Peter Blair

Kind Kit Marlowe -or Marley or Merlin: Reading Anthony Burgess's "A Dead Man in Deptford" Through the Naming of Its Main Character Peter Blair

This dissertation aims to account for the stylistic idiosyncrasies observed in the naming of the main character of Anthony Burgess?s post-modernist historical novel "A Dead Man in Deptford", the Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe. The interest in naming is due to the salience given to personal names, either because some names display a marked tendency to change form so that the same name appears under a variety of spellings, or becausen other names are 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. Names are seen to reflect the tension between structure and indeterminacy within the language system, strongly suggesting the centrality of names to the inquiry into the internal contradiction of the language system. Also, as the most conspicuous names are those which identify the protagonist, 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 the novel under review.