The main concern of my thesis is to provide an account of the stylistic idiosyncrasies observed in the naming of the characters in Anthony Burgess's post-modernist historical novel A Dead Man in Deptford (Vintage, 1994), with special reference to the names applied to its protagonist, the Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe.
The interest in naming is occasioned by the salience given to personal names, defined as proper names borne by human or anthropomorphised nominata. Their prominence is the result of two things. First, some names in the novel display a marked tendency to change form so that the same name appears under a variety of spellings, notably the protagonist's family name, Marlowe. Second, some names are frequently foregrounded by being brought into relation with other items on the strength of the formal similarities between them, inducing the reader to assign a meaning to them. This feature particularly affects the short form of Marlowe's forename, Kit, the form he is habitually called by throughout the novel. Names are consequently seen to partake of the instability of the language system, a system in which the features that define it, structure and indeterminacy, exist under tension. The orthographical vagaries names undergo are a source of ambiguity which undermines and subverts the values assigned to them by virtue of the relations they enter into. Their conspicuousness strongly suggests that names are central to the inquiry into the internal contradiction of the language system. Also, as the names most affected by foregrounding are those which identify the main character, the ambiguity surrounding them reflects the problematic concerning the identity of their bearer and the circumstances of the violent and untimely death alluded to in the title of Burgess's novel
