What Are Shakespeare's Sonnets Called | What Are Shakespeare's Sonnets Called?
What Are Shakespeare's Sonnets Called?
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Somerville College, Oxford
The naming, or entitling, of literary works raises questions which range from the abstractly philosophical to the concretely bibliographical. Indeed, this is an area in which such approaches, normally divergent, converge. Some of the metalinguistic problems of naming are amusingly cracked open in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1893), where Alice is offered four different names for a song about to be performed by the White Knight. The titles offered by the White Knight in response to Alice's questions range from 'Haddocks Eyes', 'The name of the song', by way of what the name 'really is', The Aged Aged man', then moving on to what the song 'is called', 'Ways and Means ', and arriving finally at what appears to be the essentialist centre:
'Well, what is the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this...
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