Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words

Abstract

Making innovative use of digital and library archives, this book explores how Shakespeare used language to interact with the verbal marketplace of early modern England. By also combining word history with book history, Jonathan P. Lamb demonstrates Shakespeare's response to the world of words around him, in and through the formal features of his works. In chapters that focus on particular rhetorical features in Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida, Lamb argues that we can best understand Shakespeare's writing practice by scrutinizing how the formal features of his works circulated in an economy of imaginative writing. Shakespeare's interactions with this verbal market preceded and made possible his reputation as a playwright and dramatist. He was, in his time, a great buyer and seller of words.

Digitally Post-Human: Living On and After

“…This is not a final position, however, as work on separating styles and techniques over the periodand learning anew the networks of allusion and echois ongoing. The identification of 'prop-types' and their valencies from 1590 and 1609 by Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch (2017) will take time fully to digest as will the more sociological approach to lexes undertaken by Jonathan P. Lamb (2017). There is also a dynamism embedded in exploring the anticipated experience in a playtext that is provoking new forms of digital enquiry and that is quite foreign to that derived from most novels.…”

Deforming Shakespeare's <em>Sonnets</em>: Topic Models as Poems

“…Writing about Shakespeare's position in the early modern literary marketplace, Lamb claims that "words must take a form, even when spoken…words occur as and in forms, and writers interacted with the market of words in and through form." 15 Lamb further argues for the primacy of form in the years around the turn of the seventeenth century, in part because of the "historical convergences" of phenomena including the emergence of mercantilism, the book trade, manuscript circulation, and the theater industry, among others. 16 The educational situation in particular contributed to form's importance, since "by the last three decades of the sixteenth century, humanist educational reforms" meant that "multiple generations of a single family…would have received similar instruction in writing production.…”

“…In Lamb's words, "as the sixteenth-century value of copiousness and eloquence gave way to the seventeenth-century value of plainness and directness of expression, writers and readers valued form because it conveyed ideas accurately and appropriately." 19 Form was important not only because of the shape it gave to language, which allowed for communication; form was also important because it carried its own communicative functions. As humanist authors communicated "in and through form," so can modern literary scholars communicate in and through the forms of our scholarship about these authors.…”

Semantic Classification of Metaphors in Ukrainian and English Inscriptions on Clothing

“…Several modern scholars investigate metaphors in a certain thematic area: economic metaphors (Shenker-Osorio, 2012;Pamies & Ramos Ruiz, 2017), environment metaphors (Ahmadi & Ghazali, 2018;Volmert et al 2013), metaphors and emotions (Kövecses, 2003(Kövecses, , 2012Ogarkova & Soriano, 2018), immigration metaphors (Cisneros, 2008;Montagut & Moragas-Fernández, 2020). Most studies on metaphors have been based on fiction or publicistic texts (Smirnova & Shustova, 2018;Liulka, 2019), or on the analysis of an individual idiolect (Lamb, 2017;Neary, 2017), but, to the best of the knowledge of the author, this phenomenon has never been studied on the material of clothing inscriptions in a comparative aspect. Thus, the purpose of the research is to analyse and compare metaphorical inscriptions on clothing in Ukrainian and English.…”