“What’s in a Name?”: Shakespeare, Wilde, and the Language of Identity

    Introduction

What is a name? Is it a vessel of meaning, bearing the essence of a person or object, or merely a social tag affixed by convention? This enduring question lies at the heart of two iconic literary texts: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. While Juliet famously asserts that names are superficial and malleable, Wilde’s characters—especially Gwendolen Fairfax—imbue names with almost mystical significance. These opposing views reflect a philosophical tension between nominalism and essentialism, and they resonate strongly with modern theories of language and identity. Both plays, in their distinct registers, dramatize the fraught relationship between words and the realities they claim to represent. In doing so, they anticipate central concerns of semiotics and linguistic performativity.

Juliet and the Logic of Nominalism

In Act II, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet offers one of the most quoted reflections on language in English literature:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.”¹

(Modern paraphrase: The thing we call a rose would smell just as sweet even if it had a different name. Similarly, Romeo would remain just as perfect even if he weren’t called “Romeo.”)

Here, Juliet dissociates Romeo’s identity from his inherited surname, “Montague,” which binds him to a feuding lineage. Her reflection echoes the core of nominalist philosophy: the view that names do not correspond to essential properties but are arbitrary designations shaped by social context. Romeo’s virtues, in her eyes, are independent of the sign attached to him.

This intuition anticipates the structuralist insight of Ferdinand de Saussure, who argued that the relationship between the signifier (e.g., the sound pattern “rose”) and the signified (the mental concept of a rose) is not natural but conventional,² (following Saussure, we are equating “word” with the more abstract “linguistic sign” for illustrative purposes, CGL-[158]).

Saussure’s central claim is that meaning emerges from differences among signs within a system—not from any intrinsic connection between word and thing. “Romeo” gains significance only in opposition to other names—“Tybalt,” “Paris,” or “Capulet.” Juliet’s reasoning reflects an early poetic grasp of this linguistic arbitrariness.

This nominalist stance also echoes medieval philosophy, particularly William of Ockham, who famously argued that universal terms (like “human” or “Montague”) are mere flatus vocis—breaths of speech—with no independent reality beyond the mind.³ For Ockham, language does not mirror the structure of the world; it is a tool for mental classification. Juliet’s soliloquy thus becomes a lyrical affirmation of a theory that would later challenge metaphysical realism.

As the British Library notes, “Juliet’s reflection reveals a tension between name and essence... Names, Shakespeare seems to suggest, are mutable and socially constructed.”⁴ Her plea is for love unshackled from nomenclature, for identity conceived apart from inherited labels.

Wilde’s Parody of Essentialism

If Juliet longs to transcend the power of names, Wilde’s characters fetishize them. In The Importance of Being Earnest, names are not arbitrary markers but potent symbols—performative and, in the eyes of the characters, constitutive of identity. Gwendolen Fairfax famously declares:

“My ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence.”⁵

And again:

“It is a divine name. It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.”⁶

Gwendolen is not so much in love with a person as with the phonetic charm of a name. This exaggerated essentialism comically inverts Juliet’s nominalism. Yet Wilde’s satire is unmistakable. The entire plot turns on a farcical tangle of assumed identities, with both Jack and Algernon adopting the name “Ernest” to secure romantic approval.

As the British Library notes, Wilde “satirises Victorian society’s obsession with appearances, including the belief in the moral significance of names.”⁷ Names in the play do not reveal character—they fabricate it. Wilde stages a linguistic masquerade, where the performative power of naming, later theorized by J. L. Austin and Judith Butler, becomes an engine of absurdity. Identity here is not discovered but performed; names function not as reflections of truth but as elaborate costumes in a social comedy of errors.

Comparison: Nominalist Idealism vs. Essentialist Irony

Shakespeare and Wilde tackle the same dilemma from contrasting angles. Juliet pleads for a love that transcends social labels, trusting in an inner truth beyond words. Gwendolen, by contrast, invests all her romantic hope in the surface sound of a name. Yet both dramatize a profound anxiety about the trustworthiness of language: Juliet with tragic earnestness, Wilde with comic irreverence.

What unites them is a shared skepticism about the referential power of names. Neither play ultimately resolves the problem of linguistic representation. Juliet’s hope is thwarted by a world where names define social boundaries, and Wilde’s characters are ensnared in their own linguistic games. Both works foreground the instability of identity when mediated through language.

Conclusion: The Fiction of Identity

Romeo and Juliet and The Importance of Being Earnest each stage a meditation on the nature of naming and its role in shaping human experience. Juliet seeks to dissolve the tyranny of labels in favor of authentic love, while Wilde’s characters unmask the comic consequences of treating names as destiny. Yet neither view is absolute: names are neither mere noise nor sacred essences. They operate within a social and linguistic matrix—sometimes concealing, sometimes disclosing, always shaping how we relate to others and to ourselves.

In the end, literature becomes a proving ground for testing the limits of language. In both tragedies and comedies, names draw the border between the individual and society, between truth and appearance, essence and convention. Identity, far from fixed, is shown to be a fiction we tell—and retell—through words. Perhaps “It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Perhaps.

Notes and References

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2, lines 43–47.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 67–69.
3. William of Ockham, Summa Logicae, I.10, in Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa Logicae, trans. Michael Loux (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).
4. British Library, "What's in a name? Shakespeare and names," https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/whats-in-a-name-shakespeare-and-names.
5. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I.
6. Ibid.
7. British Library, “The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-importance-of-being-earnest-a-trivial-comedy-for-serious-people.