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Updated: July 20, 2025
Rushton's hundred; for the latter gentlemen have added little to the strength, though considerably to the number, of the array on the affirmative side of the point in dispute; and we have seen, that, of the law-phrases cited by them from Shakespeare's pages, the most recondite, as well as the most common and simple, are to be found in the works of the Chroniclers, whose very language Shakespeare used, and in those of the playwrights his contemporaries.
Indeed, the hunting of a metaphor or a conceit into the ground is a fault characteristic of Elizabethan literature, and one from which Shakespeare's boldness, no less than his genius, was required to save him; and we have seen already how common was the figurative use of law-phrases among the poets and dramatists of his period.
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.
Our new advocates of the old cause, however, quote two passages which, from the freedom with which law-phrases are scattered through them, it is worth while to reproduce here. The first is the well-known speech in the grave-digging scene of "Hamlet": "Ham. There's another: Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?
But, he was rich, and I poor. He a potato, the growth of the soil; I, though generally admitted a plant of more promise and pretension I was an exotic! He was a patrician one of the small nobility a growth, sui generis, of the place " "Damn your law-phrases! stop with that, if you please."
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