Is "What's in a name" what sin a name is?

Names have always figured in the mystery of Shakespeare. We know that he at times intentionally imbedded names of living persons into his fictional works. For example, the name of Richard Field, his boyhood (though older) schoolmate from Stratford who later became the careful London publisher of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, emerges momentarily (albeit in French) in Cymbeline in a kind of name-dropping cameo when Imogen (disguised as a male youth, Fidele) is interrogated by her Roman captors:

LUCIUS: ‘Lack good youth!
Thou mov’st no less with thy complaining than
Thy master bleeding: say his name, good friend.

IMOGEN: Richard du Champ. [IV, ii, 374-377]

Shakespeare also used the names of dead people, too, though sometimes with annoying – and sometimes with excruciating – results. As to the former, there are the well-known problems suffered by Shakespeare resulting from initially christening the bibulous character in King Henry IV, Part 1 as John Oldcastle that resulted in threats of litigation and in opprobrium from Oldcastle’s descendants for defaming the dead. As is often noted, the renaming of the character as Falstaff did not completely obliterate the previous offending reference:

FALSTAFF:
By the Lord thou say’st true, lad; and is not
my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?

PRINCE:
As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle... [I, ii, 39-41]

As to the the excruciating use of names, we need only refer to the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven in 1596, that was soon followed by the emergence of his literary cognate, the painfully enigmatic Hamlet.

But Shakespeare’s propensity to appropriate and embed names in his works has resulted in speculative sightings that may or may not actually have been intended. (Only the often inscrutable Shakespeare knew for sure.) A line in Sonnet 76, "That every word doth almost tell my name," according to the Oxfordian theorists, refers to Edward DeVere inasmuch as "every word" anagrammatically provides enough letters to phonetically sound such name. Then there is the line in Sonnet 145, "‘I hate’ from hate away she threw," where "hate away" is said to likely refer to the author’s spouse, (Anne) Hathaway. Still further, some scholars suggest that the name of Malvolio, the Puritan prude in Twelfth Night, does not derive from a notion of resentful animosity ("mal" [bad] + "volio" [will]), but instead is an oblique caricature of Sir William Knolleys, Controller of the Queen’s Household under Elizabeth, who publicly lusted after Elizabeth’s maid of honor, Mary ("Mall") Fitton. "Malvolio," it is said, satirically translates into "volio Mall" ("I want Mall"). And then there is this passage from Henry IV, Part 1 where the conspirator Worcester advises Hotspur:

Peace, cousin, say no more.
And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous,
As full of peril and adventurous spirit
As to o’er-walk a current roaring loud
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear. [I, iii, 185-191]

It is hard to imagine the author writing the last line, with its reference to an "unsteadfast footing of a spear," without realizing that he is describing a "shaky-spear."

Names, and the manner in which names can enrich our perspective of a drama's character, were important to Shakespeare. As evidence of Shakespeare's enduring interest in such, one need look no further than Juliet's famous lament in his Romeo and Juliet:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet... [II, ii, 43-44]

Clearly, despite Juliet's wishful thinking to the contrary, Romeo's name was everything in the internecine hatred roiling in Verona.

Moreover, so as to emphasize the often-important link between the word we use to identify a character on the one hand, and our mental conception of that character on the other, Shakespeare frequently assigned a name to fortify an individual's particular (and, sometimes, peculiar) traits. Again, Romeo and Juliet is a case in point: Mercutio shows a mercurial temper; Benvolio [ben[e] ("good") + volio ("will")] begins the play as a would-be peacemaker [I, i, 67]; and Tybalt derives from the Middle English "tib" or "tyb" for "cat" to account for his tomcat-like, street-wise ferocity, (see, [II, iv, 20; III, i, 76; and III, i, 74] where Mercutio refers to him as "Prince of Cats," "King of Cats," and "rat-catcher" and describes the lethal wound inflicted by Tybalt as "a scratch" [III, i, 94, 102]).

But Shakespeare was never content to utilize only one aspect of a literary device, and so it is with the use of names. Consistent with his genius, he also experimented with the converse of such device by tapping into the inherent power of anonymity. Throughout his career, he ventured into the deep and unlit reaches of realms where there were no names, and mined the enormous reservoir of pent-up energy stored there.

A ready example can be discerned in Henry V. In this play, Shakespeare foregrounds a crushing reference to anonymity when he has King Henry exhorting his outnumbered troops to fight by trumpeting the camaraderie of soldiers in the much-celebrated Saint Crispin speech:

From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered,
We, few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition. [IV, iii, 58-63]

We note that the last place we would expect anonymity is within a family setting -- i.e., among a "band of brothers." (After all, one aspect of a family -- as a tribe, race, or nation -- is the members' shared descent from, affiliation with, or assumption of, a common name, not to mention the expected familiarity of the members with one another.) Thus, victorious Henry reveals a great deal when he tallies the light losses in the immediate aftermath of the battle:

Where is the number of our English dead?
Edward the Duke of York; the Earl of Suffolk;
Sir Richard Keighley; Davy Gam, esquire;
None else of name... [IV, viii, 101-104]

So much for "gentl[ing the] condition" of those "ne'er so vile." The "band of brothers" has splintered into named nobility on one side, and the anonymous common soldiers on the other. The hypocrisy of Henry's pre-battle familiarity is measured by the grim poignancy of consequences for the nameless commoners who "'died at such a place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left." [IV, i, 135-139] Shakespeare devastatingly undermines the brassy, martial jingoism voiced by the notable minority in Henry V with the silenced reality of destitution suffered indiscriminately by and among the anonymous majority. In this ostensibly proudful, patriotic play, heroic imperialism -- Shakespeare tells us ever so subtly -- is shamelessly erected on the forgotten husks of souls unknown.

In similar fashion, Shakespeare exposes the perverse egoism of hyper-inflated heroism in Coriolanus. The play examines an aristocratic warrior's visceral inability to relate to, and cooperate with, those classes of people considered inferior. Early on, the protagonist, Caius Martius, is renamed for a conquered city, Corioles, by his commanding general (Cominius) as a tribute to his heroic exploits in the battle for the city:

COMINIUS:
...Therefore be it known,
As to us, to all the world, that Caius Martius
Wears this war's garland: in token of the which,
My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him,
With all his trim belonging; and from this time,
For what he did before Corioles, call him,
With all th' applause and clamour of the host,
Martius Caius Cololianus!
Bear th' addition nobly ever!

ALL: Martius Caius Coriolanus! [I, ix, 58-66]

Immediately thereafter, Shakespeare has the newly-named Coriolanus request a reprieve for one of the citizens, now a condemned prisoner, who has been forcibly taken:

CORIOLANUS:
I sometime lay here in Corioles,
At a poor man's house: he us'd me kindly.
He cried to me. I saw him prisoner.
But then Aufidius was within my view,
And wrath o'erwhelm'd my pity. I request you
To give my poor host freedom.

COMINIUS:
Oh well begg'd!
Were he the butcher of my son, he should
Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus.

LARTIUS: Martius, his name?

CORIOLANUS: By Jupiter, forgot! [I, ix, 80-87]

The fate of the "poor man" -- like the memory of his name -- is relegated to oblivion, all due to the ever-bloating solipsism of the hero. Swallowed whole into the maw of anonymity, a kind man's acts go not only unrequited, but are shamelessly slighted by the person (saved by such kindness) whose name has become renown. Thus, Shakespeare again uses names -- and the lack of them -- to compel us to further ponder the lethal, over-looked wake left by martial ambition.

We see, then, Shakespeare’s recognition of the potency of anonymity. This recognition, however, was only the beginning. His appreciation for the contrasting effect of anonymity resulted in a masterful exploitation of his audience’s instinct to search for definitiveness in the face of undistinguished identity. The opacity of motives exhibited by, and oftentimes torturing, his dramatic characters in his mature works is evidence of his conscious effort to explore the outer reaches of such power. As an example, Hamlet immediately comes to mind, but we see it, too, in Macbeth where we again see Shakespeare use anonymity to bring out the latent chiaroscuro dimming the brightness of expanding power. Macbeth's murderous, ever-widening ambition, fatefully fuelled by the Weird Sisters, is checked by his realization that both its source and culmination are unidentifiable:

MACBETH:
How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
What is't you do?

ALL: A deed without a name. [IV, i, 48-49]

The indescribable and ineffable evil conjured by the ever-anonymous Sisters conceptually plunges us into the same muddy, unmapped morass where the ingredients of the witches' brew are found. Their brew, unapologetically, includes a body part from an unnamed victim of society's fortuitous cruelty:

Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab. [ IV, i, 30-32]

Anonymity in Shakespeare can also show the limits of power – even god-like power. In The Tempest, the deformed and brutish Caliban, (whose name is a kind of anagram of "cannibal"), remarks how the powerful magus Prospero tried to civilize him and taught him "how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night." [I, ii, 336-338] This teaching seems part of the uninvited and subsequently resented encroachment of Prospero and Miranda into Caliban’s primitive world, (e.g., Caliban protests "This island’s mine" [I, ii, 333]). The naming of the sun and moon seems, too, to diminish the primordial and unlimited mystery of those majestic planets. Such diminishment contrasts with the beautiful and magical aspects of the island that have not yet been named by the intruders but are hauntingly described in child-like fashion by Caliban:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after a long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again. [III, ii, 137-145]

Yet, the Sonnets represent Shakespeare’s most astonishing achievement in anonymity. Not only are the Sonnets unfathomably intricate, but they are also extraordinarily intimate. This intimacy leaves the reader compulsively searching for even a hint at the identity – or at least the outline of identity – of the persons described therein. Who was the Young Man, the Rival Poet, or the Dark Lady? Even the notion of whether the Narrator is to be identified with Shakespeare must be questioned. But Shakespeare – with virtuosic mastery – gives absolutely nothing away as to identity, while still giving everything up as to intimacy. The effect, then, is the purest distillation and preservation of the aesthetic as art can offer. Even an abbreviated glance at the most familiar of the 154 Sonnets, Sonnet 18, shows how Shakespeare stripped away the specificity of human identity to lay bare what remains:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
*****
*****
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The significance of "temperate" as "moderate " gives way to its etymological source from "temper" and "temp" to evoke the concept of Time. Thus, the Young Man who is as lovely as a summer’s day will – with season’s change – decay. The "eternal lines" evince the eventual creases of age that will appear on his youthful face, but foremost refer to the eternal written lines of the Sonnet. Thus, the striking, unforgettable beauty of the Young Man who is the subject of the poem, along with any hope to identify him, is lost (and forgotten) amidst the perpetual beauty of the Sonnet itself. Shakespeare mocks the significance of human identity with the last phrase "this gives life to thee" when "thee" is dead and unknown, while the Sonnet will be perpetually recited and read "so long as men can breath or eyes can see." It is as if Shakespeare realized that words can never truly capture the essence of a person, but -- still -- that words are the only lasting things that can approach such endeavor. Perhaps that is the sin a name is – derived from the profound essence of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden – where the first couple was promised by Satan to "be like God," who in Genesis 1:4-5 – like Prospero’s naming of "the bigger light and ...the less" – called "the light Day and the darkness Night." Again, naming those things that comprise the human experience – as with naming a human being – does not capture such, but if we take the time to search for identity throughout Shakespeare's works, we begin to understand that, indeed, every word almost says his name.