Part Five - Introduction to The Law in Shakespeare

Bacon's prose has less rhythmus than Hooker's or Raleigh's. We have specimens of his versification. He translated seven of the psalms into English verse, and here is his first verse:

Sternhold could not make this worse. Compare it with the crudest lines Shakespeare ever wrote.

The differences between these most august of intellectual beings are manifest. Both were sages; one was a poet, the other a philosopher. It is the difference between Homer and Plato. Both had great imaginations, but Bacon's was a reasoning imagination, which disclosed its logical processes. That of Shakespeare was intuitive, and left little trace of its trackless paths of development. It is the difference between two continents of vast area, watered by great and fertilizing rivers, full throughout of nature's wonders; but one is temperate, orderly, subject to little variation, while the other is tropical, ravaged by storms, the home of the greatest beauties sleeping in the very dens of the greatest terrors, and both beneficent and enduring. Each was a discoverer. But Bacon made his quest in the material world, while Shakespeare voyaged through the mind and soul of man and reached their destinies. One is the Columbus and the other the Dante of thought. The results have been different. The intrepid experimental investigation of causes upon which Bacon insisted as the only force which could break down the prison walls of knowledge, placed thought upon a line of logical consequences leading directly to much that we now enjoy so completely of social, political, and religious rights. This is the greatest boon ever bestowed upon humanity by one man. Bacon's genius triumphed in his closet over the servility of his disposition, and, so triumphing, impelled the race to results to which he, living, never could have led it.

The consequences which have flowed from Shakespeare have been even more diffused. They are not mere results. The man and his effects live and touch persons. His works are known to all men. Bacon's are known to few. Bacon is to us impersonal precisely where his influence is greatest, and is real where he has ceased to act. We know the supple courtier, the false friend, the pliant lawyer, and the corrupt judge. But the philosopher, in the midst of whose system we stand to-day, is nearly an ideal conception. Shakespeare, colorless as he is in all that regards material knowledge or political and religious rights, is with us always; speaks to us every day; interprets us to ourselves; is immanent in our literature as its presiding spirit.

"Bacon little knew or suspected that there was then existing (the only one that ever did exist) his superior in intellectual power. Position gives magnitude. While the world was rolling above Shakespeare, he was seen imperfectly. When he rose above the world, it was discovered that he was greater than the world. The most honest of his cotemporaries would scarcely have admitted this, even had they known it. But vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope-tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare, and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his claims." (Landor.)

The strongest proof that Shakespeare's legal knowledge was very great consists in the confident and cumulative use of these terms, not only in the general fact that they so recur in every play, in all the poems, and even in the dedications, but also in their exhaustive use in many passages where to explain some principle, to carry out some comparison or analogy to its likeness to the finest lines and features of the thought, to push some conceit to the remotest extravagance, so that it is necessary for a well-read lawyer to make special investigation into the law and statutes of that time before he can follow it, Shakespeare exhausts the capacity of the terms he employs.

We turn from these exhibitions of thorough technical skill to see whether he displays anything like such familiarity in other departments of knowledge. We find little that tends to show proficiency in medicine, and this is everybody's science. In geography he is as perfectly without location as his "still vex'd Bermoothes," which no research has been able to map. No dogma stains his plain belief in Him who was

With time and place his tricks are more magical than that by which Puck girdled the earth in forty minutes. He is utterly indifferent to the devil and hell-fire, excepting in Henry VI. in Hamlet, and in that terrific use of the witches in Macbeth, who seem to have received from him a power beyond their own to call up from futurity the coroneted baby-brows, the two-fold balls, and treble scepters. In music he discloses little technical learning, although he could make the concourse of sweet sounds quire with the young-ey'd cherubim, so divinely was his soul attuned who expressed the whole compass of our language in harmonies which we hear from him only. We find little knowledge of tactics or maneuvers and less of nautical terms, although it was an age of wars by land and sea, and his works are filled with soldiery. There is next to nothing of the ancient philosophies; not one of Plato's glorious and cloudy dreams was ever smitten by the light of this glorifying sun.

The wonder at this use of legal expressions is not so much that Shakespeare understood them so well, as it is that the man who commanded the most copious vocabulary that any English writer has ever been able to wield, should have used them with such persistence. Surely he did not need them as instruments of expression. His resources in the treasuries of words were too vast for that. These law terms were present in his mind as standards of comparison with things which nothing but his own despotic imagination could have brought into relevancy.

I know of no writer who has so impressed into his service the terms of any science or art. They come from the mouth of every personage: from the queen; from the child; from the Merry Wives of Windsor; from the Egyptian fervor of Cleopatra; from the love-sick Paphian goddess; from violated Lucrece; from Lear, Hamlet, and Othello; from Shakespeare himself, soliloquizing in his sonnets; from Dogberry and Prospero; from riotous Falstaff and melancholy Jacques. He utters them at all times as standard coin, no matter when or in what mint stamped. These emblems of his industry are woven into his style like the bees into the imperial purple of Napoleon's coronation robes.

It may be suggested that this figure, so frequently woven into Shakespeare's diction, may test whether certain plays, which have been attributed to him, come from other hands than his. Thus, I have little doubt that Sir John Oldcastle, if not wholly written by him, bears the imprint of his golden hand. The passage concerning the royal buck, the scene where Harpool forces the sumner to eat the citation he has come to serve, and the other legal phrases, taken together, seem to indicate this. If he did not compose the entire play, he mingled in its composition, like a skillful teacher who corrects the awkward execution of a pupil, by letting his hand fall for a moment upon the keys to strike chords of recognized harmony.

The soundest English and German critics agree that he wrote the first act of the Two Noble Kinsmen, and that the rest of the play is by Fletcher, who took the organ from the master after the prelude had filled the arches of the imagination with its melody. If the first act is tested by comparison with all that follows it, we have the results we should expect in such familiar expressions, as "the tenor of thy speech," "prorogue," "fee," "moiety," "canon," "seal the promise."

Legal learning and language are essentially unpoetical, and the other dramatists of that time were sparing in their use. Ben Jonson was a scholar. He delighted in the exhibition of accurate knowledge, but he does not approach the precision or ease of his great contemporary in his representations of legal proceedings, or in his use of legal terms. An examination of the court scene in the Fox will establish the truth of this remark.

Fletcher had been a student at Cambridge, and Beaumont at Oxford. The latter was the son of a judge of the court of common pleas, and was himself bred to the law. But we can find in their works no such disposition or facility in the use of law terms, or the procedure of the courts. In the Little French Lawyer, La Wit, who turns duelist and challenges everybody, including the venerable judge who has ruled against him, uses little of the vocabulary of his vocation. In the Spanish Curate, the lawyer Bartolus is a very important character, and considerable legal knowledge appears in his sayings and doings, particularly in the scene where his debtors sit down to the feast he has made for them, and are arrested for debt by the waiters, who are disguised officers, under warrants which appear as the only repast upon the plates when they are uncovered, but the performance is broad, and has not the incidental accuracy which appears again and again in Shakespeare.

So Massinaer in the Old Law, brings to trial the unfilial son and the profligate wife, but the scene, as a forensic representation, is crude, lacks detail, and displays none of that pomp of justice which all courts of any dignity exhibit.

The affiliation between the disciples of Themis and Thespis was a marked feature of those times. Many students of law forsook it and became dramatists. So common was this transition that Greene, in his Groat's Worth of Wit, published before 1593, in a passage which has been thought to reflect directly upon Shakespeare, speaks of these re-enforcements to the play-writers as those "who have left the trade of Noverint," (know all men, etc.) Sir Christopher Hatton wrote a play entitled Tancred and Gismund, and afterwards became lord chancellor. So noteworthy were these accessions from the law students that Ben Jonson begins the Poetaster, in which he lampoons a rival dramatist and the lawyers, with a scene between Ovid and his father, who detects the young law student writing plays and poems.

There is so much similarity between the opening lines of the Poetaster--

and Shakespeare's assertion of undying fame in the sonnet--

that one is tempted to conjecture that Jonson intended to impersonate Shakespeare in Ovid; but the alluring supposition is too fanciful, for we know from Ovid himself that--

John Shakespeare, coming to London, and detecting his son in the composition of plays, would have been a far better theme for an imaginary conversation than Landor chose when he gave us the examination of William Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy for deer-stealing.

Henry Wriothesly, to whom Shakespeare dedicated "the first heir of his invention," was the grandson of a common-law lawyer, who was lord chancellor from 1544 to 1547.

The relations of the most dramatic profession of real life to that which mimics life was then much like the construction of the amphitheater of Curio, which was elliptical, but built in equal sections, which could be revolved so that each became a theater, displaying a different spectacle, but could be turned in a moment into the unity of the original shape, and confuse two representations and two audiences. The inns of court were the scenes of spectacular dramas of great magnificence, the expenses of which were borne by the lawyers. These revels, as they were called, laid the best dramatic genius under contribution, and, though they have long since ended, the ancient sympathy has survived the insubstantial pageants and the actors, which have melted into thin air.

It is not difficult to account for this intimacy. The dramatists of that time were unquestionably the most brilliant men who ever lived together in one city. Intellectual society was limited. The physicians have left no memorials. The stage was abhorred by the clergy. The editor was yet to come. But there was the bar, whose members knew life and human nature as they are, and who played their parts in all their real comedies and tragedies; university men, ripe and sweet with all classical learning, cynical and humorous, tainted with no cant. The taverns were the clubs. And thus it was that the most cultivated scholarship and the most brilliant imaginations of England met in encounters, which kindled into conflagrations of wit, humor, learning, ribaldry, and wisdom.

There was everything in that romantic age to stir the imagination. There was a spirit of chivalry abroad which marched in quest of something more substantial than mouldy relics, and fulfilled vows sworn to something grander than the achievement of pious absurdities. Frobisher had sailed northward into the silence of the eternal seas of ice. E1 Dorado lifted against the western skies its shafts and domes of gold. The Armada had vanished like a portentous phantom, smitten by the valor of Englishmen, and chased far off into the Hebridean fogs by the waves of the exasperated sea, which fought for its island nursling. Hawkins, pirate and admiral, had thrown his fortune into the pit which threatened to swallow up his country, and had died under the displeasure of his stingy yet magnificent queen. Raleigh, having seen his dreams of the new world die out, lay in the Tower, writing his history, doubtless smoking the consoling weed, while awaiting the end of so much bravery, so much rashness, and so many cares, in the summons of "eloquent, just, and mighty Death." Drake had spoiled the seas and the cities thereof. Captain John Smith had told of great empires in the west, and their swarthy emperors. Mary, Queen of Scots, that changeful enchantress, as we see her now, --at one time the French lily, all sweet, and pure, and fragrant; and again the Scottish thistle, spinous and cruel to all who touched her, --had woven the cords of love into the chains of empire, and had pressed the cup of her sorceries to the lips of many men, until her own glorious head bowed to

History, among all the women who have been crowned with the thorns of sorrow, presents no figure of which Shakespeare could have made so much. But what could any dramatist do for her in the life-time of Elizabeth, or in that of the pusillanimous and unfilial Sawney who succeeded her?

A reverend church had been subverted throughout the land, and beliefs and ceremonies, which its believers asserted to be as old as the apostles, were forbidden as crimes.

Hooker, anticipating Locke, had declared that all governments exist by the consent of the governed, "without which consent there were no reason that one should take on him to be lord or judge over another." Bacon, thinking that "the knowledge whereof the world is now possessed, especially that of nature, extendeth not to the magnitude of works," had declared that there should be "one method of cultivating the sciences and another of discovering them," and by this fiat liberated experimental philosophy into the limitless fields in which it has since worked. There never was a time when so many causes confederated to stimulate the human mind to the exhibition of its greatest powers in all departments, and the result was that the soldier became a historian, the divine a statesman, the statesman a philosopher, and the lawyer the first of poets.