Jonathan Lamb argues that Shakespeare worked within a verbal market: we have become accustomed to talking about the early modern book trade, but we need to learn to talk about the trade in words. Where in the past we might have turned to the OED or a concordance to enrich our understanding of Shakespeare’s poetic diction, we now have digital resources capable of providing much greater insight into the fortunes of words in Shakespeare’s day, and, as Lamb would have it, how the value of words on the verbal market influenced the ways Shakespeare handled them in his plays.

Perhaps the third chapter of Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words, on The Merchant of Venice, is the clearest expression of the approach Lamb has in mind. As a close reader, he notices that the word if occurs frequently in Merchant. As a scholar aware of the verbal market, he scours thousands of database search hits for various early modern uses of if and discovers a striking frequency in passages related to epistemology. In this light, Lamb is able to discern that Portia uses if constructions in a different way than Bassanio and Shylock: where they are tied up in Baconian empiricism and use their ifs to induce knowledge from what can be observed—“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—Portia is ahead of the game and uses her ifs to form protoscientific hypotheses. I found this take on Merchant, as a “drama of knowledge” (100), engaging and original.

Lamb’s chapters on Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida are his most persuasive. He demonstrates that the rhetorical device of parenthesis not only features prominently in Hamlet but provides the play with its very structure. Hamlet is so easy for theater directors to cut, he reasons, and so little seems to happen in it, because it applies parenthesis to a theatrical setting, making much of its content, paradoxically, both “beautiful and unnecessary” (141–42). This compelling take on Hamlet’s legendary delay is supported by strong evidence from the play itself and from rhetorical manuals by Puttenham and Peacham. The connection to the verbal market, however, is not as clear as before.

The argument of Lamb’s sixth chapter, on Troilus and Cressida, is that Shakespeare vies with Chaucer in that play as a rival in verbal inventiveness. Chaucer’s reputation as “the well of English undefiled,” along with the extensive glossary of hard Middle English words that Thomas Speght added to his 1602 edition of Chaucer’s works, impelled Shakespeare, the argument goes, to load his Chaucerian adaptation with weird words, such as “orgulous” and “oppugnancy.” This is one of the more original and compelling theses in the tradition of thinking about Chaucer’s influence on Shakespeare, and the fact that it approaches that subject at the level of verbal performance, rather than that of more familiar kinds of source work, is refreshing.

Some readers are not going to like the central idea of Lamb’s book: the verbal market. He acknowledges in his introduction that one of his early readers did not find the idea necessary as an organizing principle, and there were times in my own reading when I felt that a chapter that was working well on its own became strained when Lamb tried to connect it to his main thesis. That said, I would not be surprised if the idea of the verbal market caught on and proved useful to scholars going forward, and my reservations about it do not diminish my admiration for this book.