Any observing customer, who had once entered the shop to buy a dose of rhubarb, might have safely given a similar account of what he saw, although utterly ignorant of Galen and Hippocrates. But let a non-professional man, however acute, presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science in discussing other subjects, and he will very speedily fall into some laughable absurdity.

To conclude my summing up of the evidence under this head, I say, if Shakespeare is shown to have possessed a knowledge of law, which he might have acquired as clerk in an attorney’s office in Stratford, and which he could have acquired in no other way, we are justified in believing the fact that he was a clerk in an attorney’s office at Stratford, without any direct proof of the fact. Logicians and jurists allow us to infer a fact of [137] which there is no direct proof, from facts expressly proved, if the fact to be inferred may have existed, if it be consistent with all other facts known to exist, and if facts known to exist can only be accounted for by inferring the fact to be inferred.

Resuming the Judge, however, I must lay down that your opponents are not called upon to prove a negative, and that the onus probandi rests upon you. You must likewise remember that you require us implicitly to believe [138] a fact, which, were it true, positive and irrefragable evidence in Shakespeare’s own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not having been actually inrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at Stratford, nor of the superior courts at Westminster, would present his name, as being concerned in any suits as an attorney; but it might have been reasonably expected that there would have been deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant—and, after a very diligent search, none such can be discovered. Nor can this consideration be disregarded, that between Mash’s Epistle in the end of the 16th century, and Chalmers’s suggestion more than two hundred years after, there is no hint by his foes or his friends of Shakespeare having consumed pens, paper, ink, and pounce in an attorney’s office at Stratford.

I am quite serious and sincere in what I [139] have written about Nash and Robert Greene having asserted the fact; but I by no means think that on this ground alone it must necessarily be taken for truth. Their statement that he had belonged to the profession of the law may be as false as that he was a plagiarist from Seneca. Nash and Robert Greene may have invented it, or repeated it on some groundless rumour. Shakespeare may have contradicted and refuted it twenty times; or, not thinking it discreditable, though untrue, he may have thought it undeserving of any notice. Observing what fictitious statements are introduced into the published "Lives" of living individuals, in our own time, when truth in such matters can be so much more easily ascertained, and error so much more easily corrected, we should be slow to give faith to an uncorroborated statement made near three centuries ago by persons who were evidently actuated by malice. [140]

What you have mainly to rely upon (and this consideration may prevail in your favour with a large majority of the literary world) is the seemingly utter impossibility of Shakespeare having acquired, on any other theory, the wonderful knowledge of law which he undoubtedly displays. But we must bear in mind that, although he was a mortal man, and nothing miraculous can be attributed to him, he was intellectually the most gifted of [141] mankind, and that he was capable of acquiring knowledge where the opportunities he enjoyed would have been insufficient for any other. Supposing that John the father lived as a gentleman, or respectably carried on trade as one of the principal inhabitants of the town, and that William the son, from the time of leaving the grammar-school till he went to London, resided with his father, assisting him in the management of his houses and land and any ancillary business carried on by him—the son might have been in the habit of attending trials in the Stratford Court of Record, and when of age he might have been summoned to serve as a juryman there or at the Court Leet; he might have been intimate with some of the attorneys who practiced in the town and with their clerks, and while in their company at fairs, wakes, church ales, bowling-, bell-ringing-, and hurling-matches, he might not only have picked up some of their professional jargon, but gained some insight into the principles of their calling, which are not without interest to the curious. [142]

Moreover, it is to be considered that, although Shakespeare in 1589 was unquestionably a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and had trod the boards as an actor, the time when he began to write for the stage is uncertain; and we are not in possession of any piece which we assuredly know to have been written and finished by him before the year 1592. Thus there was a long interval between his arrival in London and the publication of any of the dramas from which my selections are made. In this interval he was no doubt conversant with all sorts and conditions of men. I am sorry to say I cannot discover that at any period of his life Lord Chancellors or Lord Chief Justices showed the good taste to cultivate his acquaintance. But he must have been intimate with the students at the Inns of Court, who were in the habit of playing before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich, as he [143] took a part in these court theatricals; and the author, in all probability, was present among the lawyers when ‘Twelfth Night’ was brought out at the Readers’ Feast in the Middle Temple, and when ‘Othello’ was acted at Lord Chancellor Ellesmere’s before Queen Elizabeth.

Shakespeare, during his first years in London, when his purse was low, may have dined at the ordinary in Alsatia, thus described by Dekker, where he may have had a daily surfeit of law, if, with his universal thirst for knowledge, he had any desire to drink deeply at this muddy fountain:

"There is another ordinary at which your London usurer, your stale bachelor and your thrifty attorney do resort; the price three-pence; the rooms as full of company as a gaol; and indeed divided into several wards, like the beds of en hospital. * * * If they chance to discourse, it is of nothing but of statutes, bonds, recognizances, fine, recoveries, audits, rents, subsidies, sureties, enclosures, liveries, indictments, outlawries, feoffments, judgments, commissions, bankrupts, amercements, and of such horrible matter."—Dekker’s Gull’s Hornbook, 1609.

In such company a willing listener might [144] soon make great progress in law; and it may be urged, that I have unconsciously exaggerated the difficulty to be encountered by Shakespeare in picking up his knowledge of that which I myself have been so long labouring to understand. Many may think that Shakespeare resembles his own Prince Hal, when reformed and become Henry V, who, notwithstanding his revels in East Cheap, and with no apparent opportunities of acquiring the knowledge he displayed, astonished the world with his universal wisdom:

We cannot argue with confidence on the principles which would guide us to safe conclusions respecting ordinary men, when we are reasoning respecting one of whom it was truly said:

However, if my scepticism and my argumentation (worthy of Serjeant Eitherside) should stimulate you deliberately to reconsider the question, and to communicate your matured judgment to the world, I shall not have doubted or hallucinated in vain. By another outpouring of your Shakespearian lore you may entirely convince, and at all events you will much gratify,