III.
SOME LATER CONVERTS TO THE
SHAKESPEARE LAWYER DOCTRINE.
By far the
ablest and most comprehensive contribution to the subject of Shakespeare’s
legal acquirements has been made by that eminent lawyer, and statesman,
Senator Cushman K. Davis, whose work of over three hundred pages was
published in 1884, quickly went through two editions and is now out
of print. Senator Davis attaches no importance to Nash’s reference to
"Noverint"; but bases his argument entirely upon the internal
evidence of the plays and poems. In all he finds that law terms have
been used 312 times; but as he enumerates each repeated use of the same
word, and as nearly all of them are used more than once, and many as
often as four or five times, the number of distinct legal expressions
is very much less. And there is a strained effort to discover legalisms
where the average reader, even though he be a lawyer, would least suspect
them; and to swell the list many words cited are not strictly legal
words at all, e. g.,
Here "render" is forced into
service because "rendering and yielding as rent" is the phrase
in leases.
Among other words given as illustrations
of legalisms are: bourn, edict, traitor, pardon, reprieve, respite,
writ, oath, bail, execution, outlawry, verdict, jointure, dowry, attainder,
distrained, inheritance, warrant ("There’s law and warrant, lady,
for my curse," King John, Act II scene 1), tenement, last
will and testament, etc. The frequent use of such words can have no
tendency to prove a knowledge of law.
On the other hand, Senator Davis points
out numerous instances where legal terms are correctly used with their
strictly technical meanings; and he bases a strong argument on the cumulative
effect of such repeated instances. Just how many of these there are
it is a matter of some difficulty to say, as they are scattered through
the book in the midst of such words as are mentioned above, which are
not used in any legal or technical sense; but I believe they do not
number over twenty-five or thirty.
He further argues that "Shakespeare
has a lawyer’s conservatism. He respected the established order of things.
. . There is nowhere [in his works] a hint of sympathy with personal
rights as against the sovereign, nor with parliament, then first assuming
[26] its protective attitude toward the
English people. . . In all his works there is not one direct word for
liberty of speech, thought, religion—those rights which in his age were
the very seeds of time, into which his eye of all men’s could best look
to see which would grow and which would not."
To say that this spirit of "uncompromising
feudalism" indicates a legal training is to make an assertion in
the very teeth of history. Coke’s spirit, which resisted the prerogative,
which upheld the common law and chartered rights of the people, which
maintained the equality of all men in the eye of the law, was and is
typical of the lawyer. This is the "conservatism" which education
in the law breeds in its devotees. All history proves it. That Shakespeare
had none of this conservatism, that in "King John he ignored
the Magna Charta, that he ever and always shows a patrician contempt
for popular rights"—this proves, if it proves anything, that he
had not a legal training.
I believe an equal labor, an equally microscopic
examination of the dramas, an equally ingenious application of all the
references to medicine would prove with as much certainty that their
author was a physician; but, so far as I am aware, none of the numerous
writers upon his medical knowledge has as yet asserted that he either
practiced or studied the science of Galen, to whom he so often refers.
That his use of military expressions proves
Shakespeare to have been a soldier has been seriously contended. (See
W. J. Thoms’s Notelets on Shakespeare, London, 1865.) [27]