Frobisher is a pretty upper-class name - you can imagine it in an English public school. There was a fairly pathetic (but popular) comedy in GB in the 1980s called To The Manor Born, and the upper-class female sidekick was called Marjorie Frobisher. She was a bit jolly hockey-sticks and naive. Don't know if Bennett wrote Talking Heads before or after that.

Medlicott I've never heard before, but it sounds a bit silly, like meddle and Scott combined. I could imagine it being from Northern England.

Shrubsole is probably an invented name, and sounds like one of the comic, lower-class characters from Shakespeare or Dickens, who loved such resonant surnames. It's an intrinsically silly name, because a shrub can't have a sole, and I suppose this will reflect on the character.

Thank you, yackydar, that fits perfectly, because that was exactly the time when the Talking Heads were written! And there's also a character called Marjorie, so it's good to know!

As for Shrubsole, that's the part where it gets really difficult, because Bennett plays with the name and it becomes 'subsoil' and 'shrubsoil'...

I'm beginning to understand why no one has ever translated the plays! :-)

http://www.christinemirette.co.uk/onenamestud...
Shrubsole even has its own coat of arms :-)
You can read quite a lot about the TV production here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MOQbnlogBK...

Yes, I've already read that - it's the only hit for "shrubsoil" on Google, isn't it? But thank you anyway!

The problem with such articles is that they were written by and for native speakers, so they just mention the names, puns etc. but they don't explain them, because every reader would understand certain associations/connotations that I don't see. And a dictionary won't be helpful here, neither...

Same problem with "Hazflor" (which refers to a flower arrangement that is considered dangerous). Does this 'name' ring a bell?

Hazflor sounds like "hazardous flora", in case you haven't worked out the last part. It also sounds like a governmental/official name you might find stamped on something, like HazMat for hazardous materials.

It is very curious how some fictional surnames seem to sum up a certain sort of character so well that they become a by-word for it, even though there's no phonetic association. Dickens came up with a few (e.g. Pecksniff, Gradgrind, Scrooge) and so have later writers (e.g. Widmerpool in Dance to the Music of Time).

Nach dem Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames ist "Medlicott/Medlycott" ein alter englischer Name, zum 1. Mal verzeichnet 1255.

"Shrubsole" wird dort nicht aufgeführt, nur "Shrubland".

I'd never heard of Shrubsole before either. Going by list of Shrubsole births, deaths and marriages at
http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl
a) there aren't that many of them and
b) it's virtually exclusively a southern English name (or was up until the 1920s - the last entries included here at the moment)