That art incestuous:  caitiff, to pieces shake,
    That under covert and convenient seeming
    Hast practis’d on man’s life:  close pent-up guilts,
    Rive your concealing continents, and cry
    These dreadful summoners grace.”

Observe what a sense of muscularity this usage carries, not only in the foregoing, but also in various shorter instances: 

“Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.”

                   “This my hand will rather
    The multitudinous sea incarnardine.”

“What is it then to me, if impious War—­
Array’d in flames, like to the Prince of Fiends—­
Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats
Enlink’d to waste and desolation?”

“And other devils, that suggest by treasons,
Do botch and bungle up damnation.”

It should be noted, further, that Shakespeare has many palpable Latinisms, some of them very choice too; that is, words of Latin origin used quite out of their popular English sense; such as,—­“Th’ extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine,”—­“Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,”—­“Rank corruption, mining all within, infects unseen,”—­and, “To expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is.”  And sometimes, not having the fear of poetical, or rather of unpoetical precisians and martinets before his eyes, he did not even scruple to naturalize words for his own use from foreign springs, such as exsufflicate and deracinate; or to coin a word, whenever the concurring reasons of sense and verse invited it; as in fedary, intrinse, intrinsicate, insisture, and various others.

As to the sources from which Shakespeare drew his choice and use of words, the most material point seems to be, that he certainly did not go to books or scholars, or to those who made language a special object of study.  Yet he knew right well that this was often done; for he ridicules it deliriously in Love’s Labour’s Lost, when Sir Nathaniel the Curate says of Constable Dull, “He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished”; and again, still better, when it is said of the learned Curate and Holofernes the School-master, “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps";—­“They have lived long in the alms-basket of words.”  Shakespeare did not learn his language in this way:  he went right into familiar, everyday speech for his words; caught them fresh, and beating with life, from the lips of common people and intelligent men of the world, farmers, mechanics, tradesmen, and housekeepers, who used language purely as a medium, not as an object, of thought; and of professional men, as they spoke when conversing with practical things, and stirred by the motives and feelings of actual life; that is, when, however they might think as wise men do, they spoke as common people do.