type name

type name, in dramatic practice, name given to a character to ensure that the personality may be instantly ascertained. In England the allegorical morality plays of the late Middle Ages presented characters personifying, for example, the seven deadly sins—being named Envy, Sloth, Lust, and so forth. Tudor and Elizabethan dramatists were much-influenced by the moralities, and Ben Jonson in particular adopted the habit of christening his characters in such a way that whatever “humour” governed them was pointed up. In his play The Alchemist appear Subtle and Face (two confidence tricksters), Sir Epicure Mammon (a voluptuary), Abel Drugger (a naive tobacconist), and Dol Common (a strumpet). Type names were later a feature of Restoration comedy. In Sir John Vanbrugh’s comedy The Relapse, there appear, among a gallery of familiar characters with type names, Lord Foppington and his brother Young Fashion. Type names continued to be a fixture of English literature in the latter part of the 18th century, as is evident in some of the characters invented by the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan: Joseph Surface and the dramatist Sir Fretful Plagiary. The most prominent and inventive user of type names in 19th-century English literature was the novelist Charles Dickens, though his type names are imaginatively suggestive creations rather than explicit labels of a character’s occupation, attitudes, or flaws: Josiah Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind, Mrs. Sparsit, Tulkinghorn, Dr. Blimber, Mrs. Jellyby, and Captain Cuttle. Anthony Trollope and other Victorian novelists also sometimes used type names, especially for comic or flawed characters.

Type names can be found in most other national literatures, and their use has persisted at a diminished level, usually in comedic works or for comic effect.