Shakespeare's Names

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 (itis 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 keyplays: 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.

Maguire seems to have enjoyed writing Shakespeare's Names and it is correspondingly enjoyable to read., ...a crucial text not only for those interested in Shakespearian drama but for anyone interetsed in language more generally..., Her detailed account of performances...are hugely illuminating. This is a book as much for theatre lovers as for linguists. And anyone who tries to be both will be delighted that she has written it., [a] stimulating book... criticism of such distinction, engaging, learned, and far-reaching... Shakespeares Names is, to borrow a phrase from Loves Labours Lost, a great feast of language (5.1.36-7), both in its graceful writing and its endearing subject.

Laurie Maguire was educated in Scotland and studied at the University of London and at the Shakespeare Institute. She lectured in Canada for 12 years before taking up a position as Tutorial Fellow at Oxford in 1999. Her publications include several books on Shakespeare and numerous articles on Renaissance drama, textual problems, performance, and women's studies. She has lectured widely across the United States.