ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides a discussion on Shakespeare's terms of art from the law and herbals exploits primarily the hard-word dictionaries gathered in Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) and the digital archive of Early English Books Online (EEBO), but also the Oxford English Dictionary and online repositories like JSTOR and Literature Online. Shakespeare may have used John Gerard's Herball while he wrote his plays, and his knowledge of the law was ample enough to merit several papers, essay collections, and monographs, many of which pay special attention to his knowledge and use of legal jargon. If the law was mainly the province of specially educated lawyers, tradesmen and property-owners of all kinds were, in "Shakespeare's litigious age", necessarily versed in legal concepts and terminology. John Rastell's Exposicions of Termys of Law of England of about 1523, and the anonymous Banckes's Herball, published in 1525, both function as monolingual lexicons designed to explain terms of art.
