Shakespeare's World of Words ed. by Paul Yachnin (review)

In Shakespeare's dramatic worlds, words are often treated with suspicion. Both Hamlet and Troilus, respectively, deride their potential emptiness and equivocation: "Words, words, words" (Hamlet, 2.2.210) and "Words, words, mere words" (Troilus and Cressida, 5.3.119). Falstaff punctures the lofty aspirations of "honor" by dismissing it as nothing but "A word … Air" (1 Henry IV, 5.1.131, 135–36). And Cleopatra calls out Caesar's flattery by transforming the noun into a damning and original verb: "He words me, girls, he words me" (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.230). Yet while Shakespeare's characters tend to dwell on the pitfalls of words—in particular, their propensity for misdirection—Shakespeare himself had a dramatist's attunement to the array of their potential effects and the ways that lexical ambiguity might be mined for expressive ends. As Paul Yachnin writes in his introduction, Shakespeare's linguistic creativity derives not merely from a knack for invention, but more prominently from an acute awareness of how to illuminate the "worlds" inside existing words. In the processes of "rewriting and re-creation," Shakespeare was able "to generate new languages and new ways of seeing the world by orchestrating existing social and literary vocabularies" (4).

This impressive and wide-ranging volume brings together a variety of perspectives to consider the expansive world of words that unfolds on Shakespeare's stage. One of the most welcome features of Shakespeare's World of Words is its diverse body of contributors. Essays from literary scholars appear alongside those by theater practitioners and performance scholars. Two chapters are cowritten, including "Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural Language in Measure for Measure" by Yachnin and Patrick Neilson, which draws on Neilson's experience of directing a 2010 production of Measure for Measure at McGill University (24). This essay, which features close readings of the word "slip," reflections on the metaphorical character of Shakespeare's writing and of language more broadly, and practical strategies for rehearsal and performance, effectively demonstrates the value in bringing together literary analysis, critical theory, and performance studies. As Sarah Werner suggests in another chapter, "little scholarship on Shakespeare thinks of the plays in terms of theatrical performance" (182). Shakespeare's World of Words addresses this gap by consistently considering Shakespeare's words not simply as textual, literary, and verbal, but also as theatrical and embodied.

A topic as capacious as Shakespeare's "world of words" does not easily lend itself to a neat summary. Yachnin's introduction observes that "this book makes an argument for the artistically and socially creative pre-eminence of Shakespeare's world of words" (5), a fitting, if general, assessment. Many chapters are arranged around a single word, phrase, or set of words. Lucy Munro offers a fascinating history of a pair of early modern homonyms, "antique / antic," and suggests that the overlapping sound and spelling of these words made them "a productive source of aesthetic and intellectual play for early modern writers" (77–78). Munro extends her discussion to consider these terms in relation to archaism and neologism, arguing that antique and antic "take[] us to the heart of some key debates about language in the late sixteenth century. Self-conscious archaisms might be 'antique,' carrying the weight and gravity of age, but both archaisms and neologisms might be 'antic,' deforming the language with grotesquery and disorder" (83–84). In "Learning to Colour in Hamlet," Miriam Jacobson uses a short exchange between Polonius and Ophelia to probe the constellation of meanings that attend the verb "colour" in early modern English. Jacobson's compelling analysis weaves together strands of materialist and linguistic criticism to argue that the fluidity of early modern notions of "colouring" mirrors the semantic fluidity of the language itself, and that Hamlet, a play "full of the language of colour, dye, and ink" (113), "gives us a glimpse into the metamorphic and fluid nature of early modern language in action" (120). Lynne Magnusson's essay takes...