There must be a book somewhere on the subject of Shakespeare's choice of names for his characters. The fact that I can't immediately find one isn't enough to establish that this is an area left untouched by academics There are dictionaries of characters and glossaries saying who they are but it's hard to believe that stretching the investigation to book length is an idea that has so far eluded every scholar in search of a theme.Perhaps it simply doesn't stretch to book length but that doesn't usually stop them filling it up with arcane background research. It seems to me that Shakespeare couldn't bear to have a minor character in a play fulfilling some necessary function without at least giving them a fitting name, like a painter who needs to fill every corner of a vast canvas with detail.
The constabulary are an unfortunate target of ribald naming in Love's Labour's Lost and Henry IV part 2, with Dull, Fang and Snare. Mouldy and Wart also appear in Henry IV, 2, suggesting that it was in earlier plays that Shakespeare enjoyed himself the most with names because A Midsummer Night's Dream is among the early plays where Bottom most famously appears. Froth is in Measure for Measure. Speed is a 'slow-witted servant' in Two Gentlemen of Verona.
I don't know if Elizabethan third-formers would have found Gobbo as amusing as we did in 1975 in The Merchant of Venice but I hope contemporary audiences enjoyed the names of Richard II's favourites, Bushy, Bagot and Green as much as we did in the sixth form. One wonders how long Shakespeare sat considering what names to give them. But how well he chose. Green, what a funny name to put alongside Bushy and Bagot.
So, is it because Timon of Athens is unfinished that Poet and Painter aren't given names. Had he not come up with suitable names by the time he abandoned it, if it was abandoned, or are they left as such because they are ciphers not worthy of personalities of their own. Or perhaps Middleton wrote those characters and over-ruled Shakespeare's wish to call them Waffle and Daub, or perhaps frivolous, joke names weren't thought becoming in such a dark play and perhaps by 1606, Shakespeare had lost all the mirth he had once found in such diversions. You see, you could make a book out of endless speculation and textual reference if you really needed a book to bolster your academic career. Many such have been written on less convincing arguments. For instance, it would not do to extrapolate from the large number of Italian names used in Italian settings that the plays were written by Marlowe after he had been secretly taken off to Italy after another corpse had been provided as evidence that he had been murdered in Deptford. It is more likely that Marlowe was murdered in Deptford.
But there might be more hidden resonances to be found than that Othello includes the word 'hell' and Desdemona has in it 'demon'. It is hard to believe that happened by accident in the work of a writer who clearly enjoyed giving names to his characters.
I love Imogen, the innocent wife in Cymbeline and am disconcerted to find its origin cited on the interweb as being the result of the printer's mis-reading of the Celtic name, Innogen, in that very play. So Shakespeare can't really be credited with inventing it but, as ever, it is the printer's fault and not because the author had bad handwriting. So there's another chapter for the book.
But my favourite name, in not my favourite play, is Moth, the irreverent page in LLL. And it looks as if Shakespeare liked it, too, because he used it in MND as well. As far as I can tell, that is Seroca Davis as Moth on the right of the picture above.
There must be a book about all this if one looks hard enough for it. If not, it looks as if it might need doing and, if nobody else will do it, I might have to. I have been wondering how I might spend the flat season once I don't go to work any more. I could call it Green, and other amusing names that Shakespeare gave his characters.
