Butler—The Vocabulary of Shakespeare. 41 
adopted and those lines are fewer than the pages. In support 
of his statement Lee quotes the following passages: Plutarch’s 
words are: “I am Cains Marcius who hath done to thee par¬ 
ticularly and to all the Voices generally, great hurt and mis¬ 
chief, wdiieh I cannot deny for the surname of Coriolanus 
which I hear.” In Shakespeare’s lines we read: 
My name is Cams Marcius, who hath done 
To thee particularly and to all the Voices 
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may 
My sur-name Coriolanus. 4. 5. 71. 
Ten words identical in scarcely four lines! What of that? 
Vo matter how great the verbal similarities are in these cita¬ 
tions, for I can prove that the borrower had already used every 
single word that is here quoted except “particularly.” He had 
no need to borrow words for his diction was already better than 
Plutarch or his translator could supply. Vew terms were to 
him no temptation. 
Vo book was kept before our youthful dramatist more than 
the Bible. Translations were then numerous and widely cir¬ 
culated. There may have been a copy in his birth-house for 
his kindred were not without Puritan leanings. At all events 
the Scriptures were before him in church and in school where 
attendance was alike obligatory. His “small Latin” was 
largely learned from the Testament in Latin. The Great Bible 
of 1539 was set up in the church of his baptism, and that wide 
open and where the way-faring man could read. Scriptural 
quotations are so numerous that a bishop has written a volume 
about them. In fact no two books of the time had so many 
words in common as Shakespeare and the Bible. Yet for the 
most part neither borrowed from the other while both in comr 
inon took up the words of common life. Hence quotations 
from Holy Writ were not so literal as has been often believed, 
they were adapted to Shakespearian purposes by Shakespear¬ 
ian words. In the locution, “He that doth the ravens feed yea 
providently caters for the sparrow,” two most expressive words 
are not Biblical, namely, providently and caters. Veither of 
them had been before used by Shakespeare nor were they again, 
and so they belong to his U7ra£ Xeyo/xeva. The Oxfordians 
