That Pope has a special way with proper names has been observed before now. And indeed a usage as idiosyncratic as ‘Sternhold himself he out-Sternholded’ cries aloud for comment. One does not have to be a grammarian to discern the interest of a line like

Nor to respond with delight and quickened attention to a number of parallel constructions (‘ … nine such Poets made a Tate’). However, such observations have never been enlisted in the service of any account of Pope's wider aims. I shall seek to show that Pope characteristically exploits a penumbra of doubt which surrounds proper nouns used in this way. He deliberately blurs the status of such nouns in order to reinforce certain thematic and satiric motifs. Above all, The Dunciad can be seen to derive much of its imaginative density from this trick.

In this one instance we do have a pointer from previous criticism. Aubrey Williams has demonstrated how Pope employs the word ‘Heidegger’ (spelt in fact with the last two letters reversed, I, 290) to convey the sense of a mythical beast rather than that of the actual showman. ‘Never again, inside the poem, can the name refer solely and strictly to the historical Heidegger.’ With Theobald the case is much the same, but it is more intensively worked by Pope. In Williams' terms, ‘The important thing is that a “Tibbald” has never been defined … The Tibbald of the Dunciad is not quite the Theobald of history.’ A Tibbald, indeed, comes to suggest ‘a species of dull writer’ [my italics].