ABSTRACT
Shakespeare played with his own name. Not only in the sonnets, but also with characters named William in the plays can we detect self-parody by Shakespeare. Made up as it is of two intelligible one syllable English words, the name Shakespeare was subject to another kind of variation, again due to whimsical spelling. Shakespeare created a number of important characters for his plays with names like his own—made up of two monosyllabic English words. Not only did Shakespeare change the name Oldcastle to Falstaff, but he publicly apologized for the knight’s earlier name. Falstaff function for Hal in the Henry IV plays is, we can conjecture, rather a bit like Shakespeare’s must have been for Southampton or whoever the poet’s friend in the sonnets is. A further link connecting Falstaff with Shakespeare is that very probably the playwright was fat—at least when he was older.
