mselves to writing or
translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that
we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, but is strongly
confirmed by the notably frequent occurrence of legal phrases in the
dramatic literature of that age.

But the question, then, arises,--and it is one which, under the
circumstances, must be answered,--To what must we attribute the fact,
that, of all the plays that have come down to us, written between 1580
and 1620, Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect? For it is
true, that, among all the dramatic writers of that period, whose
works have survived, not one uses the phraseology of the law with the
frequency, the freedom, and the correctness of Shakespeare. Beaumont,
for instance, was a younger son of a Judge of the Common Pleas, and,
following the common routine that we have noticed, after leaving the
University, became an Inns-of-Court man, but soon abandoned law for
literature; his friend and associate, Fletcher, was the son of a bishop,
but had an uncle who was a lawyer and a diplomatist, and is himself
believed to have been of the Inns of Court. Rich gleanings of law-terms
might, therefore, be expected from the plays written by these
dramatists; yet it may safely be asserted, that from Shakespeare's
thirty-seven plays at least twice as many passages marked by legal
phraseology might be produced, as from the fifty-four written by
Beaumont and Fletcher, together or alone! a fact the great significance
of which is heightened by another,--that it is only the vocabulary of
the law to the use of which Shakespeare exhibits this proclivity. He
avails himself, it is true, of the peculiar language of the physician,
the divine, the husbandman, the soldier, and the sailor; but he uses
these only on very rare occasions, by way of description, comparison,
or illustration, when something in the scene or the subject in hand
suggests them. But the technical language of the law runs from his
pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought. The word
"purchase," for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire by
giving value, in law applies to all legal modes of obtaining property,
except inheritance of descent. And the word in this peculiar and most
technical sense occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays,
but only in a single passage (if our memory and Mr. Dyce's notes serve
us) in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Equal,