How do names attach themselves to particular objects and people and
does this connection mean anything? This is a question which goes
as far back as Plato and can still be seen in contemporary society
with books of Names to Give Your Baby or Reader's Digest columns of
apt names and professions. For the Renaissance the vexed question
of naming was a subset of the larger but equally vexed subject of
language: is language arbitrary and conventional (it is simply an
agreed label for a pre-existing entity) or is it motivated (it
creates the entity which it names)? Shakespeare's Names is a book
for language-lovers. Laurie Maguire's witty and learned study
examines names, their origins, cultural attitudes to them, and
naming practices across centuries and continents, exploring what it
means for Shakespeare's characters to bear the names they do. She
approaches her subject through close analysis of the associations
and use of names in a range of Shakespeare plays, and in a range of
performances. The focus is Shakespeare, and in particular six key
plays: Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew,
A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus
and Cressida. But the book also shows what Shakespeare inherited
and where the topic developed after him. Thus the discussion
includes myth, the Bible, Greek literature, psychological analysis,
literary theory, social anthropology, etymology, baptismal trends,
puns, different 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; the reader will also find material from contemporary
journalism, film, and cartoons.
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