L ITERARY NAMES This page intentionally left blank Literary Names Personal Names in English Literature ALASTAIR FOWLER OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alastair Fowler 2012 T e moral rights of the author have been asserted First published 2012 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–959222–7 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc F or my daughter Alison This page intentionally left blank P reface M y title Literary Names calls for explanation. The subtitle “Personal Names in English Literature” provides some of this but not quite enough. It gives no hint that while the main focus is on English I have made sorties into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. T his book is an expansion of my 1974 Witter Bynner lecture at Harvard and my 2008 F. W. Bateson lecture at Oxford. Discussion after the Bateson lecture suggested the subject of literary names was far larger than I had grasped, and deserved treatment at book length. Sub- sequent work confi rmed this: indeed, it now seems that a single book is hardly enough. T he following pages do not amount to a defi nitive or systematic trea- tise. I have rather aimed at a series of interrelated essays exploring how names have functioned in literature. The broader chapters (1, 2, 4, 7, and 9) are mixed with others on individual authors who use names in spe- cially interesting ways: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov. I hope these case studies may be found less superfi cial. E mphasis has fallen on earlier literature, partly because I am less ignorant about it and partly because names mattered more in Renais- sance literature, and more diversely. In pre-Enlightenment literature names loomed large, not least in its hidden levels, in acrostics and anagrams. A book of this sort incurs a mountain of indebtedness—more, prob- ably, than I am aware of, and certainly more than can be adequately acknowledged here. Perhaps the greatest intellectual debt of scholars is to educative conversation with colleagues and friends. In my case this means colleagues at Oxford, Edinburgh, Princeton, Charlottesville, and elsewhere—many of them now gone: F. W. Bateson, Irvin Ehren- preis, C. S. Lewis, Wallace Robson. Among living colleagues at Edin- burgh University, it is a pleasure to acknowledge what I have learned from Michael Bury, Owen Dudley Edwards, Liz Elliott, R. D. S. Jack, Roger Savage, and Susan Shatto (the last almost a collaborator). viii preface O thers, elsewhere, have corresponded generously: William Bellamy, Eleanor Cook, Jerry Leath Mills, James Nohrnberg, Bernard Richards, Tom Roche, Roger Swearingen, David Vander Meulen, Sir Christo- pher Ricks, and Jack Levenson (who after more than thirty years of contestation has fi nally persuaded me that Finnegans Wake is immensely enjoyable). On heraldry, I consulted Robin Orr Blair (formerly Lord Lyon King of Arms) and Katy Lumsden of the Genealogical Offi ce, Dublin. F ormer pupils too have instructed me, especially Christopher But- ler, Anne Coldiron, Tom Corns, Peter Field, and Misako Himuro. But debts to pupils remain unknowably vast. S ome friends or acquaintances made the sacrifi ce of reading indi- vidual chapters or part chapters in draft: Howard Erskine-Hill, Robert Cummings, Denis Feeney, Juan Pellicer, and Peter Davidson. Others helped on particular points: John Burrow, Martin Dodsworth, Peter France, Christopher de Hamel, Emrys Jones, Aleta Konkol, Norman Kreitman, Michael Lurie, Mark Scowcroft, Karen Thompson, and Robbert Wetselaar. And always the staff of the National Library of Scotland have been unfailingly helpful. I t is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the contribution of P rofessor John Considine of the University of Alberta, who made many learned and valuable suggestions. W hat I owe to my wife Jenny may be imagined from the fact that she had to talk names every single day for three years. A lastair Fowler E dinburgh, 2011 C ontents A bbreviations x Introduction 1 1 . N aming in History 11 2 . M odes of Naming 29 3 . T he Faerie Queene 53 4 . H idden Names 75 5 . S hakespeare’s Names 1 01 6 . M ilton’s Changing Names 125 7 . A ssumed and Imposed Names 141 8 . T hackeray, Dickens, and James 171 9 . A rrays of Names 193 1 0. J oyce and Nabokov 215 Afterword 233 G lossary 235 R eferences 237 I ndex 267