Excerpt from Shakespeare's Legal Maxims In the plays of Ben Jonson, George Chap man, and other dramatists of their time, legal maxims are to be seen in Latin. Shakespeare never quotes legal maxims in Latin, but he gives correct translations of them which are so embodied in his verse and prose that they have not the appearance of quotations. This may be one of the reasons why they have not been noticed by the commentators. Another reason may be that the commentators who were not members of the legal profession did not recognise them because they were ignorant of law, and the commentators who were lawyers did not recognise them because they were ignorant of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's correct translations of legal maxims are, I think, the only satisfactory evidence we have of his knowledge of Latin. I now give one example of Shakespeare's correct translations of the Latin maxims, and of the good verse he makes of it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.