Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 by Various

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Very profound legal studies, therefore, cannot be predicated of
Shakespeare on the ground of the knowledge which he has shown of this
peculiar kind of statute.

It is not surprising that both our legal Shakespearean commentators cite
the following passage from "As You Like It" in support of their theory;
for in it the word "extent" is used in a sense so purely technical, that
not one in a thousand of Shakespeare's lay readers now-a-days would
understand it without a note:--

_Duke F._ Well, push him out of doors,
And let my officers of such a nature
_Make an extent_ upon his house and lands."
Act iii. Sc. 1.

"Extent," as Mr. Rushton remarks, is directed to the sheriff to seize
and value lands and goods to the utmost extent; "an _extendi facias_" as
Lord Campbell authoritatively says, "applying to the house and lands
as a _fieri facias_ would apply to goods and chattels, or a _capias ad
satisfaciendum_ to the person." But that John Fletcher knew, as well
as my Lord Chief Justice, or Mr. Barrister Rushton, or even, perhaps,
William Shakespeare, all the woes that followed an extent, the elder
Mr. Weller at least would not have doubted, had he in the course of
his literary leisure fallen upon the following passage in "Wit Without
Money" (1630):--

"_Val_ Mark me, widows
Are long _extents_ in law upon men's livings,
Upon their bodies' winding-sheets; they that enjoy 'em
Lie but with dead men's monuments, and beget
Only their own ill epitaphs."
Act ii. Sc. 2.

George Wilkins, too, the obscure author of "The Miseries of Enforced
Marriage," uses the term with as full an understanding, though not with
so feeling an expression or so scandalous an illustration of it, in the
following passage from the fifth act of that play, which was produced
about 1605 or 1606:--

"They are usurers; they come yawning for money; and the sheriff with
them is come to serve an _extent_ upon your land, and then seize your
body by force of execution."

Another seemingly recondite law-phrase used by Shakespeare, which Lord
Campbell passes entirely by, though Mr. Rushton quotes three instances
of it, is "taken with the manner." This has nothing to do with good
manners or ill manners; but, in the words of the old law-book before
cited,--

--"is when a theefe hath stollen and is followed with hue and crie and
taken, having that found about him which he stole;--that is called ye
maynour. And so we commonly use to saye, when wee finde one doing of an
unlawful act, that we tooke him with the maynour or manner."

_Termes de la Ley_, 1595, fol. 126, _b_.

Shakespeare, therefore, uses the phrase with perfect understanding, when
he makes Prince Hal say to Bardolph,--

"O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen
years ago, and wert _taken with the manner_,
and ever since thou hast blush'd extempore."
1 _Henry IV_.Act ii, Sc. 4.

But so Fletcher uses the same phrase, and as correctly, when he makes
Perez say to Estefania, in "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,"--

"How like a sheep-biting rogue, _taken i' the manner_,
And ready for the halter, dost thou look
now!"--Act v. Sc. 4.

But both Fletcher and Shakespeare, in their use of this phrase, unusual
as it now seems to us, have only exemplified the custom referred to by
our contemporary legal authority,--"And so we _commonly use to saye_,
when wee finde one doing of an unlawfull act, that we tooke him with the
maynour"; though this must doubtless be understood to refer to persons
of a certain degree of education and knowledge of the world.

It seems, then, that the application of legal phraseology to the
ordinary affairs of life was more common two hundred and fifty years ago
than now; though even now-a-days it is much more generally used in the
rural districts than persons who have not lived in them would suppose.
There law shares with agriculture the function of providing those
phrases of common conversation which, used figuratively at first, and
often with poetic feeling, soon pass into mere thought-saving formulas
of speech, and which in large cities are chiefly drawn from trade
and politics. And if in the use of the law-terms upon which we have
remarked, which are the more especially technical and remote from
the language of unprofessional life among all those which occur in
Shakespeare's works, he was not singular, but, as we have seen,
availed himself only of a knowledge which other contemporary poets and
playwrights possessed, how much more easily might we show that those
commoner legal words and phrases, to remarks upon Shakespeare's use of
which both the books before us (and especially Lord Campbell's) are
mainly devoted, "judgment," "fine," "these presents," "testament,"
"attorney," "arbitrator," "fees," "bond," "lease," "pleading," "arrest,"
"session," "mortgage," "vouchers," "indentures," "assault," "battery,"
"dower," "covenant," "distrain," "bail," "non-suit," etc., etc.,
etc.,--words which everybody understands,--are scattered through all the
literature of Shakespeare's time, and, indeed, of all time since there
were courts and suits at law!

Many of the passages which Lord Campbell cites as evidence of
Shakespeare's "legal acquirements" excite only a smile at the
self-delusion of the critic who could regard them for a moment in that
light. For instance, these lines in that most exquisite song in "Measure
for Measure;"--"Take, oh, take those lips away,"--

"But my kisses bring again
_Seals_ of love, but _seal'd_ in vain";--

and these from "Venus and Adonis,"--

"Pure lips, sweet _seals_ in my soft lips imprinted,
What bargains may I make, still to be _sealing_!"--

to which Mr. Rushton adds from "Hamlet,"--

"A combination and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his _seal_."

Act iii. Sc. 4.

"Now must your conscience my acquittance
_seal_."--Act iv. Sc. 7.

And because indentures and deeds and covenants are sealed, these
passages must be accepted as part of the evidence that Shakespeare
narrowly escaped being made Lord High Chancellor of England! It requires
all the learning and the logic of a Lord Chief Justice and a London
barrister to establish a connection between such premises and such a
conclusion. And if Shakespeare's lines smell of law, how strong is the
odor of parchment and red tape in these, from Drayton's Fourth Eclogue
(1605):

"Kindnesse againe with kindnesse was repay'd,
_And with sweet kisses covenants were sealed_."

We ask pardon of the reader for the production of contemporary evidence,
that, in Shakespeare's day, a knowledge of the significance and binding
nature of a seal was not confined to him among poets; for surely a man
must be both a lawyer and a Shakespearean commentator to forget that the
use of seals is as old as the art of writing, and, perhaps, older, and
that the practice has furnished a figure of speech to poets from the
time when it was written, that out of the whirlwind Job heard, "It is
turned as clay to the _seal_," and probably from a period yet more
remote.

And is Lord Campbell really in earnest in the following grave and
precisely expressed opinion?

"In the next scene, [of "Othello,"] Shakespeare gives us a _very
distinct proof_ that he was acquainted with Admiralty law, as well as
with the procedure of Westminster Hall. Describing the feat of the Moor
in carrying off Desdemona against her father's consent, which might
either make or mar his fortune, according as the act might be sanctioned
or nullified, Iago observes,--

"'Faith, he to-night hath hoarded a land carack:
If it prove a _lawful prize_, he's made forever';

the trope indicating that _there would be a suit in the High Court of
Admiralty to determine the validity of the capture_"!--p. 91.

"Why did not his Lordship go farther, and decide, that, in the
figurative use of the term, "land carack," Shakespeare gave us very
distinct proof that he was acquainted with maritime life, and especially
with the carrying-trade between Spain and the West Indies? We
respectfully submit to the court the following passage from Middleton
and Rowley's "Changeling,"--first published in 1653, but written many
years before. Jasperino, seeing a lady, calls out,--

"Yonder's another vessel: Ile _board_ her:
if she be _lawfall prize, down goes her topsail."_
Act i. Sig. B. 2.

And with it we submit the following points, and ask a decision in our
favor. First, That they, the said Middleton and Rowley, have furnished,
in the use of the phrase "lawful prize," in this passage, very distinct
proof that they were acquainted with Admiralty law. Second, That, in
the use of the other phrases, "board," and especially "down goes her
topsail," they have furnished yet stronger evidence that they had been
sailors on board armed vessels, and that the trope indicates, that, had
not the vessel or lady in question lowered her topsail or top-knot, she
would then and there have been put mercilessly to the sword.

But what shall we think of the acumen and the judgment of a Chief
Justice, a man of letters, and a man of the world, who brings forward
such passages as the following as part of the evidence bearing upon the
question of Shakespeare's legal acquirements?--

"Come; fear not you; _good counsellors lack
no clients._"
_Measure for Measure_. Act i. Sc. 2.

"One that _before the judgement_ carries poor
souls to hell."
_Comedy of Errors_. Act iv. Sc. 2.

"Well, Time is the old _Justice_ that examines
all such offenders,--and let Time try."
_As You Like It_. Act iv. Sc. 1.

"And that old common _arbitrator_, Time."
_Troilus and Cressida_. Act iv. Sc. 5.

"No cock of mine; you crow too like a _craven_."
_Taming of the Shrew_. Act ii. Sc. 1.

"Bestial oblivion or some _craven_ scruple."
_Hamlet_. Act iv. Sc. 4.

By which last line, according to Lord Campbell, (p. 55,) "Shakespeare
shows that he was acquainted with _the law for regulating 'trials by
battle_'"!

But to proceed with the passages quoted in evidence:--

"Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the
skin of an innocent lamb should be made
_parchment_? that parchment, being _scribbled
o'er_, should undo a man? Some say, the bee
stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's _wax_; for I did
but _seal_ once to a thing, and I was never mine
own man since."--2 _Henry VI_. Act vi. Sc. 2.

Upon citing which, his Lordship exclaims,--

"Surely Shakespeare must have been employed to write _deeds_ on
_parchment_ in _courthand_, and to apply the _wax_ to them in the form
of _seals_. One does not understand how he should, on any other theory
of his bringing-up, have been acquainted _with these details_"!

One does not; but we submit to the court, that, if two were to lay their
heads together after the manner of Sydney Smith's vestrymen, they might
bring it about.

In aid of his Lordship's further studies, we make the following
suggestion. He doubtless knows that one of the earliest among our small
stock of traditions about Shakespeare is that recorded by Aubrey as
being derived from Stratford authority, that his father was a butcher,
and that "when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he
kill'd a calfe, he wold do it in a high style, and make a speech."
When his Lordship considers this old tradition in connection with the
following passage in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays,--

"Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the
slaughter,"--

2 _Henry VI._ Act iii. Sc. 2.

how can he resist the conclusion, that, although the divine Williams may
not have run with "Forty," it is highly probable that he did kill
for Keyser? Let his Lordship also remember that other old tradition,
mentioned by Rowe, that John Shakespeare was "a considerable dealer
in wool," and that William, upon leaving school, "seems to have given
entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him"; and
remember, also, this passage from another of Shakespeare's earliest
plays:--

"He is too picked, too spruce, too affected,
too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may
call it...He draweth out the _thread of
his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument._"
--_Love's Labor's Lost_. Act v. Sc. 1.

Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler's craft, as well as of
the art of rhetoric, compressed into that one sentence by the hydraulic
power of Shakespeare's genius? Does it not show that he was initiated in
the mysteries of long and short staple before he wrote this, perhaps,
his earliest play? But look again at the following passage, also written
when his memory of his boyish days was freshest, and see the evidence
that _both_ these traditions were well founded:--

"So, first, the harmless sheep doth yield _his fleece;_
And, next, _his throat unto the butcher's knife."_

Could these lines have been written by a man who had not been both a
considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher who killed a calf in high
style and made a speech? Who can have a doubt about this matter, when he
appreciates rightly the following passage in "Hamlet," (Act v. Sc. 2,)
and is penetrated with the wisdom of two wise commentators upon it?--

'Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.'

Dr. Farmer informs me that these words are merely technical. A wool-man,
butcher, and dealer in _skewers_ lately observed to him that his nephew
(an idle lad) could only _assist_ him in making them;--he could _rough
hew_ them, but I was obliged to shape their ends! To shape the ends of
wool-skewers, i.e., to _point_ them, requires a degree of skill; any one
can _rough-hew_ them. Whoever recollects the profession of Shakespeare's
father will admit that his son might be no stranger to such terms. "I have
frequently seen packages of wool pinn'd up with skewers."--STEEVENS.

Lucky wool-man, butcher, and dealer in skewers! to furnish at once a
comment upon the great philosophical tragedy and a proof that its author
and you were both of a trade! Fortunate Farmer, to have heard the story!
and most sagacious Steevens, to have penetrated its hidden meaning,
recollecting felicitously that you had seen packages of wool pinn'd up
with skewers! But, O wisest, highest-and-deepest-minded Shakespeare, to
have remembered, as you were propounding, Hamlet-wise, one of the great
unsolvable mysteries of life, the skewers that you, being an idle lad,
could but rough-hew, leaving to your careful father the skill-requiring
task to shape their ends!--ends without which they could not have bound
together the packages of wool with which you loaded the carts that
backed up to the door in Henley Street, or have penetrated the veal
of the calves that you killed in such a high style and with so much
eloquence, and which loaded the tray that you daily bore on your
shoulder to the kitchen-door of New Place, yet unsuspecting that you
were to become its master!

Yet we would not too strongly insist upon this evidence, that
Shakespeare in his boyhood served both as a butcher's and a
wool-stapler's apprentice; for we venture to think that we have
discovered evidence in his works that their author was a tailor. For, in
the first place, the word "tailor" occurs no less than thirty-five times
in his plays. [The reader is to suppose that we are able to record this
fact by an intimate acquaintance with every line that Shakespeare wrote,
and by a prodigious effort of memory, and not by reference to Mrs.
Clark's Concordance.] "Measures" occurs nearly thrice as often; "shears"
is found no less than six times; "thimble," three times; "goose," no
less than twenty-seven times!--and when we find, that, in all his
thirty-seven plays, the word "cabbage" occurs but once, and then with
the deliberate explanation that it means "worts" and is "good cabbage,"
may we not regard such reticence upon this tender point as a touching
confirmation of the truth of our theory? See, too, the comparison which
Shakespeare uses, when he desires to express the service to which
his favorite hero, Prince Hal, will put the manners of his wild
companions:--

"So, like gross terms,
The Prince will, in the perfectness of time,
Cast off his followers; and their memory
Shall as a _pattern or a measure_ live
By which his Grace must mete the lives of
others."

2 _Henry IV._, Act iv. Sc. 4.

And in writing one of his earliest plays, Shakespeare's mind seems to
have been still so impressed with memories of his former vocation, that
he made the outraged Valentine, as his severest censure of Proteus,
reproach him with being badly dressed:--

"Ruffian, let go that rude, uncivil touch!
Thou friend _of an ill fashion!_"

Act v. Sc. 4.

Cleopatra, too, who, we may be sure from her conduct, was addicted to
very "low necks," after Antony's death becomes serious, and declares her
intention to have something "after the high Roman fashion." And what but
a reminiscence of the disgust which a tailor of talent has for mending
is it that breaks out in the Barons' defiant message to King John?--

"The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;
We will not line his thin bestained cloak."

_King John_, Act iv. Sc. 3.

A memory, too, of the profuse adornment with which he had been called
upon to decorate some very tender youth's or miss's fashionable suit
intrudes itself even in his most thoughtful tragedy:--

"The canker galls the infants of the Spring
Too oft before their _buttons_ be disclos'd."

_Hamlet_, Act i. Sc. 3.

In "Macbeth," desiring to pay the highest compliment to Macduff's
judgment and knowledge, he makes Lennox say,--

"He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
_The fits of the season_."--Act iv. Sc. 2.

Not the last fall or last spring style, be it observed, but that of the
season, which it is most necessary for the fashionable tailor to know.
In writing the first scene of the "Second Part of Henry IV.," his mind
was evidently crossed by the shade of some over-particular dandy,
whose fastidious nicety as to the set of his garments he had failed to
satisfy; for he makes Northumberland compare himself to a man who,

"_Impatient of his fit_, breaks like a fire
Out of his keeper's arms."

And yet we must not rely too much even upon evidence so strong and so
cumulative as this. For it would seem as if Shakespeare must have been
a publisher, and have known the anxiety attendant upon the delay of an
author not in high health to complete a work the first part of which has
been put into the printer's hands. Else, how are we to account for his
feeling use of this beautiful metaphor in "Twelfth Night"?

"Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And _leave the world no copy_."

Act i. Sc. 5.

But this part of our subject expands before us, and we must stay our
hand. We merely offer these hints as our modest contribution to the
attempts to decide from phrases used in Shakespeare's works what were
his avocations before he became a playwright, and return to Lord
Campbell and Mr. Rushton.

When Malone, in 1790, broached his theory, that Shakespeare had been an
attorney's clerk, he cited in support of it twenty-four passages. Mr.
Rushton's pamphlet brings forward ninety-five, more or less; Lord
Campbell's book, one hundred and sixty. But, from what he has seen of
it, the reader will not be surprised at learning that a large number of
the passages cited by his Lordship must be thrown aside, as having no
bearing whatever on the question of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.
They evince no more legal knowledge, no greater familiarity with
legal phraseology, than is apparent in the ordinary conversation of
intelligent people generally, even at this day. Mr. Rushton, more
systematic than his Lordship, has been also more careful; and from the
pages of both we suppose that there might be selected a round hundred
of phrases which could be fairly considered as having been used by
Shakespeare with a consciousness of their original technicality and of
their legal purport. This is not quite in the proportion of three to
each of his thirty-seven plays; and if we reckon his sonnets and poems
according to their lines, (and both Mr. Rushton and Lord Campbell cite
from them,) the proportion falls to considerably less than three. But
Malone's twenty-four instances are of nearly as much value in the
consideration of the question as Lord Campbell's and Mr. Rushton's
hundred; for the latter gentlemen have added little to the strength,
though considerably to the number, of the array on the affirmative side
of the point in dispute; and we have seen, that, of the law-phrases
cited by them from Shakespeare's pages, the most recondite, as well
as the most common and simple, are to be found in the works of the
Chroniclers, whose very language Shakespeare used, and in those of the
playwrights his contemporaries.

Our new advocates of the old cause, however, quote two passages which,
from the freedom with which law-phrases are scattered through them, it
is worth while to reproduce here. The first is the well-known speech in
the grave-digging scene of "Hamlet":--

"_Ham_. There's another: Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?
Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his _cases_, his _tenures_, and
his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave, now, to knock him about
the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his _action of
battery_? Humph! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land,
with his _statutes_, his _recognizances_, his _fines_, his _double
vouchers_, his _recoveries_: Is this the _fine_ of his _fines_, and the
_recovery_ of his _recoveries_, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?
will his _vouchers_ vouch him no more of his _purchases_, and _double
ones_, too, than the length and breadth of a pair of _indentures_? The
very _conveyances_ of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must
the _inheritor_ himself have no more? ha?"--Act v. Sc. 1.

The second is the following Sonnet, (No. 46,) not only the language,
but the very fundamental conceit of which, it will be seen, is purely
legal:--

"Mine Eye and Heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine Eye my Heart thy picture's sight would _bar_,
My Heart mine Eye the freedom of that right.
My Heart doth _plead_ that thou in him dost lie
(A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes);
But the _defendant_ doth that _plea_ deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is _impanelled_
A _quest_ of thoughts, all tenants to the Heart,
And by their _verdict_ is determined
The clear Eye's _moiety_, and the dear Heart's part;
As thus: Mine Eye's due is thine outward part,
And my Heart's right, thine inward love of heart."

It would seem, indeed, as if passages like these must be received as
evidence that Shakespeare had more familiarity with legal phraseology,
if not a greater knowledge of it, than could have been acquired except
by habitual use in the course of professional occupation. But let us see
if he is peculiar even in this crowding of many law-terms into a single
brief passage. We turn to the very play open at our hand, from which
we have quoted before, (and which, by the way, we have not selected as
exceptional in this regard,) "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage," and
find the following passage in Act V.:--

"_Doctor_. Now, Sir, from this your _oath and bond,_
Faith's pledge and _seal_ of conscience, you have run,
Broken all _contracts_, and _forfeiture_
Justice hath now in _suit_ against your soul:
Angels are made the _jurors_, who are _witnesses_
Unto the _oath_ you took; and God himself,
Maker of marriage, He that hath _seal'd the deed_,
As a firm _lease_ unto you during life,
_Sits now as Judge_ of your transgression:
The world _informs against you_ with this voice.--
If such sins reign, what mortals can rejoice?
_Scarborow_. What then ensues to me?
_Doctor_. A heavy _doom_, whose _execution's_
Now _served upon_ your conscience," etc.
p. 91, D.O.P., Ed. 1825.

Indeed, the hunting of a metaphor or a conceit into the ground is a
fault characteristic of Elizabethan literature, and one from which
Shakespeare's boldness, no less than his genius, was required to save
him; and we have seen already how common was the figurative use of
law-phrases among the poets and dramatists of his period. Hamlet's
speech and the Forty-sixth Sonnet cannot, therefore, be accepted as
evidence of his attorneyship, except in so far as they and like passages
may be regarded as giving some support to the opinion that Shakespeare
was but one of many in his time who abandoned law for letters.

For we object not so much to the conclusion at which Lord Campbell
arrives as to his mode of arriving at it. His method of investigation,
which is no method at all, but the mere noting of passages in the order
in which he found them in looking through Shakespeare's works, is the
rudest and least intelligent that could have been adopted; and his
inference, that, because Shakespeare makes Jack Cade lament that the
skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, and affirm that it is
not the bee, but the bee's wax, that stings, therefore he must have been
employed to write deeds on parchment and append wax to them in the form
of seals, is a fair specimen both of the acuteness and the logic which
his Lordship displays in this his latest effort to unite Law and
Literature.

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