The market is first and foremost an abstraction. The concrete imagination and the theatrical imagination are the cornerstones of a vernacular theory of the market, without which it would not attract interest, intellectual curiosity, and support beyond specialized academic circles. I examine the rhetoric of the market and its failure to conform to the rules governing classical tragedy (unity of time, unity of place, unity of action) despite the fiction maintained by the rhetoric of economic discourse. The concrete imagination plays an important role in the mystique of the market and its institutionalization.