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Reviews 135 timber and hon and in none of these is it specified that the destination was Egypt Political circumstances had changed in some way. Balletto's edition of the notarial acts is exemplary. Her mastery of the exceedingly difficult notarialtexts,made infinitely more difficult by the poor state of preservation of the manuscripts, is to be admired. The only criticism which can be made is that the critical apparatus is inadequate. There is an index of proper nouns: places, names, commodities, ships. But there is no index by type of contract nor any critical apparatus for technical terminology. There is an enormous number of barbarized Latin technical terms, many derived from vernaculars, and to find out what they mean can involve a great amount of research in obscure reference works. The editor could have saved users a great amount of trouble. However, this is a criticism which could be made of the entire series for Balletto merely follows editorial practice. John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Barton, Anne, The names of comedy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1990; cloth; pp. x, 221; R.R.P. CAN$35.00. Names, like puns, are taken more seriously now than they used to be. Yet literary onomastics is, and always has been, something of a minefield. A student of meaningful Active names once interpreted the name of Lady Wishfort in Congreve's The Way of the World in terms of the 'fort' of her honour, apparently unaware that the name might point to a longing for 'it', namely sexual experience. More recently a commentator on James Joyce's story 'The Dead' noted solemnly that the name of the central figure, Gabriel Conroy, had 'attracted attention as containing roi, the French for "king"'. He neglected to expound the other French word that the name Conroy contains. Such gaucheries are hard to find in Anne Barton's book. She is wellinformed about the Cockwoods, Loveits, and Wishforts of Restoration comedy, and even more so about the significantly-named characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Her book is full of provocative suggestions and conjectures. How, for example, could the poet in Shakespeare's sonnets promise immortality to the young man when his name is not, as far as we can tell, ever mentioned or alludedto,whereas Anne Hathaway, not centrally important to the sequence, 'has her name glanced at in [sonnet] 145'? Not only is the significance of the name Viola in Twelfth Night explored but also the curious phenomenon of its remaining unmentioned until the last few tines of the play. And while proper attention is given to the names of celebrated and important characters, the minor figures, all the way down to Gyb the cat in Gammer Gurton's Needle, also receive their share of attention. 136 Reviews The book is much more, however, than a series of random insights. The philosophical basis for the discussion is the debate in Plato's Cratylus between Cratylus himself, w h o argues for an essential relationship between a name and its bearer, and Hermogenes, for w h o m the connection is arbitrary. A good example of the perceptions arising from this distinction is: 'The more urban and familiarly allied to the times Elizabethan and Stuart comedy is, ... the more likely it will be to gravitate away from the hermogenean in the direction of descriptive names'. Tragedy, contrariwise, favours hermogenean naming, exploring 'the plight of the individual suddenly stripped, through some misfortune, of a previously existing personal name'. In a few writers, however, such as Ben Jonson, cratylism appears to be 'an ingrained habit of mind', colouring virtually all of their work. There is some uncertainty about the book's range and scope. Greek and Roman comedy are treated quite thoroughly, as are Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. One might question the discrimination against Restoration comedy, not tackled until almost the end of the book, and against m o d e m writers, who are mentioned only briefly. But in general this is a stimulating, gracefully written, and well-structured study. T. G. A. Nelson Department of English University of N e w England Benson, C. David, and Elizabeth Robertson, eds, Chaucer's...

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