Onomastic Mastication

[steepholm]

Even making allowance for dramatic convention, it's always bothered me a little how few characters in Renaissance and Restoration drama appear to notice the eloquence of their names, especially given their near-universal obsession with wordplay. How could Sir Epicure Mammon, for example, ever hope not to be recognized as a worldly epicure the moment he announced himself? Was Sir Andrew Aguecheek fated from birth to be sickly, along with all the alliterative Agucheeks before him, or could he have shrugged off his fate by the constant application of good diet and callisthenics?

I know, I know, they aren't real people so the question is nonsensical - but given the effort that goes into making these characters appear real in many other ways I still think it a natural and non-trivial one. It's just this kind of irritant that provoked me in a former life to spend three years writing about Spenserian allegory, to the delight of all.

What about our names, though? I always felt sorry for John Craven, and for anyone whose surname happened to be Lipfriend. But some names are subtly ambiguous. For years, I thought of the name "Lance Armstrong" as an uber-macho one, rolling Sir Lancelot and Fortinbras into one. Now, I recognize it as a tacit admission of cheating - that he lanced his arm in order to become strong. Like Poe's purloined letter, Armstrong's confession was lying in plain sight, but few had eyes to see it. Perhaps characters in seventeenth-century comedies are suffering from the same problem? "Falstaff, you say? Is that Falstaff as in 'not really Welsh', or is that a dildo in your codpiece? Or does it, perchance, just happen to be your name?" The possibilities are endless.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Collecting distinctively appropriate (or in-) names of people engaged in various professions has long been an amusing pastime.

Then there are near-misses. Why was the novel The Man Who Folded Himself written by David Gerrold and not by John Creasey?

I once read a poor novel set in Elizabethan times in which characters fall into fits of laughter on finding that another character is surnamed Hogg. Why? That's not an unusual name. And how much funnier it would have been if they'd ever heard of Sir Francis Bacon.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Irrelevant trivia: The Man Who Folded Himself was originally titled The Man Who Fucked Himself, but the publisher wouldn't go for it.

Irrelevant trivia, part two: there's also a novel by Christopher Morley called The Man Who Made Friends With Himself. It would be rather fun to have a lot of titles beginning The Man Who... shelved together -- I just tried a search at the University of Washington library and got, among much else:

The man who accused the king of killing a fish : the biography of Narin Phasit of Siam (1874-1950)
Man who also made steel
The man who ate a goose : a play in three acts
The man who ate death : an anthology of contemporary Serbian stories
The man who ate his boots : the tragic history of the search for the Northwest Passage
The man who ate the 747
The man who ate the money
The man who ate the popomack : a tragi-comedy of love in four acts
The man who beats the S & P : investing with Bill Miller
Man who became a fish
A man who became a savage a story of our own times
The man who became an eagle : a Haida legend
Man who became Sherlock Holmes
The man who believed he was king of France a true medieval tale
The man who believed he was king of France : a true medieval tale
The man who believed in the code of the West
Man who bought America
The man who bought himself : the story of Peter Still
The man who broke into Auschwitz a true story of World War II
---etc., also

The woman who ate python & other stories
The woman who battled for the boys in blue. Mother Bickerdyke; her life and labors for the relief of our soldiers. Sketches of battle scenes and incidents of the sanitary service
Woman who came at six o'clock
The woman who can't forget : the extraordinary story of living with the most remarkable memory known to science : a memoir
The woman who censored Churchill
The woman who cooked her husband
The woman who could not die
The woman who could not live with her faulty heart
Woman who danced
The woman who dared

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Man Who Fucked Himself is a bad title, not because of the word but because that's only a small part of the plot, and ought to be a bit of a surprise, whereas "Folded Himself" depicts the whole story very well.

You might be interested in knowing What They Did. (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1978/08/28/1978_08_28_085_TNY_CARDS_000327974)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're quite right about that being a bad title. I wonder if someone who had no reputation would even have been able to get a manuscript of that title read? I sure wouldn't have been very inclined in its favor if it had come over my transom. (I forget what the book itself was like -- am pretty sure I did read it, and that I enjoyed it at least somewhat.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Not forgetting one of my favourites: The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.