Shakespeare’s Names (review)

The title of Laurie Maguire’s Shakespeare’s Names is beguilingly but also ambiguously simple. It could very well be a work of nineteenth-century philology or a book found next to Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, but it could also be the (mischievously deadpan) title of a postmodern study of signifying practices in Shakespeare. Maguire’s book is a little of all of the above. Befitting the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series to which it belongs, the book is an impressively wide-ranging, learned, insightful, but also accessible study of what’s in a Shakespearean name. Its many virtues are not, however, entirely separable from some of its shortcomings.

The first chapter (“On Names”) offers perhaps the best case in point, filling in what the introduction only briefly sketches out as the book’s premise and methodology: first, that “names matter; and names are matter—material entities capable of assuming lives and voices of their own” (4); and second, that the exploration of this premise will primarily be “formalist,” although it will also have “serious philosophical and historicist points to make” (4–5). Thus, Maguire introduces the issue of how names might matter by evoking the distinction between nominalism and what she calls “onomastic predestination” (13). But rather than run through the long history of philosophical debates about, say, nominalism and realism, she offers an engagingly eclectic array of examples of nominalism and onomastic predestination from a range of sources, including literary works from several periods, the Bible, and even contemporary life. She doesn’t so much take philosophical or theoretical positions as illuminate the many different ways in which names can matter in both life and literature (most obviously in works using allegory). She then extends the argument to words or language in general. Maguire evokes, among other things, the linguistic domination associated with colonialism, Renaissance interest in etymologies, and what she terms “poetymologies” (36)— the onomastic wordplay that exercised so many minds, especially in the early modern period. However, Maguire’s somewhat breezy style also occasionally feels as though she is doing what she suggests Shakespeare’s Feste does, to “[highlight] in jest and en passant what philosophers examine in earnest and at length” (26).

Something similar could be said of some of the historical and linguistic questions she takes up. Maguire is content, for example, simply to note that “the early modern interest in etymology (whether actual or fanciful in derivation) was inherited from ancient Greece” (32) without situating that interest more specifically as an early modern social practice. Further, some of the forays into deconstructive analysis sometimes come across as Derrida Lite. That is to say, the book has the great virtue of being both informative and readable for both scholars and students, but it occasionally suffers from some of the consequences attendant on trying to reach both audiences.

The individual chapters generally follow form, although happily the arguments become more visible and incisive. A chapter on Romeo and Juliet runs through some familiar arguments about the nature of language in the play and how it is associated with the very culture from which the young lovers try to escape. Once again, the writing is a pleasure to read, and the insights come in rapid bursts that crystallize ideas with elegant economy. However, Maguire adds a twist by including an extended discussion of a French-English bilingual production (at the 1989–90 Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival) to illustrate not only the problems that names and language can pose, but also the resolution that might be reached. Noting how the lovers reciprocally come to adopt each other’s language in the production, Maguire argues that “Love . . . means learning to speak the language of the beloved” (68). The chapter on the numerous Helens in Shakespeare’s plays makes a more pointed argument by linking all the Helens, including the Helenas, to propose that various mythical stories about Helen of Troy (which made her name toxic for girls) always circulated...