Jonathan P. Lamb How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare's England Cambridge University Press 336 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978-1009460415
Jonathan P. Lamb
On How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare's England
Interview of
September 22, 2025
In a nutshell
Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike have explored how we build the world with metaphors and other figurative language. The present era is undergoing a massive metaphorical transformation, as computer technology has introduced (one might say “installed”) a new vocabulary: even when it causes us to cringe, we sometimes speak of “rebooting” the cause for social justice, or “clicking” on a problem. These metaphors do not simply express human experience and identity; they compose them by framing and forming them in language.
Early modern England (1500-1700) had its own pervasive set of metaphors. Although someone familiar with Shakespeare’s plays might assume the dominant metaphors came from the theater—“all the world’s a stage,” after all!—by far the most significant and widespread metaphor came from books and related text technologies: cover, page, headline. Bound, volume, spine. Folio, quarto, octavo. Book of nature, art of printing, a taste of a book. Set forth for all to see, read you like a book, a fool in folio.
Early modern England abounded in such “bookish” words and phrases, most of which were inherited from earlier traditions and media or imported from other cultures. Playwrights and poets used this lexicon to make new kinds of art. Pamphleteers appealed to books to stage political attacks. Preachers formulated theological arguments using metaphors of page and binding. Scientists claimed to leaf through the Book of Nature. Always rhetorically situated and rarely systematic, this lexicon did not merely offer a linguistic tool; it created a broad conceptual resource for writers and readers. How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England argues that books gave early modern writers the language to describe and reshape the world around them. At a scale and range far beyond what scholars have imagined, this language expressed and, in turn, gave form to religious, political, racial, scientific, and literary questions that remain relevant today.
A printing press at the British Library
The wide angle
Scholars of book history and early modern English literature have long affirmed and debated the impact of printing technology on culture. They often invoke exemplary claims and concepts, such as John Foxe’s portrayal of the press as a divine gift or Francis Bacon’s grand statement that the press, along with gunpowder and the magnetic compass, would remake the world and produce modernity. This conventional knack for working from illustrative examples requires a certain imaginative extrapolation, by which canonical writers speak for all of English culture.
Rejecting extrapolation and exemplarity in favor of expansiveness and inclusivity, this book is the first to explore the lexicon of the book in rigorous detail and to describe its transformative power. How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England asks, how did the widespread vocabulary of books, printing, and related text technologies (e.g., paper, ink, and letters) shape the way people think about the world? How did the shared rhetoric of books become a reflex of the imagination? If it is true that the press jump-started the modern era, what were the extent and qualities of that impact? This study looks not only to the material records but also to the linguistic and rhetorical ones. It traces how the descriptive codes emerging from printed books, which were themselves gathered from the figurative and material terms of other languages and earlier cultures, fostered ways of thinking and, in turn, gave writers language to negotiate their responses to the print medium. Instead of debating how the world became modern, this book shows how it became bookish.
A close-up
I hope readers look first at the table of contents, to see the whole range of topics covered in the book: from printing language to book-related insults, and from scientific claims to racial categorization. I hope readers would begin reading with the Preface, which offers an accessible summary to the book’s main ideas, then move to the central claims of the book, which have to do with the place of bookish language in the English cultural imagination.
More than anything, though, I hope readers relish the sheer number and richness of the examples in the book. Having spent over two years collecting five-thousand examples for this study, I can safely say that the details make the book what it is. Perhaps one of my favorite examples features in Chapter 1. It comes from a sermon by John Donne:
The heart is a booke, legible enough, and intelligible in it selfe; but we have so interlined that booke with impertinent knowledge, and so clasped up that booke, for feare of reading our owne history, our owne sins, as that we are the greatest strangers, and the least conversant with the examination of our owne hearts.
The heart is already a metaphor for the seat of personhood, common across many cultures. Donne’s comparison of the heart to a marked-up, clasped-up book gives Donne a way to address how it should be easy (‘legible’, ‘intelligible’) to read the book of the heart, but we often make it difficult. As I write in How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England, the congregant who hears or reads this sermon must become both the book and its reader. This example, along with many others, made the book a delight to write.
Lastly
I hope this book causes people to see anew how important the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still are to our current culture. In the book’s final chapter, for instance, I show how the early modern language describing the technology of the printing press helped formulate the concept of whiteness that we are still working to understand today. In another chapter, I show how important the “book of nature” metaphor was to emerging notions of scientific knowledge. In short, if we want to come to grips with the postmodern (or late modern) culture of the twenty-first century, we could do worse than look to premodern England. For scholars in my field, I want to encourage example-heavy methods, language-forward inquiry, and continued interest in the ecologies of books.
