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PERSONAL PUNS

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"I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man."
Charles Lamb

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Punning must have been around since words were invented. Double meanings, mis-hearings, hidden messages all add fun and sometimes another dimension to the wordsmith's work. But puns on the author's own name are particularly interesting as they provide an indelible watermark or fingerprint of the author's presence in their work.

Here are a collection of works or passages where the authors have left a trace of themselves in their own work. You might be so kind as to let me know of any others you know of...

William Shakespeare

Well, you might expect me to start with the main man, le grand fromage, the numero uno. No stranger atall to puns and certainly not to punning on people's names from his wife Anne Hathaway to friends such as Richard Field, Shakespeare had plenty of punning scope with his first name of William:

SONNET 135

"Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine to make thy large Will more.
  Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;
  Think all but one, and me in that one Will."

Here we have a perfect 14 puns on the poet's name in a 14-line sonnet. The puns' meanings including: to wish, the shortened form of the author's first name, female genitalia, male genitalia and sexual desire.

Jesus Christ

Now here's a guy you might not expect to go around punning. Not directly on his own name but directly on Saint Peter's he allegedly said, according to Matthew 16.18:

"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church."

Here we have a pun on Peter's name, which is petros in the Greek language of the New Testament, with rock which is petra in Greek. The pun being that the Christian church was originally built on St. Peter.

Bartholomew Griffin

This Elizabethan poet punned on his own name frequently:

My Lady's hair is threads of beaten gold;
Her front the purest crystal eye hath seen;
Here eyes the brightest stars the heavens hold;
Her cheeks, red roses, such as seld have been;
Her pretty lips of red vermilion dye;
Her hand of ivory the purest white;
Her blush Aurora, or the morning sky.
Her breast displays two silver fountains bright;
The spheres, her voice; her grace, the Graces three;
Her body is the saint that I adore;
Her smiles and favours, sweet as honey be.
Her feet, fair Thetis praiseth evermore.
But Ah, the worst and last is yet behind:
For of a griffon she doth bear the mind!

In this conventional Elizabethan conceit, griffon is an obvious pun on the author's name as well as his wife being of him and thinking of him.

And elsewhere, he writes:

Work, work apace, you blessed sisters three,
In restless twining of my fatal thread.
O let your nimble hands at once agree
To weave it out and cut it off with speed.
Then shall my vexed and tormented ghost
Have quiet passage to the Elysian rest,
And sweetly over death and fortune boast
In everlasting triumphs with the blest.
But ah, too well I know you have conspired
A lingering death for him that loatheth life,
As if with woes he never could be tired;
For this you hide your all-dividing knife.
One comfort yet the heavens have assigned me,
That I must die and leave my griefs behind me.

in which he puns on his own name in leaving his griefs behind him when he dies as well as his family of "Griffs".

John Donne

John Donne (1572-1631) had plenty of scope to pun on his name. In A Hymn to God the Father he does so extensively:

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Here, Donne puns on his own surname of Donne as well as his son's same surname in the 3rd. verse. To augment this punning he puns on his Son shining, as in "sun", as well as his wife's maiden name which was More.

And when he secretly married Sir Thomas Egerton’s niece, Anne More, in 1601 he was dismissed from his position of private secretary to Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, and summed up the experience with:

"John Donne, Mary Donne, Undone."

Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov was an exceptional wordsmith who embedded many puzzles in his novels. In his Despair, self-name punning is especially evident in the original language:

"malinovoi siren'iu v nabokoi vaze" and

"svernuv s bul'vara na bokovuiu ulitsu"

bok as a short-form of Nabokov also appears many times elsewhere throughout the text.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche likened the sound of his name to several words but especially Ichts and Nichts which he felt both represented the "self" and "nothingness" that he felt was within himself and anagrammatically within his own name:

In Schopenhauer as Educator, he has:

"zwischen Ichts und Nichts" ("between I and nothingness") and

"Jetzt / zwischen zwei Nichtsen / eingekrûmmt" ("Now suspended between two nothingnesses").

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau (1817-1862) made the predictable pun on his own name by often describing himself as:

"a thorough man".

Edward de Vere

Edward de Vere, 17th. Earl of Oxford, frequently punned on his own name. In his poem known as Echo Verses:

...Oh heavens ! who was the first that bred in me this fever ? Vere
Who was the first that gave the wound whose fear I wear for ever ? Vere.
What tyrant, Cupid, to my harm usurps thy golden quiver ? Vere.
What sight first caught this heart and can from bondage it deliver ? Vere.

Yet who doth most adore this sight, oh hollow caves tell true ? You...

Each of the first 4 lines rather clumsily pun on Vere's surname and there is a further pun in the final line on true, as in veracity.

In some correspondence, Oxford would also pun on his own name still further by signing it with a distinctive and unique capital V:

eVer yours

And in a further pun on Oxford's own name, the animal depicted in Oxford's cognisance is a boar:

de Vere = Verres = Roman for "boar".

Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh punned on his own name in his poem to Elizabeth I which he named:

"Ocean’s Love to Cynthia".

The title puns on Walter’s name resembling "water". (Queen Elizabeth I was known by the name of Cynthia, amongst others.)

Raleigh also wrote a quatrain named Moral Code:

"WATER thy plants with grace divine, and hope to live for aye;
Then to thy Saviour Christ incline, in him make steadfast stay;
Raw is the reason that doth lie within an atheist’s head,
Which saith the soul of man doth die, when that the body’s dead"

Here he puns on his first name via WATER, his surname via Raw and lie and his full name via the acrostic WalTer RaWlie.

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney wrote the landmark series of love sonnets named Astrophil and Stella that prompted the subsequent craze in sonnet writing. The Stella (star) is his ex-lover, the former Penelope Devereaux, now Lady Rich, and Astrophil (star lover) is Sidney. Sidney puns on his own name in this title as phil is not only Greek for "love / lover" but is also obviously short for "Philip".

In the sonnets themselves he goes on to pun on the various meanings of his ex-lover's new surname of Rich as well as her first name of Penelope via pen.

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is most famous for authoring "Gulliver's Travels" but also wrote poetry. He was a theologian and though his initial attempts at becoming a Dean were thwarted he eventually realised his ambition by attaining that position at St. Patrick's. Thenceforth, he was known as "Dean".

He published a series of intimate letters to Esther Johnson which he titled Journal to Stella, a phonetic pun on Esther's name. Later he published a poem detailing his love affair with Esther Vanhomrigh which he titled Cadenus and Vanessa identifying himself and his lover by word-play on their respective names.

Cadenus is an anagram of Decanus, which is Latin for Dean; Vanessa is from "Van" in "Vanhomrigh" and "essa" from "Esther".

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly punned on his own name by publishing works under the anagrammatical name of Lincoln Croyle.

Joe Klein

Joe Klein published the book Primary Colours (about the US Democratic election campaign of 1992) under the name Anonymous. Yet he revealed himself in the very first line of that book with the words:

"I am small".

Klein is obviously German for small.

Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth was the niece of the famous Sir Philip Sidney who wrote the landmark Astrophil & Stella that uses personal name puns. Lady Wroth was clearly inspired by her uncle and patterned her The Countess of Mountgomery's Urania on Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Lady Wroth married Sir Robert Wroth in 1604 in an apparently unhappy match and had an affair with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, with whom she had 2 children. In her sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the first sonnet sequence ever published by an English woman, she pleads for her lover's constancy and puns on their names in the process:

In Sonnet 13 of A Crown of Sonnets dedicated to Love she writes:

"With Truth in love, and Justice in our Will" punning on William Herbert's first name and with it capitalised for emphasis.

And in Sonnet 48 she writes:

"Yet love I will, till I but ashes prove" in which she pledges her love for William Herbert in a further pun on his first name.

She also repeatedly puns on her own surname of Wroth via its anagrammatical resemblance to worth:

In Song 5:

"Time gave time but to be holy,
True Love, such ends best loveth:
Unworthy Love doth seek for ends,
A worthy Love but worth pretends;
Nor other thoughts it proveth"

and in Sonnet 8 of A Crown of Sonnets dedicated to Love:

"Strengthened by Worth, renew'd by carefulnesse" assisted by proper name capitalisation.

Jan van Eyck

The great Flemish painter van Eyck (?1395-1441) regularly left traces of himself in his paintings. In the superb Arnolfini Marriage of 1434, for example, he left the inscription 'Johannes de eyck fuit hic' (Jan Van Eyck was here). And in his Portrait of a Man painted the same year and believed to be a self-portrait he left the punning inscription "Als Ich kan" (As I can), an obvious play on "As Eyck can".