or greater,
is the comparative frequency with which Shakespeare uses other legal
phrases; and much wider is the disparity, in this regard, between him
and the other dramatic writers of his whole period,--Marlowe, Greene,
Peele, Kyd, Lilly, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Ford, Webster,
Massinger, and the undistinguished crowd.

These facts dispose in great measure of the plausible suggestion,
which has been made,--that, as the courts of law in Shakespeare's time
occupied public attention much more than they do at present, they having
then regulated "the season," as the sittings of Parliament (not then
frequent or stated) do now,[F] they would naturally be frequented by the
restless, inquiring spirits of the time, Shakespeare among them, and
that there he and his fellow-dramatists picked up the law-phrases which
they wove into their plays and poems. But if this view of the case were
the correct one, we should not find that disparity in the use of legal
phrases which we have just remarked. Shakespeare's genius would manifest
itself in the superior effect with which he used knowledge acquired in
this manner; but his _genius_ would not have led him to choose the
dry and affected phraseology of the law as the vehicle of his flowing
thought, and to use it so much oftener than any other of the numerous
dramatists of his time, to all of whom the courts were as open as to
him. And the suggestion which we are now considering fails in two other
most important respects. For we do not find either that Shakespeare's
use of legal phrases increased with his opportunities of frequenting
the courts of law, or that the law-phrases, his use of which is most
noteworthy and of most importance in the consideration of the question
before us, are those which he would have heard oftenest in the course of
the ordinary business of the courts in his day. To look at the latter
point first,--the law-terms used by Shakespeare are generally not those
which he would have heard in ordinary trials at _nisi prius_ or before
the King's Bench, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real
property, "fine and recovery," "statutes," "purchase," "indenture,"
"tenure," "double voucher," "fee simple," "fee farm," "remainder,"
"reversion," "dower," "forfeiture," etc., etc.; and it is important to
remember that suits about the title to real estate are very much rarer
in England than they are with us, and in England were very much rarer in
Shakespeare's t