Naming as art in Shakespeare’s Tempest

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to argue the potentiality of symbolic meaning in all names, and 2) to show how Shakespeare's names had symbolic meanings that were generally accessible to the audiences of his time. The specific subject of this analysis is The Tempest (hereafter Tmp). It was placed first within the First Folio collection of Shakespeare's plays to represent his artistic vision, and its names and references illustrate that vision. They are more varied in type than usual in Shakespeare's plays and are summative of his career. I shall distinguish six general (and sometimes overlapping) types: generic references, topical references, figurative epithets and sobriquets, references to classical mythology, etymological (and phonetically suggestive) references, and names repeated from earlier plays. This last type reverses the themes with which the names were previously associated, and the reversal of themes illustrates the irony typical of Shakespeare's artistic vision.