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, 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 adorn ment 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 "Impatient of his fit, breaks like a fire 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 wellknown 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); A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the Heart, The clear Eye's moiety, and the dear Heart's 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 the forfeiture Justice hath now in suit against your soul: Angels are made the jurors, who are wit nesses 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. There are, however, very considerable grounds for the opinion that Shakespeare had more than a layman's acquaintance with the technical language of the law. For it must be admitted, in the first place, that he exhibits a remarkable acquaintance with it. That other playwrights and poets of his day manifest a like familiarity (as we have seen they do) precludes us, indeed, from regarding the mere occurrence of law-terms in his works as indications of early training proper to him alone. But they who, on the strength of the not unfrequent occurrence of legal phrases in many of the plays and much of the poetry of the Elizabethan period, would maintain that Shakespeare's use of them furnishes no basis for the opinion that he acquired his knowledge of them professionally, must also assume and support the position, that, in the case of contemporary dramatists and poets, this use of the technical language of convey-. ancing and pleading also indicates no more than an ordinary acquaintance with it, and that, in comparing his works with theirs in this regard, we may assume the latter to have been produced by men who had no professional acquaintance with the law; because, if they had such professional acquaintance with legal phraseology, its appearance in their works as well as in Shakespeare's would manifestly strengthen rather than invalidate the conclusion, that his familiarity with it was acquired as they acquired theirs. This position is, to say the least, a very difficult one to maintain, and one which any considerate student of Elizabethan literature would be very unwilling to assume. For our ignorance of the personal life of Shakespeare is remarkable only because he was Shakespeare; and we know little, if any, more about the greater number of his literary contemporaries than we do about him. It cannot even be safely presumed, for instance, that George Wilkins, the author of the law-besprinkled passage just above quoted from the "Miseries of Enforced Marriage," was not a practising attorney or barrister before or even at the time when he wrote that play. On the contrary, it is extremely probable, nay, quite certain, that he and many other dramatic authors of the period when he flourished, (1600-1620,) and of the whole Elizabethan period, (1575-1625,) were nestling attorneys or barristers before they became full-fledged dramatists. We are not without contemporary evidence upon this point. Thomas Nash, friend to Robert Greene, a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose works were in vogue just before Shakespeare wrote, in an "Epistle to the Gentlemen Students of the Two Universities," with which, according to the fashion of the time, he introduced Greene's "Menaphon" (1587)* to the reader, has the following paragraph: "I will turn my back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk a little in friendship with a few of our trivial translators. It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neckverse, if they should have need; yet English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as, Blood a beggar, and so forth; and if you intreat him fair in a frosty morn ing, he will afford you whole Hamlets,-I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches. But, oh, grief! Tempus edax rerum,-what is that will last always? The sea, exhaled by drops, will, in continuance, be dry; and Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage." It has most unaccountably been assumed that this passage refers to Shakespeare; † and it is even so cited by Lord *Lord Campbell gives the date 1589; but see Mr. Dyce's indisputable authority. Greene's Works. Vol. I., pp. xxxvii. and ciii. It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to sneer at Jasper Hey Campbell himself,-to our surprise, when we remember his professional training and experience as a sifter of evidence. But, as far as regards its reference to a leaving of law for literature, it is clearly of general application. Nash says, "It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions, etc., to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves," etc. By the trade of Noverint he meant that of an ly applied to members of that profession, attorney. The term was not uncommonbecause of the phrase, Noverint universi per presentes, (Know all men by these presents,) with which deeds, bonds, and gan. And Nash's testimony accords with many other legal instruments then bewhat we know of the social and literary history of the age. There was no regular army in Elizabeth's time; and the younger sons of gentlemen and well-todo yeomen, who received from their fathers little more than an education and a very small allowance, and who did not become either military or maritime adventurers, opening their oyster with a sword, entered the Church or the profesgrade; and as at that period there was sion of the law in its higher or lower much more demand for lawyers and much less for clergymen than there is now, and the Church had ceased to be a steppingstone to political power and patronage, while the law had become more than ever before an avenue to fame, to fortune, and to rank, by far the greater number of these young gentlemen aspired to the woolsack. But then, as now, the early years of professional life disappointment. Necessity pressed sorewere seasons of sharp trial and bitter ly or pleasure wooed resistlessly, and the slender purse wasted rapidly away while the young attorney or barrister awaited wood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,--one or more of them, whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was published in 1581. It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in A Midsummer Night's Dream. the employment that did not come. He knew then, as now he knows, "the rich man's scorn, the proud man's contumely"; nay, he felt, as now he sometimes feels, the tooth of hunger gnawing through the principles and firm resolves that partition a life of honor and self-respect from one darkened by conscious loss of rectitude, if not by open shame. Happy, yet, perhaps, oh, unhappy, he who now in such a strait can wield the pen of a ready writer!-for the press, perchance, may afford him a support which, though temporary and precarious, will hold him up until he can stand upon more stable ground. But in the reigns of Good Queen Bess and Gentle Jamie there was no press. There was, however, an incessant demand for new plays. Play-going was the chief intellectual recreation of that day for all classes, high and low. It filled the place of our newspapers, our books, our lectures, our concerts, our picture seeing, and, in a great measure, of our social gatherings and amusements, of whatever nature. It is hardly extravagant to say, that there were then more new plays produced in London in a month than there are now in Great Britain and the United States in a year. To play-writing, then, the needy young attorney or barrister possessed of literary talent turned his eyes at that day, as he does now to journalism; and it is almost beyond a doubt, that, of the multitudinous plays of that period which have survived and the thousands which have perished, a large proportion were produced by the younger sons of country gentlemen, who, after taking their degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, or breaking away from those classic bounds ungraduated, entered the Inns of Court, according to the custom of their day and their condition. They wrote plays in Latin, and even in English, for themselves to act; and they got the professional players to act popular plays for them on festal days. What more natural, then, than that those who had the ability and the need should seek to recruit their slender means by supplying the constant demand for new plays? and how inevitable that some of them, having been successful in their dramatic efforts, should give themselves up to play-writing! As do the great, so will the small. What the Inns-of-Court man did, the attorney would try to do. The players, though they loved the patronage of a lord, were very democratic in the matter of playmaking. If a play filled the house, they did not trouble themselves about the social or professional rank of him who wrote it; and thus came about that " common practice" for "shifting companions" to "leave the trade of Noverint" and "busy themselves with the endeavors of art"; and hence it is that the plays of the period of which we are writing have, in many passages, so strong a tinge of law. One reason for the regarding of Nash's sneer as especially directed against Shakespeare is the occurrence in it of the phrase, “whole Hamlets,—I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches," which has been looked upon as an allusion to Shakespeare's great tragedy. But the earliest edition of "Hamlet" known was published in 1603, and even this is an imperfect and surreptitiously obtained copy of an early sketch of the play. That Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, when he was but twenty-two years old, is improbable to the verge of impos sibility; and Nash's allusion, if, indeed, he meant a punning sneer at a play, (which is not certain,) was, doubtless, to an old lost version of the Danish tragedy upon which Shakespeare built his "Hamlet." We have, then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of Shakespeare's entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, but is strongly confirmed by the notably frequent occurrence of legal phrases in the dramatic literature of that age. |