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Shakespeare's Names. By Laurie Maguire. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 256. $60.00 cloth. Reviewed by Yu Jin Ko
The title of Laurie Maguire's Shakespeare's Names is beguilingly but also ambiguously simple. It could very well be a work of nineteenth-century philology or a book found next to Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us, but it could also be the (mischievously deadpan) title of a postmodern study of signifying practices in Shakespeare. Maguire's book is a little of all of the above. Befitting the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series to which it belongs, the book is an impressively wide-ranging, learned, insightful, but also accessible study of what's in a Shakespearean name. Its many virtues are not, however, entirely separable from some of its shortcomings.
The first chapter ("On Names") offers perhaps the best case in point, filling in what the introduction only briefly sketches out as the book's premise and methodology: first, that "names matter; and names are matter-material entities capable of assuming lives and voices of their own" (4); and second, that the exploration of this premise will primarily be "formalist," although it will also have "serious philosophical and historicist points to make" (4-5). Thus, Maguire introduces the issue of how names might matter by evoking the distinction between nominalism and what she calls "onomastic predestination" (13). But rather than run through the long history of philosophical debates about, say, nominalism and realism, she offers an engagingly eclectic array of examples of nominalism and onomastic predestination from a range of sources, including literary works from several periods, the Bible, and even contemporary life. She doesn't so much take philosophical or theoretical positions as illuminate the many different ways in which names can matter in both life and literature (most obviously in works using allegory)....