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Renaissance Names in Masquerade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
A rose by any other name—preferably rosa eglanteria—smelled not merely as sweet, but sweeter, in the cultured nostril of the Renaissance. Throughout Europe personal names customarily appeared in print in forms far removed from the simple vernacular bestowed at baptism. In examining twenty-odd thousand volumes while indexing dedications and other preliminaries in British books printed before 1641, the writer has encountered hundreds of instances. A survey of this material, organized to illustrate the various types of masquerade that writers assumed, may assist other students of Renaissance literature. The droller examples may even amuse. My final section, after noting various types of mystifications and puzzles, will leave the reader with a group of unsolved signatures on which he is invited to exercise his ingenuity. The examples throughout the article are drawn from books printed in the British Isles before 1675, except for a few from British authors published on the Continent. No excursion has been made into the rich field of Latin legal documents, though I must acknowledge aid from such standard keys to that material as Charles T. Martin's Record Interpreter.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 An abridgment of this paper was read to the Renaissance Group at the Modern Language Association meeting in Boston on 29 Dec. 1952.
2 See Hoyt H. Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1947), p. 139.
3 As explained below, documentation is by date and then STC number. Many Continental writers are known almost exclusively by Latinized forms. Sometimes, indeed, the originals have been forgotten, as is evidenced by Edward Rosen in “The True Name of Erycius Puteanus,” Fontes Ambrosiani, xxvi (Milan, 1951), 385-397.
4 W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London: Bibliographical Soc), ii (1951), 946.
5 I, William Shakespeare (London, 1937), pp. 63-64. Incidentally, Vigilantius might be construed as Gregory. For Hotson's demonstration that T. Cutwode (1599-6151) is Tailboys [Dymoke], see Essays by Divers Hands, xvii (1938), 47-68.
6 The most accessible text is in Andrew Clark's edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives (Oxford, 1898), ii, 50-53. The poem was recently discussed by Mr. I. A. Shapiro in “The ‘Mermaid Club’,” MLR, xlv (1950), 6-17. The one unkeyed name, still unsolved, is that of the author, Radulphus Colphabius, Aeneacensis, which unfortunately reads variously in the MSS.
7 A special dedication to Sir George Carew is inserted in a Harvard copy of Minsheu's Guide into Tongues. When referring to it in The Library, 5th Ser., vii (1952), 20, I assumed it to be unique; I have since found a second copy at Princeton.
8 The reversed spellings find a parallel in the title of a popular book, Thomas Lupton's Siuquila (1580-16951), long before Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
9 See Fernand de Schickler, Les Eglises du Refuge en Angleterre (Paris, 1892), iii, 116. From a unique copy in the Library of Ste Geneviève, Paris, Schickler describes a Huguenot book, La Main Chrestienne aux Tombez (T. Vautrollier, 1587), not in STC but familiar in an English version of the same year (STC 5154). The anagram is not retained in the translation.
10 Misread as if English, “Anon Jesu reads,” by H.W.D., “John Andrewes,” TLS, 31 July 1930, p. 628, but clarified in an anonymous note inserted in the Folger copy. I am indebted to H.W.D. for calling attention to both the anagram and the reversed acrostic mentioned earlier.
11 The solution of Paul E. McLane, “Spenser's Morrell and Thomalin,” PMLA, lxii (1947), 936-949.