Naming Names in "All's Well That Ends Well"

Abstract

N EDITING SHAKESPEARE, AN APPARENTLY TECHNICAL QUESTION will often open out into a larger area of theory or interpretation. The case at hand begins but does not end with speech prefixes. The Oxford Shakespeare offers to its editors this guideline on speech prefixes: general, personal names are to generic ones... [,] but exceptions may be allowed.' The general rule sounds conducive to a welcome precision, avoiding any confusion about who is speaking. But were all personal names equally preferred by Shakespeare? If the text of the play that is supposed to be closest to his hand suggests rather that some names are central to the character while others are casual afterthoughts tacked onto a conception that is essentially generic and functional-tacked on in order to answer a local, practical need and abandoned when it is past-is there not some distortion in treating all names the same? Whether they appear twenty times in the text or only once? Whether they are underlined by comment and wordplay or just mentioned in passing? This distinction seems to me to operate with special force in All's Well That Ends Well, separating names of considerable structural significance and mythic resonance like Helen and Diana from those of Dumaine, Reynaldo, and Lavatch, which are introduced late and quickly dropped once they have served their immediate purpose. The editors of the Oxford Complete Works, adhering to their own principle, give us in All's Well the headings First/Second Lord Dumaine rather than the Folio's First/Second Lord, Reynaldo rather than the Folio's Steward, Lavatch rather than the Folio's Clown. In this they depart from the practice of most recent editors, who often list some or all of these names in the dramatis personae but tend to retain for the repeated speech headings the generic designations used consistently in the Folio text. And, for this play at least, I think this is the wiser practice. It is better to leave these prefixes as indicated throughout the Folio All's Well-Steward, Clown, and Lords-than to key all their entries and speech headings to those nonce names.