Part Four - William Shakespeare - Attorney At Law

In aid of his Lordship’s further studies, we make the following suggestion. He doubtless knows that one of the earliest [96] 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,

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, 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

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:

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?

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 pinned 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! [97]

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:

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:

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?

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:

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

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,

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?

But this part of our subject expands before us, and we must stay our hand. We [98] 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:

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:

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 [99] 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:

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.