THE VOCABULARY OF SHAKESPEARE. 
JAMES DAVIE BUTLER. 
No depredator of Shakespeare has denied that “the fool had 
planted in his memory an army of good words.” It is inter¬ 
esting to ascertain, and even to inquire, where he recruited 
those soldiers. 
We know that he more or less borrowed all his structural 
plots except one from preceding writers, and he would natur¬ 
ally borrow language also. That he did so borrow has been as¬ 
serted by most writers, and their statements led Boswell Stone 
in his edition of those chronicles of Holinshed from which 
Shakespeare learned the facts concerning his English histori¬ 
cal plays, with every word Shakespeare had in fact copied from 
them printed in Italics. The words thus italicized proved to 
be surprisingly far between. An extremje instance will hardly 
make us overrate their fewness. 
A man imprisoned in the Tower of London being found dead 
the next morning was thought by some to have been strangled. 
Strangled in the chronicle is the only word italicized of 
all those in these following lines, and more after them: 
But see, his face is black and full of blood, 
His eyeballs further out than when be lived, 
Staring full ghastly like a strangled man, 
His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling, 
His hands abroad displayed, &c. 
Again, Sidney Lee declares that in the classical plays our 
dramatist adhered to the translated text of Plutarch “with the 
utmost literalness.” But there is a reprint of North’s trans¬ 
lation of 1587—the edition which Shakespeare must have used, 
which points out every line from which any word was actually 
