather than
his physical, pain at this uncharacteristic behaviour, a betrayal of
unwritten rules.36 It is, appropriately, Dromio of Ephesus who is
given the comic-poignant testimony about his life history of beat-
ings.37 In Menaechmi Plautus also diVerentiates the two master—
servant relationships. The resident twin, astonished by the magna-
nimity of the unknown slave who saves him, rejects the servant’s
explanation that he is Menaechmus’ man: ‘I had never yet anie
servant would do so much for me (Bullough i. 35).
It is tempting to argue that Adriana seeks in marriage the
symbiotic friendly ‘service’ of the Syracusans, but Wnds that Anti-
pholus of Ephesus oVers her only servitude. However, the play does
not permit such simple thematic bifurcation. Before deciding what
kind of marriage Adriana wants to have, we must Wrst consider
what kind of woman Adriana wants to be.

‘Two Parts in One’

Historically, as we have seen, Ephesus oVers two female role
models: the independent pagan Amazon and the submissive Chris-
tian servant. At the beginning of the play Adriana is clearly equated
178 The Place Name: Ephesus

with the former, Luciana with the latter. Adriana chafes at the
restrictions marriage imposes on women; she questions the male
right to have geographic freedom, desiring equal liberty for hus-
bands and wives. Critical and resentful of her husband’s greater
freedom, she expresses herself in actions as well as words, granting
herself permission to circulate out of doors. Her quid pro quo
independence has not been well received: ‘Look when I serve him
so, he takes it ill’ (2.1.12). Desiring ‘the sweetnesse of liberty’,
viewing marriage as rather a ‘servitude than wedlock’, Adriana is
exactly the kind of woman who so alarmed Heywood and appalled
the Renaissance male. Playing ‘two parts in one’—the male and the
female—she is in the tradition of the Ephesian Amazon.
It is because of Ephesus’ tradition of non-submissive women that
St Paul directs his letter about wifely submission not to the Gal-
atians, Corinthians, or Colossians, not to the Philippians, the Heb-
rews, or the Romans but to the Ephesians. It is the Ephesians who
are most in need of Paul’s advice:
Submitting yourselves one to another in the feare of God. Wives, submitte
your selves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the
wives head, even as Christ is the head of the Church, and the same is
the saviour of his bodie. Therefore as the Church is in subjection to Christ,
even so let the wives be to their husbands in every thing. Husbands,
love your wives, even as Christ loved the church, and gave him selfe for it.
(Ephesians 5: 21–33.)
Concerned to establish domestic harmony through domestic hier-
archy, Paul is explicit in his message: husbands must love their
wives, but wives must be subject to their husbands.
Luciana knows Paul’s lesson by heart:
There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye
But hath his bound in earth, in sea, in sky.
The beasts, the Wshes, and the winged fowls
Are their males’ subjects and at their controls:
Man, more divine, the master of all these,
Lord of the wide world and wild wat’ry seas,
 The Place Name: Ephesus 179

Indu’d with intellectual sense and souls,

Of more pre-eminence than Wsh and fowls,
Are masters to their females, and their lords:
Then let your will attend on their accords . . .
Ere I learn love, I’ll practice to obey. (2.1.16–25, 29)
The lines are Luciana’s but the sentiments are Paul’s: Luciana is
merely paraphrasing Ephesians 5:21 V.38
Having introduced this opposition between the Amazon and the
Pauline female, the play immediately begins to deconstruct it. Adriana
can hardly be an independent woman since, as a wife, she has technic-
ally espoused submission, while Luciana, who preaches submission,
can do so only because (as Adriana points out), she is independent:
thou, that hast no unkind mate to grieve thee,
With urging helpless patience would relieve me;
But if thou live to see like right bereft,
This fool-begg’d patience in thee will be left. (2.1.38–41)
The identities of Adriana and Luciana, like those of the twins,
begin to merge, become confused. Despite her rhetorical question,
‘Why should their liberty than ours be more?’, Adriana seems to
want not liberty but the right to love and be loved as a wife. No Moll
Cutpurse, she. When next we meet the women it is Adriana who
has the long Pauline speech on marriage as she lyrically, passion-
ately tells Antipholus that husband and wife are ‘undividable in-
corporate’ (2.2.122). Luciana’s subsequent speech on marriage is
strangely unspiritual, full of knowing advice to her (supposed)
brother-in-law about how to conduct an extramarital aVair:
Look sweet, speak fair, become disloyalty;
Apparel vice like virtue’s harbinger;
Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted;
Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint:
Be secret-false. (3.2.11–15)
Instead of husband and wife being one, as Paul counsels, the wife is
to be kept ignorant of the husband’s inWdelity: ‘what need she be
acquainted?’ Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was about breaking
180 The Place Name: Ephesus

down the wall of division; Luciana’s advice here is about how to

paper over that wall.
The contradictions and cross-overs in female identity become
increasingly obvious. Despite the feminist vigour of her conversa-
tion with Luciana, Adriana plays a more (al)luring role with her
husband, while Luciana the good (wearing, in the BBC version, a
necklace with a large cruciWx) is involved in a disturbing dialogue
with her supposed brother-in-law (3.2). One wonders if Luciana’s
behaviour is not slightly Xirtatious. Despite some valiant attempts
to redirect Antipholus’ attentions (‘Why call you me love? Call my
sister so’: 3.2.59; and cf. 57, 60, 65), Luciana concludes the dialogue
with an ambiguous line: ‘hold you still; j I’ll fetch my sister to get
her good will’ (70).
The line may be a desperate excuse to exit (after all, the situation
is now dangerously physical, Antipholus having asked to hold
Luciana’s hand; and his love talk is clearly out of control since he
has just proposed marriage). Both the BBC production and the 1983
RSC version played the line as an impetus to exit. In the 1962 RSC
version, however, Luciana succumbed to Antipholus, giving him
her right hand in a waltz gesture (repeated in more legitimate
circumstances at 5.1.375–7) while her left hand caressed his hair.
Although she quickly removed her hand, aghast at herself, her
exit line was a helplessly loving acceptance of the situation. In Ian
Judge’s 1990 RSC production Luciana’s acceptance of Antipholus
was less passive. ‘I’ll fetch my sister to get her good will’ was a
spirited decision to face the music, Luciana having agreed to love
Antipholus. Her later recounting of the conversation to Adriana was
triumphant, not apologetic:
That love I begg’d for you [gleeful laugh], he begged of me.
First he did praise my beauty [gleeful laugh], then my speech. (4.2.12, 15)
In the 2005 Oxford production Luciana turned at the furthest stage
point of her exit only to mouth silently to Antipholus ‘I-Love-You’. In
Act 5 the Abbess touches a sore spot when she questions Adriana about
 The Place Name: Ephesus 181

the possibility of her husband’s ‘unlawful love’. The BBC close-up of

the Courtesan at this moment showed the rival suspected by Adriana.
However, in Adrian Noble’s production (1983), Adriana’s admission
that ‘some love . . . drew him oft from home’ (5.1.56) was accompanied
by a glare at Luciana. In Adriana’s eyes the submissive sister was not as
innocent as she appeared. In the 2005 Oxford production Adriana’s eyes
were accusatory and Luciana’s face guilty.
By Act 5, then, the identities of Adriana and Luciana are as
confused as those of the Antipholi. Adriana the independent meekly
submits to the Abbess’ rebukes, even though the Abbess’ claim (that
Adriana’s jealousy has caused her husband’s madness) is unfounded,
as Acts 1–4 show. Luciana the submissive objects vociferously on
behalf of her sister (5.1.87–8) and encourages Adriana to resist: ‘Why
bear you these rebukes and answer not?’ (5.1.89). In the play’s
conclusion the Antipholi are distinguished, returned to their separ-
ate identities, but their partners are not.
This duality seems to be deliberate. Throughout Errors we see
Adriana and Luciana trying to work out which type of Ephesian
woman to be (pagan or Christian, independent or submissive), and
experimenting with whether it is possible to be both. Can women play
‘two parts in one’, being both divine (goddess) and ‘diviner’ (witch)?
Shakespeare juxtaposes this adjective and noun in the play’s structural
centre, Act 3, Scene 2, where Antipholus’ romantic approaches to
Luciana are followed by Dromio’s narrative about her onomastic
relative, Luce. Luciana the goddess, ‘more than earth divine’, is
followed by Luce the ‘diviner’ (140); the advocate of wifely submission
in marriage, the woman who will be subservient to her husband, is
followed by a more assertive type of servant. But the scene begins with
the goddess sanctioning sin and ends with the witch seeking holy
marriage. This is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
Opposites can coexist, however, as the name Luce/Luciana im-
plies and as Adriana’s attentions to her ‘husband’ ’s body and soul
at 2.2.207–8 speciWcally show. And if in Errors Shakespeare can
182 The Place Name: Ephesus

combine the pagan and the Christian in Ephesus, why cannot the
women do so too?
In this duality Adriana resembles Lysistrata, that other independ-
ent heroine who staged a lock-out scene. Lysistrata’s lock-out tactic
was deliberate, Adriana’s unwitting, but the motive was the same:
domestic harmony. The women in Lysistrata do not want peace qua
peace but as a guarantor of normal domestic life: uninterrupted
market shopping, regular sexual relations. Adriana similarly regrets
the demise of domestic activities: carving, speaking, looking, touch-
ing (2.2.113–18). Like Adriana, although for a diVerent reason, Lysis-
trata has no reconciliation with a partner.39 Instead, in a dénouement
unusual in Greek drama, the divided chorus of old men and old
women come together, celebrating the resumption of interrupted
relations. In Lysistrata as in Errors it is the older couple(s) who are
depicted most harmoniously. Adriana is left dramatically in the cold
by Shakespeare, and perhaps by Antipholus; she and her husband
have some voyaging still to do.
If the ending seems inconclusive, the marital future uncertain, it
is not because of Adriana but because of her husband. Three of the
four main protagonists in Errors not only experience mistakes of
identity but initiate their own experiments with opposing and
complementary personalities, doubles, binaries, paradoxes. Anti-
pholus of Syracuse seeks his twin in order to make himself whole
again, but, before achieving this goal, he Wnds himself by losing
himself to Luciana. Adriana and Luciana synthesize two extremes of
female behaviour. Only Antipholus of Ephesus clings tenaciously to
his original identity (5.1.214–54). Act 5 provides the end of a journey
for all but him; it is now his turn to explore personality. Ephesian
Antipholus must now embark on a quest for self- and family identity
just as Syracusan Antipholus embarked in Act 1.40
The straying husband, the errant Antipholus of Ephesus, thus
becomes errant in a diVerent way: like his twin at the beginning of
the play, he is erraticus.41 He too may eventually unite opposites,
telling his wife ‘I am thee’ (3.2.64). In the spirit of doubling and
 The Place Name: Ephesus 183

repetition which is this play’s dominant mode, we may hope that

Adriana’s marriage, like that of her mother-in-law, will be a remar-
riage. But that is for the future. Adriana inhabits a world where the
thaumaturge is Pinch not Prospero, and the one magician—the
dramatist—who could give her (and us) a happy ending, declines
to do so. Although the play ends, as comedies should, with mar-
riage, Shakespeare leaves us with but the appearance of a happy
ending. Not all illusions are dispelled: Ephesus’ reputation for
duplicity is still in evidence. This play could not have happened in
Epidamnus.
 Epilogue
‘Virginia Woolf ?’ He [ James Joyce] smiled astutely. ‘An impressive
name . . . she married her wolWsh husband purely in order to change
her name. Virginia Stephens is not a name for an exploratory
authoress. I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness
of names. GeoVrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and
correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colly
Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was
very Percy and very Bysshe’.
( James Joyce quoted in Prokosch, Voices 26)
 notes

introduction
1. See also Anagnostopolous: Cratylus is the ‘earliest attempt to solve a perennial
problem about the relationship between the nature and structure of language
and the nature and structure of the world’ (‘The SigniWcance’ 319).
2. The argument about the yaks’ generic name applies equally to an indi-
vidual’s personal name: ‘though the name might be useful to others it
was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it
themselves and hence might as well dispense with it’. Cf. Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the Gnat asks Alice, ‘ ‘‘What’s the
use of their having names? . . . ’’ ‘‘No use to them,’’ said Alice; ‘‘but it’s
useful to the people that name them’’ ’ (149).

chapter 1
1. For the importance attached by all societies to names, see Lévi-Strauss;
Frazer ch. 22; Cassirer; Brown. For naming ceremonies see Quigley.
2. Both Herodotus (4. 184, Godley ii. 387) and Pliny (5. 8, Rackham ii. 251)
report on the same phenomenon, taking the Atlantes’ namelessness as
proof of their lack of civilization. Pliny, however, indicates that the tribe’s
namelessness may be a myth: ‘si credimus’. For the tale of the Atlantes
as a possible traveller’s tale, see Pulgram 150–1, and compare Homer’s
position in the Odyssey 8.552–4: ‘For no one, whether of low or high
degree, goes nameless once he has come into the world; everybody is
named by his parents the moment he is born’ (cited by Pulgram). In
Macbeth the witches’ malevolent activity is ‘a deed without a name’: as
D. J. Gordon observes (54) ‘what is nameless is monstrous’. Albany in King
Lear concurs with Gordon. He addresses Goneril as ‘Thou worse than any
name’ (5.3.159).
3. The Grimm brothers’ Rumpelstilzchen is a failed Odysseus. A poor
miller tells the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold (which
186 Notes

she can’t) and the king promises to marry her if this is true. Rumpel-
stilzchen helps the despairing girl who, in exchange, promises him her
Wrst-born child. A year later Rumpelstilzchen comes to claim the child
but takes pity on the distraught queen: if she can Wnd out his name
within three days she can keep her child. After two days in which a
messenger searches and enquires fruitlessly, he comes across a little man
jumping and singing ‘Rumpelstilzchen is my name’. The queen’s tragedy
is averted and a furious Rumpelstilzchen destroys himself. This tale
illustrates the equation between name and identity (Rumpelstilzchen is
vulnerable when his name is known).
4. For an analogous position see Roche on Mortimer’s wife in 1 Henry 4:
‘since her lines are not in English, she is denied a name’ (141).
5. This exchange appears in the Wlm but not in the novel (compare the
dialogue in The Pianist 177).
6. His use of Nicodemus as a verb indicates the correlation between name
and behaviour. Shakespeare employs the same tactic for extreme behav-
iours: ‘Petruchio is Kated’ (TS 3.2.245); ‘out-Herods Herod’ (Ham. 3.2.14),
‘I would not have been so Wdius’d’ (Cor. 2.1.130–1).
7. For Bacon’s position on words versus things see Vickers, ‘Bacon and
Rhetoric’.
8. This belief in surrogationalism (that words are surrogates for things) is
not without problems when pressed to its logical extreme, for words
such as fairies, Santa Claus, or unicorn should not be possible, having no
prior object to describe (Earle 154). Neither in the Bible, nor in Plato’s
Cratylus, does anyone invent a name for something which does not yet
exist (Harris and Taylor 38).
9. Cf. Judith Butler: ‘Power is understood on the model of the divine power
of naming, where to utter is to create the eVect uttered’ (32). The
Treason Act of 1534, which deWned treasonous speech as treasonous
action (Burrow, ‘Sixteenth Century’ 16), clearly understands the illocu-
tionary power of speech. For recent American legislation on racist
speech as racist action see Butler 52–69.
10. For the woman’s loss of name and self in marriage, see T.E.: ‘man and
wife are one person: . . . when a small brook or little rivulet incorpor-
ateth with Rhodanus [the river Rhone], Humber, or Thames, the poor
rivulet loseth her name; it is carried and recarried with the new associ-
ate; it beareth no sway. . . . A woman as soon as she is married . . . hath
lost her stream’ (125).
 Notes 187

11. On Spenser as a structuralist, with The Faerie Queene constantly demand-

ing that its readers adjudicate diVerence, sameness, oneness, and duality,
see Gareth Roberts 12–47.
12. On naming in Crusoe see Novak ‘Defoe’ 51 and ‘Friday’ passim. In her poem
Crusoe Elizabeth Bishop investigates the relation among words, things, and
meaning, using Crusoe as a type of the writer (see Ferry ‘Crusoe’). The
relation between the name-giver and the writer has long been noted.
Classical and early modern authors viewed ‘metaphor-making . . . as the
bestowing of a new name’ (Ferry, Art 145). Emerson writes, ‘The poet is the
Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appear-
ance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name
and not another’s’ (Emerson, ‘The Poet’ in Collected 13).
13. Critics frequently note the relationship between naming, authorship, and
patriarchy as in Amy Pawl’s analysis of Fanny Burney’s Evelina: ‘An
author is one who names and . . . that power ultimately belongs to
[Burney’s] father or to any of the father Wgures . . . in her novel. Burney’s
trepidation about the role of author is not wholly of her own making, of
course: Genesis shows that naming is a male prerogative’ (Pawl 298). In
D. J. Enright’s Paradise Illustrated Eve embraces the task of naming with
results totally diVerent from those of Adam:
‘Lady’s Wnger’, said Eve.
‘Lady’s smock.
Lady’s slipper.
Lady’s tresses . . . ’
...
‘Lily.
Rose.
Violet.
Daisy.
Poppy’.
...
‘She’s better at names than you were’,
The Lord observed.
‘They all sound womanish to me’,
Said Adam nettled. (Enright 14–15)
Of course the results are ‘womanish’: the world and the word now match
the woman’s view.
14. Harry Berger says that the syphogrants’ ‘older names and natures persist
in the reformed language’ (288; my emphasis); his expansive inference is
188 Notes

probably correct, but it is more than Hythloday asserts. On the problems

of naming in Utopia see Romm.
15. For the eVect of this nomenclature in conWrming Bertram as a juvenile,
see Lower, 239–46.
16. The oft-cited exception to the arbitrary nature of signiWcation is ono-
matopoeia (name-maker), where words match sounds. However it is
noticeable that onomatopoeia is not aVected by foreign languages—
susurrer and chuchoter in French (to whisper) are as onomatopoeic as
whisper is in English, for example—and thus supports a conventional
rather than motivated theory of language.
17. Cf. Anagnostopolous: ‘for Plato the term ‘‘name’’ seems to cut across all
grammatical distinctions’ (‘Plato’s Cratylus’ 693).
18. This is a Wtting conclusion to a life in which language, names, and
identity were intertwined: ‘Greek timè, or timos, means both ‘‘personal
honor’’ and ‘‘value’’, the price of a thing. And the noun timorai means
both ‘‘assistance’’ and ‘‘vengeance’’. Timon, as it were, is exploring the
etymology of his own name’ (Kermode in G. B. Evans (ed.), 1443).
19. Logos and onoma certainly exist as separate words, but Hare’s (unex-
plained) point may be that there is an overlap in their meanings, hence
his conclusion that ‘it was easy for Plato to suppose that the way in
which a word like ‘‘man’’ got its meaning was the same as that in which a
proper name like ‘‘Meno’’ got its meaning’ (33). Modern German reveals
the common ground of name and noun by capitalizing both.
20. Cf. Sidney’s observation in Apology for Poetry (108) about the
development of Terence’s Gnatho and Chaucer’s Pandar from names
to nouns.
21. David Schalkwyk illustrates both the linguistic/ontological dilemma of
language, and the interface between proper name and noun, in relation
to the word apartheid. To change this name, as the South African
government proposed, to ‘plural democracy’, ‘multinational develop-
ment’, or ‘separate development’, is manifestly not to change the thing.
Furthermore, although apartheid is a common noun, and hence trans-
latable from Afrikaans into other languages, the world has refused to
translate it. Apartheid is used as a proper name (176–7). On the (non)-
translation of proper names see Pulgram 191: ‘A true translation neither
necessitates nor aims at the loss or eradication of the original. In this
sense, then, proper names are not as a rule translated.’ W. H. Auden
reached the same conclusion via a metaphoric route: ‘Proper names are
poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable’ (267).
 Notes 189

22. Cf. Paradise Lost 10, 867–8 where Adam commands Eve, ‘Out of my
sight, thou serpent, that name best j BeWts thee with him leagued’
( because some commentators believed her name meant ‘serpent’; see
PL ed. Fowler 553).
23. Hence the importance traditionally attached to the curse: since name
equals identity, for an evil-wisher to traYc with the name was as
disastrous as a witch traYcking with the more material excrescences
of hair and nail clippings. Nicknames originated as a way of protecting
the real name (and thus the individual). For a contemporary variant of
protection see Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar: ‘ ‘‘My name’s Elly Higginbo-
tham’’, I said. ‘‘I come from Chicago’’. After that I felt safer. I didn’t want
anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real
name and coming from Boston’ (11). Rumpelstilzchen (n. 3) illustrates the
danger of letting someone know your name.
24. Puns arise when words compete for contexts, or invoke two contexts at
once. Webster exploits the dual associations of pippin in The White Devil
5.6.109.
25. The bond between godparent and godchild was strong, for, in an age of
short life-expectancy, godparents were replacement parents. ‘Children
would ask their godparents’ blessing whenever meeting them, much as
they did of their parents every morning and evening’ (Singman and
McLean 37). There is thus considerable logic in Folio King Lear’s attribu-
tion of the play’s last speech to Edgar (as opposed to the Quarto’s
attribution to Albany), who survives Lear’s three natural children.
(There is, incidentally, considerable illogic in referring to a godfather in
a play set in non/pre-Christian Britain but the anachronism is typical of
Shakespearean practice.)
26. This is how ‘parson’ is used by Samuel Richardson in Clarissa when
Lovelace boasts of his facility in giving pet love-names: ‘No parson ever
gave more real names than I have given Wctitious one’ (letter V, iii. 61).
27. The same sense of ‘appropriate’ animal names obtains today. I am surely
not the only reader to have been surprised to Wnd that ‘Richard Parker’
in Yann Martell’s The Life of Pi was the name of a tiger.
28. And are much more common in the USA than in Great Britain (Petrie 12).
29. Psychologists of naming point out that, whereas names often used to be
descriptive (as in surnames), in today’s culture only nicknames fulWl that
function.
30. On the etymology of Robert cf. Camden K3r, p. 69, and Lyford P1v.
190 Notes

31. In the same year Field printed a French grammar (STC 6763; A Treatise for
Declining of Verbs) by the French teacher Claudius Hollyband, who signed
himself Claude de Sainsliens in the prefatory material. Frenchifying his
name was a habit for Hollyband (see e.g. STC 6738 in 1576). Franklin
Williams (320) identiWes Field’s foreign alias as Italian; the phrase is, in fact,
identical in Italian and Spanish but the Spanish context of the title-page
suggests that Field intended it as Spanish, as does his earlier use of the
identical imprint in the Spanish New Testament (STC 2959). The STC
number cited by Williams for Catholico Reformado (24580) should be 19741.
32. Thus, a French text of 1600 and another of 1602 were printed ‘A Londres:
Par Richard Field, demeurant aux Black-Frieres, 1600 (STC 15451 and STC
15449); a 1624 translation of Camden’s Annals came ‘de l’imprimerie de
Richard Field’ (STC 4502). In 1595 his Latin edition of Calvin read
‘Londini: In aedibus Richard Field’ (STC 4372.5), and his 1603 edition of
Cicero read ‘Londini: apud Robertum Dexter in Cœmeterio D. Pauli ad
insigne Serpentis ænei, 1603’ (STC 5320). His name receives full transla-
tion only in Spanish texts (three times) but in his 1611 Latin edition of
Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini he gave his Wrst name and his surname an
appelativum and a translation respectively. The imprint reads: ‘Cosmo-
poli [i.e. At London]: apud Theophilum [by lover of God] Pratum
[Meadow i.e. Field] anno 1611’ (STC 25596.5). One wonders whether
Field’s fondness for printing and publishing religious material occa-
sioned the choice of Wrst name here. There is, of course, no Latin
equivalent for Richard, which is a name of Germanic origin. If the
view of an Elizabethan minister in Northamptonshire that Richard was
‘not a godly name’ (Cressy 162) was widespread, then Field’s choice of
Theophilus was a pointed rejoinder.
33. The passage is noteworthy for its insistent interest in names. Lucius
urges Imogen: ‘Say his name, good friend.’ After du Champ is named,
Lucius then asks the page his name, responding etymologically to the
disguised Imogen’s identiWcation of herself as the loyal page Fidele:
‘Thou dost approve thyself the very same; j Thy name well Wts thy
faith; thy faith thy name’ (4.2.380–1). On names in Cymbeline see Pitcher.
One might note the irony whereby this play about names makes popular
a non-existent girl’s name: Imogen is thought to be a mistake (by
Shakespeare or the compositor) for Holinshed’s Innogen. (Shakespeare
uses Innogen elsewhere—she appears as a ghost character in Much Ado.)
However, Ros King has recently argued that Imogen may not be an
 Notes 191

error: the form appears in Holinshed, in the index to vol. i of the 1586
edition of his Chronicles (King 72).
34. Joseph Hall similarly entered into dialogue with Marston when, in his
epigram on the satirist, he wrote that mad dogs were cured by castration
(‘by cutting & kinsing’). When Marston reprinted this epigram in the second
edition of The Scourge of Villainy, he added a marginal note to the reader:
‘*Mark the witty allusion to my name’ (Marston, Poems 165; Ruthven 23).
35. The tradition lives on. At Magdalen College, Oxford, the annual Perrot
Oration, written and delivered in Latin by a student, summarizes the
year’s events in the College. It is rooted in puns on fellows’ names (puns
which must work in English and in Latin). Thus Susan Hitch appears as
Susanna Impedimentum; much is made of a Senior Bursar named
Charles Young; and the promotion of the ambulatory Ralph Walker to
Chair of the Humanities Division is ironically noted (examples from
Lucian Holland, Oratio Perrotiana, 2000).
36. In The Praise of Folly Erasmus satirizes a theologian who interpreted the
three declensions of Jesu (us, -um, -u) as indicating (collectively) the
trinity and (individually) sum, middle, and ultimate (64–5).
37. In the seventeenth century John Oldham wrote ‘A Satire’ in which ‘The
Person of Spenser is brought in, Dissuading the Author from the Study
of Poetry’. Despite strict adherence to his Juvenalian satiric model,
Oldham imitates Spenser in one important regard: ‘he delays naming
Spenser’s ghost, in the manner of the Faerie Queene itself ’ (Alastair
Fowler, ‘Genre’ 94).
38. Aristophanes’ practice is in marked contrast to his tragedian counter-
parts who stress character names well before their entries (Olson 305).
For Shakespeare’s habit of naming characters well in advance see Lower.
In 1694 Lawrence Echard complained that ‘one great Fault common to
many of our Plays is, that an Actor’s name, Quality or Business is scarce
ever known till a good while after his appearance; which must needs
make the Audience at a great Loss, and the Play hard to understand’.
The audience is thus ‘forc[ed] to carry Books with ’em to the Play-house
to know who comes in, and who goes out’ (xiii).
39. See Melchiori, ed. 2H4 2.4.89–92 n. for explanation of the several sign-
iWcations of the pun.
40. The classical Autolycus was the son of Mercury, god of thieves. In
Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we read that Chione
bore to Mercury ‘a sonne that hyght Autolychus, who provde a wyly
pye’ (Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid 283).
192 Notes

41. For the aptness of the name Diana see Ch. 3.

42. Ernst Pulgram points out, however, that although we don’t expect personal
names to ‘mean’ anything any more (‘because of the semantic intranspar-
ency of names in several vernaculars’), we do expect foreign names to be
translatable and hence to have meaning (155). For examples of translators’
attempts to deal with names (e.g. Humpty Dumpty) see Manini 162.
43. In the RSC production of Richard 2 at The Other Place in 2000, directed by
Stephen Pimlott, the set featured a coYn-sized and coYn-shaped mound
of earth which was variously draped with an English Xag and dug up.
44. In the 2000 RSC production this sequence of lines was used to begin
several scenes, spoken by diVerent characters. Richard’s predicament
was a universal linguistic predicament.
45. For discussions of postlapsarian language in Richard 2 see Weidhorn,
‘Relation’ 310–12; Gordon 217; Joseph Porter 12–19.
46. On economic naming systems and the devaluing of currency in Eliza-
bethan England see Burnett 294, and Foucault, Order 169, 172, 176.
Chapter 1 of William Carroll’s Great Feast of Language deals illuminat-
ingly with words and exchange in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
47. Anne Barton notes that in the play’s last moments Lodovico ‘tries to give
[Othello] back his name—‘O thou, Othello, that was once so good’
(291)—and Cassio, his lost occupation—‘Dear general, I never gave you
cause’ (299) (Names 129). Lucking also writes persuasively about the way
in which ‘Iago’s attack on meaning—in particular on the meaning of
personal names—is an attack on identity as well’ (‘Othello’ 118). On name
in Othello see also Doran.
48. For an extended discussion see GriYn.
49. Thus, I have to take exception to Coleridge’s view of Iago’s ‘motiveless
malignancy’; racism is its own motive.
50. In a brilliant analysis of slander in the play Kenneth Gross illustrates the
way in which words and material objects are ‘torn apart’ (829). Much of
what he says about slander also applies to names, and to language
generally. Othello’s lament that ‘we can call these delicate creatures
ours, j And not their appetites’ (3.3.269–70) is as much a linguistic lament
as sexual. The things in which we repose trust—Desdemona, language,
names—can be made to mean diVerently in others’ mouths, in other
contexts as Menenius realizes among the Volscians in Coriolanus when he
is told ‘The virtue of your name j Is not here passable’ (5.2.12–13). When
he departs, the soldiers mock his onomastic conWdence: ‘Now, sir, is
your name Menenius? j ’Tis a spell, you see, of much power’ (5.2.95–6).
 Notes 193

chapter 2
1. Nonetheless, editorial preference for Q1’s reading shows the diYculty of
Juliet’s position that ideas can be divorced from words. Earlier editors’
promotion of the Q1 reading into their Q2 copy-text of Romeo and Juliet
(see the editions of H. H. Furness (1899), Edward Dowden (1900), Peter
Alexander (1951), John Dover Wilson (1955)) illustrates locally and textually
the point the play makes largely and philosophically: names matter. Oscar
Wilde satirizes such views in The Importance of Being Earnest (1, 394–9)
when Gwendolen declares, ‘My ideal has always been to love someone of
the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires
absolute conWdence. The moment Algernon Wrst mentioned to me that
he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you.’
2. This problem did not exist during Romeo’s infatuation with that other
Capulet, Rosaline, as courtly love does not move towards marriage.
3. The Norton-Oxford edition emends from Q1 here. Q1 reads ‘Whats Moun-
tague? It is nor hand nor foote, j Nor arme, nor face, nor any other part.’ Q2
reads ‘Whats Mountague? it is nor hand nor foote, j Nor arme nor face, o be
some other name j Belonging to a man.’ See Wells and Taylor, Textual
Companion 294 (2.1.83–4/814–15) for analysis of the alternatives.
4. For a contemporary refraction of Cinna’s predicament, see Orson Welles’
Julius Caesar (1937). In his production Caesar was a Hitler Wgure and the
actor who played Cinna observed that Cinna’s death ‘symbolized what
was happening in the world [at the time], if your name was Greenburg
and even if you weren’t Jewish’ (Welles 105–6).
5. Cf. The Two Gentlemen of Verona where Julia reassembles the torn pieces of
Proteus’s love-letter: ‘here is writ ‘‘love-wounded Proteus’’. j Poor wounded
name: my bosom as a bed j Shall lodge thee till thy wound be throughly
heal’d’ (1.2.110–12). In The Rape of Lucrece Collatine utters the name Tarquin
‘through his teeth, as if the name he tore’ (RL 1786–7). In Othello, a play very
much concerned with names (Barton Names, Watson, Gross) language itself
becomes material: Othello speaks with ‘a bombast circumstance j Horribly
stuVed with epithets of war’ (1.1.12–13).
6. John Stuart Mill makes a similar point in ‘Of Names’: ‘A town may have
been named Dartmouth, because it is situated at the mouth of the Dart.
But it is no part of the signiWcation of . . . the word Dartmouth, to be
situated at the mouth of the Dart. If sand should choke up the mouth of
the river . . . the name of the town would not necessarily be changed’
(Hornish 135).
194 Notes

7. This situation is replayed less tenderly in Twelfth Night 1.5.133–8, where

Malvolio misjudges the tone required. Olivia desires information: ‘What
kind o’ man is he? . . . What manner of man? . . . Of what personage and
years is he?’ Malvolio equivocates in an attempt at Feste-style wit: ‘Of
very ill manner.’ In his conversation with the gravedigger in Hamlet 5.1,
Hamlet realizes that he must resort to plain speaking if communication
is to be successful: ‘We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo
us’ (lines 126–7).
8. For interesting analyses of Mercutio’s distinction between art and nature,
see Estrin and Everett.
9. Ed Snow contrasts this with Romeo’s kinetic energy and static images
(170–5).
10. David Lucking narrows this to a tragedy of literacy. It is, as he points out,
Romeo’s ability to read that leads him to the Capulet feast (‘ ‘‘Balcony’’
Scene’). However, failure to rely on the written word (the letter from
Friar Lawrence) is also responsible for disaster: Romeo’s trust in oral
report brings him from Mantua to the Capulet vault in Verona (Whittier
38). Pierre Iselin argues (in a position that, as will become apparent,
I agree with entirely) that the play is a tragedy of naming. For an analysis
of the play as a debate about reference see William N. West.
11. The paradoxes in this paragraph are indebted to Steiner; White; Ward-
haugh; Edwards; Grillo; G. A. Wells; Richard Bailey; Grosjean; Romaine.
12. Literary examples of the power of silence include Chaucer’s Griselda,
where Griselda’s uncomplaining acquiescence to Walter’s repeated
cruelty becomes increasingly subversive (see Hansen 188–207), and Shake-
speare’s French princess in Henry 5, where Katherine’s apparently benign
incomprehension forces Henry into French.
13. It is no coincidence that the ‘savage’ Caliban has one of the most poetic
speeches in The Tempest; and, in a line richly aware of the Janus-like
qualities of language, he declares ‘You taught me language, and my proWt
on’t j Is I know how to curse’ (1.2.366).
14. In a conXation of communicative practice with linguistic practice we
ascribe ‘language’ to the body, as Romeo does when he sees the silent
Juliet: ‘her eye discourses, I will answer it’. Here Romeo interprets
Juliet’s ocular discourse correctly; but the diYculty inherent in all
communication is seen when Ulysses arrogantly glosses Cressida’s
body language as sexual invitation:
There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip;
Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out
 Notes 195

At every joint and motive of her body.

(Troilus and Cressida 4.6.56–8)
15. As the British army and the Irish resistance resort to violent confronta-
tion in the play’s tragic ending, Sarah relapses into dumbness and Nellie
Ruadh’s baby is pronounced dead.
16. A similar project of renaming—this time in the form of surnames—took
place in Austria in 1816, for a census. The census compiler records ‘[T]he
confusion must not last. The names must be made ready for the parish
records; surnames must be invented.’ He concludes triumphantly, ‘The
new names are Wnding favor, and whoever bears one holds his head
higher and is more hopeful, prouder than he has been before. Now he
knows who he is’ (cited in Pulgram 164, 165, my emphasis).
17. For interesting discussions of this production see Hodgdon, ‘Looking for
Mr Shakespeare’ and Salter.
18. Drifting over the set’s empty road, it also evoked the Wlm’s opening shot
and the parched conditions (Texan desert, Canadian prairie, Veronese
square) blamed by Benvolio for the feuding families’ public brawl in 3.1.
19. The set subtly reiWed another linguistic contrast in the play: the language
of speed versus the language of caution. Most of Verona is hasty and
impatient: Mercutio resists Benvolio’s advice in 3.1 to retreat from the
midday sun and potential confrontation with the Capulets; Juliet laments
her elderly Nurse’s slowness as love-messenger (2.4), and in 3.2 she chafes
at the sun’s measured progress across the heavens which delays dusk,
Romeo, and her wedding night. By conspicuous contrast, Friar Laurence
aphoristically counsels caution: ‘Wisely and slow. They stumble that run
fast’; ‘Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow’ (2.2.94; 2.5.15). Although the
production featured fast vehicles throughout (the opening quarrel, for
example, was staged as a game of ‘highway chicken’ with the Capulet and
Montague servants bumping each other’s fenders in head-on confronta-
tion), Friar Laurence, alone of all the characters, rode a bicycle. Further-
more, his herb garden was set in the rusted body of a discarded car,
propped awry in the earth, with plants sprouting from the wheel-less hubs
and empty door frames. Was this a relic of Friar Laurence’s more reckless
days, now rejected? A monument to Verona’s rash behaviour? Whatever
its source, the defunct car served as a permanent visual reminder that
Friar Laurence did not speak Verona’s dangerous language of speed.
20. In aube tradition the lady has a dialogue about the time of day with the
watchman, or other oYcial, who alerts her to the danger of dawn
(Kaske 167–79).
196 Notes

21. Such reciprocity in love makes logical sense of Juliet’s mixed metaphor in
3.2.26–8 where she is both subject and object, buyer and seller. It is very
diVerent from the superWcially similar scene of language exchange in The
Taming of the Shrew (4.5) where Petruchio makes all the demands and
Katherine all the concessions.
22. Eliot was a Warwickshire man, a near-contemporary of Shakespeare,
and Lever speculates on the possibility that he and Shakespeare may
have known each other. Whether the men were acquainted or not,
it seems more than probable that Shakespeare was reading Eliot in
1593–4—for instance, towards its conclusion (u4r–x1r, pp. 159–61), the
dialogue oVers a bathetic descent from poetic lyricism to a Mercutian-
style ‘satire on the Petrarchan lover in which all the stock conceits of
the contemporary sonnet craze are lumped together’ (Lever 83).
23. To twenty-Wrst-century readers, Romeo’s code-switching, like Morti-
mer’s intention of learning Welsh, might seem an encouraging example
of linguistic and sexual equality. But neither of these characters is
presented in ways that invite emulation. Romeo realizes that his love
for Juliet has made him ‘eVeminate’: he turns the other cheek, prefers
peace to Wghting, love to hate, and consequently, though unintentionally,
causes the death of his friend Mercutio. (Critics are often very hard on
Romeo; see e.g. Snow.) Mortimer is uninterested in politics, tardy in
warfare, paciWst and passive rather than militarily aggressive, preferring
to linger in connubial conference rather than to engage enthusiastically
with the enemy. In the early modern period foreign languages were
traditionally viewed as feminine languages in contrast to the rugged
masculinity of English; this was especially true of French (see Steinsaltz
318–19 and Fleming). Romeo’s desire to speak his wife’s language in a
production in which her language is French doubly eVeminizes him.
24. In fact, the play is not about the Irish language so much it is about the
relationship between language and culture; see Friel, ‘Extracts’ 58. It is
also, as Friel points out, about the relationship between two cultures: ‘It
would be better if the English treated the Irish as a genuinely foreign
people, which they are, and not as resident clowns.’
25. In a Globe and Mail article on bilingualism, Victor Goldblum, Canada’s
OYcial Language Commissioner, observed: ‘Québec’s sense of collective
destiny continues to clash with the rest of Canada’s strong attachment to
individual freedoms.’ Thus, ‘even if we’re bilingual and can communicate
with one another we’re . . . not speaking the same language when we talk
about individual and collective interests’ (my emphasis). See Campbell
 Notes 197

D3. Thus, in Canada and Ireland, as elsewhere, it is cultural heritage

rather than language that divides; but language inevitably embodies
cultural heritage.
26. On Melville’s interest in naming see Levin 58: ‘Melville employed . . .
Scriptural names—Ishmael, Ahab—to convey the eVect of preWguration,
the feeling that all this has happened before and will inevitably happen
again.’ The American cartoonist, Gary Larson, is consistently interested
in names. A cartoon of Melville struggling with his Wrst drafts reads as
follows: ‘moby dick. Chapter 1. Call me Bill. Call me Al. Call me Larry.
Call me Roger. Call me Warren.’
27. The reconstructed text of the Norton/Oxford Shakespeare reads ‘Is it no
more to be your daughter than to say my mother’s name?’ (21.195–6).
28. On the concept of purity in names see Pulgram 193–4 (who quotes
Chomsky), and Kermode 202.

chapter 3
1. See McLeod ‘Un Editing’; ‘Information’; ‘Fiat Flux’; ‘Angels’.
2. But not always: Desdemon at F TLN 3266 gives a line of dialogue with
four iambic feet; the Q Desdemona (M1r) gives an iambic line of four and
a half feet, with a spondee in the third foot.
3. For Helen see 103, 104, 153; for Helena see 74, 88.
4. For Helen see 1.1.208; 2.2.144; 3.2.137, 172, 251; 4.1.160; for Helena see
1.1.180; 2.2.104, 113; 3.2.111, 166, 187, 246; 4.1.130, 171. These references are
not exhaustive but their distribution of forms is representative. Helen
and Helena are always used in close proximity; neither form dominates
in any given scene.
5. Agnes Latham’s note in the Arden 2 edition of As You Like It (3.2.140)
expresses an anachronistically twentieth-century sensibility: ‘few if any
of Shakespeare’s audience would pick up the reference and know that he
was saying Rosalind was as beautiful as Helen but more chaste’.
6. ‘After the Council of Trent, the Church declared that children should be
named after canonized saints, so that those saints might act as models
and as special protectors and advocates before God’. However, ‘most
people were called after saints well before this. The Church was merely
conWrming the practice’ (Wilson 191, 192). As late as the eighteenth
century Fielding could comment of Bridget Allworthy in Tom Jones:
‘Her conversation was so pure, her looks so sage, and her whole
198 Notes

deportment so grave and solemn, that she seemed to deserve the name
of saint equally with her namesake’ (76).
7. I say ‘the Shakespeare canon’ as opposed to ‘Shakespeare’ since this
scene is attributed by the Oxford editors to Nashe (candidates proVered
by others include Greene and Peele).
8. On Hell and Helen see J. Roberts, Wild 145–7.
9. The author of a book on onomastics can scarcely fail to remark the
appositeness of a quotation about apples coming from a critic called
Pippin.
10. However, my survey of parish records in England in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries does not reveal any obvious or widespread avoid-
ance of the name Helen.
11. The name ‘Helen’ and its variants (Helena, Ellen) consistently appear in
the top Wfty names for girls in England, Wales, and the USA (Dunkling
45–7).
12. It is a short step from here to nouns such as doll (originally a hypocoristic
of Dorothy) and marionette (from Mary or Marie). As we saw in Ch. 1, to
become an eponym is a striking act of unnaming.
13. King Minos of Crete received an annual tribute from Athens of seven
young men and seven young women whom he threw to the Minotaur (a
monster with a bull’s head and a man’s body) as a living sacriWce.
Discontent with this arrangement, the Athenians soon protested; The-
seus volunteered himself as a victim. King Minos agreed, however, that if
anyone succeeded in killing the Minotaur the potential victims could
return to Athens. The Minotaur was housed in a huge palace (the
Labyrinth) which was such a maze of rooms and corridors that only
the architect could Wnd his way out of it. When one of Minos’ daughters,
Ariadne, fell in love with Theseus she gave him a ball of thread with
which he could Wnd his way out of the labyrinth once he had killed the
Minotaur at its centre. On the signiWcance of Bottom’s name see Stroup,
Willson, and Peter Holland.
14. For further possibilities see D’Orsay Pearson 278.
15. One cannot fail to recall Aristotle’s view that tyrants are ruined once
they rape and violate (Politics 1311a, 1314b; cf. Jed 3).
16. The complete story is recounted in Plutarch 44–7.
17. It is his presentation of her as a minor which enables Trussell to present
her as a victim; most other complaint poetry presents her as a penitent
whore (Catty 68).
18. See e.g. Rudd, and Bate, Ovid 130–46.
 Notes 199

19. Technically Helen was only semi-divine, the oVspring of a mortal and a
god.
20. See Elizabeth Fowler 59–65 and Levine, passim.
21. Jocelyn Catty points out that in the Faerie Queene, for both Acrasia and
Busyrane, ‘enchantment is a substitute for physical force’ (82).
22. This theme was developed gratuitously in Robert Le Page’s production
at the National Theatre in 1992 where Puck raped the First Fairy in Act
2 Scene 1.
23. In a logic not untypical of cultural history, Helen is being punished
sexually for the crime of sex (she risks her virginity pursuing Demetrius
to the wood). See C. S. Lewis, ‘After Ten Years’, and Catty 84–6 on rape
as a punishment for ‘erring females’ in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
24. Titania’s reference may speciWcally reXect the ongoing conXict in
the Netherlands, and the famines and dearth of the mid-1590s (Sharpe
197–201).
25. Edward Rocklin describes an acting exercise in which students focused
their interpretation of 1.1 round one signiWcant prop: a volume of The
Laws of Athens (156–7).
26. In Kenneth Branagh’s production of 1990, Bottom was played by Richard
Briers as a star whose ego demanded that his colleagues perform
persuasion. Quince’s epithets were separated by long pauses in which
Quince (a Victorian actor-manager played by Branagh) assessed the
reaction, concerned that he had not yet secured the services of his
leading man. Bottom’s ‘well; I will undertake it’ was delivered with a
combination of reluctance and generous condescension as he apparently
yielded to an invitation which he had never intended to refuse.
27. The word is similarly inXected in Milton: ‘for Nature here j Wantoned as
in her prime’ (Paradise Lost V. 294–5). In Richard 2 Bolingbroke contem-
plates ‘[f ]our lagging winters and four wanton springs’ (1.3.214).
28. Respectively: 1.1.11, 12, 13, 14, 57, 67, 68, 68, 83, 86.
29. In Branagh’s production Snug distributed his business card to the audi-
ence not just revealing his name but promoting his joinery services: with
three weddings he was understandably anticipating much in the way of
home improvements.
30. In fact in the Quarto ‘wall’ is twice placed in italics (as are other proper
names) and in the Folio three times.
31. Almost all editions name the character Puck but the Oxford single-text
edition edited by Peter Holland, and the Norton Shakespeare (based on
the Oxford Complete Works) both name the character Robin Goodfellow.
200 Notes

The Quarto of 1600 and the 1623 Folio Xuctuate between Robin and Puck
in stage directions and speech preWxes (although they do not mix the two
within single scenic blocks). For example, Robin enters as Robin good-
fellow at F TLN 373–4 and is Rob. in speech preWxes; later he re-enters as
Pucke (TLN 627) and is Puck. or Pu. in speech preWxes.
32. Genesis does not specify the fruit but medieval European writers and
artists identiWed it as an apple, presumably to make the fruit familiar.
33. Helen probably originates as a vegetation or tree goddess, ‘the shining
one’ (Skutsch 188; Meagher 14–20). The importance of Mary in subse-
quent Christian tradition may be Christianity’s attempt to incorporate
the matriarchal aspect of pagan worship ( Jean Roberts, ‘Shades’ 52).
34. This episode may help us with the staging of Troilus and Cressida 1.2, in
which Cressida and Pandarus watch the Trojans returning after the day’s
battle. Pandarus identiWes the warriors for Cressida. It is a notoriously
diYcult scene to stage (like so many in this play). Is it a large, proces-
sional scene, the focus on the warriors? Or a small, intimate scene, the
focus on the conversation between uncle and niece? Given Cressida’s
position as a calque on Helen’s (see below), the scene must, I think,
belong to Cressida and Pandarus.
35. In his pair of sonnets ‘Menelaus and Helen’ Rupert Brooke boldly presents
Helen in old age, her beauty decayed. More daringly, C. S. Lewis’
unWnished short story, ‘After Ten Years’, presents Menelaus’ disappoint-
ment at the moment of regaining Helen: ‘He had never dreamed she
would be like this; never dreamed that the Xesh would have gathered
under her chin, that the face could be so plump and yet so drawn, that
there would be grey hair at her temples and wrinkles at the corners of her
eyes. Even her height was less than he remembered’ (134).
36. ‘We may discard the story of the blindness, either as sheer invention or
as a misunderstanding of his saying that he was blind and now saw the
truth’ (Skutsch 188).
37. For an extended and detailed analysis of the innovative nature of Helen
see Matthew Wright, passim.
38. The servant Litio in Gascoigne’s Supposes has a very Euripidean speech
when, faced with duplication of character, he considers the possibility of
the world containing more than one Philogano, Erostrato, Ferrara,
Sicilia, and Cathanea (4.4, Boas 316–17). Gascoigne’s acquaintance with
Euripides is well documented: he translated and published Jocasta (with
Francis Kinwelmershe) in 1566 (the same year as he published Supposes),
and he praises Euripides generally in A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573).
 Notes 201

39. Lock’s phrase refers to shadows in Walcott’s Omeros but his concise
summation is applicable to the Euripidean eidolon.
40. Numerous examples can be found on pp. 137, 140, 144, 154, 175, 188.
41. On Menelaus’ limited intellect see GriYth 37; Pippin 153.
42. Menenius makes the same mistake among the Volscians in Coriolanus 4.2.
43. The irony of Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, he points out, is
quintessentially Greek: Rome was ‘not an ironic culture’ (219).
44. See 191–2, 261–2, 294 (where The Phoenician Women is speciWed for study),
316, 348–9, 359–60, 417, and 422. The schools cited include Eton, St Paul’s,
Westminster, and Winchester.
45. I am grateful to Mark Bland for sharing this unpublished discovery
with me.
46. A list of texts and reference books bought for St Paul’s school in 1582–3
include ‘Euripides graeco-lat cum annotat. Stiblini et Brodaei’. This was
presumably the handsome 1562 Basle edition.
47. Raven 6; Armstrong 268, 289–90; on the book trade from Italy to
Southampton see Armstrong 275–6.
48. I am grateful to Gary Taylor for this information.
49. I am grateful to Kirsty Milne for this information.
50. For evidence that Shakespeare read Buchanan’s Latin work—he used
Pompae Deorum (published 1584) in Venus and Adonis and Othello—see
Baldwin 651–8.
51. Rhesus is popular in Cambridge inventories in dates before the (known)
existence of a separate publication. Leedham-Green speculates that ‘the
play enjoyed a brief and never to be repeated popularity as a teaching
text’ (i p. xxiii).
52. This is the spelling adopted in the Oxford Complete Works.
53. In one understudy’s rehearsal I witnessed for the 1981 RSC production
directed by Trevor Nunn, Philip Franks as Bertram thumbed through his
little black book (of addresses? conquests?) with a comic hesitation as he
tried to locate the name of today’s potential bed partner: ‘they told me
your name was . . . [pause, Xick, Xick, Wnds it, relief] Fontibell’.
54. Violenta appears once in a stage direction in Folio Twelfth Night at
TLN 461. This page and All’s Well That Ends Well were both set by
compositor B. Compositor B set All’s Well X1v (with Violenta at TLN
1603), then X6 (where Diana does not appear). Before completing All’s
Well (Y1 and Y1v) he set four formes of Twelfth Night. When he met the
Wrst stage direction ‘Enter Viola’ in his copy for Twelfth Night Y3v, he
presumably took it as an abbreviation for the name Violenta which he
202 Notes

had just set in All’s Well. He subsequently encountered Viola’s name in

the text of Twelfth Night and so never repeated the error (Turner 130). Of
Twelfth Night’s Violenta, Laurie Osborne comments ‘ ‘‘Violenta’’ is coin-
cidentally appropriate, appearing at the point in the play where Viola/
Cesario is at her/his most vehement and aggressive in terms of behav-
iour’ (15). Osborne’s comment illustrates the drive to onomastic legibil-
ity that motivates all readers, even in the case of a textual error. David
Daniell makes a similar point with greater textual authority when he
observes that Viola’s cross-dressed pseudonym, Cesario, means ‘little
Caesar’ (Julius Caesar 8). The Oxford Textual Companion places Julius
Caesar in 1599 and Twelfth Night in 1601.
55. The only production I have seen which comes close to supporting this
view was Trevor Nunn’s 1981 RSC production in which Cheryl Campbell
played Diana as if she belonged in the Moulin Rouge: standing on a table
with a rose between her teeth, swirling her skirts, and entertaining the
soldiers with song.
56. This phrase of Cressida’s occurs in a conversation with Pandarus. With
teasing exasperation Pandarus complains that he does not know ‘at what
ward’ Cressida lies; that is, he does not know what defensive position she
adopts. In reply, Cressida recounts the defensive tactics available to her.
First, she says, she can lie ‘upon my back, to defend my belly’ (1.2.260).
No editor before 1998 has glossed this perplexing phrase. In a note
exploring variant interpretations, David Bevington suggests (357) that
Cressida ‘may regard sexuality itself as a defence’. Lorraine Helms is less
tentative and more explicit. Cressida will ‘accept concubinage to avoid
rape’. In other words, ‘surrender becomes her last line of defense’ (38).
57. Cressida in Troilus and Cressida is recuperated both in her own right and
as a reXection of the Helen of Troy story; Isabella in Measure for Measure
oVers an alternative to the story of Lucrece (as a novice nun Isabella is
professionally equipped to become a martyr, but this is a step she
resolutely refuses to take); and Helen of Troy is revised again in All’s
Well that Ends Well where, unhistorically rejected, the heroine places
Bertram in the role of adored and pursued mythic creature.
58. In a later reworking of the Lucrece myth, Thomas Heywood’s play The Rape
of Lucrece, Valerius similarly takes pleasure from the delay caused by denial:
That crafty girl can please me best
That no, for yea, can say,
And every wanton willing kiss
Can season with a nay. (2.3, p. 361)
 Notes 203

59. On Helen and weaving, see Blundell; Bergren. On weaving generally see
Cunningham.
60. The Riverside editor speculates that in revising the play Shakespeare
transferred to Pistol business and lines originally given to FalstaV, but
failed to alter FalstaV’s Doll to Pistol’s Nell (‘Note on the text’ 972).
61. The issue of consent had been raised earlier: in a statute of 1555; in Sir
William Staunford’s Exposition (1567); in William Lambard’s Eirenarcha
(1588), 257; and it continued to occupy Michael Dalton in The Country
Justice (1618) and T.E. in The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632). For
helpful discussions of literature in relation to the law on this topic—and
the enduring imprecision, and the apparent tautology and contradiction,
of terminology—see B. Baines; Walker; Garrett; Catty; Belsey; Porter
217; Brownmiller; Wynne-Davies.

chapter 4
1. See 2.1.62; 1.1.52; 2.1.167; 1.2.129–30; 3.2.29; 1.1.66; 2.1.209; 1.2.196; 3.2.19;
3.2.92; 3.2.157.
2. Cressida is Cressid thirty-two times in Troilus and Cressida (she is Cressida
on ten occasions) but this is a diVerent case: Cressid seems to have been
used as often as Cressida in the period. In texts printed between 1576 and
1632 Cressid is used twenty-one times, Cressida twenty-six times (these
Wgures are skewed by Heywood’s preference for Cressida in The Iron Age:
eleven times over three uses of Cressid; however Whetstone’s eight uses
of Cressid comes close to evening things out). I have noted Cressid in the
following texts (bracketed dates are those of Wrst publication): George
Whetstone, The Rock of Regard (1576); George Pettie, The Palace of Pleasure
(1576); Thomas Proctor, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578);
Anon. (a student in Cambridge); A Poor Knight his Palace of Private Pleasures
(1579); Austin Saker, Narbonus: The Labyrinth of Liberty (1580); Robert
Greene, Arbosto (1589); Thomas Heywood, Troia Britannica (1609); Shake-
speare, Troilus and Cressida (1609); Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (1632).
For Cressida in the same period see: Robert Greene, Euphues his Censure to
Philautus (1587); Tully’s Love (1589); Greene’s Mourning Garment (1590);
Greene’s Never Too Late (1590); Richard Johnson, The Seven Champions of
Christendom (1596); Thomas Heywood, Troia Britannica (1609); Shake-
speare, Troilus and Cressida (1609); Richard Johnson, A Crown Garland of
Golden Roses (1612); Anon. The Life and Death of Hector (1614); Robert
Greene, Alcida: Greene’s Metamorphosis (1617); Richard Braithwait, Nature’s
204 Notes

Embassy (1621); John Hagthorpe, Visiones Rerum (1623); and Thomas Heywood,
The Iron Age (1632).
3. As I have done elsewhere: see ‘ ‘‘Household Kates’’ ’.
4. I am grateful to Emma Smith for sharing this unpublished information
with me.
5. Reinhartz is using anonymity in its conventional sense here; her book is
about unnamed characters in the Bible. However, her work is inXuenced
by that of Natanson and her observation in this sentence can be usefully
applied to Natanson’s concept of anonymity, and to my extension of it.
(Indeed her discussion often makes this transition for us, sliding between
the literal and the conceptual.)
6. In her forthcoming Arden 3 edition of the play Barbara Hodgdon leaves
intact the F stage direction for Petruchio’s unaccompanied exit at TLN
2747.
7. For Hotspur and Henry 5’s resemblance to Petruchio, see Maguire,
‘ ‘‘Household Kates’’ ’.
8. The metrically convenient variant ‘Katherina’ is occasionally used; how-
ever, Katherine never refers to herself in this form. Stanley Wells points
out that Katherina, although apparently authentically Italian, is in fact
recorded in medieval English (Wells and Taylor 171).
9. ‘And besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John’ (The Importance of
Being Earnest 1. 423–4).
10. Elsewhere in the play we note the use of abbreviated forms for servants
in a sentence where proper names function generically as common
nouns, reducing the servants further to the realm of literal anonymity:
‘Be the Jacks fair within, the Gills fair without?’ queries Grumio at
4.1.49–50. The homogenized world of service is further highlighted in
a telling exchange between Grumio and the servants at 4.1.106 V.
Whereas four of the Wve servants welcome him by name (‘Welcome
home, Grumio!’; ‘How now, Grumio?’, etc.), Grumio greets them
individually as ‘you’ (‘Welcome, you; how now, you; what, you; fellow
you’). Incidentally, Wve servants greet him; he addresses four. The stage
direction calls for the entry of ‘foure or Wve servingmen’ (TLN 1733).
11. See e.g. ‘the ladie Katharine’ in iii. 572 (twice) and ‘the ladie Catharine’
on p. 547; ‘their daughter Katharine’ appears on p. 572, and ‘our most
deere beloved Katharine’ on p. 573. Princess Katherine is Kate through-
out the short quartos The Famous Victories of Henry 5 (1598) and Henry
5 (1600).
 Notes 205

12. According to Withycombe (187) Kate was the most common diminutive
of Katherine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Berger, Brad-
ford, and Sondergard (1998) list only four plays between 1590 and 1610,
besides the three Shakespeare plays under consideration, which use the
name Kate (one of these is The Taming of a Shrew, plausibly an adapted
derivative of The Shrew; see Stephen R. Miller’s careful analysis of the
subplot); ten others contain a Katherine in the same period, and one has
Katharina. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s canon we Wnd a ‘Mistress Kate
Keepdown’ in Measure for Measure (referred to by Mistress Overdone at
3.2.199) and in The Tempest Stephano sings ‘But none of us car’d for Kate; j
For she had a tongue with a tang’ (2.2.49–50).
13. I know of no other Shakespearian female who is addressed by name so
persistently. Touchstone’s ‘taming’ of Audrey does display similar tactics
in a similar situation. Trying to mould Audrey’s behaviour, Touchstone
insistently punctuates his speech with the vocative ‘Audrey’. Although
the total of his addresses does not approach those of the Kates, the
principle seems to be the same.
14. This question carries the same implications that a similar question (‘Are
you our daughter?’) has in King Lear (1.4.218). Just as personal name is
linked to identity so positional name in a relationship brings with it
certain behavioural expectations appropriate to hierarchy (Weidhorn,
‘Relation’ 307).
15. As we will see in Ch. 5 in relation to the Comedy of Errors (whose
composition the Oxford Textual Companion places three to four years
after The Shrew), this belief is naive. For Tranio as a servant’s name, see
Plautus, Mostellaria (which also features a slave called Grumio).
16. Elizabeth Schafer notes the ways in which ‘father’ is often ‘very familiarly
stressed’ in productions: in William Ball’s 1976 television production
‘Petruchio gave Baptista a big hug’; in a 1905 American production
‘Gremio repeated the word ‘‘father’’ with ‘‘great gusto’’ ’ (2.1.126 n., p.
132). In The Taming of a Shrew Ferando (the Petruchio equivalent) calls
Alphonso (the Baptista equivalent) ‘father’ after the marriage is agreed and
Alphonso refers to him as ‘sonne’ (sig. B3v, ll. 3, 101).
17. Richard 3 tries the same tactic with less success. He views King Edward’s
widow as sister in Act 1 and addresses her as such in Act 2 but calls her
‘mother’ in Act 4: ‘Therefore, dear mother—I must call you so—’
(4.4.412). The text of Supposes does the same thing when, after the Wnal
line of dialogue, this hopeful noun appears: Applause.
206 Notes

18. Despite this guidance, Sly immediately addresses his lady with a form of
his own: ‘Madam wife’ (Induction 2.12).
19. Or does Sly naively believe that his identity is his name? In either case
there is a diVerence between the conWdent self-naming of Sly and the
external derivation of Katherine.
20. The phenomenon is not limited to the early modern period. For an
analysis of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (‘The man who called himself,
after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor-Kirylo Sidorovitch-
Razumov’), see Docherty 63.
21. As Holly Crocker argues, at the end of the play Katherine and Bianca
change places but the binary of womanhood (shrewish or submissive)
remains intact (Crocker 151, 149).
22. Sly interrupts once in The Shrew, three times in A Shrew.
23. See Heilman, and Leggatt (Comedy) for example.
24. A Shrew voices this concept malapropistically when the player oVers the
Lord a play: ‘you maie have a Tragicall or a comoditie’ (sig. A3r, l.16; my
emphasis).
25. The closest I have come to seeing this kind of gendered doubleness
embodied on stage was in Mark Rylance’s Cleopatra at Shakespeare’s
Globe in Southwark in 1999. Theatrically mannered without being
histrionically tricksy, Rylance played not Cleopatra but an RSC-style
actress playing Cleopatra.
26. Even the professionals could be tricked in this way. Petruchio’s series of
boasts beginning ‘Have I not in my time heard lions roar . . . ?’
(1.2.200 V.) was so convincing that an awe-struck Hortensio asked
‘Have you?’
27. Gascoigne’s Supposes is similarly insistent on this point when the servant
Dulippo, conditioned by hierarchy, continues to call Erostrato ‘master’
and has to be cautioned (C5r).
28. One of the notable features of A Shrew is that names (and disguise names)
are little used. Characters are referred to by class relationship not name, as
when Polidor introduces Aurelius as ‘a wealthy Marchants sonne of Cestus’
(C1r) and the disguised Philotus is asked ‘what saies Aurelius father?’ (E1v).
(Critics have speculated that the short metrical line here indicates a blank
left for completion by the writer with a trisyllabic disguise name for
Philotus.) This is in contrast to Supposes which uses disguise names in
dialogue, speech preWxes, and stage-directions throughout but is careful
always to remind us that these are not the characters’ real names. Thus, at
4.1 and 4.2, we have ‘erostrato fained’ (D7r and D7v). The dialogue is
 Notes 207

equally clear in separating name and identity: ‘the right Philogano, the right
father of the right Erostrato’ (D7r).
29. The actor replaced Shakespeare’s indeWnite article with the possessive
pronoun.
30. Natasha Korda makes a similar point about the pun on Kates/cates: ‘it
refuses to remain tied to its modiWer, ‘‘household’’, and insists instead
upon voicing itself, shrewishly, where it shouldn’t (i.e. each time Kate is
named)’ (Korda 117).
31. This plurality of inset dramas means that the editorial indication ‘Aside’
is unusually problematic. Aside to whom? To which audience? In her
forthcoming Arden 3 edition Barbara Hodgdon eschews all asides.
32. Although initially it ran a risk. The Wrst dilemma of Sly was funny; the
second was repetition; and repetition can become tedium. Paradoxically,
it was this very risk which oVered rescue: the multiplication (rather than
mere duplication) of the dilemma moved us beyond repetition to theat-
rical triumph.
33. A similar challenge to Sly had begun the OSC production of the play,
underlining the reality/Wction threshold. In Induction 2 the servingman’s
extended denial of Sly’s reality (‘you know no house nor no such maid j
Nor no such men . . . ’) concluded emphatically: ‘such names and men as
these, j Which never were, nor no man ever saw’. The emphasis was assertive
rather than conWdent, a hypnotist’s suggestive planting (here unplanting) of
an idea. It was followed by a tense beat in which the plot’s potential was in
the balance. The relief was obvious when Sly succumbed: ‘Now Lord be
thanked for my good amends!’ (Induction 2.91–7).
34. My phrasing is deliberate: a ‘submission speech’ need not be submissive.
35. I am grateful to Elisabeth Dutton for this observation.
36. At the end of his experience in A Shrew Sly shows his critical limitations
by taking the play’s title literally: ‘I know now how to tame a shrew’
(G2v, l.3). The productions of The Shrew which most underline the play’s
capacity for misogyny tend to be those which omit the Sly framework
(Jonathan Miller’s BBC Wlm of 1980, and his RSC production of 1987 ) and
therefore remove the taming plot’s status as performance.
37. Natanson talks throughout of the ‘actor’—meaning the agent—but his
lines resonate theatrically. Thus, for instance, when he says ‘the actor is
also, at times, an observer’ (Anonymity 10) one thinks of all the onstage
moments, indicated above, when characters observe others, and of Sly’s
complex duality as observer of, and participant in, ‘The Taming of the
Shrew’.
208 Notes

38. I am grateful to Barbara Hodgdon for this observation.

39. Given the ingrained nature of mythological understanding in the cul-
ture, one might expect these collocations to be conventional shorthand
references but this expectation is not conWrmed by a search of prose,
poetry, and drama in the period. In Edward Hall’s production of the play
for Propeller Theater Company (2006–7 in Newbury, Stratford upon
Avon, and London) ‘Leda’s daughter’ was changed to ‘heavenly Helen’.
40. In a Wnal irony unanticipated by Shakespeare, the most problematic
debate in textual circles originates in a variant name, Henslowe’s sign-
iWcant/insigniWcant 1594 entry for The Taming of a Shrew at Newington
Butts (see Foakes and Rickert 22). Furthermore, the afterlife of The
Shrew is a history of names which reference the taming of the shrew
but which call attention to the gap between the successor and the
precursor texts. Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed invokes the Shakespeare text
indirectly but does not follow on from it in any coherent way. So too the
immensely popular eighteenth-century opera by Mozart’s contempor-
ary, the Spanish composer Vicente Martı́n y Soler (working in Vienna)
La Capricciosa Corretta (1795). Literally the title means ‘The Capricious
Woman Corrected’ but it is ubiquitously translated as ‘The Taming of
the Shrew’. It had a diVerent title at its Wrst performance—La Scuola del
Maritati (‘The School for Spouses’). It has, however, little to do with
Shakespeare’s play (despite the claims of opera articles) and is a conven-
tional shrewish-wife play.

chapter 5
1. Menaechmi, by contrast, is told from the resident twin’s point of view.
2. Unhappy with the repetition of nativity in line 407 (TLN 1896), which
they viewed as compositorial eyeskip from line 405 (TLN 1894), Hanmer
and Johnson emended to felicity and festivity, respectively. The duplica-
tion of nativity may indeed be an error. George Walton Williams (pers.
comm.) points out two other textual cruces that involve repetition: ‘To
seek thy helpe by beneWciall helpe’ (1.1.151; TLN 154; Dover Wilson
emends the Wrst help to helth, Rowe to life, Cunningham (Arden) to
pelf ), and ‘Besides her urging of her wrecke at sea’ (5.1.360; TLN 1835; the
Oxford Complete Works (ed. Wells et al.), following Collier, emends the
Wrst her to his). Compositorial anticipation, in which the second item
(which is correct) drives out the Wrst, may well explain the double
nativity of 5.1. TLN is from Charlton Hinman.
 Notes 209

3. Egeon describes his oVspring as being so alike that they could not be
distinguished ‘but by names’ (1.1.53), yet when we meet them they are
onomastically identical. Plautus, aware that the farcical confusions of
Menaechmi require a set of identical twins with identical names, gives
elaborate background reasons for such double nomenclature: ‘He changed
the name of the surviving brother j (Because, in fact, he much preferred the
other) j And Sosicles, the one at home, became j Menaechmus—which had
been his brother’s name’ (trans. Watling, 104). William Warner’s translation
(1595), which may have been available to Shakespeare, is more succinct:
‘The Wrst his Father lost a little Lad, j The Grandsire namde the latter like his
brother’ (reprinted in Bullough, i. 13). Shakespeare, as Alexander Leggatt
notes, ‘provides two sets of twins with the same name and not a word of
explanation’ (Comedy 3).
4. The raised eyebrows and rolled eyes of the listening prostitutes in Trevor
Nunn’s 1976 RSC production showed that these women questioned the
paradox, agreeing with the noun more than the adjective.
5. The Oxford Complete Works over-helpfully reduces this protean character
to the singular consistency of ‘Nell’, an emendation based on the belief
that ‘Nell’ represents an imperfect revision by Shakespeare to avoid
confusion of Luciana/Luce. For arguments in favour of retaining ‘Luce’
see Whitworth 124 and Werstine. R. A. Foakes (ed. Comedy) suggests that
Shakespeare may initially have ‘thought of taking over into his play [from
Plautus’ Menaechmi] both the maid and a Wgure corresponding to the
cook, Cylindrus’ (p. xxv, n. 1).
6. See Werstine for analysis of the unsatisfactory use of this term.
7. The role may originally have been played by John Sincler (Sincklo), an
actor in Strange’s or Admiral’s Men c.1590–1, and later in the Chamber-
lain’s Men, whose thinness was commemorated in the Induction to The
Malcontent (1604).
8. As Robert Smallwood rightly objected (‘Shakespeare’ (1991), 350), the
introduction of a Doppelgänger reduced ‘the audience’s participation in
the joy of recognition and reconciliation . . . to simple curiosity about
how the trick was done’. Carlo Goldoni’s I Due Gemelli Veneziani (1748)
shows the very diVerent dramatic eVects which result when Menaechmi
is adapted with the aim of one actor playing twins.
9. In the BBC production the Duke’s invitation for a brief synopsis is a
response to the audible pity of the crowd; his two subsequent invitations
to Egeon to continue are because he is increasingly entranced by the
tale. The onstage crowd in the 1983 RSC production emulated and so
210 Notes

reinforced the gestures with which Adriana accompanied her narrative

(5.1.136–60), aware of the performance pressure in her tale. In the 1976
RSC version Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus presented their mater-
ial (5.1.214–54) as if in a court of law, conferring, consulting notes, and
taking exhibits (such as the rope) from a briefcase.
10. Elsewhere Berry is more astute: ‘Certainly Adriana has overdone her
complaints. . . . But this is not the same thing as saying she has no
grounds for complaint’ (Shakespeare’s Comedies 32).
11. Casting exigencies in the 1995 RSC Tempest, directed by David Thacker,
forced the metamorphosis of ‘Adrian’ into ‘Adriana’, a tantalizing link
with Errors, although in production it proved a thematic cul de sac.
12. Mike Gwilym’s Ephesian Antipholus (RSC 1976) smoked, played cards,
rolled dice, and consorted with a MaWoso merchant.
13. For this reason, productions of Errors which present the Dromios as
circus clowns seem to me to miss the point. Clowns inhabit a world
where crazy, illogical, violent, ‘magical’ events are expected; the Dro-
mios do not. Dromio of Syracuse and his master (like Vincentio in The
Taming of the Shrew) are ordinary people going about their business; they
unwittingly Wnd themselves involved in an illusion. ‘Thus strangers may
be haled and abused/bemused.’
14. In this same production Adriana’s reaction to the news that Antipholus
has maltreated the exorcist was delivered slowly, in a tone both con-
descending and soothing: ‘Peace, fool, thy master and his man are here, j
And that is false thou dost report to us’ (5.1. 178). The implication was
that the kitchen-maid (who here delivered the Messenger’s speech) was
mad.
15. Whereas Nunn chose to underline the alliance of commercial and
Christian in his choice of goldsmith’s wares, the 1993 Manchester Royal
Exchange production stressed the commercial and the pagan in its
presentation of a modern-day Ephesus, epitomized by ‘port and ter-
minus scurry as an eclectic hive of travellers—including a City type
carrying a Zulu spear and shield—queue and hurry and squint at direc-
tions’ (anon., review in Independent 9 Sept. 1993; my italics).
16. This work may have provided Shakespeare with the name of the Duke,
Solinus, in Errors. See Foakes, ed., Errors p. xxx.
17. Solinus sig. Aa3v; Heywood, Gunaikeion, sig. V1v–V4v; Raleigh sig. Rrrr2v
(Part 1. b. 4. ch. 2. §15).
18. Although tradition has it that the temple ‘was founded by the Amazons
during their campaign against Athens and Theseus’, Pausanius tells us
 Notes 211

that the Temple of Artemis predates the Amazon association (7 [Achaia].

2.7–8, Jones et al. 175–7). Apparently the Amazons sought sanctuary in
the temple, hence their association with it. This association led to their
being credited with the founding of the temple. In the Wfth century, four
bronze statues of Amazons were chosen to decorate the temple pedi-
ment.
19. Simon Shepherd deals with stage depictions of Amazons in Amazons and
Warrior Women. For analogous discussions see Callaghan, Martin, Sulli-
van, Woods, Wright, and the entry under ‘Amazon’ in Berger, Bradford,
and Sondergard.
20. The dress worn by Adriana in the second half of the BBC version had
two circular gold/black bodice cups reminiscent of a military breast-
plate, while the tiara head-dress she wore throughout gave her a regal
air.
21. We might note here that Paul’s departure from Ephesus in ad 57,
plagued by storm and shipwreck, led to an attempt to winter in a Cretan
harbour called Phoenix, and a voyage in a ship whose Wgurehead was the
Twins (Acts 27 and 28). Furthermore, Paul, like many apostles, Jews, and
Eastern peoples, adopted a name familiar in the Graeco-Roman world,
changing his identity from Saul to Paul.
22. Lock-out scenes are not the prerogative of Plautus alone; one also
appears in a Pauline episode, describing an event that took place in
Ephesus. In Acts 19 some itinerant exorcists ‘planned to experiment by
using the name of the Lord Jesus’. The incantation they chose was
‘I adjure you by Jesus, whom Paul preaches, to come out!’ They tried
this on a possessed Ephesian, but the demon replied ‘I know Jesus and
I know Paul, but who are you?’ The possessed man then pounced on two
of his exorcists and drove them out of his house into the street (vv. 13–16).
Similarly, Plautus does not have the monopoly on disguise and mis-
taken identity. In his sermon on Ephesus Common Pleas (see above),
Edward Chaloner compares the devil’s theatrical use of disguise to a
scene from Plautus’ Amphitryo, invoking Acts 14: 12 in which the crowd
compares Barnabas to Jupiter and Paul to Mercury. Chaloner’s marginal
reference further stresses the Pauline/Plautine connection. (A divine at
Oxford, Chaloner had presumably seen college productions of Plautus.)
23. The Courtesan in the 1983 RSC production ascended from beneath
the stage, clad in red. To the typical (physical) stereotypes of the
buxom, callipygian prostitute was thus added another (more ethereal)
212 Notes

stereotype: the scarlet woman, the Whore of Babylon, rising through the
stage trapdoor, the area associated on the Elizabethan stage with Hell.
24. The text is inconsistent in the ages of the Antipholi who are presented as
twenty-Wve (1.1.125; 5.1.321) and thirty-three (5.1.401).
25. This was indeed the impression in Trevor Nunn’s production where
Adriana’s naked arm and shoulder emerged to close the shutters, and
her red espadrille dropped from the balcony (the shoe was later pre-
sented by Antipholus of Ephesus as ‘evidence’ in his deposition of 5.1: see
above, n. 9). Antipholus of Syracuse subsequently departed shoeless, a
red carnation between his teeth, clearly sexually exhausted. In the 1983
RSC production Adrian Noble made the ‘dinner’ arrangements equally
clear by concluding Adriana’s invitation to the wrong husband in 2.2
with a clinch which Antipholus increasingly enjoyed: Dromio functioned
as a chair for the embracing couple but such was Antipholus’ ardour that
he and Adriana collapsed in passion on the ground. The oVstage inten-
tion was unambiguous.
26. Desmond Barritt’s Antipholus in the 1990 RSC production made the
double entendre clear in his slightly self-conscious announcement ‘I’ll—
ahem, ‘‘knock’’—elsewhere’: 3.1.121. Joseph Candido contrasts the Cour-
tesan’s ‘sexually symbolic open door’ with the ‘shut house of the
nameless wife’ in Menaechmi (219).
27. I am grateful to George Walton Williams for these caveats. For Wil-
liams’ extended discussion of this matter see ‘Staging the Adulterate
Blot’.
28. Antipholus of Syracuse concludes his list of Ephesian iniquities with the
summation ‘many such-like liberties’ (1.2.102). Productions often illus-
trate this phrase with stage business that links it with sex, and hence
with Adriana’s rhetorical question. In the 1962 production Antipholus
accompanied the phrase with hand gestures which indicated a female
bosom; in 1976 Antipholus rotated his Blue Guide to admire what was
obviously a centre-fold pin-up. Ephesus in the Wrst century ad was
renowned for self-indulgent leisure: ‘bordellos, singers, actors, playboys,
whores’ (Trell 86). The 2006 production at Shakespeare’s Globe,
inXuenced by the ‘Carry On’ Wlms of the 1960s and 1970s, by A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and Up Pompeii (1969),
presented an indulgently sexual atmosphere.
29. For Ariadne in Chaucer and Gower see Riehle 179.
30. Nell is also the name of a kitchen-maid in Romeo and Juliet, who is
requested to enter with Susan Grindstone (1.5.9).
 Notes 213

31. As I argued in Ch. 3, it is precisely this image which Shakespeare tries to

rehabilitate.
32. Onomastic identity and malleability are very much to the fore in
Menaechmi, Amphitryo, and the Tudor adaptation of Amphitryo, the an-
onymous Jack Juggler. ‘And what’s your name?’—‘Any name that suits
you’ (Amphitryo 243). ‘You can be Sossia as much as you like when I don’t
want to be. At the moment I am Sossia’. ‘[D]id ye never heare why the
Grecians termed Hecuba to be a bitch? . . . Because . . . she railed, and there-
fore well deserved that dogged name’ (Menaechmi in Bullough 29). ‘For
ought I se yet, betwene erneste and game, j I must go sike me an other
name’ ( Jack Juggler in Axton 79). Such Xexibility extends even to geography
where the same stage represents diVerent locations at diVerent times. The
prologue to Menaechmi (not included in Warner’s translation) explains that
the play’s location is Epidamnus but when another play is performed on
the same stage the location will be some other city (ed. Watling 104).
33. Whether his attitude is playful or imperative is not relevant to this
discussion; but if playful he is parodying by exaggeration conventional
imperious behaviour.
34. He puns on the Latin servias/inservias.
35. Arden of Faversham combines both, creating a hybrid genre even more
marked than that of Errors.
36. Ian Hughes, playing Dromio of Syracuse at the RSC in 2000, records his
diYculty in negotiating the text’s requirements. The actors of the
Ephesian master/servant realized ‘that violence and beatings were the
foundation on which their relationship is built. There is hardly a scene
between them when Antipholus of Ephesus does not beat his Dromio.
But somehow for David [Tennant, playing Antipholus of Syracuse] and
myself, the very notion of beating went against our basic instincts about
the relationship between the Syracusan boys. And yet the stage direction
remained: ‘‘Antipholus beats Dromio’’ ’ (Hughes 33). Their solution was
to opt for a harmless, playful Laurel and Hardy violence.
37. Robert S. Miola (23) demonstrates the classical, comic antecedents of this
testimony; but traditions of classical comedy have not stopped the
narrative being delivered seriously in production. The 2006 production
at Shakespeare’s Globe (directed by Christopher Luscombe) managed to
have it both ways. The centurion guarding Dromio was moved to
comical-tragic shoulder-shaking tears and had to borrow Dromio’s Xoor-
cloth-sized handkerchief. (Dromio subsequently wrung out this—
in reality, a replacement—handkerchief over the audience, who were
214 Notes

showered by its contents.) Ralph Berry views Dromio’s speech as a

‘disturbing reminder of the human being behind the cartoon’ (Social
Class 22).
38. Trevor Nunn’s production had Luciana read the speech from a book in
which she showed her sister the relevant passage, indicating that the
subject is non-negotiable. In the 2005 Oxford production she delivered
the speech with religious fervour.
39. It is unclear whether Lysistrata is married or not; some translations have
her refer to her husband, others to her ‘man’. Peter Hall’s production for
the Old Vic (1993) paired her oV with the Magistrate. Critics who view
Lysistrata as married cite the improbability of the Athenian women
agreeing to a sex-strike if the initiator were not imposing similar depriv-
ation upon herself; those who view Lysistrata as single Wnd a thematic
parallel between Lysistrata, the guardian of Athens, and Athens’ mytho-
logical protectress, the chaste, unmarried Athena.
40. This point was made most intriguingly in the BBC production in the
reassignment of a line which is marked for alteration but not reassign-
ment in the published text; nor indeed can its reassignment be justiWed.
In the Folio text Antipholus of Ephesus explains his origins: he was, he
tells Duke Solinus, brought to Ephesus by ‘that most famous warrior, j
Duke Menaphon, your most renowned uncle’ (5.1.368–9). In the BBC
Wlm Solinus is given the line ‘Menaphon your most renowned uncle’
(the deleted ‘Duke’ showing that the reassignment is not accidental,
although, perplexingly, the BBC text still assigns the line (minus the
‘Duke’) to Antipholus). On screen Solinus delivers the line with epi-
phanic fervour as if realizing that one more member of the family still
remains to complete the reunion. Antipholus of Ephesus’ roll of the eyes
at the mention of Menaphon suggests that family (whether uncle/
nephew, father/son, husband/wife) is not a concept with which he is
at ease: he has deliberately ignored the ties that his brother has been
so anxious to seek. (This at least is the only explanation I can give for
a moment which has no authoritative textual basis. George Walton
Williams astutely suggests that the reassignment is an error: in prepar-
ing the Wlmscript from the Alexander text someone interpreted the
‘Duke’ of line 369 as a speech preWx and reassigned the ensuing words
accordingly.)
41. In the stage directions to 1.2 and 2.2 the Folio presents Antipholus of
Syracuse as Erotes and Errotis, which editors take to be misreadings
of Erraticus (wandering).
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 index
Adams, Robert M. 19
Adriatic sea 159, 168
Aeschylus 32
Ainsworth, Henry 17
Albee, Edward 24, 42
Alexander, Peter n. 193
Allott, Robert 102
Amazons 7, 163–4, 177–8, 179,
n. 210–11
Anagnostopolous, Georgios n. 185,
n. 188
Andreas, Bernard 146
Apollonius of Tyre 162
Arden of Faversham n. 213
Ariosto, Ludovico 31
Aristophanes 39, 82, 92, 166–7,
n. 191, n. 214
Aristotle 2, 21, 43, n. 198
Armstrong, Elizabeth 100, n. 201
Artemis (Amazon goddess) 163–4
Artemis (Greek goddess) 163–4
Artemis (Temple of ) 163,
n. 210–11
Ashley, Leonard R. N. 71
Atwood, Margaret 9
Auden, W. H. n. 188
Augustine of Hippo 21, 114
Austin, Norman 93, 97
Austria n. 195
Axton, Marie n. 213
Babington, Gervase 16, 17
Backscheider, Paula R. 44
Bacon, Francis 2, 14, 17, 74, n. 186
Bailey, Amanda 139–40
Bailey, Richard n. 193
Baines, Barbara 114–15, n. 203
Baldwin, T. W. 97, 100, n. 201
Bamber, Linda 128
Bandello, Matteo 71
Barber, C. L. 158
Bardsley, Charles W. 13
Barker, Pat 58
Barry, Peter 44, 74
Barton, Anne 38, 39, 40, 108, n. 192,
n. 193
Bashar, Nazife 118
Bassnett, Susan 27
Baswell, Christopher C. 109
Bate, Jonathan 60, 82, n. 191, n. 198
Beckett, Samuel 6, 43
Becon, Thomas 173
Belsey, Catherine 52, 115, n. 203
Berger, Harry n. 187
Berger, Thomas n. 205, n. 211
Bergren, Ann 92, n. 203
Bernstein, Mashay 71
Berry, Philippa 55
Berry, Ralph 55, 158, 166, 174–5,
n. 210, n. 214
Bevington, David n. 202
244 Index
Bible
Acts 162, 163, n. 211
Babel 15–16
biblical language 45, n. 197
commentaries on 15, 16, n. 189
Ephesians 54, 152, 159, 161, 164,
165, 172, 173, 178–9, 179–80
on marriage 164, 165, 178–9,
n. 214
the fall 15–16, 45–6, 92, n. 200
Genesis 1, 3, 77–8
Geneva translation 22, 45
John 15
Matthew 35–6
Adam’s naming 17, 14–15, 125
bilingualism see translation
Bioni, Giovanni Francesco 129
Bishop, Elizabeth n. 187
Blount, Thomas 46
Blundell, Sue n. 203
Boas, Frederick S. n. 200
Boccaccio, Giovanni 107
Boose, Lynda 124, 132
Bourdieu, Pierre 88
Bowden, Caroline 100
Bradford, William C. n. 205, n. 211
Brennan, Elizabeth M. 31
Brooke, Arthur 71–2
Brooke, Rupert n. 200
Brown, W. F. n. 185
Brownmiller, Susan 85, n. 203
Buchanan, George 100, 101, n. 201
Bullough, GeoVrey 177, n. 209, n. 213
Burckhardt, Sigurd 16
Burghley, Mildred 100
Burnett, Mark Thornton n. 192
Burney, Fanny n. 187
Burns, Margie 151
Burrow, Colin 24, 38, n. 186
Butcher, S. H. 43
Butler, H. E. 20, 90
Butler, Judith n. 186
Calderwood, James 51
Callaghan, Dympna n. 211
Calvin, John 16
Camden, William 6, 9, 29, 30–31,
32–3, 36, 76, n. 189
Canada
Canadian literature 70–71
Meech Lake accord 64
origins of name 71
Québec 62, 63–4, n. 196–7, see
also ‘translation,
bilingualism’
Candido, Joseph n. 212
Cannon, Christopher 111, 117, 118
Carey, John 35
Carlson, Marvin 25, 43
Carroll, John M. 23
Carroll, Lewis n. 185
Carroll, William 47, n. 192
Cassirer, Ernst n. 185
Catling, Christopher 36
Cato the Elder 14
Catty, Jocelyn 113, 114, 115–16, 116–17,
n. 198, n. 199, n. 203
Cawdrey, Robert 46
Cecil, William 28
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 29
Césaire, Aimé 18
Chaloner, Edward 162, n. 211
Chapman, George 74, 97, 103
Chaucer, GeoVrey 11, 43, 79, 82, 83,
84, 109, 111, 118, 160–61, 168,
n. 194, n. 212
Chomsky, Noam 73, n. 197
Cinthio, Giraldi 13, 48
 Index 245

Clarkson, Carol 24 Deane, Seamus 59

Cocker, Edward 23 Defoe, Daniel 12, 17, 44, n. 187
Cockeram, Henry 23 Dekker, Thomas 19
Coetzee, J. M. 18 Déprats, Jean-Michel 61
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor n. 192 Derrida, Jacques 20, 49, 52–3
Colie, Rosalie 110 Detmer, Emily 132
Collier, John Payne n. 208 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds 27–8
Congreve, William 130 Diana (goddess) 162, 163, 164
Conrad, Joseph n. 206 Temple of 162–3
consent 84–5, 111, 112, 114–19, n. 202, Docherty, Thomas 39, 122, 130, 146,
n. 203 147, n. 206
and adultery 116–17 Dolan, Frances 132, 133, 139–40, 174
and conception 114 domestic violence 133
and force 114, 119 Donaldson, Ian 114
of Lucrece 115–16 Donne, John 10, 37
mind vs body 114–15, see also Doran, Madeleine n. 192
‘Helen of Troy’ and ‘rape’ Dowden, Edward n. 193
Cooper, Helen 11, 43 Downam, George 102
Cooper, Thomas 21, 46 Drant, Thomas 59–60
Corcoran, Mary 16 Drayton, Michael 102, 103
courtesan (in Comedy of Du Bartas, Saluste 67
Errors) 166–8, 170, n. 211–12 Dubrow, Heather 129
hetaira 167 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 28
Coward, Noel 10 Dusinberre, Juliet 131, 133, 169
Craik, T. W. 11
Cressy, David 26, n. 190 Earle, William James n. 186
Crocker, Holly n. 206 Echard, Lawrence n. 191
Cunningham, Henry n. 208 Eco, Umberto 73
Cunningham, Valentine n. 203 editing 153–4, n. 193, n. 197, n. 204,
n. 207, n. 208, n. 214
Dallington, Robert 102 authorship n. 198
Dalpé, Jean-Marc 63, 64–5 composition in Folio n. 201–2
Dalton, Michael 34, n. 203 foul papers 106, 155, n. 209
Daly, Mary 18 textual cruxes 50–1, 88, 116, 123,
Daniell, David n. 202 153–54
Dantanus, Ulf 69 involving names 11, 20, 155,
Davies, John 103 89–90, n. 193, n. 199, n. 202–3,
Day, Angel 38 n. 208, n. 209
Day, John 100 Edwards, John 60, n. 194
246
Eliot, John 67–8, 102, n. 196
Elyot, Thomas 82, 103
Emerson, Ralph Waldo n. 187
Enright, D. J. 16, n. 187
Ephesus 7, 152, 158–64, 177, 182, 183,
n. 210 n. 211
as commercial centre 159, 161,
162, n. 210
association with magic 152, 160,
161, 183
association with revelry 159
conversion to Christianity 160
divided religious identity 159–60
founding of 163
and models for female
conduct 153, 177–8, 181
pagan beliefs 160, 162, 181–2,
n. 210
Epidamnus 7, 152, 164, 183, n. 213
Erasmus, Desiderius 37, 99, 102,
n. 191
Estrin, Barbara L. n. 194
Euripides
Alcestis 101
Andromache 99, 101
Andromeda 101
Bacchae 97, 101
Electra 99
Hecuba 97, 98, 99, 101, 102
Helen 94–7, 98, 101, 104, 105,
108–9, 118, 119, n. 201, n. 200
Hippolytus Coronatus n. 99
Ion 94, 97, 101
Iphigenia among the Taurians 94,
97, 101
Iphigenia in Aulis 97, 99, 101
Jocasta 97, 99, 101, n. 200
Medea 99, 101
Orestes 97, 99, 101, 102
Index
Phoenician Women 99, 101, n. 201
Rhesus 101, n. 201
Suppliants 101
The Women of Troy 11, 92, 94,
100, 101
ownership of texts 98, 99, 100
printing of texts 98–100, 103–4
availability in England 99–100
paratextual materials 98–9
references to 98, 100–3
Renaissance acquaintance
with 97–104, n. 201
Shakespeare’s knowledge
of 97–8, 102–3, 104–5, 108–9
teaching of in schools 97, n. 201
translation of 98, 99, n. 200
Evans, G. B. 87, 89, 90, 108, 116,
n. 203
Evans, J. M. 16
Everett, Barbara n. 194
Famous Victories of Henry 5, The
n. 204
Fehrenbach, R. J. 100
Ferry, Anne 21, n. 187
Field, Richard 34–5, n. 190
Fielding, Henry 13–14, 43, 78,
n. 197–8
Fine, Gail 21
Fineman, Joel 85, 114, 117
Fleming, Juliet n. 196
Flesch, William 120, 144
Fletcher, John 111, 129, n. 208
Florio, John 105
Fludd, Robert 34
Foakes, R. A. 162, n. 208, n. 209,
n. 210
Ford, John 19, 39
Foss, Clive 160
 Index 247

Foucault, Michel 31, n. 192 Gower, John 162, 168, n. 212

Fowler, Alastair n. 189, n. 191 Greek drama see Euripides
Fowler, Elizabeth 84, n. 199 Greenblatt, Stephen 132
Fowler, H. N. 2, 14 Greene, Robert 37, 75, 103, n. 198
Frazer, James n. 185 Greer, Germaine 158
Friel, Brian 17, 59, 60–1, 68–9, n. 195, Gregory, Francis 23
n. 196 Grennan, Eamon 154–5
Frye, Northrop 125, 128 Greville, Fulke 37
Furness, H. H. n. 193 GriYn, Eric n. 192
GriYth, John G. n. 201
Gainsford, Thomas 102 Grillo, R. D. n. 194
Galen 114 Grimm, brothers n. 185–6
Garber, Marjorie 55 Grosjean, François n. 194
Garner, Shirley Nelson 131–2 Gross, Kenneth 49, n. 192, n. 193
Garrett, Cynthia E. n. 203
Gascoigne, George 97, 103, 137, 139, Haddon, Mark 33
141, 144, 148, 149, n. 200, Hadrian (Roman Emperor) 163, 168
n. 205, n. 206–07 Hale, John K. 35
Gataker, Thomas 101 Haliburton, Thomas 70
Gay, Penny 144 Hall, Joseph n. 191
Gazophylacium 30 Hamilton, A. C. 154
Genette, Gérard 22 Hanmer, Thomas 153, n. 208
genre 55, 72, 94–5, 108, 151, 154, Hansen, Elaine n. 194
156–7, 165, n. 213 Hare, R. M. 22, n. 188
classical unities 158 Harris, Roy 19, 21, n. 186
farce 138, 154 Harsnett, Samuel 121–2
romance 154, 156–7 Harvey, A. E. 161
tragedy 56, 72, 154 Harvey, Gabriel 103
Gibbens, Nicholas 17 Haugen, Einar 15
Gibbon, Edward 162 Hawkes, Terence 20
Godley, A. D. n. 185 Hayward, John 103
Golding, Arthur 79, 102, n. 191 Heaney, Seamus 50
Goldman, Michael 45 Heilman, Robert B. n. 206
Goldoni, Carlo n. 209 Helen of Troy 6
Goldsmith, Oliver 28 abbreviation as Nell 6, 111, 116–17,
Gordon, D. J. n. 185, n. 192 168–9
Gosson, Stephen 102–3 abduction by Paris 91
Gouge, William 28, 29, 30, 124, beauty of 92, n. 200
173–4 classical reception of 91–97
248 Index

Helen of Troy (Cont.) Hollyband, Claudius 172, 173, n. 190

and consent 110, 112, 118–19, 169 Homer
Cressida, association The Iliad 92, 93
with 109–10, 118, n. 200, The Odyssey 10–11, n. 185
n. 202 Hornish, Robert N. n. 193
and the eidolon 92–7, 118–19 Houlbrooke, Ralph 173
etymology of 32, 77, n. 198 household, the Elizabethan 171,
folklore, origins in n. 200 172–4
as a minor 81, n. 198 Howard, Jean 123, 132
other Helens Howell, A. C. 14
popularity of name n. 198 Hunter, G. K. 11
rape of 81, 85 Hutson, Lorna 148–9
recuperation of 92–5, 118
St Helena (mother of Ireland 18, 59, 60–61, 68–9, n. 197
Constantine) 6, 76–7 Iselin, Pierre 65–6, n. 194
and semiotics 95
semi-divine status n. 199 Jack Juggler n. 213
and sexual transgression 77, 92, James VI 100
107–8, 110, 168–9, n. 213 Jed, Stephanie H. n. 198
Shakespeare’s rewriting of 6, Jenkin, William 13
82–3, 104–5, 108–9, 111–12, Jewel, John 35
118–19, n. 202 Johnson, Carol Lee 41
single referent of 6, 75–77, 107, 119 Johnson, Samuel 65, 153, n. 208
spelling of 74–5, n. 197, see also Jones, Emrys 97, 98
Plutarch; see also Theseus Jones, W. H. S. 163
Helms, Lorraine n. 202 Jonson, Ben 35, 36, 37, 38, 53, 97, 99,
Henry VIII 27 100, 101, 105
Herodotus 93, n. 185 Joyce, James 184
Heywood, Thomas 34, 75, 97, 113, Just, Roger 167
129, 163–4, 178, n. 202, n. 203,
n. 210 Kahane, Henry and Kahane,
Hinman, Charlton n. 208 Renee 13
Hobbes, Thomas 20, 46 Kahn, Coppélia 128–9, 130, 131
Hodgdon, Barbara 88, n. 195, n. 204, Kaske, R.E. n. 195
n. 207 Kermode, Frank 21, n. 188, n. 197
Holinshed, Raphael 124, n. 191 Kidley, William 32
Holland, Peter 4, 79, 82, 87, n. 198, Kidnie, M. J. 142
n. 199 King, Ros n. 190–1
Holland, Philemon 103, 121 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 14
 Index
Kinwelmershe, Francis n. 200
Korda, Natasha 132, n. 207
Kroetsch, Robert 70
L. N. (Wit’s Commonwealth) 102
Lacan, Jacques 44
lacunae 122–3, 140–1, 143
in characterization 145, 147–9
readers’ responses to 146–7
in texts 146–8
Lahiri, Jhumpa 41
Lambard, William n. 203
language
and ambiguity 54–5, 72, n. 194
and the body 110, n. 194–5
chiasmus 145
and colonialism 18, 60–1, 63–4,
68–9
and communication 3, 48, 53,
64–7, 68–9
and convention 141–2
and culture 57, n. 196–7
and domesticity 126–7, n. 205
and gender n. 196
and humanism 45
and identity 53–4, 57, 59, 71
and idioms 66–7, n. 196
of law 86–7, 88
learning the beloved’s
language 54, 67, 68, n. 196
and metaphor 53, n. 196, 90, 95
and money 45–7, n. 192
and narrative 72, 156–7, n. 209–10
and nationhood 59
and oaths 54
and oxymoron 56, 154
and paradox 55, 154, n. 194, n. 209
and parody 66, n. 196
Petrarchan 165, 66
249
and power 17–18, 56–7, 59, 64–6,
87, 88, 143, 149
public vs. private 53
and puns 50–1, 65–6, 71, 72, 86,
136, 154–5, 158, n. 213
and the Reformation 45–6
and repetition 95–6, 145, 154
the signiWer and signiWed 5, 20,
21–2, 45–7, 53, 54, 57, 68, 71,
93, 95, 118–19, 130, 142, 156,
n. 185, n. 188, n. 192
and silence 48, 57, 58, 110, 146, 170,
n. 194
and sound 68, n. 188
and tragedy 56, 72, n. 194
and translation see ‘translation’
and war 58, n. 194
Lanyer, Emilia 110
Larson, Gary n. 197
Latham, Agnes n. 197
law 86–8, 113–14, 116–18, n. 199,
n. 203
Lawrence, T. E. 10
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1–4, 7–8, 18,
n. 185
Le Page, Robert 61–2, 62–9 passim,
71, n. 199
Leedham-Green, Elizabeth 100, 101,
n. 201
Leggatt, Alexander 170, n. 206,
n. 209
Leonard, John 7
Lessing, Doris 39
Lever, J. W. 67, n. 196
Levin, Harry 43, 44, 49, n. 197
Levine, Laura n. 199
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 29, n. 185
Lewis, Anthony J. 166
Lewis, C. S. n. 199, n. 200
250
liminality 123
Livy 115
Lloyd, Lodowick 101–2, 103
Lock, Charles 95, n. 200
Locke, John 22
Lodge, David 7–8, 9, 44
Lodge, Thomas 102, 103
Lodwick, Francis 15–16
Logan, George 19
Lower, Charles B. n. 188, n. 191
Lucas, F. L. 97
Lucian 168
Lucking, David 48, 52, n. 192, n. 194
Lyford, Edward 10, 22, 30, n. 189
Lyly, John 103
Lyons, CliVord 111
magic 160–1
Mallette, Richard 83
Manini, Luca n. 192
Marc’hadour, Germain 26, 36
Marcotte, Paul 106–7
Marlowe, Christopher 75
1 Tamburlaine 112–13
Dido, Queen of Carthage 75, 76, 78
Dr Faustus 32, 75
Edward 2 110
Jew of Malta 11, 74
marriage 3–4, 54, 83, 85, 87, 123,
152–3, 157–8, 164–8, 170–5,
177–83, n. 186, n. 193
and inWdelity 166–7, 179–81,
n. 212
as an institution 157–8
Renaissance attitudes to
women 165–6
and service 171–2, 173–5, 177–9,
181–2, n. 214
Index
see also ‘Bible, Ephesians, on
marriage’
Marston, John 34, n. 191, 164
Martel, Yann n. 189
Martin y Soler, Vicente n. 208
Martin, Priscilla n. 211
Martindale, Charles 98
Martindale, Michelle 98
Maveety, Stanley 45
McCall, Gordon 62–9 passim, 71
McKerrow, R. B. 36, 155
McLean, Will 26, n. 189
McLeod, Randall n. 197
McMullan, Gordon 27
Meagher, Robert Emmet n. 200
Melchiori, Giorgio n. 191
Melville, Hermann 70, n. 197
Middleton, Thomas 12, 34, 39
Mill, John Stuart n. 193
Miller, Jonathan n. 207
Miller, Stephen R. n. 205
Milton, John 7, 15, 35, 37, 75, 99, 100,
n. 189, n. 199
Miola, Robert 152, n. 213
Montaigne, Michel de 5, 14, 37,
46, 105
More, Sir Thomas 14, 19, 37, 103, 172,
n. 187–88
Mulcaster, Richard 20, 103
Munday, Anthony 102
Names
and actors’ roles 149–50
in allegory 13, 24, 38
anagrams of 35
of animals 1–2, 29, n. 189
anonymity (unknowable
identity) 6–7, 120, 121–2,
 Index
138–9, 141, 142, 143–4, 147–51,
n. 204
anonymous (unknown
name) 121–2
appropriateness of 24, 42, 48,
39–40, 48–49, 89, 105
authors’ interest in 42–44
and baptism 13, 26, 28–29, 168, see
also ‘names, naming
ceremonies’
of characters 7–8, 11–12, 42–4,
89–90, 106, 122, 130, 134–6,
146, 155, n. 199–200, n. 203,
n. 206–7, n. 209
and colonialism 18, 21–2, 23–5
delayed naming 38–9, n. 191
dictionaries of 22–3, 30, 40–1, 77
diminutives 7, 29–30, 120–1,
123–30, 150, 168–9, n. 203–4,
n. 205
and domesticity 123–4, 126
and power 125, 127–9, n. 205
and status 124, n. 204
see also ‘Helen, abbreviation as
Nell’
etymology of 30, 38, 39, 41, 61, 71,
77, 165, 168, 32–6, n. 188
and gender 7, 18–19, 29, 54, 125,
128–30, n. 186, n. 187
and godparents 26–9, 30, n. 189
and identity 1–4, 9–13, 15, 17, 19,
20–1, 24–5, 30–1, 38–40, 41–2,
45, 48–9, 50, 52–3, 59–60,
72–3, 89, 96–7, 105, 117, 121–2,
125–30, 134–5, 140, 147, 150–1,
168–70, n. 185, n. 189, n. 195,
n. 206, n. 209, n. 213
causal relationship with 13–14,
24, 17
251
as labels 3, 14–15, 29, 31, 52,
120–21, 139
and metre 75, n. 197
multiple names 120–1, 122, 138
namelessness (absence of
name) 3–4, 7, 9, 10–11, 51,
57, 70, 168, 170, n. 185,
n. 186
naming ceremonies 59, n. 185
nicknames 106–7, n. 189
and nouns 2, 16, 19, 20, 23–5, 47,
77–8, 89–90, n. 188, n. 198,
n. 199
omission of 145, 146, n. 208
origins of 2–3, 9, 10–12
parents’ naming 40–1
of places 7, 60–1, 68, 70, 152–3,
158–64
physicality of 52, n. 192, n. 193
and power 3–4, 17–19, 57, 59,
60–1, 88, 125, 127–30, n. 186,
n. 186, n. 192, n. 205
puns on 11, 34–40, 45, 66, 136,
150–1, 181, n. 191, n. 207,
n. 207
relation to language 21–6, see also
‘language’
renaming 18, 19–20, 51–2, 54,
88–9, 117, 123–5, 127–8, 135,
n. 187, n. 189, n. 192, n. 194,
n. 195
scriptural n. 197
self-naming 129–30, n. 206
ships’ names 31–32
signiWeds, relation to 5, 45, 47, 49,
77–8, 93–4, 96–7, 125, 142,
n. 186, n. 193, see also
‘language’, ‘signiWer and
signiWed’
252 Index

Names (Cont.) Paulson, Ronald 78

signiWcation of 4, 7–8, 29, 44, 73, Pausanius 163, n. 210–11
78–79, n. 193 Pawl, Amy n. 187
spelling of 74–5 Pearson, D’Orsay W. 79, 82, n. 198
and status 29–30, 48, 124, 127–8 Peele, George 77, 97, n. 198
translation of 34–5, 36–7, 38, 60–1, Penkethman, John 30
66, 105–6, n. 188, n. 190, performance
n. 192 asides n. 207
unnaming 2 audience’s role in 139, 146–47
as verbs n. 186, see also ‘Helen of doubling 133, 134–143 passim, 150
Troy’ metatheatricality 131, 134, 136–8,
Nashe, Thomas 76, n. 198 142, n. 207
Natanson, Maurice 6–7, 120, 122, role-playing 6, 89–90, 130–1, 133,
139, 141, 144, n. 204, n. 207 134–43, 143–5, 149–50, 150–1,
Neill, Michael 37 164, n. 206
Nevo, Ruth 164 and actors’ identities 150
New, W. H. 71 and anonymity 120, 133, 143–5,
Newman, Karen 154 150–1
Norbrook, David 46 by characters in drama 140–1,
North, Thomas 102 134, 143
Novak, Maximillian 15, n. 187 and gender 141–3
Novy, Marianne 67 and identity 134–6, 138–9
Nuttall, A. D. 97, 98, n. 201 and manners 143
and servants 139–40
Oldham, John n. 191 Perkins, William 34
Olson, S. Douglas 39, n. 191 Petrie, Helen 41, n. 189
Orlin, Lena Cowen 132 Phillips, Edward 22–3
orthography 74–75 Philostratus 160
Osborne, Laurie n. 202 Pianist, The (Wlm) 12, n. 186
Ovid 32, 79, 82, 97, 115–16, n. 191 Pickeryng, John 102
Pippin, Anne Newton 77, 95, n. 198,
Painter, William 102, 107–8, 115–16 n. 201
Palmer, D. J. 159 Pitcher, John n. 190
Parker, Patricia 60 Plath, Sylvia 42, n. 189
Patten, William 22 Plato 2–3, 14, 21, 22, 93–4, n. 185, n.
Paton, Maureen 42 186, n. 188
Paul, St 7, 153, 157, 159–60, 161, 162, Plautus 7, 141, 152, 153, 157, 164, 165,
164, 165, 172, 178, n. 211 166, 167, 177, n. 205, n. 208,
Paul’s Cross (place) 162 n. 209, n. 211, n. 212, n. 213
 Index 253

Pliny 121, n. 185 Roberts, Jean 76, 84, 107, n. 198,

Plutarch 79–81, 83, 91, 102, 103, n. 200
n. 198 Robertson, James 64
Pollak, Ellen 11 Roche, Anthony n. 186
Pomeroy, Sarah B. 167 Rocklin, Edward n. 199
Pope, Alexander 11 Rogers, Guy McLean 162
Porter, Joseph n. 192 Romaine, Suzanne n. 194
Porter, Roy n. 203 Romm, James n. 188
Price, Sampson 162 Rose, Mary Beth 112–13
printers’ devices 36 Ross, Sinclair 70
props (on stage) 142 Rowe, Nicholas n. 208
Pulgram, Ernst 9, 23–4, 119, n. 185, Rowley, Samuel 19
n. 188, n. 192, n. 195, n. 197 Rudd, Niall n. 198
Puttenham, George 21, 88 Ruthven, K. K. 34, 38, n. 191
Ryan, Kiernan 51
Quigley, Michael n. 185
Quintilian 20, 90 Salter, Denis n. 195
Salmon, Vivian 16
Rackham, H. n. 185 Schafer, Elizabeth 133, n. 205
Rackin, Phyllis 123 Schalkwyk, David n. 188
Raleigh, Walter 40, 163, n. 210 Seazer, J. A. 61
Ramus, Petrus 21 Segal, Charles 94, 95, 104
rape 85, 91, 110, 111, 112–19 Selden, John 129
ambiguity of term in early- Seneca 79, 81, 97
modern period 112–13 servants 139–40, 171–7, n. 213
crime against woman/ relation to masters 172–4, 175–7,
man 113–14, 117–18 n. 213
statute change 117–18 see ‘household, the Elizabethan’
as punishment n. 199, 85 see ‘marriage, service’
see also ‘consent’ Shakespeare, William
Raven, James n. 201 All’s Well That Ends Well 6, 7, 20,
Reinhartz, Adele 122, 144, 147, 150, 28–29, 42, 76, 98, 104–9, 169,
n. 204 172, n. 188, n. 201–2
Reynolds, John 102 Antony and Cleopatra n. 206
Richardson, Samuel 14, 43–4, As You Like It 39, 76, 77, n. 197,
n. 189 n. 205
Rickert, C. T. n. 208 Comedy of Errors 7, 72, 106–7,
Riehle, Wolfgang n. 212 149, 152–83, n. 205,
Roberts, Gareth n. 187 n. 208–14
254 Index
Shakespeare, William (Cont.)
theme of doubleness in 152–8,
164, 177–83
Coriolanus 10, 12, 49, n. 186, n. 192,
n. 201
Cymbeline 35, 39, n. 190
Hamlet 7, 40, 72, n. 186, n. 194
1 Henry 4 6, 30, 68, 123, 124–5, 159,
169, n. 186, n. 196
2 Henry 4 6, 20, 29–30, 39, 116–17,
159, 169, n. 191
Henry 5 6, 7, 14, 18–19, 30, 39,
85–6, 107, 116–17, 123, 124–5,
167, 169, n. 194, n. 204
1 Henry 6 77, n. 198
2 Henry 6 39–40, 60, 121, 168
3 Henry 6 106–7, 123
Henry 8 19–20, 27, 121, 123
Julius Caesar 20–1, 52, n. 193,
n. 202
King John 10, 20, 148
King Lear 26–27, 61, n. 185, n. 189,
n. 205
Love’s Labour’s Lost 25, 27, 32, 45,
46–8, 123, n. 192
Macbeth 11–12, 61, n. 185
Measure for Measure 114, n. 202,
n. 205
Merchant of Venice 19
Merry Wives of Windsor 25, 60, 121,
146, 159
Midsummer Night’s Dream 4, 6, 20,
59, 61–2, 74, 75–6, 78–9,
82–91, 108, 112, 116, 168, 169,
n. 197, n. 198, n. 199
Much Ado about Nothing 45, 72,
121, n. 190
Othello 13, 48–9, 74, 121, 123, 148, n.
192, n. 193, n. 201
Pericles 40, 61, 72, 107, 156–57, 162,
166, 107
Rape of Lucrece 35, 85, 110, 114,
115–16, n. 193
Richard 2 39, 45–46, 88, n. 192,
n. 199
Richard 3 27, n. 205
Romeo and Juliet 5–6, 7, 14, 50–73
passim, 76, 135, n. 193, n. 194,
n. 195, n. 196, n. 212
translation of 62–9, 71, n. 195
sources 67–8
Sonnets 37, 76, 105
Taming of the Shrew 6, 7, 74,
120–51, 171, n. 186, n. 196,
n. 203, n. 203–8 passim, n. 210
feminist criticism of 128–9,
131–3, 148
The Tempest 18, 40, 61, 80, 158–9,
171, 172, n. 194, n. 205, n. 210
Timon of Athens 21, 32, n. 188,
n. 201
Titus Andronicus 25, 61, 97, 98, 168
Two Noble Kinsmen 11, 83
Troilus and Cressida 6, 74, 109–12,
118–19, 168, 169, n. 194–5,
n. 200, n. 201, n. 202, n. 203
Twelfth Night 25–6, 147, n. 194,
n. 201–2
Two Gentlemen of Verona n. 193
Venus and Adonis 35, 107, n. 201
The Winter’s Tale 40
Shakespeare, productions of
All’s Well That Ends Well 42, 104,
n. 201, n. 202
Antony and Cleopatra n. 206
Comedy of Errors 153, 156–7, 159,
161–2, 170–1, 175–7, 180–1,
n. 209–14
 Index 255

Julius Caesar n. 193 Staunford, William n. 203

King Lear 61 Steevens, George 65
Macbeth 61 Steiner, George 15, 50, 69, n. 194
Midsummer Night’s Dream 61–2, Steinsaltz, David n. 196
83, 84–5, 86, n. 199 Sterne, Lawrence 13, 22, 28–9, 42,
Pericles 61 146, n. 186
Richard 2 n. 192 Stesichorus 92–3, 95, 108, 118, 119,
Romeo and Juliet 6, 62–9, 71, n. 196 n. 200
Taming of the Shrew 6, 126, 130, 133, Stingel, Victorinus 102
134–43, 144, 147, 148, 149–50, Stroup, Thomas B. 89, n. 198
n. 205, n. 207, n. 208 Stubbs, Imogen 11
The Tempest n. 210 Sullivan, Arthur 88
Titus Andronicus 61 Sullivan, Margaret M. n. 211
Troilus and Cressida 109, n. 200 Swift, Jonathan 57, 58
Sharpe, Jim n. 199 Szpilman, Wladyslaw n. 186
Shepherd, GeoVrey 14
Shepherd, Simon n. 211 T.E. 113–14, 116–17, n. 186, n. 203
Sheridan, Richard Brindsley 77–8 Taming of a Shrew, The 128, 132, 142,
Sidney, Philip 14, 37, 43, 75, 97, 102, 144, n. 205, n. 206, n. 207
107, 113, 114, n. 188, n. 197 Tasso, Torquato 101
Silk, Michael 97 Taylor, A. B. 109
Singman, JeVrey L. 26, n. 189 Taylor, Gary 20, n. 193, n. 198,
Skutsch, Otto n. 200 n. 202, n. 204, n. 205, n. 208,
Smallwood, Robert n. 209 n. 209
Smith-Bannister, Scott 26, 28, 29 Taylor, Talbot J. 19, 21, n. 186
Snow, Ed n. 194, n. 196 theatre companies, early
Snowse, Robert (R. S.) 174 modern n. 209
Snyder, Susan 107 theatre companies, contemporary; see
Solinus, J. C. 102, 162, 163, n. 210, 102 Shakespeare, productions of
Sondergard, Sidney L. n. 205, n. 211 Theseus 168, 78–83
Sparke, Michael 34 battle of the centaurs 78–9
Spenser, Edmund 17, 38–9, 58, 75, condemnation of 80–2
103, 105, 113, 114, n. 187, n. 191, and the law 86–8, n. 199
n. 199 and the Minotaur n. 198, 78
Spitzer, Leo 45 poor government of 83, n. 198
Sprat, Thomas 22 and rape 79–81, 86
St Paul’s School n. 201 sources on 79; and see also
stage directions 106, n. 201 Plutarch
Stallybrass, Peter 123 war 86
256 Index
Thomas, Keith 29
Thompson, Ann 131
Thucydides 5, 58
Tilley, M. 31
Tostevin, Lola Lemire 71
Tourneur, Cyril 37
translation
and bilingualism 62–9, 71, n. 196
and communication 66–7, 69
of dramaturgy 61
and gender n. 196
and multilingual puns 65–6
and politics 64, 62–9 passim
and power 60–1
and reappropriation 60, 62
of Shakespeare 61–2, 62–9 passim
theories of 59–60
Trell, Bluma L. 160, 163, n. 212
Trussell, John 75, 81–2, n. 198
Turner, Robert K. n. 202
Vanbrugh, John 42
Varney, Andrew 44
Vaughan, William 101
Velz, John 49
Verstegan, Richard 33
Vickers, Brian 20, n. 186
Vico, Giambattista 15
Virgil 81, 97
Vives, Juan Luis 173
Walcott, Derek 12, n. 201
Walker, Garthine n. 203
Waller, Gary 17, 45
Walton, Izaak 37
Wardhaugh, Ronald n. 194
Warner, William 162, n. 209, n. 210,
n. 213
Warren, Austin 44
Watling, E. F. 141, n. 209, n. 213
Watson, Robert N. 48, n. 193
Watt, Ian 12, 43, 44
Webbe, William 102, 103
Webster, John 11, 14, 31–2, 103, n. 189
Weidhorn, Manfred 10, 51, n. 192,
n. 205
Weimann, Robert 45
Wellek, René 44
Welles, Orson n. 193
Wells, G. A. n. 194
Wells, Stanley 20, 153, 158, 166, n.
193, n. 198, n. 202, n. 204, n.
205, n. 208, n. 209
Werstine, Paul 155, n. 209
West, William N. n. 194
Whetstone, George 103, n. 203
White, James Boyd 5, 58, n. 194
Whittier, Gayle 55
Whitworth, Charles 154, n. 209
Wilde, Oscar 23, 124, n. 193, n. 204
Willet, Andrew 16
Williams, Arnold 16
Williams, Franklin B. 34, 35,
n. 190
Williams, George Walton n. 212,
n. 214
Willson, Robert F. Jr 89, n. 198
Wilson, John Dover n. 193, n. 208
Wilson, Stephen n. 197
Wilson, Thomas 22
Withycombe, E. G. n. 205
Woods, Susanne n. 211
Wright, Matthew n. 200, n. 211
Wynborne, John 21–2
Wynne-Davies, Marion 117, 118,
n. 203
Zink, Sidney 14