Chapter 3 considers engagements with words in performance, focusing on John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, or The City Gallant, and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women. Tracing the plurality of linguistic tastes associated with playgoers, it tracks key forms such as jests, conceits, and ‘fresh’ language and explores key debates between heightened and plain style, and about novelty and aptness. These tastes persisted despite shifts in linguistic fashion, resulting in plays that, despite paratextual complaints about the impossibility of pleasing all tastes, encompass a striking degree of linguistic variety into their practice. Greene’s Tu Quoque and Women, Beware Women reveal playwrights catering to a variety of linguistic tastes simultaneously, even whilst asking playgoers to reflect upon the judiciousness of their tastes, and even the trustworthiness of language itself.