3
‘An Adopted Name of Privilege’
The final scene of King Lear includes a version of the trial by combat, a ritual familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences from the early moments of Richard II. In Richard, the scene is a virtual exposition of trial ceremony: a trumpet sounds, the defendant and his accuser stand forward, and the Lord Marshal, instructed by the king, addresses to each a series of formal questions:
What is thy name? And wherefore com’st thou hither
Before King Richard in his royal lists?
Against whom comest thou? And what’s thy quarrel?
Speak like a true knight, so defend thee heaven.
(RII I. iii. 31–4)
Mowbray and Bolingbroke identify themselves by name and degree, and the combat may begin. But in Lear, when Edgar appears at the third trumpet to challenge his brother Edmund, this customary pattern is violated. Albany stands for the king, and at his instigation a herald proclaims the ritual questions:
What are you?
Your name, your quality, and why you answer
This present summons?
(Lr V. iii. 120–2)
Our expectation is that the disputants will fulfill the form, and answer the questions; the ensuing combat would seem to depend upon their acquiescence to the ceremony. But our expectation is frustrated, and frustrated in a startling fashion: the disguised Edgar, denying the ritual request, declares instead his intention to retain his disguise. ‘Know,’ he says, ‘my name is lost; / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit’ (122–3). Disowned by his father, cheated and betrayed by his brother, Edgar has lost his name by necessity, and throughout the play he chooses to keep it concealed by policy. No longer accepted by his lineal relations, he becomes by turns Poor Tom, and the countryman who leads Gloucester to ‘Dover cliff’, and the second countryman who finds him after his ‘fall’ – and ultimately the anonymous masked challenger of the trial by combat. Only when Edmund lies dying at his feet does he reclaim his lost name and lineage: ‘My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son’ (171).
Significantly, this repossession of both name and family comes at a time when Edgar recovers his stolen birthright: both Gloucesters are dead, and he stands at the head of his line. What is even more significant, however, is the dramatic chronology which makes this revelation possible. For Edgar has reclaimed his name before this, in the poignant confrontation with Gloucester in which, he says, ‘I revealed myself unto him … and from first to last / Told him our pilgrimage’ (V. iii. 194–8). It is in fact this self-naming which leads directly to Gloucester’s death: ‘His flawed heart … too weak the conflict to support … Burst smilingly’ (198–201). But although the reunion between parent and child precedes the trial by combat in historical time, it is described after it in the dramatic action; moreover, the incident takes place offstage, and is retold by the son, rather than presented directly to the audience. This dislocation places dramatic emphasis, not upon the filial recognition scene, but on the son’s reclamation of his name. For a playwright so consistently interested in the motif of the family reunion, this is a surprising departure, which underscores the importance of Edgar’s action. The transition from ‘Know, my name is lost,’ to ‘My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son,’ marks a crucial development in the tragedy, and constitutes nothing less than a rite of passage.
In view of the ritual origins of drama, it is perhaps not surprising to encounter in Shakespeare a dramatic pattern based upon names and naming which corresponds to some well-known aspects of primitive religious practice. Among ancient Greek and Semitic tribes, and for a number of primitive tribes today, the name was thought of as part of the extended self of the individual, and therefore as vulnerable: to know another’s true name was, in some sense, to have power over him. Hence there developed a practice of dual naming; in which a publicly used personal name, often a sur- or nickname, was substituted for the secret or sacred name of the individual. In some Australian tribes, as Frazer points out,1 the secret name was known only to fully initiated members of the group – that is, to those who had come of age. Likewise in ancient Egypt two names were bestowed upon the child; the ‘good’ or ‘little’ name was in public use, while the other, the ‘true’ or ‘great’ name, was kept concealed. The names of kings, priests, and other sacred persons were guarded with especial care in such societies, since to hold power over them would be particularly desirable. To give the child the name of a living person became an ambiguously valued action – it might either sap the vitality of the original bearer, or, alternatively, revitalize him and guarantee him extended life. Often the names of the dead were taboo, and could not be mentioned; the inference is that to do so would be to evoke the ghost. For the same reason, those who held the same name as a dead person might choose another, lest the ghost think he was called when his namesake was addressed. The word ‘name’ in Hebrew and other Semitic societies is in fact a virtual synonym for ‘posterity’, and to bless or curse the name is thus to affect the entire family and future of its bearer.
Now, some equivalences between these patterns and certain details in Shakespeare’s plays will be immediately apparent – as for example the dramatic tension produced by the fact that Hamlet bears the same name as his father, or the resonance of Richard II’s poignant cry, ‘Arm, arm, my name.’ Of special interest to the reader of Shakespeare, however, is the explicit congruence suggested between the rite of initiation and the gaining or learning of a name (or a new name). Eliade notes that the initiation rite itself represents a symbolic death and resurrection, and describes the practice of certain African tribes who severely beat the novice, ‘which is said to “kill” his old name so that he may be given another.’2
We need not, of course, restrict our search for such rituals to the practice of primitive tribes or non-western cultures. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel, and is given a new name: ‘Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince has thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed’ (32 : 28). At the time of the covenant, God likewise renames Abram: ‘Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee’ (Gen. 17 : 5). Moses, cast into the Nile as a nameless infant, is given a name which signifies both his identity and his destiny: Pharaoh’s daughter ‘called him Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water’ (Exod. 2 :10). When Saul accepts Christ, he is known as Paul, and Simon known as Peter; in the Vulgate the significance of the name is clear: ‘Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam’ (Matt. 16 : 18). ‘Christ’ itself is a cognomen or epithet meaning ‘the anointed one’, which is frequently substituted for or added to the given name of Jesus. The book of Revelation explicitly describes a ritual of renaming: ‘To him that over-cometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it’ (2 : 17), and it is also in Revelation that we hear of one who sat on a white horse, and was called Faithful and True; ‘and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself’ (19 : 11–12).
The Arthurian legends, which probably represent the period of English literature most overtly concerned with initiation rituals, place a similar stress upon the acquisition or revelation of the name. In Malory, Arthur finds his true name and title only after he succeeds in drawing a sword from a stone; the sword bears an inscription which identifies its owner as ‘rightwise king born of all England’.3 Galahad is knighted by his father, Lancelot, but will not tell his name; the name is revealed for the first time by the graven letters on the Siege Perilous, which describe him as ‘Galahad, the haut prince’.4 He then performs the confirmatory ritual of drawing another sword from a stone, this one engraved to ‘the best knight in the world’,5 and acquires the shield of Joseph of Arimathea, reserved for ‘Galahad, the good knight’,6 ‘the worthiest knight of the world’.7 In a similar way Gareth, the younger brother of Gawain, comes incognito to Arthur’s court, where he is mockingly called Beaumains (‘Fair-hands’) until he proves himself a knight and discloses his true identity.
Classical literature offers the example of Oedipus, perhaps the most suggestive of all legendary searches for the name. Oedipus begins his adventures confident of who and what he is: the son of Polybus of Corinth. By the close of Sophocles’ play, he has learned not only the significance of his given name, ‘Swollen-foot’, but also his real identity and the identity of the murderer he seeks; tragically, the two are the same. The new Sphinx riddle posed for Oedipus is the same as that posed for Shakespeare’s tragic heroes: ‘who am I?’ – and the form taken by that riddle is the name, as Bernard Knox suggests:
oἶδα the knowledge of the tyrannos, πoύζ the swollen foot of Laius’ son – in the hero’s name the basic equation is already symbolically present, the equation which Oedipus will finally solve.8
Oedipus the son of Polybus and Merope is also Oedipus the son of Laius and Jocasta; Oedipus the son of Jocasta is also Oedipus, Jocasta’s husband. When Jocasta finally learns the truth, she addresses him in despair: ‘Unfortunate. This is the only name I can call you.’9 He is no longer either husband or son. As the meaning of his name is revealed, the name itself is at once lost and agonizingly regained.
In these cases, the loss or abdication of the name need not imply the bearer’s ignorance: the true name must be earned through a ritual of initiation, and once the rite of passage is successfully undergone, the other initiates – e.g. the Knights of the Round Table, the Apostles – are permitted to share the once concealed or forbidden knowledge. As was the case with Edgar, the true name includes both a personal name (Joseph, Galahad, Arthur) and a surname or cognomen, which may be generic (Israel), titular (‘the best knight in the world’) or both (‘king born of all England’). In Shakespeare’s plays, this surname is often called an ‘addition’. The hero of Cymbeline is named ‘Posthumus’ because his parents predeceased him, but his other name, ‘Leonatus’, was given to his father as a ‘sur-addition’ because of his bravery in war (I. i. 28–33). As this suggests, Shakespearean additions, like their ritual counterparts, must be earned; they may prove dangerous and even fatal if the rite which qualifies the bearer has not been completed, or is somehow reversed or undone. Thus the proud surname of ‘Coriolanus’ proves Caius Marcius’ death warrant when he uses it in Corioles, and once Lear resolves, ‘Only we shall retain / The name, and all th’ addition to a king’ (I. i. 135–6), he is ultimately deprived not only of title but also of name: ‘Does any here know me? This is not Lear’ (I. iv. 227).
The most clear-cut example of the dangerous addition is probably that of Macbeth, where the tantalizing sequence of ‘Glamis’, ‘Cawdor’, and ‘King hereafter’ leads ineluctably to murder and self-destruction. Ross has greeted Macbeth with the title Thane of Cawdor’, unconsciously echoing the trifold ‘hail’ of the witches: ‘In which addition, hail, most worthy thane!’ (I. iii. 106). But Macbeth’s subsequent actions, in killing the king and seizing his title, are not emblems of achieved maturity, but rather the opposite: ‘brave Macbeth – well he deserves that name’ (I. ii. 16) is transformed first into ‘the baby of a girl’ (III. iv. 106), and then into the monster of the final scenes, who is neither man nor child, and whose name has lost its personal qualities to become itself a ‘title’, the synonym for tyrant:
Young Siward What is thy name?
Macbeth Thou’lt be afraid to hear it.
Young Siward No; though thou call’st thyself a hotter name
Than any is in hell.
Macbeth My name’s Macbeth.
Young Siward The devil himself could not pronounce a title
More hateful to mine ear.
(V. vii. 5—9)
As was the case with Jacob and with Oedipus, man’s name here becomes his fate. It is a pattern we will see repeated frequently, with varying permutations, throughout Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories.10
One assumption which lies behind the quest for a name is that of a natural reciprocity between the name and the thing – a concept that is often expressed in the tag phrase nomen-omen.11 The name is thought to embody the qualities of its bearer, and becomes a sort of talisman. In Shakespeare this kind of name magic usually represents a lost ideal, an earlier and simpler world in which one-to-one correspondences between names and things existed, and in which, therefore, the name did not have to be sought or earned. John of Gaunt, who represents just such a world in Richard II, puns on his name – rather in the manner of Donne’s final hymns – as he lies on his deathbed:
O, how that name befits my composition !
Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old!
Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast;
And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt?
For sleeping England long time have I watched:
Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt.
The pleasure that some fathers feed upon
Is my strict fast – I mean my children’s looks –
And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt;
Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave
Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones.
(II. i. 73–83)
Richard’s impatient response (‘Can sick men play so nicely with their names?’ – 84) characteristically misses the point, and Gaunt’s explanation stresses the necessary link between the personal and familial aspects of the name: ‘Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me [by banishing his son Bolingbroke, and thereby ending his line] I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee’ (86–7). But the play on ‘Gaunt’ also suggests an inherent appropriateness between the name and its bearer – an appropriateness which is about to die in England, as Gaunt is dying, and as the name of England itself has lost its power. Indeed, Gaunt’s great ‘this England’ speech, which immediately precedes the puns on his own name, sets up precisely the same pattern of correspondences. ‘This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle …‘ (II. i. 4off) – in all there are eleven lines of verse and thirteen appositive metaphors before the name of ‘England’ is introduced, yet the speech, which is a single sentence of twenty lines, is perfectly clear, because its metaphors are persuasive. The equation between ‘this other Eden, demi-paradise’ (42) and ‘this England’ (50) is – or was – so exact that the listener assumes the subject. But now, argues Gaunt, the proper name for England is not ‘ Eden’ but ‘tenement or pelting farm’ (60) ; the easy equivalence between name and thing has been lost, and with it the power which that name wields. The lesson here for Richard lies in the third, unspoken, equivalence, also assumed by an earlier and simpler world: the equivalence between the names of ‘Richard’ and ‘king’.
A similar pattern of nomen-omen appears in Coriolanus, a play much concerned with the losing and finding of names. Here the reference is to one Censorinus, an ancestor of Caius Marcius, ‘And nobly namèd so, twice being censor’ (II. iii. 246). The detail is taken from Plutarch,12 and the comment made by one of the hostile tribunes in persuading the citizens to revoke their support for Coriolanus. His implication is clear, and is underscored by the succeeding dialogue: once there was a time when magistrates, and indeed magistrates of this noble family, were fit for their posts – so fit that their names and posts were identical. But this is no longer the case; despite his honorable lineage, Caius Marcius, surnamed Coriolanus, is unfit to be consul.
Of all Shakespearean nomen-omen instances, however, none is more striking than the episode of Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar. (The Roman plays, with their natural interest in the cognomen, seem to take ‘name’ as a thematic element with some consistency.) On his way to Caesar’s funeral, Cinna is halted by a gang of plebians who challenge his loyalty and ask his name. Unluckily, he bears the name of one of the conspirators, and the plebians, taking the name for the thing, fall upon him and beat him:
Cinna I am Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!
Fourth Plebian Tear him for his bad verses ! Tear him for his bad verses!
Cinna I am not Cinna the conspirator.
Fourth Plebian It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.
(III. iii. 31–7)
The scene is a vivid emblem of the confusion which has fallen upon Rome after the murder of its ruler. When times are bad for anyone, the poet suggests, they are particularly bad for poets. Behind the wry Shakespearean truth, however, lies another important thematic point: since the name is no longer directly equivalent to the thing, we act at our peril. For just as one may beat the wrong Cinna, so one may kill the wrong Caesar.
To kill the wrong Caesar is, of course, the fate of revolutionists and conspirators throughout Shakespeare, whether their intended targets are Roman emperors or English kings. In Julius Caesar the distinctions between nomen and cognomen, name and addition, are first blurred, then lost, so that ‘Julius’ lies bleeding while ‘Caesar’ escapes the conspirators’ hands. Brutus feelingly invokes the doctrine of the king’s two bodies:
O, that we could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But alas,
Caesar must bleed for it.
(II. i. 169–71)
But the result of his actions is ironically opposite to his intent. The initial confusion, however, and a willful one, is not Brutus’ but Cassius’ – since for reasons of both policy and nature, Cassius discounts the idea that names have power.
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’.
(I. ii. 142–7)13
If this sounds a little like Edmund on astrology, or Iago’s advice to Roderigo, that is because it is also part of Cassius’ own ambitious plan. ‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’ do have the same number of syllables, and the same metrical stress – but then so does ‘Cassius’, the unspoken name behind this argument. Yet the irony again resides within the speaker’s own rhetoric, for ‘Caesar’, unlike the others, can and does start a spirit – his own; his name alone has the power to conjure, as Cassius learns at last: ‘O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet! / Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords / In our own proper entrails’ (V. iii. 94–6). Caesar’s personal name of ‘Julius’ is used only twice in the play without the powerful addition: once by Mark Antony, and once by Brutus – both times, significantly, after he is dead. Caesar himself consistently speaks of himself in the third person:
Caesar should be a beast without a heart
If he should stay at home today for fear.
No, Caesar shall not. Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he …
And Caesar shall go forth.
(II. ii. 42–8)
Yet there are of course two Caesars, the invincible ruler and the vulnerable man – a man who suffers from ‘the falling sickness’ and is hard of hearing:
I rather tell thee what is to be feared
Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
And tell me truly what thou think’st of him.
(I. ii. 211–14)
All the greater, therefore, is the conspirators’ dismay when they discover that it is ‘Julius’ who lies bleeding at the Capitol, while Caesar is mighty yet – in fact, doubly mighty. The vengeful ghost stalks the battlefield, and a new Caesar, like a new phoenix, rises from the ashes of the old.
The stage is not long empty of a Caesar; the play’s first mention of Octavius comes immediately after Antony’s funeral oration. But Octavius is repeatedly described as ‘young’; he is untried, an uninitiated novice, and there is in Antony’s phrase ‘no Rome of safety’ for him yet (III. i. 289). It is not until the fourth act that he appears, still patronized by Antony: ‘Octavius, I have seen more days than you’ (IV. i. 18); in the third scene of that act ‘young Octavius’ is addressed or described by his novice’s epithet no less than three times (92, 150, 165). But the next scene begins the fifth act, and with it his transition from boyhood to manhood, again manifested through a change of name. Antony, still condescending, instructs ‘Octavius’ to lead his troops to the left, but Octavius demurs; he will take the right. ‘Why do you cross me in this exigent?’ demands Antony, and the reply is worthy of the speaker’s namesake: ‘I do not cross you; but I will do so’ (19–20). Only four lines later, we hear Antony for the first time address his colleague as ‘Caesar’, and ‘Caesar’ he remains, to Brutus (V. i. 56) and to himself (54). The ‘peevish schoolboy’ (61) has come of age, and the boast of ‘always I am Caesar’ is transferred to a new generation.
Julius Caesar thus offers its audience versions of the dangerous ‘addition’, the equally dangerous (because fallacious) belief in nomen-omen, and the initiation rite; of these it is the initiation rite which comes to occupy the most important position in the pattern of naming and renaming which animates so many of Shakespeare’s plays.
In Richard II, for example, we can trace both a genuine pattern of initiation and a counterfeit of that pattern, as Richard and Bolingbroke each seek names which the other refuses to acknowledge. Bolingbroke progresses steadily through a sequence of names – Hereford, Lancaster, King Henry IV – insisting at each stage upon the perquisites of his title:
Berkeley My Lord of Hereford, my message is to you.
Bolingbroke My lord, my answer is – to Lancaster;
And I am come to seek that name in England.
(II. iii. 69–71)
Symbolically, on his return from exile, he chooses as his chief public complaint the fact that Richard has removed his engraved name from the buildings of the Lancaster estate: ‘From my own windows torn my household coat, / Raced out my impresse, leaving me no sign ... To show the world I am a gentleman’ (III. i. 24–7). But Bolingbroke believes that kingship is a role, rather than an anointed right bestowed immutably on a chosen person; just as he can alter his behavior to suit the tastes of Northumberland on the one hand, and an oyster-wench on the other, so his progression from name to name is an act of expedience, culminating in a political objective. Neither the temporary loss of a name, nor the gaining of one, affects his nature and his confident sense of self; even when he has attained the kingship, his principal interest in ‘name’ is lineal, rather than personal, and centers on the dissolute behavior of his ‘unthrifty son’ (V. iii. 1). It is only at the close of the play, with a change in Richard’s name rather than his own, that we see him truly moved, and determined for the first time to legitimize the stolen name of ‘King’.
For Richard, of course, the quest for the name is vital, the more so because of his insistent denial that his name is lost. As we have already noted, his desperate cry of ‘Arm, arm, my name!’ (III. ii. 86) is greeted by the news that the citizens are deserting; for Richard the call to arms is, tragically, not metaphor but an articulation of literal truth – of the lost nomen-omen relationship in which he steadfastly believes. The impertinent Northumberland predictably takes a more harshly realistic view, in a revealing exchange with the Duke of York:
Northumberland Richard not far from hence hath hid his head.
York It would beseem the Lord Northumberland
To say ‘King Richard’.…
Northumberland Your grace mistakes; only to be brief Left I his title out.
York The time hath been
Would you have been so brief with him, he would
Have been so brief with you to shorten you,
For taking so the head, your whole head’s length.
(III. iii. 6–14)
But that time is already long past. In the deposition scene (IV. i.) it is Richard himself who finally disclaims the name, refusing the courtesy title of ‘my lord’ offered by Northumberland, almost as if he had overheard the conversation with York:
No lord of thine, thou haught, insulting man,
Nor no man’s lord: I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font
But ‘tis usurped.
(IV. i. 253–6)
To his mind, in losing the title of ‘King’, he loses also the name of ‘Richard’, and becomes, as Coriolanus will later become, ‘a kind of nothing, titleless’ (Coriol. V. i. 13). His belief in the nomen-omen relationship, the kingship of persona, compels him to regard an ‘unkinged Richard’ as an oxymoron. As he reasons in his soliloquy at Pomfret Castle, to ‘play … in one person many people’ (V. v. 31) is, for him, to be ‘nothing’ (38); to lose his title is also to lose his name.
Yet Richard’s name is not irretrievably lost, nor is its power altogether gone. Like the ghost of Caesar, the corpse of the dead Richard returns to confront his usurper, and the body of the murdered king is for the first time given its full and proper name:
Great king, within this coffin I present
Thy buried fear: herein all breathless lies
The mightiest of thy greatest enemies,
Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought.
(V. vi. 30–3)
Exton’s action and his pronouncement make Richard’s name into a word of power. ‘Richard of Bordeaux’, like ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Edgar and thy father’s son’, reunites the individual with his lineage and heritage. Too late, Bolingbroke begins to realize that he, like the Roman conspirators, has chosen Richard’s wrong name – seized the public name and not the secret or sacred one. He has appropriated a kingship, but the power of Richard of Bordeaux escapes him, and the name of King Richard, ‘that sweet lovely rose’ (1HIV I. iii. 173), comes inexorably to haunt his troubled reign.
Just as the name of the slain king haunts Brutus and Bolingbroke (as Henry IV), so his father’s name haunts Hamlet. Claudius has usurped the kingdom, the queen, and the name of king, but Hamlet sees himself as a usurper as well – he bears his father’s name, but feels unworthy of it. ‘I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane’ (I. iv. 44–5), he apostrophizes the ghost; these noble additions should be the son’s as well. But, like Edgar, he feels that he has been dispossessed of them. The nomen-omen fitness of the names of young and old Fortinbras taunts him; in that case the son is the image of the father, and though a novice, ‘of unimprovèd mettle hot and full’ (I. i. 96), young Fortinbras soon proves himself ‘a delicate and tender prince’ (IV. iv. 48), a destined ruler. But young Hamlet is persuaded that he bears no such resemblance to his father, the king. Like Edgar, therefore, he chooses a disguise, an ‘antic disposition’, which leads others to the same conclusion he has already drawn: that Hamlet is not Hamlet. His own inadequacies, as he sees them, coupled with Claudius’ act of usurpation, have robbed him of his name.
Hamlet’s reassertion of the lost name is, ironically, assisted by his school-fellows and age-mates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Their failure becomes the means of his success. And the literal mark used to achieve that success is of particular interest, as Hamlet himself explains:
I had my father’s signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal,
Folded the writ up in the form of th’ other,
Subscribed it, gave ‘t th’ impression, placed it safely,
The changeling never known.
(V. ii. 49–53)
With his father’s ring he signs his name to the paper and the deed. In one uncalculated action (‘Why, even in that was heaven ordinant’ – 48) Prince Hamlet thus claims the authority of King Hamlet, and exercises the prerogative of the royal seal, the king’s official signature. ‘Denmark’, for him, like ‘Egypt’, for Cleopatra, is more than a country of origin – it is a surname, part of his identity and role; the play contains allusions to ‘the main voice of Denmark’ (i. iii. 28), and to ‘jocund health[s] that Denmark drinks today’ (I. ii. 125), both references to Claudius, while Gertrude implores Hamlet to ‘look like a friend on Denmark’ (I. ii. 69), again alluding to her present husband. Thus, by the act of using his father’s seal, the emblem of Denmark, Hamlet lays claim once more to his name and its proper additions.
As we saw in King Lear, so also in Hamlet the importance of reclaiming the name is emphasized by a rearrangement of dramatic chronology, in order to place the literal moment of self-declaration at center stage. The shipboard incident with its account of the seal, like Edgar’s tale of his talk with Gloucester, is presented to the audience at one remove – retold, rather than acted. Moreover, this incident, which occurs before the graveyard scene, is not retold until after it. The scene which therefore draws our attention, and which contains the crucial declaration, is the highly charged moment at Ophelia’s graveside, when Hamlet challenges the grieving Laertes. As Edgar had unfolded himself, declaring, ‘My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son,’ so Hamlet, suddenly revealing himself, steps forward to proclaim,
This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
(V. i. 257–8)
Private name and public name, personal name and surname, both long denied, come together at last in this self-assertion. The epithets addressed by a son to the ghost of his father are now worn as the son’s own right; the dramatic tension which has extended from the initial address, ‘I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane’ is resolved by the rightful appropriation of that address: ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane.’ Again the rite of passage has concluded with the gaining of a new name. If we need further corroboration of the importance of the name here, we may look to Hamlet’s ensuing apology to Laertes, remembering that only once before in the play (iv. ii. 3) has he referred to himself by name at all:
Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
(V. ii. 235–8)
It is almost as if he enjoys, for the first time, the sound of his own name.
For Hamlet and Edgar, as to a certain extent for Richard and Bolingbroke, the experience of the naming ritual is the same: the novice begins with a personal name, but loses it or chooses to conceal it; he then passes some time in a nameless state, during which he is engaged in a quest or an initiation; having successfully undergone this rite, he acquires a new, public name, or else recovers his lost name with an ‘addition’ denoting family, rank, or social position. This is a basic pattern of maturation in Shakespeare’s plays, and, as we have already noted, aspects of it can be found in many of the histories and tragedies. In King Henry IV Part I, for example, Prince Hal tries on a variety of names. Scornfully described by Hotspur as the ‘sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales’ (I. iii. 228) and the ‘nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales’ (IV. i. 94), both belittlings of his right to office, he will later lay claim to that title through his actions in battle: ‘And God forbid a shallow scratch should drive / The Prince of Wales from such a field as this’ (V. iv. 9–10). As the play begins, we hear his father, the king, express the significant wish that his son be proved a changeling, swapped at birth for the valiant Hotspur, and many others suggest that this is in fact the case – that Hal is not his father’s son. To become ‘son Harry’ (V. v. 39) he faces down his namesake on the field at Shrewsbury, in a formal scene of combat which once again marks a coming of age:
Hotspur If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.
Prince Thou speak’st as if I would deny my name.
Hotspur My name is Harry Percy.
Prince Why, then I see a very valiant rebel of the name.
I am the Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more.
(V. iv. 57–62)
Hal, who by his previous behavior has indeed denied his name, here lays direct claim to both name and title. England cannot support two Harrys – so Hotspur must die. ‘I am the Prince of Wales/ like ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane,’ joins together the sundered pieces of personal and public roles, and announces the change for which the regained name is a talisman. In the subsequent plays chronicling Hal’s life and reign, this initiation pattern is twice repeated, each time accompanied by a further change of name. When Falstaff addresses the new monarch as ‘King Hal’ at the close of Part II (V. v. 41), we perceive the magnitude of his error, for that name and that title are irreconcilable. And when King Henry re-christens himself ‘Harry le Roy’ as he talks in disguise to the soldiers at Agincourt (HV IV. i. 49) we see a new kind of ruler fashioning himself to suit his changing country.
The love tragedies, too, include elements of the renaming ritual. Romeo’s growth to maturity involves a change both in his own name and in that of his beloved. Prior to his meeting with Juliet he has exhibited all the symptoms of the classic Petrarchan infatuation: he roams the woods in darkness, and by day ‘makes himself an artificial night’ (I. i. 143), all for the love of the tantalizingly distant, maddeningly chaste lady Rosaline. Friar Lawrence calls this ‘doting’. Despite his facility with quip and sword, Romeo is at this point still in many ways a child.
But the sight of Juliet brings about a change in his behavior and rhetoric which is confirmed by his willingness to change his name. ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo?’; ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name’; ‘What’s Montague…?’; ‘What’s in a name?’ (II. ii. 33–43). Juliet’s insistent questions are all in a way invitations to the quester to sever himself from his child’s name or son’s name, and to seek a new one through action and initiation. ‘Romeo, doff thy name,’ she urges, and unhesitatingly he consents to do so:
Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
(50–1)
The new name he chooses for himself is appropriate; he is not only her love but for this moment ‘Love’ himself, Cupid, Eros, who ‘with love’s light wings’ can o’erperch walls. The Romeo who doted on Rosaline has disappeared as effortlessly as the memory of Rosaline herself: ‘I have forgot that name and that name’s woe’ (II. iii. 46). Unluckily for Romeo, however, his initiation involves not one but two actions associated with coming of age: in rapid succession he marries and he kills, and the second action dooms the first. Juliet’s playful image of danger and loss now begins to come true:
Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud,
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine
With repetition of ‘My Romeo!’
(II. ii. 161–4)
When she does call out his name repeatedly, at the news of his banishment and Tybalt’s death, Romeo’s first, histrionic response touches, likewise, on an ironic truth:
As if that name,
Shot from the deadly level of a gun,
Did murder her; as that name’s cursèd hand
Murdered her kinsman. O, tell me, friar, tell me,
In what vile part of this anatomy
Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack
The hateful mansion.
(III. iii. 102–8)
Her forgiveness and her love are not enough. The tomb to which she is taken mocks the power of the name to summon its bearer, as Echo’s cave mocks its own lonely inhabitant. To Juliet he is ‘My Romeo’, but he is also a Montague, and that is a name he can lose now only through his own death.
For Troilus and Cressida, the consequences of mingling love and war are, if possible, even more disastrous. In the play which tells their story, nomen-omen reappears in a malignant guise: ‘Let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers-between Pandars!’ (III. ii. 200–2). The archetypes predate the play, and are determinative; free will in names, as in actions, is ‘slave to limit’ (III. ii.82). When the anguished Troilus observes the dalliance between Diomedes and Cressida, his confusion is directly related to the wish to make the name equal to the thing: ‘This is, and is not, Cressid’ (V. ii. 144). The meaning of ‘Cressid’ to him will not square with the facts as they appear.
The audience’s familiarity with ‘Troilus’, ‘Cressida’, and ‘Pandar’ as archetypes or literary clichés gives these lines a curious doubleness in time, as if the play we are watching is or might be different from the story so often told before: against all reason we hold to the wish that for once Cressida will be faithful, and Troilus at last rewarded in his love. But Cressida’s prayer, ‘Make Cressid’s name the very crown of falsehood / If ever she leave Troilus!’ (IV. ii. 101–2) inevitably fulfills itself, and the play’s characters are locked into their names and roles. Cressid is Cressid, despite Troilus’ confusion; her ‘secret’ name is the name given her by legend, known to the audience and playwright, but not to Troilus – or to herself. Neither of them, of course, suspects that their destinies are fixed by history, and doubly sealed by their very names. The spectacle thus presented, of archetypes struggling blindly against their own defined identities, is – like the play itself – at once ironic and tragic.
We saw in Romeo and Juliet the beginning of the name quest, the novice’s first step toward maturity, and in Troilus and Cressida the inexorability of the sacred or legendary name, together with the power wielded by those who know it. In Antony and Cleopatra we see Shakespeare coming to terms with the end of the quest for the name, the drama of the name regained. Cleopatra, of course, bears many names, among them Isis, Dido, Venus and the generic cognomen ‘Egypt’. Like Bolingbroke, she knows the name game, and can shift from one role to another virtually at will. But from the first moment that we hear of Antony – and long before we meet him – he is presented as a man who has lost his name, and with it that name’s power; as one of the Roman soldiers remarks,
sometimes, when he is not Antony,
He comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.
(I. i. 57–9)
To this opinion Octavius likewise gives his assent; Antony, who was once a legend, now loses himself in dotage, and is ‘not Antony’. The name of ‘Antony’ here carries a historical, almost a mythical weight; it is a category, and not merely a personal name – as we would say, ‘a Hercules’, or ‘a Hitler’. And in his frustration, Antony himself is occasionally prone to this usage, as when he enters the throne room to find a messenger from Octavius kissing Cleopatra’s hand:
Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried, ‘Ho!’
Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth,
And cry, ‘Your will?’ Have you no ears? I am
Antony yet.
(III. xiii. 90–3)
There is pathos here, for this Antony no longer commands kings; his forces depleted, his troops deserting, he has shed most of the power which once was his. Yet he is hardly a novice. How then can we call this an initiation, or a self-discovery? If we can do so, it is, I think, by looking at the other meaning of ‘Antony’ – the Egyptian meaning, which is given so full an explication in Cleopatra’s dream vision (V. ii. 74–100). In this reading, Antony is rather lover than soldier, his exploits in the field all confirmatory actions in the service of his lady. Much the same irony is present here as in Troilus: the Roman soldiers understand in ‘Antony’ the substance of a soldier and ruler; the audience, which knows the rest of the legend, perceives that he has only now become the true ‘Antony’, a warrior who gave all for love.
The voice in which he addresses her is that of a man on a quest:
Dost thou hear, lady?
If from the field I shall return once more
To kiss these lips, I will appear in blood;
I and my sword will earn our chronicle….
Come,
Let’s have one other gaudy night.
(III. xiii. 172–83)
And Cleopatra, delighted at this restoration, replies,
It is my birthday.
I had thought t’ have held it poor. But since my lord
Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.
(185–7)
The two names are mutually sustaining and restorative. The mention of Cleopatra’s birthday, which Shakespeare takes from Plutarch,14 is here appropriately juxtaposed to an image of rebirth through the name. In short, the situation in Antony and Cleopatra bears a certain resemblance to a phenomenon we noticed in Julius Caesar and Richard II: the singling out of the wrong name. Cleopatra’s Antony is in this moment restored, even as the Roman Antony prepares to die; at the end of this same scene, as if to emphasize the dichotomy, his Roman aide Enobarbus resolves to leave him.
The death of Antony, when it comes, is tragically linked with Cleopatra’s use (or misuse) of his name. Terrified of his anger after she has deserted his troops in battle, she takes refuge in the monument and sends the eunuch Mardian with a message:
Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself:
Say that the last I spoke was ‘Antony.’
And word it, prithee, piteously.
(IV. xiii. 7–9)
All too faithfully, Mardian performs his charge:
The last she spake
Was ‘Antony! most noble Antony!’
Then in the midst a tearing groan did break
The name of Antony; it was divided
Between her heart and lips: she rend’red life,
Thy name so buried in her.
(IV. xiv. 29–34)
So effective is this piteous wording that it immediately realizes itself as truth. As the name of Antony is fictively broken and buried, so the living Antony resolves himself for death, as if the (supposed) destruction of his name wielded some magical power over the bearer of that name. ‘Unarm, Eros. The long day’s task is done, / And we must sleep’ (35–6). Eros declines to stab his captain, and kills himself instead; yet if the soldier Eros is not his master’s slayer, the fault may yet lie with his namesake: ‘I will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t / As to a lover’s bed.… Eros, / Thy master dies thy scholar’ (99–102). As it happens, Shakespeare did not invent the name of Antony’s companion, nor did he choose the names of Cleopatra’s handmaidens, Iras and Charmian; yet it is clear that Antony dies in the company of love, and Cleopatra attended by her chief attributes of ire and charm. Thus in Antony and Cleopatra names become more than things – become powerful watchwords, easy to misinterpret, and tragic to misuse. Antony, long an initiate of war, remains almost throughout a novice in love; the triumph of regaining the name is followed immediately by the careless cursing of that name, at the direction of one whom Antony has acknowledged to be a ‘witch’ (IV. xii.47).
Of all Shakespeare’s heroes, perhaps the one who delights most in his new-won name is Coriolanus; yet, as we have already seen, it is his incautious use of that name which leads directly to his death. Like Bolingbroke and Hal, Coriolanus progresses through many names in the course of the play. When we first meet him he is Caius Marcius, son of Volumnia, but soon he earns the surname of ‘Coriolanus’, conqueror of the city of Corioles. The way in which he wins and accepts that name is worth our attention: declining any share of the spoils of war, he consents to receive only his general Cominius’ horse, and his proclamation:
from this time,
For what he did before Corioles, call him,
With all th’ applause and clamor of the host,
Caius Marcius Coriolanus.
Bear the addition nobly ever!
(I. ix. 62–6)
But no sooner has he been given this honorific surname than the audience is offered a chance to see what names mean, and do not mean, to Caius Marcius. Like any hero, he has the right to beg a favor of his generals, and this he promptly does, recalling that in the city of Corioles lives a poor man who once gave him shelter. ‘I request you’, he says, ‘To give my poor host freedom’ (86–7). ‘O, well begged!’ cry the generals, and ‘Marcius, his name?’ (87, 89). But Marcius has forgotten his name.
By Jupiter, forgot!
I am weary; yea, my memory is tired.
Have we no wine here?
(90–2)
Personal names have no significance for him. Did the man live, or die, because Marcius had forgotten his name – or was he ever thought of again? Could knowing his name have saved him? Things without names tend to slip from our memories, as Marcius himself is shortly to learn.
In the middle of the play, Coriolanus undergoes a process of stripping which is characteristic of the hero of Shakespearean tragedy. From the man who has everything – mother, wife, son, public honors, even briefly the consulate – he becomes a man who has nothing – a man who, like Edgar, wears a disguise, and temporarily lacks a name. Arriving at the home of his former enemy, he is greeted by Aufidius, ‘the second name of men’ (IV. vi. 126) in Cominius’ phrase, and subjected to an insistent catechism:
Whence com’st thou? What wouldst thou? Thy name?
Why speak’st not? Speak, man. What’s thy name?
In reply, Coriolanus unmuffles himself:
Coriolanus If, Tullus,
Not yet thou know’st me …
necessity
Commands me name myself.
Aufidius What is thy name?
Coriolanus A name unmusical to the Volscians’ ears,
And harsh in sound to thine.
Aufidius Say, what’s thy name?
Thou has a grim appearance, and thy face
Bears a command in’t….
What’s thy name?
Coriolanus Prepare thy brow to frown. Know’st thou me yet?
Aufidius I know thee not. Thy name!
Coriolanus My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done
To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces,
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus. The painful service,
The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood
Shed for my thankless country, are requited
But with that surname….
Only that name remains.
(IV. v. 57–77)
‘Only that name remains.’ Aufidius is right to wonder what this stranger in his camp may represent. In his own view, Coriolanus is no longer a man, but just a living name, or more properly a living surname. His addition of ‘Coriolanus’ replaces, and obliterates, all his other names and titles, leaving him no wife, no mother, no kin. In an earlier speech to the senators extolling the virtues of Coriolanus on the battlefield, Cominius described him in terms which were disturbingly machine-like: ‘from face to foot / He was a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries’ (II. ii. 108–10). Now, newly ensconced in Corioles, this inhuman abstraction seems to be all that is left of Caius Marcius Coriolanus. On the one hand, his name has become a magic talisman to the Volscians; the ‘soldiers use him as the grace ‘fore meat’ (IV. vii. 3). On the other hand, the man himself disclaims all names.
Coming to plead with him for mercy on behalf of Rome, Cominius finds that he has rejected even his surname:
He would not seem to know me….
Yet one time did he call me by my name.
I urged our old acquaintance, and the drops
That we have bled together. Coriolanus
He would not answer to; forbade all names;
He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
Till he had forged himself a name o’ th’ fire
Of burning Rome.
(V. i. 8–15)
He will not be known by the proud title which commemorates a Roman victory; yet what title, what surname, could be awarded to the Roman general who conquers Rome? The concept is an oxymoron; the would-be conqueror remains, therefore, effectively dehumanized, ‘a kind of nothing, titleless’. Characteristically, and with his usual charming obtuseness, the old counsellor Menenius when he goes to see him pleads from the other extreme, claiming exactly the kind of name Marcius has forbidden. ‘My son Coriolanus’ (V. ii. 63); ‘thy old father Menenius’ (70) – these are names that have long been rejected, long abandoned as too painful and vulnerable. The meeting between the two is framed by a scene that is at once painful and comic, as Menenius, sailing confidently into the Volscian camp, boasts to the watchmen of the power of his name:
Menenius My name hath touched your ears: it is Menenius.
First Watch Be it so; go back. The virtue of your name Is not here passable.
(V. ii. 11–13)
His name is not a magic word, a password, a shibboleth, despite what he may think. But Menenius presses further:
Menenius Sirrah, if thy captain knew I were here, he would use me with estimation.
First Watch Come, my captain knows you not.
Menenius I mean thy general.
(51–4)
Menenius has the wrong name, the wrong addition, yet again – and he certainly has the wrong name when Coriolanus at last appears: ‘My son Coriolanus…O my son, my son!’ (70). We may be reminded of Falstaff’s ill-chosen cry, ‘God save thee, my sweet boy!’ (2HIV V. v. 43) addressed to the newly crowned king. For Coriolanus has made up his mind: ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not’ (81). He disavows all familial and lineal ties, and his one word for Menenius is ‘Away!’ The watch, standing at the fringes of this exchange, now has its inevitable revenge:
First Watch Now, sir, is your name Menenius?
Second Watch ‘Tis a spell, you see, of much power.
(94–6)
The magic power of names is completely denied by the world into which Coriolanus has withdrawn. For if they know his name, they will have power over him; and if he uses their names, he admits to a relationship which makes him vulnerable. To be nameless is to be unassailable, like a god.
But Coriolanus is not unassailable; he, too, has a secret name, and when that name is pronounced he will respond. It is for this reason that Volumnia approaches him as she does. She arrives accompanied by his wife, Virgilia, who in turn produces their son as a kind of stage property, an emblem of longevity: I ‘brought you forth this boy,’ she says, ‘to keep your name / Living to time’ (V. iii. 126–7). But Volumnia knows that this kind of lineal afterlife is less important to him than the afterlife afforded by fame and reputation in which she has schooled him. Skillfully, she begins to work on his feelings of history:
if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name
Whose repetition will be dogged with curses,
Whose chronicle thus writ, ‘The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wiped it out,
Destroyed his country, and his name remains
To th’ ensuing age abhorred.’
(142–8)
Here is a name over which Coriolanus will have no control. His new addition will be abhorrent and unpronounceable: the living paradox of a Roman conqueror of Rome. The key to Volumnia’s strategy here lies in her dual role: she is both the mythic embodiment of Rome, the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, and the human mother of a particular man. Artfully now she turns from the civic to the personal – roles which have long been conflated in her tutelage of her son – appealing to him as a private man: There’s no man in the world / More bound to’s mother…yet.… / To his surname Coriolanus ‘longs more pride / Than pity to our prayers’ (158–71). And this reversal has its intended effect, though Coriolanus is perceptive enough to see that such pity is ‘most mortal to him’ (V. iii. 189). No longer an ‘engine’, who ‘wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in’ (V. iv. 23–4), in taking his mother’s hand and reaffirming the lineal bond he seals his own doom. For Aufidius has been listening, and Aufidius now knows the secret name. The scene in which he makes use of that knowledge is one of the most painful in the tragedies, and one which shows us the initiation pattern reversed, the hero turned back, step by step, from cognomen to nomen, from maturity to childhood.
Ironically, the scene begins with Coriolanus marching for the first time with the commoners, a man who has at last acknowledged his bond with humanity. But Aufidius’ jealousy is inflamed, and he unconsciously echoes the attack of the Roman tribunes, with the same chosen epithet of vilification:
Aufidius tell the traitor in the highest degree
He hath abused your powers.
Coriolanus Traitor! How now!
Aufidius Ay, traitor, Marcius!
Coriolanus Marcius!
Aufidius Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius! Dost thou think
I’ll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol’n name
Coriolanus, in Corioles?
(V. vi. 84–9)
This is a point which has probably never occurred to Coriolanus: that the inhabitants of Corioles might object to his surname, which signifies that he has conquered their city. But the worst is yet to come, as the indictment proceeds: ‘at his nurse’s tears,’ continues Aufidius, ‘He whined and roared away your victory’ (96–7). ‘Hear’st thou, Mars?’ erupts Coriolanus, calling upon his namesake, and Aufidius’ reply is the final straw: ‘Name not the god, thou boy of tears!’ (100). Not Mars’ man, Marcius, but ‘boy’ – his final name as well as his first name, and a name so truly given that Coriolanus can do nothing but repeat it in disbelief: ‘“Boy!” O slave!’ ‘“Boy!” False hound!’
If you have writ your annals true, ‘tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. ‘Boy’?
(V. vi. 102, 111–15)
‘Boy’ is the true and hidden aspect of Coriolanus’ nature, an aspect which, once articulated, has the status of the ominous ‘secret name’ of ritual. It is a name which accords with his pride, his vanity, his sense of war as a sexual event bonding man to man, his choice of war over statecraft, his relative indifference to his wife and child – and, above all, his passionate love for, and submission to, his mother. Rendered vulnerable by all of these, he is mercilessly stripped of the lineaments of adulthood. The literal sparagmos, or tearing to pieces of the hero which is his fate, follows directly from this loss of name; once again, those who know the secret name of a king or priest are able to rob him of his power. The killing of the name here results, not in a symbolic death and rebirth, but in a real death, only partially compensated – if at all – by the promise that ‘he shall have a noble memory’ (V. vi. 152). The secret nomen of ‘boy’ returns Coriolanus to the role of novice from which he began.
To be a ‘novice’ in Shakespeare’s plays is to be one not yet learned in his craft or art – or in his own nature. Octavius is called a novice by Antony – ‘Triple-turned whore! ‘Tis thou / Hast sold me to this novice’ (A&C IV. xii. 13–14) – because of his inexperience in war, and the slain Edward of Wales is described as a ‘princely novice’ who never lived to rule (RIII I. iv. 225) ; according to Petruchio his fellow suitors are novices in love (Shr. II. i. 304), and the virginal Isabella in Measure for Measure is appropriately described as ‘a novice of this place’ both because it is a nunnery, and because she is untried in the ways of generosity and compassion. As we have noted, the Shakespearean novices who most directly undergo a process of maturation in the course of their plays are often those who, in doing so, pass through the concomitant stages of losing and regaining their names. The situation of Coriolanus is really a variation of the naming pattern rather than a contrast to it, just as the name-quest of Romeo, though it does not complete the full cycle exemplified by Edgar or Hamlet, nonetheless partakes of many of its aspects. In each case the basic rhythm of movement, from personal name to lost name to new name or name regained, can be felt as animating the life – and sometimes the death – of the hero.
If the play itself is in some sense a ritual, it contains within it echoes and vestiges of other rituals. Juliet seeks to know what’s in a name; Hamlet impishly demands of Osric, ‘What imports the nomination of this gentleman?’ (V. ii. 129–30). Both pose a version of the initiate’s question, identifying the name as riddle, spell and watchword, as well as title, rank and lineage. For the author of the ‘Will’ sonnets, once publicly calumnized as considering himself ‘the only Shake-scene in a country’,15 the quest for the name and that name’s meaning offers the dramatic ritual of initiation as yet another significant metaphor for the knowledge of self.
Notes
1 Sir James Frazer, The New Golden Bough, Theodor H. Gaster (ed.) (1890; rpt. [abridged] New York: Mentor Books, 1964), p. 235. Frazer’s chapter on ‘Tabooed words’, pp. 235–46 (sections 181–8), supplemented and revised by Gaster (esp. pp. 176, 271–2), is the major source of anthropological data in this paragraph.
2 Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation; The Mysteries of Death and Rebirth, Willard R. Trask (trans.) (originally published as Birth and Rebirth) (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958; rpt. Harper & Row, 1975), p. 74.
3 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (1906; rpt. London: J. M. Dent & Sons [Everyman’s Library], 1963), I, p. 10 (Bk. I, Ch. v).
4 Malory, II, p. 167 (Bk. XIII, Ch. iv).
5 Malory, II, p. 166 (Bk. XIII, Ch. ii).
6 Malory, II, p. 178 (Bk. XIII, Ch. xi).
7 Malory, II, p. 175 (Bk. XM, Ch. ix).
8 Bernard Knox, ‘Sophocles’ Oedipus’, in Cleanth Brooks (ed.) Tragic Themes in Western Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955; rpt. 1966), p. 13.
9 Knox, p. 20.
10 In accordance with the comedy of humors, the most interesting names in the comedies and the comic names in the tragedies and histories tend to be static and stereotypical rather than progressive and emblematic: consider Touchstone, Sir Toby Belch, Bottom, Doll Tearsheet, Ancient Pistol.
11 Cf. ‘Nomen atque omen quantivis iam est preti,’ Plautus, Persa, 625 (‘That’s a name and omen worth any price’).
12 T. J. B. Spencer (ed.) Shakespeare’s Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius and Coriolanus in the Translation of Sir Thomas North (Middlesex, England, and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1964, rpt. 1968), p. 296.
13 The frequency and peculiarity of spoken names in Julius Caesar has been remarked by numerous critics, including Dowden, Granville-Barker, G. Wilson Knight, L. C. Knights, and Maurice Charney. Recently, Madeleine Doran, in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), has argued for a balance and pairing between ‘Caesar’ and ‘Brutus’ in the play, with the third name of ‘Roman’ bringing them into equipoise. See her essay,’ ‘‘What should be in that ‘Caesar’?” – Proper names in Julius Caesar’ (pp. 120–53), for a thoughtful discussion of the iterations and resonances of these names. For further analysis of proper names in the play, Doran cites especially R. A. Foakes, ‘An approach to Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare Quarterly, V (1954), 259–70, and M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background (London, 1910), pp. 228–32 and n. 1.
14 Spencer, p. 272.
15 Robert Greene, Groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance (1592), sig. F1v.