s pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.
Take the word 'purchase' for instance, which, in ordinary use, means
to acquire by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes
of obtaining property except by inheritance or descent, and in this
peculiar sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four
plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been suggested that it was in attendance
upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal vocabulary. But
this supposition not only fails to account for Shakespeare's peculiar
freedom and exactness in the use of that phraseology, it does not even
place him in the way of learning those terms his use of which is most
remarkable, which are not such as he would have heard at ordinary
proceedings at NISI PRIUS, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer
of real property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,'
'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,'
'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc. This conveyancer's jargon
could not have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in
London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of
real property were comparatively rare. And besides, Shakespeare uses
his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his first London
years, as in those produced at a later period. Just as exactly, too; for
the correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have
compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord Chancellor."

Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a sciolist's
temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal
solecisms will be found. The abstrusest elements of the common law are
impressed into a disciplined service. Over and over again, where such
knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare
appears in perfect possession of it. In the law of real property, its
rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries,
their vouchers and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the
method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the
rules of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in
the principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the
distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of
attainder and forfeiture, in the requisit