Kind Kit Marlow –or Marely or Merlin: A reading of Anthony Burgess's A dead man in Deptford through the naming conventions applied in the novel

2010

The main concern of my thesis is to provide an account of the stylistic idiosyncrasies observed in the naming of the characters in Anthony Burgess's post-modernist historical novel A Dead Man in Deptford (Vintage, 1994), with special reference to the names applied to its protagonist, the Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe. The interest in naming is occasioned by the salience given to personal names, defined as proper names borne by human or anthropomorphised nominata. Their prominence is the result of two things. First, some names in the novel display a marked tendency to change form so that the same name appears under a variety of spellings, notably the protagonist's family…