ALIENA

Celia's choice of pseudonym is an interesting and revealing one. As she says, it is a "reference to [her] state" (l. 125); she has been expelled from the kingdom (although her expulsion is rather self-inflicted - the Duke banished explicitly only Rosalind, and it is Celia who takes it upon herself to leave the kingdom with her), and therefore she will be alienated from her home and alien in whatever place she ends up. It was a common practice in Renaissance drama, a tradition held over from the medieval morality plays, to make character's names indicative of their personalities and types. Although a device more commonly used by playwrights like Ben Jonson (Nightingale, the ballad-singer, in Bartholomew Fair) and Thomas Dekker (Hodge, a common nickname for a rustic [OED], in The Shoemaker's Holiday), Shakespeare is certainly not adverse to utilizing this technique - see also Sir Toby Belch, the drunken knight of Twelfth Night and Perdita, "lost little girl," in The Winter's Tale. Like Perdita, the name Aliena is chosen specifically because it is referential and therefore carries weight both for the character and for the audience.

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