Reading Names in an Elizabethan Allusion: Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Thomas Nashe

Abstract

AbstractMy 1974 edition of Everard Guilpin's 1598 collection of satires and epigrams, Skialetheia, fails to recognize how heavily one passage relies for many of its effects on the names of the two individuals ridiculed and thus, in consequence, how readily the two are identifiable. I now see that the initials of Southampton and Nashe are given prominence in one line and that the text plays throughout, in a variety of ways, on the name Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, thought by most scholars to be the Fair Young Man of Shakespeare's Sonnets. This allusion to these two has gone unnoticed (other than in my edition) and its method of playing on names thus gone unappreciated. My identification of the two satirized by Guilpin, which was tentative in my edition, can now be confident. Specialists in the English Literary Renaissance need to be alert to the way names were embedded within texts.