The Senses of Names: Shakespeare and Early Modern Rhetorics and Culture

Michel de Montaigne distrusted what John Florio translated as “the vanitie of words”; Henry Peacham, on the other hand, perceived “the nigh and necessary conjunction” of eloquence and wisdom, “the only ornaments whereby a man’s life is beautified”. In their different views, the two writers equally deemed words to be changing ‘subjects’, ready, we may say, to respond to the Biblical command to “increase and multiply”.
 Against the vagaries and excesses of words, names, especially proper names, would allegedly be the champions of fixity and identity within language. But how strong is their vocation to monumentalize? Or even to establish and guarantee filiation? What are the imports (textual, cultural) of an unkept promise to define, if names fail to do so? How many ‘senses’ (meanings, referents and trajectories) are there in a name? With respect to the early modern culture, how does the difference of literature intersect the political dimensions of the name, the appellation, the appellative? In _The Tempest_ Shakespeare invented an unnamed island; what can we make of the extreme case of the absence of the name? The paper aims to address these and other questions through a discussion of examples drawn from Shakespeare's plays.