The Names of Comedy

Tragic dramatists inherit their characters' names from history or myth, whereas comic writers usually choose names. This book debates whether names are arbitrary impositions or truthful expressions which meaningfully describe the named, hence analyzing the very nature of language itself.

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Unlike tragic dramatists, who have usually inherited their characters' names from history or myth, comic writers are name-givers. They have always confronted a fundamental choice: whether to give "speaking" names, expressing the nature of the characters, or "accidental" ones, which allow for greater independence and for change. These different attitudes towards naming are bound up with the larger debate about the truthful or arbitrary nature of language itself: the debate formalized in Plato's dialogue "Cratylus", and continuing today. This book takes the "Cratylus" as its starting point. It examines the way individual dramatists and varieties of comedy are drawn either towards the position of Plato's Hermogenes, who believes that names are arbitrary impositions, or towards the essentialist view held by Cratylus himself. It claims that although the bias of comedy is inherently Cratylic, it is a bias perpetually being modified and corrected by the rival approach to naming. The first chapter is concerned with Aristophanes, and with the varying onomastic allegiances of Menander, Plautus and Terence.
The second examines English mediaeval drama, partly in relation to the introduction and spread of surnames, while the third considers the contribution of Hermogenean and Cratylic attitudes to modes of comedy established during the early 16th century and their subsequent polarization in Shakespeare and Jonson. At the heart of the book lie two chapters on Shakespeare, naming and names. Chapter five looks at a group of Shakespeare plays - the Fenriad, "Romeo and Juliet" and "Othello" - in which naming strategies associated with comedy are made to operate within alien contexts. The book ends with general chapters on namelessness in tragedy, comedy and folklore, and its consequences for social and personal identity. A brief epilogue traces the history of English comic naming from the Restoration to Beckett.