ABSTRACT
Most of the names in the Comedies and Romances are significant as tags, allusions or, at times, a combination of both. Shakespeare plays poetically with some in the dialogue. The Romances have, on the whole, rather less name signification than the other Comedies, with Pericles and Cymbeline the only titles taken from character names. Not that drama is the only source for Shakespeare’s names in The Comedy of Errors. Shakespeare had used it for Petruchio’s Kate deceased father in The Taming of the Shrew, and the name occurs for characters throughout the playwright’s career. Petruchio’s Kate is thus not a gentle and aristocratic “Katherine” like Shakespeare’s others in Love’s Labor’s Lost, Henry V, and Henry VIII. The “local habitation” and names in A Midsummer Night’s Dream points to the Theseus myth as a correlative for the play. The Merchant of Venice settings are handled in the same deliberate manner often used by Shakespeare for character names.
