Character, personality, its threatened loss and its restitution, are issues habitually discussed in Shakespeare using metaphors of water, tears and melting. Moreover, when Shakespeare's characters use such language, their very syntax tends to float, to become inexact or ambiguous. What can this tell us about the characters that possess this language? Many of these watery sites can also be located in a larger mechanism of symbols, specifically ports, shipwreck and the story of the falling Icarus. How are these two mechanisms of watery syntax and watery symbols connected? Though not a collocation of Shakespeare's invention, I shall suggest in this essay that this cluster of associations nevertheless proves particularly complex in his work.

The corollary to this enquiry works with the converse of the above contention, and now and then this twin breaks the surface. This second thesis is that, while the operation of melting undoes character or personality, the operation of naming fixes it. A famous example will show how these two ideas are connected.

When Richard II decrowns himself in the fourth act of his play, his language flits melodramatically between a search for various names or roles which can be used to fix his sense of identity, and an opposing tendency to think about various unfixing, mobile, liquid actions. He