What’s in a name?

It would be very easy to start this text with a note that today marks the death of Nostradamus in 1566 (I wonder if he saw THAT coming?), especially as he was contemporary - just - with the main subject of today’s entry. But I won’t. That would be too easy. Instead I intend to digress from any previous format (you know, where I take inspiration from events in history, my latest encounters with the medical profession or the proliferation of pants that plague my neighbourhood – two pairs again today and what appears to be either a bra or a small hammock) and for a change I will bow to a theme that has been encroaching on my life over the past few days. There have been a few points over previous weeks when this theme has tried to assert itself, but I knocked it back. Midsummer’s Day/Night was one of them, but we were only just back from Hungary then and anyway, the News covered all things Druidic at Stonehenge for me. Perhaps a blog about lay lines and standing circles another day? At the start of the week, when I was in hospital, the Globe Theatre burned down – well, if you take a temporal skip back a fair few hundred of your Earth years. However, the final straw that prompted this thread happened yesterday on Twitter, where, in a reply to a Tweet, I noted that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’. My observation was re-tweeted by none less that Shakespeare himself. I kid you not. @shakesp if you don’t believe me!

The exact Tweet went as follows [certain details removed to protect the guilty]:

Shakesp RT @OberonUK @xxxxxxxxx I'm saying nothing! Discretion is the better part of valour! http://bit.ly/XXXXS5:19 PM Jun 30th from Tweetbots

I am curious to know which part of the Tweet was picked up by the bot, the quote from Shakespeare or the Oberon part of my name.

For anyone who doesn’t know, and shame on you, Oberon appears in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and it is from that reference that I draw my web-name. I’ve used the name since 1994 when I started working at Durham University (on the 4th July to be exact). That was back in the days when the internet was more the plaything of boffins and researchers, predominantly text based and used mostly out of educational establishments. The University granted access to JANET – the Joint Academic Network ISP backbone which even today is responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains. Windows (like the original USS Enterprise) didn’t even have a number let alone a fancy name like Vista!

Now, being gay in those days was a very different kettle of cod. There were none of the methods of contact that the yoof of today take for granted. No internet dating sites (let alone ones dedicated to gay men), very few bars or clubs and certainly no mobile-phone-based apps like GRINDR for hooking up with like-minded pooftahs within reasonable travelling distance. The most we had was a couple of pages on CEEFAX/TELETEXT (GL GWM 27 seeks GWM 20-30, GSH for chat & FSHP), personal ads in the ‘free paper’, or the local pub which ran a ‘gay friendly’ night on a Sunday once a month, played YMCA on an endless loop and came with a pretty good chance you’d be queer-bashed when leaving. But JANET, and subsequently a home PC, gave me access to the internet and such wonders as IRC – Internet Relay Chat, text based, but real-time, where you could chat with actual people. They even had a North room! OK, so that covered an area from Leeds to Newcastle via Manchester and Carlisle, but the point is it WASN’T London. So what, that you got disconnected every hour?! So what, that it could take just as long again to get back online?! So what, that phone bill totals were often so high they were indistinguishable from the actual phone number! It was a revolution. And it demanded an online persona, a name, something to allow others to identify you but that wasn’t linked directly to your actual real life. (Heaven forbid that any straight person should find out about your double life!) And so OberonUK was born, with tongue in cheek and a wry poke at the world. Oberon, you see, is the King of the Fairies. It seemed somehow appropriate.

So with a name borrowed from Shakespeare, the Bard has had a number of impacts on my life. I studied The Dream for O-level (back in the days when examinations had currency and it actually meant something to get an ‘A’ grade), so I have a love for that particular play. My school motto was borrowed from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true” – a quote from Polonius who gave us few other phrases still in use today such as "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "brevity is the soul of wit."

Shakespeare is credited with many phrases which remain in common use today, and is widely believed to have coined quite a few new words too:

• bedazzled (The Taming of the Shrew)
• coldhearted (Antony and Cleopatra)
• dauntless (Macbeth)
• to drug (Macbeth; first use as a verb)
• gloomy (several, "to gloom" was a verb)
• to humour (Love's Labour's Lost, first attestation as a verb)- regular readers of my blog may recall my thoughts on the four humours from last week.
• mimic (Midsummer Night's Dream)
• new-fangled (Love's Labour's Lost / As You Like Itpuking (As You Like It)
• uncomfortable (Romeo and Juliet)

There are many more, but I do not wish to make much ado about nothing!

I’m sure many will recognise the title of this blog entry, “What’s in a name?” as being a direct lift from Romeo and Juliet, where the ill-fated and ‘star cross’d’ heroine contemplates the fact that Romeo belongs to the Montague family, with whom her own relatives, the Capulets, have been feuding:

JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

You will, of course, also recognise “A rose by any other name” – Shakespeare is unavoidable and pops up to shake his ruff in the most unlikely of places. I remember at Art College in Carlisle we had a lecturer in print technology who could bore the socks off even the most stalwart student and was blessed with the most obvious and unrealistic hairpiece. Made from the best nylon money could buy - we knew it was nylon: you could see the M&S tab! It all but hovered just above his head and never seemed to quite keep up with him when he changed direction. He turned up late one day to a lecture, and delivered his monotone monologue for a full hour without noticing (or maybe just not acknowledging) that some whit had written on the blackboard behind him: “Toupee or not toupee: that is the question!” but more of the original version of that particular speech later.

All this said I will confess that aforementioned lecturer did teach me one interesting fact: Newspapers were originally available only in the broadsheet format and were traditionally set without columns, just lines of fully-justified text that spanned the whole page length. When the tabloid format was introduced, the style changed to include the use of columns. In type, where you have two or more columns, or a gap between facing pages, the space between the columns is known as the ‘gutter’. It is from there that we get the term, “The Gutter Press” although the term has somewhat changed in meaning to be synonymous with sensationalist and poorer quality reporting. I seem to be off on a tangent. A tangent, a tangent, my kingdom for a tangent! I must stay focused and stop this tangential thinking.

Sorry, that was a terrible misquote from Richard III, “A horse, a horse..” but does remind me of another story where my brother-in-law, who was a manager of a country house-cum hotel-cum-restaurant and, as the nights began to draw in, was in charge of organising an enormous marquee to be erected in the grounds for forthcoming events, such as a proposed November 5th fireworks party, Halloween all-nighter and various wedding functions leading up to Christmas. He was not happy, and his mood was not improved when I offered another Richard III misquote: “Now is the winter of our disco tents”.

Our mate Bill can also lay claim to inspiring any number of modern classics, not least of which is West Side Story, a re-work of Romeo and Juliet where the Tony, the leader of the Jets gang falls in love with Maria, the sister of rival Sharks gang leader. If you recognise nothing else, you’ll have heard “America” :

I like to be in America
OK by me in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America

And less obvious are the many Star Trek stories that have taken inspiration, or at very least their titles, from Shakespeare:

• Star Trek VI – The Undiscovered Country
• Dagger of the Mind
• By Any Other Name (see above)
• Thine Own Self (see above)
• All Our Yesterdays
• Remember Data asking, “If you prick me, do I not...leak?”

And in Time’s Arrow, the crew have to pose a travelling players and quote from The Dream, with Mrs Carmichael, their temporary landlady recruited to play Puck and Pickard (Patrick Stewart being a fully-fledged Shakespearean actor) joining her to deliver the following:

Picard/Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

Carmichael/Titania: What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
I have forsworn his bed and company.

What you might not know is that Hamlet was NOT an original work and that Shakespeare is widely believed to have stolen it from the original Klingon text (speakers of Klingonese will recognise the beginning of the famous To be or not to be soliloquy) :

taH pagh taHbe'. DaH mu'tlheghvam vIqelnIS.
quv'a', yabDaq San vaQ cha, pu' je SIQDI'?
pagh, Seng bIQ'a'Hey SuvmeH nuHmey SuqDI',
'ej, Suvmo', rInmoHDI'? Hegh. Qong --- Qong neH ---
'ej QongDI', tIq 'oy', wa'SanID Daw''e' je
cho'nISbogh porghDaj rInmoHlaH net Har.

By now you will know I’m a huge Blackadder fan, with the second series being my absolute favourite, and littered with Shakespeare quotes. Also there was the actual meeting between Edmund and Bill in Back and Forth:

Blackadder: [punches Shakespeare] That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next 400 years. Have you any idea how much suffering you're going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in "A Midsummer's Night Dream", wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like, "What ho, my Lord," and, "Oh, look, here comes Othello talking total crap as usual."

(He quoted it wrong of course, it is "A Midsummer Night's Dream" not "A Midsummer's Night Dream)

The choice of Oberon was further influenced by the fact that Will was himself of somewhat ambiguous sexual persuasion and scholars still debate the degree of his bisexuality. For me the evidence lies very firmly in his sonnets and in particular No 144:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

Even with any potential linguistic differences I’d say that is pretty conclusive stuff. Buggery bollocks, Bill the Bard was a bloody bender!

And if any final affirmation is required about the suitability of the name Oberon for a (somewhat dysfunctional, but still surviving) gay male, consider this: The name Oberon was chosen for a moon of one of the solar system’s planets; Oberon can be found in perpetual orbit around Uranus! But it is such stuff that dreams are made on!