Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works? Nobody knows.
We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been
proved. KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is
not final and absolutely conclusive. We can infer, if we want
to, like those slaves. . . . No, I will not write that word,
it is not kind, it is not courteous. The upholders of the
Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call US the hardest names they
can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well,
if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I
will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call
them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms
reflecting my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.
To resume. What I was about to say was, those thugs have built
their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and
established facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am
glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it while there
is anything else to resort to.
But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a
place of that sort. . . . Since the Stratford Shakespeare
couldn't have written the Works, we infer that somebody did.
Who was it, then? This requires some more inferring.
Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent
like a tidal wave whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of
admiration, delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up
and claim the authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or
two? One reason is, because there are a dozen that are
recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you remember
"Beautiful Snow"? Do you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,
Rock Me to Sleep"? Do you remember "Backward, turn, backward, O
Time, in thy flight! Make me a child again just for tonight"? I
remember them very well. Their authorship was claimed by most of
the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every
claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least--to
wit, he could have done the authoring; he was competent.
Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't.
There was good reason. The world knows there was but one man on
the planet at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not
two. A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and
then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching
across the plain--footprints that were three miles apart, each
footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with
forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any doubt
as to who made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?
Where there two? No--the people knew who it was that had been
along there: there was only one Hercules.
There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn't be two;
certainly there couldn't be two at the same time. It takes ages
to bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.
This one was not matched before his time; nor during his time;
and hasn't been matched since. The prospect of matching him in
our time is not bright.
The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not
qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.
They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both
natural and acquired--for the miracle; and that no other
Englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed,
anything closely approaching it.
Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor
and horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has
synopsized Bacon's history--a thing which cannot be done for the
Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize.
Bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his
death in old age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed
in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and
conjectures and might-have-beens.
Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen,
and had a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was
"distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian: she
corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his
APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor
Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration." It is the
atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations
and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the
parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere
saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep
subjects; and with polite culture. It had its natural effect.
Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use
for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education.
This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know,
because we have no history of him of an informing sort. There
were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do
and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to
the dead languages. "All the valuable books then extant in all
the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a
single shelf"--imagine it! The few existing books were in the
Latin tongue mainly. "A person who was ignorant of it was shut
out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but
with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of
his own time"--a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for
his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works
would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before
the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his
twenties.
At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent
three years there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the
English Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the
cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during
another three years. A total of six years spent at the sources
of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men. The three
spent at the university were coeval with the second and last
three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with
nothing to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were
"presumably" spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a
butcher. That is, the thugs presume it--on no evidence of any
kind. Which is their way, when they want a historical fact.
Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to
them. They know the difference, but they also know how to blink
it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is
better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to
bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it. They know
by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-
tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;
no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged
bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out
his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and
assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering
bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.
The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where
reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not even if--
but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument,
and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better than a thug,
is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the praise.
That is the right spirit.
They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection
with the Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher.
They also "presume" that the butcher was his father. They don't
know. There is no written record of it, nor any other actual
evidence. If it would have helped their case any, they would
have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a
wilderness of butchers--all by their patented method "presumption."
If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will
further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers
were his father. And the week after, they will SAY it.
Why, it is just like being the past tense of the compound
reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular
accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the expression
which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a whole ancestry,
with only one posterity.
To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law,
and mastered that abstruse science. From that day to the end of
his life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges;
not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in
front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and
successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most
formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table
Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his
years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult
steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving
behind him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge his divine
right to that majestic place.
When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the
other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal
aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so
prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the
historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange,
incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon
they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and
rightful place, they seem at home there. Please turn back and
read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are
meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate
admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed
to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the
moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate, not
overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. "At ever turn
and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or
illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems
almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal
phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end
of his pen." That could happen to no one but a person whose
TRADE was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.
Veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and
draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm,
but no mere PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or
elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling accuracy, if
he were hardy enough to try. Please read again what Lord
Campbell and the other great authorities have said about Bacon
when they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.
Chapter VII
If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to
decide whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe
I would place before the debaters only the one question,
WAS SHAKESPEARE EVER A PRACTICING LAWYER? and leave everything
else out.
It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not
merely myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished: that he not
only knew some thousands of things about human life in all its
shades and grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and
crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, but that he
could TALK about the men and their grades and trades accurately,
making no mistakes. Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken,
or is it only Tom, Dick, and Harry? Does the exhibit stand upon
wide, and loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is not
evidence, and not proof--or upon details, particulars,
statistics, illustrations, demonstrations?
Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified
definitely as to only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-
equipments, so far as my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk
abide with me--his law-equipment. I do not remember that
Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and
sieges and strategies, and then decided and established for good
and all that they were militarily flawless; I do not remember
that any Nelson, or Drake, or Cook ever examined his seamanship
and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that
art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever
testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of
royal court-manners and the talk and manners of aristocracies; I
don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or Grecian or
Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a past-master
in those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't remember that
there is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing testimony--
unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of
Shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law.
Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace
back with certainty the changes that various trades and their
processes and technicalities have undergone in the long stretch
of a century or two and find out what their processes and
technicalities were in those early days, but with the law it is
different: it is mile-stoned and documented all the way back,
and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex and
intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of
knowing whether Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether
his law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal
shop-talk is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a
machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and from
occasional loiterings in Westminster.
Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had
every experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the
mast of our day. His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the
sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has LIVED
what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random
listenings. Hear him:
-
Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt
of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the
word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the
greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and
hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under
headway.
Again:
-
The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and
sky-sails set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run
out, and all were aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards
and booms, reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail
the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas,
her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black
speck.
Once more. A race in the Pacific:
-
Our antagonist was in her best trim. Being clear of the
point, the breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under
our sails, but we would not take them in until we saw three boys
spring into the rigging of the CALIFORNIA; then they were all
furled at once, but with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the
top-gallant mast-heads and loose them again at the word. It was
my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while standing by to loose it
again, I had a fine view of the scene. From where I stood, the
two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while their
narrow decks, far below, slanting over by the force of the wind
aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics
raised upon them. The CALIFORNIA was to windward of us, and had
every advantage; yet, while the breeze was stiff we held our own.
As soon as it began to slacken she ranged a little ahead, and the
order was given to loose the royals. In an instant the gaskets
were off and the bunt dropped. "Sheet home the fore-royal!"--
"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's home!"--"Hoist away, sir!"
is bawled from aloft. "Overhaul your clew-lines!" shouts the
mate. "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech! belay! Well the
lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the royals are set.
What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say
to that? He would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his
trade out of a book, he has BEEN there!" But would this same
captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's
seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that
have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost
to history in the last three hundred years? It is my conviction
that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him. For
instance--from "The Tempest":
-
MASTER. Boatswain!
BOATSWAIN. Here, master; what cheer?
MASTER. Good, speak to the mariners: fall to 't, yarely,
or we run ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!
(ENTER MARINERS.)
BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts!
yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle.
. . . Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring her to
try wi' the main course. . . . Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her
two courses. Off to sea again; lay her off.
That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now,
for a change.
If a man should write a book and in it make one of his
characters say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing
galley and the imposing-stone into the hell-box; assemble the
comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick
about it," I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing,
and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically,
not practically.
I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty
hard life; I know all the palaver of that business: I know all
about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all
about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts,
drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay
casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries;
arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of
copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting
amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs;
and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt
for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot
and the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so
whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a story, the
first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his
phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening--like
Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not by experience. No one
can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with
pick and shovel and drill and fuse.
I have been a surface miner--gold--and I know all its
mysteries, and the dialects that belongs with them; and whenever
Harte introduces that industry into a story I know by the
phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have ever
served that trade.
I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not
findable in any but one little spot in the world, so far as I
know. I know how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a
pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up the
mountain to its source, and find the compact little nest of
yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground. I
know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that
fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who
tries to use it without having learned it by the sweat of his
brow and the labor of his hands.
I know several other trades and the argot that goes with
them; and whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to
any of them without having learned it at its source I can trap
him always before he gets far on his road.
And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to
superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the
matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the
previous controversies have informed me, concerning which
illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:
WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply
read and of limitless experience? I would put aside the guesses
and surmises, and perhapes, and might-have-beens, and could-have-
beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are-justified-in-presumings,
and the rest of those vague specters and shadows and
indefintenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict
rendered by the jury upon that single question. If the verdict
was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford
Shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure,
so forgotten, so destitute of even village consequence, that
sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and friend of his later
days remembered to tell anything about him, did not write the Works.
Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED bears the
heading "Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages
of expert testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the
first nine, as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to
me, to settle the question which I have conceived to be the
master-key to the Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.
Shakespeare as a Lawyer [Note 1.]
The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence
that their author not only had a very extensive and accurate
knowledge of law, but that he was well acquainted with the
manners and customs of members of the Inns of Court and with
legal life generally.
"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making
mistakes as to the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to
Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither
be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." Such
was the testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers
of the nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of
Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequently became Lord
Chancellor. Its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by
lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it
is for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to
avoid displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal
terms and to discuss legal doctrines. "There is nothing so
dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to
tamper with our freemasonry." A layman is certain to betray
himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never
employ. Mr. Sidney Lee himself supplies us with an example of
this. He writes (p. 164): "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare .
. . obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the
payment of No. 6, and No. 1, 5s. 0d. costs." Now a lawyer would
never have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is
the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the
prerogative of the court), but to find a verdict on the facts.
The error is, indeed, a venial one, but it is just one of those
little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the writer
is a layman or "one of the craft."
But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal
subjects, he is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his
incompetence. "Let a non-professional man, however acute,"
writes Lord Campbell again, "presume to talk law, or to draw
illustrations from legal science in discussing other subjects,
and he will speedily fall into laughable absurdity."
And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare?
He had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy
familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in
English jurisprudence." And again: "Whenever he indulges this
propensity he uniformly lays down good law." Of "Henry IV.,"
Part 2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written
the play, I do not see how he could be chargeable with having
forgotten any of his law while writing it." Charles and Mary
Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays
with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration,
and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and force."
Malone, himself a lawyer, wrote: "His knowledge of legal terms
is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation
of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of
technical skill." Another lawyer and well-known Shakespearean,
Richard Grant White, says: "No dramatist of the time, not even
Beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the Common Pleas,
and who after studying in the Inns of Court abandoned law for the
drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and
exactness. And the significance of this fact is heightened by
another, that is only to the language of the law that he exhibits
this inclination. The phrases peculiar to other occupations
serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison, or
illustration, generally when something in the scene suggests
them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as part of his
vocabulary and parcel of his thought. Take the word 'purchase'
for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire by giving
value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining
property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar
sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four
plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been suggested that it was in
attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal
vocabulary. But this supposition not only fails to account for
Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that
phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning
those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not
such as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at NISI
PRIUS, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real
property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,'
'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee
farm,' 'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc. This
conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging
round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years
ago, when suits as to the title of real property were
comparatively rare. And besides, Shakespeare uses his law just
as freely in his first plays, written in his first London years,
as in those produced at a later period. Just as exactly, too;
for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are
introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a
Lord Chancellor."
Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a
sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar
art. No legal solecisms will be found. The abstrusest elements
of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service. Over
and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers
unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession
of it. In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and
descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers
and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method
of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules
of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the
principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the
distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the
law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid
marriage, in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of
the law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the
Crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority."
To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have
not cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own
times, VIZ.: Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. 1855, created a
Baron of the Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-
Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863,
and better known to the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity
he was raised in 1869. Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and
as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified, was one of the
first legal authorities of his day, famous for his "remarkable
grasp of legal principles," and "endowed by nature with a
remarkable facility for marshaling facts, and for a clear
expression of his views."
Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity" with the
with not only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the
technicalities of English law, a knowledge so perfect and
intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault. . . .
The mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all
occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts was
quite unexampled. He seems to have had a special pleasure in his
complete and ready mastership of it in all its branches. As
manifested in the plays, this legal knowledge and learning had
therefore a special character which places it on a wholly
different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge
which is exhibited in page after page of the plays. At every
turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile,
or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law. He seems
almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the commonest of legal
expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or
illustration. That he should have descanted in lawyer language
when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond,
was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was
exhibited in a far different manner: it protruded itself on all
occasions, appropriate or inappropriate, and mingled itself with
strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects."
Again: "To acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles,
and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases
not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's
chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of
employment in some career involving constant contact with legal
questions and general legal work would be requisite. But a
continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was
just what the manager of two theaters had not at his disposal.
In what portion of Shakespeare's (i.e., Shakspere's) career would
it be possible to point out that time could be found for the
interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of
practicing lawyers?"
Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some
possible explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of
law, have made the suggestion that Shakespeare might,
conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney's office before he
came to London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his
opinion as to the probability of this being true. His answer was
as follows: "You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of
which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own
handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not
having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records
of the local court at Stratford nor of the superior Court at
Westminster would present his name as being concerned in any suit
as an attorney, but it might reasonably have been expected that
there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, and
after a very diligent search none such can be discovered."
Upon this Lord Penzance commends: "It cannot be doubted
that Lord Campbell was right in this. No young man could have
been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon
continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving
traces of his work and name." There is not a single fact or
incident in all that is known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or
tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship. And after
much argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject,
we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less
an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea of
his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces."
It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that
he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. "That Shakespeare
was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may
be correct. At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of
Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the
town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining
probability to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had
employment in one of them. There is, it is true, no tradition to
this effect, but such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's
occupation between the time of leaving school and going to London
are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in
them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an
attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a
high style,' and making speeches over them."
This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There
is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a
butcher's apprentice. John Dowdall, who made a tour of
Warwickshire in 1693, testifies to it as coming from the old
clerk who showed him over the church, and it is unhesitatingly
accepted as true by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol. I, p. 11, and
Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.) Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in
it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who must have written his
account some time before 1680, when his manuscript was completed.
Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is
not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It has been evolved out
of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking
for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's marvelous
acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But Mr.
Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the
tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in
its stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there
no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and
Lord Penzance pointed out, is really put out of court by the
negative evidence, since "no young man could have been at work in
an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act
as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work
and name." And as Mr. Edwards further points out, since the day
when Lord Campbell's book was published (between forty and fifty
years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of other
legal papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's
youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one
signature of the young man has been found."
Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's
office it is clear that he must have served for a considerable
period in order to have gained (if, indeed, it is credible that
he could have so gained) his remarkable knowledge of the law.
Can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so,
tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter?
That Dowdall's old clerk, over eighty years of age,
should have never heard of it (though he was sure enough
about the butcher's apprentice) and that all the other
ancient witnesses should be in similar ignorance!
But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy.
Tradition is to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but
cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case. Shakespeare
of Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, but the
author of the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher's
apprentice. Anyway, therefore, with tradition. But the author
of the Plays and Poems MUST have had a very large and a very
accurate knowledge of the law. Therefore, Shakespeare of
Stratford must have been an attorney's clerk! The method is
simplicity itself. By similar reasoning Shakespeare has been
made a country schoolmaster, a soldier, a physician, a printer,
and a good many other things besides, according to the
inclination and the exigencies of the commentator. It would not
be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin as
a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time.
However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that
he has fully recognized, what is indeed tolerable obvious, that
Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training. "It may, of
course, be urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of
medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to
morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has
ever contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is
wrong; that contention also has been put forward.) It may be
urged that his acquaintance with the technicalities of other
crafts and callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was
also extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a
sailor or a soldier. (Wrong again. Why, even Messrs. Garnett
and Gosse "suspect" that he was a soldier!) This may be
conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To
these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in
season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is
abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out of
season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses
it into the service of expression and illustration. At least a
third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would
indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas,
nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of
which are not colored by it. Much of his law may have been
acquired from three books easily accessible to him--namely,
Tottell's PRECEDENTS (1572), Pulton's STATUTES (1578), and
Fraunce's LAWIER'S LOGIKE (1588), works with which he certainly
seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come
from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings.
We quite agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal knowledge
is not what could have been picked up in an attorney's office,
but could only have been learned by an actual attendance at the
Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and on circuit, or by
associating intimately with members of the Bench and Bar."
This is excellent. But what is Mr. Collins's explanation?
"Perhaps the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the
hypothesis that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!),
that he there contracted a love for the law which never left him,
that as a young man in London he continued to study or dabble in
it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts,
and to frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition
is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently
had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject
where no layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious
display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping
himself from tripping."
A lame conclusion. "No other supposition" indeed! Yes,
there is another, and a very obvious supposition--namely, that
Shakespeare was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade,
versed in all the ways of the courts, and living in close
intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of Court.
One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated
the fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training,
but I may be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance
to his pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those
of Malone, Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord
Penzance, Mr. Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed
their opinion on the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements. . . .
Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from
Lord Penzance's book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had
somehow or other managed "to acquire a perfect familiarity with
legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical
terms and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of
the pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster." This, as
Lord Penzance points out, "would require nothing short of
employment in some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal
questions and general legal work." But "in what portion of
Shakespeare's career would it be possible to point out that time
could be found for the interposition of a legal employment in the
chambers or offices of practicing lawyers? . . . It is beyond
doubt that at an early period he was called upon to abandon his
attendance at school and assist his father, and was soon after,
at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a trade. While under
the obligation of this bond he could not have pursued any other
employment. Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London. He
has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this
he did in some capacity at the theater. No one doubt that. The
holding of horses is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice,
as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever the nature
of his employment was at the theater, there is hardly room for
the belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his
progress there was so rapid. Ere long he had been taken into the
company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a "Johannes
Factotum.' His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for
the constancy and activity of his services. One fails to see
when there could be a break in the current of his life at this
period of it, giving room or opportunity for legal or indeed any
other employment. 'In 1589,' says Knight, 'we have undeniable
evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a
salaried servant, as may players were, but was a shareholder in
the company of the Queen's players with other shareholders below
him on the list.' This (1589) would be within two years after
his arrival in London, which is placed by White and Halliwell-
Phillipps about the year 1587. The difficulty in supposing that,
starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed
to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of
most extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable.
Still it was physically possible, provided always that he could
have had access to the needful books. But this legal training
seems to me to stand on a different footing. It is not only
unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by the
known facts of his career." Lord Penzance then refers to the
fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant
White) several of the plays had been written. 'The Comedy of
Errors' in 1589, 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1589, 'Two Gentlemen
of Verona' in 1589 or 1590," and so forth, and then asks, "with
this catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible
that he could have taken a leading part in the management and
conduct of two theaters, and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied
upon, taken his share in the performances of the provincial tours
of his company--and at the same time devoted himself to the study
of the law in all its branches so efficiently as to make himself
complete master of its principles and practice, and saturate his
mind with all its most technical terms?"
I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because
it lay before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter
of Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still
better set forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to
me, which beset the idea that Shakespeare might have found them
in some unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other
occupations, for the study of classics, literature, and law, to
say nothing of languages and a few other matters. Lord Penzance
further asks his readers: "Did you ever meet with or hear of an
instance in which a young man in this country gave himself up to
legal studies and engaged in legal employments, which is the only
way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless
with the view of practicing in that profession? I do not believe
that it would be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance
in which the law has been seriously studied in all its branches,
except as a qualification for practice in the legal profession."
This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative;
and so uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and
maybe-so's, and might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-
have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster of Paris out of
which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which
goes by the Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me
that the man who wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and
lawyers. Also, that that man could not have been the Stratford
Shakespeare--and WASN'T. [End of Twain quotation]
[Note.1]. From Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED.
By George G. Greenwood, M.P. John Lane Company, publishers.
The biographers of Shakespeare delight in speculating that other dramatists of the times co-authored or were themselves solely responsible for many of the plays. They offer the names of Heywood, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Wilkes, Rowley, Hooker, Kyd, Drayton, Dekker, Nash, Queen Elizabeth, or anyone with the initials "W.S."
But if the detested name of Bacon be mentioned, these "biographers" are at once provoked to frenzied rage.
I will quote James Phinney Baxter The Greatest of Literary Problems (1915):
It was estimated many years ago that ten thousand volumes, large and small, had been written on the "Shakespeare" Works. This number should have about doubled by this time, and it is true to say that they constitute such a confusing mass of irreconcilable opinions as to be useless to students, except as a warning against juggling with glittering theories in literary criticism. This, however, can hardly compensate for the dissemination of so much fiction, and the imposition of useless toil to overworked librarians and callow students.