from Greenwood's Is There a Shakespeare Problem?

"Shakespeare's Legal Knowledge" – Part 1

Chapter II

[37] I now turn again to the question of Shakespeare’s supposed knowledge of the law; and I fear I must begin by alluding to a very sad personal incident. After quoting Lord Campbell’s words, "There is nothing so dangerous as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry," I wrote (The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 371): "A layman is certain to betray himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never employ." As an instance I quoted Mr. (now Sir) Sidney Lee, who writes (Life of Shakespeare, Library Edition, p. 164): "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare. . . obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of Ł6," etc. I pointed out that a lawyer would not have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," since it is the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the Court), but to find a verdict on the facts, and I added that this was "just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or ‘one of the craft.’" In a foot-note I gave, as another example, a passage from Abbott’s Life of Bacon, where the author, a Doctor of Divinity, speaks of Parliament’s power to "rectify…an injury arising…from the overriding of statutes by common law"; on which I remarked that whereas statutes can, and frequently do, override the common law, the common law cannot override [38] a statute. I proceeded to give yet one more example from Mr. Robertson’s Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus? where we read (p. 59): "Let us formulate all the tests that the problem admits of, first putting a few necessary caveats." Whereupon I observed: "No lawyer would speak of ‘putting a caveat.’ The legal term is to ‘enter a caveat.’" Now, this remark of mine was a strictly accurate one, but it led to very unfortunate consequences. Some time after the publication of my book, Mr. Robertson complained to me—or, if he demurs to the word "complained," I will say "objected"—that in the index to my book I had mentioned him as having betrayed "his ignorance of law." I at once explained, as the fact was, that not having time to compile the index for myself I had asked Mr. Lane to employ an indexer to do the work on my behalf, and that I had unfortunately not noticed this reference to Mr. Robertson. I recognised, of course, that it was a serious matter.

To charge Mr. Robertson—one who "has taken all knowledge for his province"—with ignorance of any subject under the sun!—Not for worlds would I have been guilty of such an offence. So, forthwith, on returning home, I corrected the offending passage of the index in my copy of The Shakespeare Problem Restated, in view of the possibility of a second edition, by substituting the words, that "he is not a lawyer" for the words, "his ignorance of law." But, alas, the evil had been done and I must abide the consequences. Mr. Robertson brings it all up against me at p. 175 of his opus magnum, where he writes of my unfortunate self: "And the compiler of his index sternly clinches the matter by the entry, ‘Robertson, Mr. J. M., betrays his ignorance on law,* 372 note’"! Whereon he further remarks: "The most amusing item of all, perhaps, is that I happen to have spent four and a half years of my youthful life in a law office. But it was [39] a Scotch office (to say nothing of the fact that I was immensely more interested in literature than in law); and in Scotch law they do not, to my recollection, speak of ‘caveats,’ which word is therefore for me simple English, and not ‘jargon.’" I do not quite understand the reference to "jargon," but I note that "caveat" is for Mr. Robertson "simple English," though for most others it is simple Latin. I will not controvert Mr. Robertson’s statement that this is "the most amusing item of all," though whether the humour be "English" or "Scotch" I do not quite know; but I fear Mr. Robertson must have "smiled a sort of sickly smile" at the joke of his having spent four and a half years of his youthful life in a Scotch law office with results rather literary than legal, and, though I deplore the unfortunate language made use of by my indexer, I must still assert that the instance I selected from Mr. Robertson’s book on Titus is an extremely appropriate one, and that "no lawyer would speak of ‘putting a caveat.’"**

Turning from this "most amusing item of all," at which I trust the reader has laughed as much as was expected of him, I must now say a word on Mr. Robertson’s criticism of my reference to Lord Campbell’s book. Here Mr. Robertson plainly shows that, although later on in his great work he has alluded to my book The Vindicators of Shakespeare,*** he has not done me the honour to read it, or, certainly, had not done so when he wrote his chapter III, on "The Argument from Legal Allusions in Shakespeare." He speaks of my extracts from Lord Campbell’s work, "made through Lord Penzance," and [40] quotes, as part of an argument directed against me, and as though it would be new to me, a passage from Lord Campbell, the whole of which I had myself quoted in The Vindicators at pp. 89 and 90. I will now quote it again, since Mr. Robertson founds upon it an amazing assertion which I shall show to be absolutely unfounded:

"Great as is the knowledge of law," writes his lordship, "which Shakespeare’s writings display, and familiar as he appears to have been with all its forms and proceedings, the whole of this would easily be accounted for if for some years he had occupied a desk in the office of a country attorney in good business, attending sessions and assizes, keeping leets and law days, and, perhaps, being sent up to the Metropolis in term-time to conduct suits before the Lord Chancellor or the Superior Courts of Common Law at Westminster, according to the ancient practice of country attorneys, who would not employ a London agent to divide their fees."

Hereupon Mr. Robertson exclaims (p. 36): "Here, at the very outset, we have a radical conflict between the champions of the lawyer theory. ‘We quite agree with Mr. Castle,’ writes Mr. Greenwood [my italics], ‘that Shakespeare’s legal knowledge is not what could have been picked up in an attorney’s office, but could only have been learned by an actual attendance at the Courts, at a Pleader’s in Chambers [sic], and on circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the Bench and Bar.’ Mr. Greenwood is thus in conflict with his chief witness, upon whose testimony have apparently been built the opinions of nearly all the other witnesses whom he cites."

Now, incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact that the passage with which Mr. Robertson presents his readers as a quotation from my book ("‘We quite agree with Mr. Castle,’ writes Mr. Greenwood," etc.) was not written by me at all, but by Mr. Churton Collins. It will be found in my book, at p. 380, at the end of a rather [41] long quotation from that writer’s Studies in Shakespeare (p. 240), and plainly marked as such. Such, therefore, was Mr. Robertson’s haste in putting his 600 pages together that he has actually been guilty of the extraordinary negligence of ascribing to me, as though they were part of my argument, words cited by me from Mr. Churton Collins.**** But even if the words quoted had been really my own, and not Mr. Collins’s, where would have been the "radical conflict," or, for the matter of that, any conflict at all, between me and Lord Campbell (as quoted), whom Mr. Robertson is pleased to call my "chief witness"? According to Lord Campbell’s hypothesis, Shakespeare had been for a considerable number of years ("some years") in a busy attorney’s office; he had attended sessions and assizes; he had kept leets and law days; and "perhaps" (which Mr. Robertson marks with italics, but which I, certainly, pray in aid as part of the case) had been sent to London in term-time "to conduct suits before the Lord Chancellor or the Superior Courts of Common Law at Westminster." How, I would ask, does this differ from the postulates put forward by Mr. Castle, with which Mr. Collins (in the passage erroneously attributed to me) has expressed his agreement? It seems to me, on the contrary, that Lord Campbell’s hypothesis goes even beyond Mr. Castle’s requirements in providing Shakespeare with opportunities for acquiring knowledge of law. The supposed "conflict" appears to be a fond thing vainly invented by Mr. Robertson. All this is, indeed, passing strange.† [42]

Having now disposed of the imaginary conflict between me and my "chief witness" (so called), let us return to matters more germane to the issue. In the preceding chapter I quoted the opinions of a number of lawyers of undoubted "Stratfordian" orthodoxy, such as Malone, Lord Campbell, Grant White, and Rushton,†† to the effect that the works of Shakespeare give evidence of such an amount of legal knowledge on the part of their author as can hardly be accounted for except on the supposition that he had received some special training in the law. To these I added the testimony of Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, and I will now cite once more the opinion of the late Professor Churton Collins. He was not a lawyer, and I do not agree with him in finding evidence of legal knowledge in Titus Andronicus, but he was a distinguished man of letters, a keen Shakespearean scholar, and he had a large knowledge of seventeenth-century literature; wherefore I think his remarks on this question may be worth some consideration. After referring to Shakespeare’s knowledge of medicine, marine and military affairs, and other crafts and callings, he writes: "To these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory; as is abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out of season, now in manifest, now in recondite, application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them a [43] single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not coloured by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily accessible to him, namely Tottell’s Precedents (1572), Pulton’s Statutes (1578), and Fraunce’s Lawier’s Logike (1588), works with which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings." The writer concludes the paragraph with the words above quoted which Mr. Robertson has so strangely ascribed to me. Sir Sidney Lee, too, as already mentioned, had borne his testimony to "Shakespeare’s accurate use of legal terms, which deserves all the attention that has been paid it," though he considered that this "may be attributable in part to his observation of the many legal processes in which his father was involved."†††

Nor would it be difficult to quote competent legal opinion at the present day to the same effect as to the accuracy with which Shakespeare makes use of legal terms and expressions, but I will content myself with one illustration. At the present day we are all of us familiar with the title now borne by Lord Reading, "The Lord Chief justice of England." But that title dates only from the year 1875, although Coke had tried to assume it, and was informed when he was dismissed, in the year of Shakespeare’s death, that he had incurred the displeasure of the King by so doing. And upon this matter we read in the modern Encyclopaedia of the Laws of England: "Shakespeare, ever accurate in his legal terminology, styles Gascoigne, C. J., ‘Lord Chief justice of the King’s Bench’ in the dramatis persona, of ‘King Henry IV,’ Part 2 ."‡

Now, in view of this imposing array of strictly [44] orthodox authority, I certainly thought I was justified in making use, for the purposes of my argument concerning the authorship of Shakespeare, of this generally received opinion as to the legal knowledge displayed in his works; but it is quite legitimate criticism to say that I did not submit these opinions, and the alleged proofs upon which they are based, to searching analysis of my own. I did, indeed, take note of Sir Sidney Lee’s assertion that "legal terminology abounded in all plays and poems of the period," which appeared to me an exaggerated statement, and upon which I remarked (p. 391) that if he "had said that many lay writers of the period, including poets and dramatists, were much more given to the use of ‘legal terminology’ than such writers are at the present day, his assertion would have been within the bounds of truth," for "we must admit that this use of legal jargon is frequently found in lay writers, poets and others, of the Elizabethan period—in sonnets, for example, where it seems to us intolerable. That is true, and by all means let due weight be given to the fact." I also took note of Sir Sidney Lee’s reference, in illustration of his above-mentioned assertion, to Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnets (1593) and to Zepheria (1594), to both of which instances I devoted a "Note to Chapter XIII." As to Zepheria, of which I quoted as a good example Canzon 37, I contended that these sonnets are so absurd that one can hardly believe they were intended for serious poetry. They seem rather by their truly ridiculous and ostentatious introduction of legal terms (such as "supersedeas" and "Praemunire," e.g.) to be intended for humorous verse in the nature of parodies, although we are told they were themselves parodied by Sir John Davies in one of his gulling sonnets. "But, however this may be," I wrote, "the example of Zepheria has no relevancy to our argument in Shakespeare’s case, because the author is anonymous. I should think it highly probable that he was a lawyer, and [45] what we are in search of is instances of familiarity with legal learning and legal life, in the writings of a layman without legal training, such as may fairly be put forward as parallel to the Shakespearean instances. Perhaps it was partly because the author was a lawyer that another lawyer poet—Sir John Davies—eminent both at the Bar and on the Bench, held him up to ridicule in his Gullinge Sonnets of 1595." Mr. Robertson, who cites Zepheria as though it had some relevancy to the question of Shakespeare’s alleged legal knowledge, passes over these remarks of mine sub silentio, leaving his readers to suppose that this alleged analogous case had not come under my purview at all; nor does he make mention of my observations with regard to Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnets.‡‡ To these last I devote a considerable amount of consideration, giving quotations with the view of showing that the case of Barnabe Barnes is not really parallel with that of Shakespeare. I can only refer my readers to The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 408 and 409, to the conclusion arrived at on p. 410, and to the comparison I make, also at p. 410, between Barnes’s Sonnets and Shakespeare’s Sonnet xlvi.

Then Mr. Robertson thinks he has found a parallel in a sonnet of Drayton’s: "Drayton who was no lawyer, but was a poet, could not so far resist the legalist craze as to abstain from working out in one sonnet the fancy that his mistress may be tried for murdering his heart: